(Ellie how soon do want the Bhorki defeated? or do you want them defeated? because that will dictate my charries next actions)

_________________


<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

Winter fired at the Bhorki, who were starting to get on his nerves again. As he had anticipated, he was getting more guts and blood across his combat suit, but he remembered not to smile in satisfaction that he had been proven right yet again.

Then the Portal activated. Winter stared at it. It was so....pretty. The light was so blue and swirly and....he would have spent a longer time admiring it, but a Brute, who was standing next to him also admiring the Portal, realized that Winter was there and attacked. Annoyed at being broken out of his reverie, Winter grabbed the Brute's arm and spun the creature around him, letting it trip over his leg on the way. Then he let go. It fell down the stairs with a very satisfactory crashing sound, and didn't stir. Very satisfying.

Noticing that Thanfield was having difficulties--again--Winter looked for one of the little aliens so that he could use it as a club again. He needed to relieve some stress, and they had proven to be the most effective means to do it.

He found one before too long, swinging it by its tail into a bulkhead, then proceeding to swing it into other aliens. It was not only satisfying, it was enjoyable. Besides--some of them were still staring at the beautiful Portal, so he got to take them by surprise. With a glare on his face and joy in his heart, he smashed the eel-like alien into other aliens. Battles were so much fun.

_________________

((Well, seeing as we had an alien jamming the door open and the station tilting all over the place I didn't think it far-fetched that there might be water. But whatever ))

Holly paused, struck by Winter's strategy. Good idea, that. Not likely that she could even lift this sturdy little alien, though, who was steadily clawing the end of her board into shavings, and this rendered execution of the idea difficult and resulted in its abandonment. The pause, however, meant that in an instant that particular piece of board had progressed far enough into the alien's grasp to break with a sharp crack.

Had it not been for the sudden activation of the Portal Holly would have been hard pressed to hold the alien off, but as it was the strange creature stopped in turn to admire the blue swirls of the time gate. Casting about for some other makeshift weapon Holly seized upon a segment of iron piping and with it managed to render that particular alien senseless.

_________________

((lol, Aerandir- "so blue and swirly..." That made me crack up! anyway...
Oh, Ellie, will we need a Grey for the plot? I could play one if you want me to))

Carson was ducked behind a desk, trying rather frantically to reload one of his pistols. He jumped as the Portal activated.
During his momentary lapse in concentration, a Bhorki jumped around the side of the desk. Carson jumped up and managed to drop his ammo. The alien advanced slowly, as if it was enjoying the sight of a panicking scientist. Carson threw the pistol he was holding into the Bhorki's face. The alien hissed with displeasure, but kept coming.
Carson pulled the other pistol from his belt. Unfortunately, it was empty too.

"I never asked for your help!" Thanfield roared in reasonable fury as he leaped backwards from Winter's swinging alien, his trigger pull coming off premature. A spout of plasma shot forth, sizzling onto one of the consoles and making the Portal flicker like a Christmas light.

Very pretty indeed.

The second time he was no so fortunate. The chitinous head swung in low, striking him right on a painful place he would rather not mention. The wind knocked out of him, he doubled over. His handgun shot went awry once again, [s]inadvertently[/s] deliberately blowing a hole right through the Bhorki advancing on Carson. Two of the brutes took note and began closing in. Unfortunately for him, Thanfield was a tad bit preoccupied to notice them. Ow.

Ow, ow, ow, ow...

Corporal Winter was going down.

Now seriously pissed off, Thanfield whipped around in time to blast the heads off the two advancing brutes. His sadistic, pissed off side took no modicum of satisfaction in the colorful explosion of brains and guts - not that the former was in abundance. He turned his fire towards the mass of Bhorki swarming around Alannah's cover. Guts splattered. Handgun sang. Thanfield grinned.

_________________

Carson looked up, startled. One minute a Bhorki had been smiling evily at him, and the next it had a rather large hole in it's side. Looking in the direction the shot had come from, Carson saw Thanfield doubled over. He thought about thanking the Marine, but decided he looked rather preocupied at the moment.
No more aliens were coming towards the scientist at the moment, and he had a moment to reload his gun.

((here's my Grey bio!

Name: Siym (pronounced SEE-ym))
Age: 400 and some-odd-years
Appearance: http://www.stargatesg1971.com/thor/a279.html

I'll bring him in when I get a chance. lol))

Carson gasped as the aliens, one after another, climbed through the Portal. He fired at them, but the bullets didn't seem to bother them at all.

As the leader dissapeared through the Portal, Carson's attention was quickly drawn back to the fight at hand. Several Bhorki were closing in around him.

Winter laughed. Coming out through his glare, it sounded both insane and evil at the same time. A delightful noise. He had been wrong--this mission wasn't going to be a typical, boring one. Obviously, the government had decided that it needed to do more to entertain its Marines, so it had sent these fantastic aliens. It was incredibly enjoyable to swing the smaller ones into the larger ones and watch them tumble backwards. It was almost as much fun watching Private Thanfield try to dodge the 'accidental' hits that Winter occasionally made. Battles were the best thing since schoolyard fights. Naturally, he enjoyed himself and excelled in both. The reasons for why those fighting against him were angry afterwards were beyond him. He didn't really care, anyways--he just had fun.

So it didn't occur to him, when he saw the brutes nearby dismantle the glowing crystal by the pretty portal, that maybe stopping them would be a good thing. Instead, he continued to smash his little, quite-unconscious alien into the larger, angry-looking aliens. When the last big one jumped into the portal, though, and the beautiful swirly blue thing vanished, Winter felt a moment of shock. How could they just....do that to him? Well, not to him, but to the pretty portal? It was fun to look at, and they turned it off. That was not a good move.

He felt his temper rising and took it out on the remaining aliens--his makeshift club was starting to get a little worn by now, so he wouldn't be keeping it up for much longer. Of course, he could always try swinging one of the big ones around--that might be fun. He almost smiled at the thought of Thanfield trying to dodge that. He laughed again.

_________________

The abrupt theft of their crystal, accompanied with the Bhorki's little bit sudden and every bit unauthorized departure, gave the now trigger happy Private Riley Thanfield a million chances to whack this party - or what remained of it - and generally look the mean old fart.

But he found his mean old fart face unexpectedly cut short when Winter's club hit him once again in the face for the second time in ten minutes.

He crawled back to his feet in time to blast off the last Bhorki brute. His face throbbed like hell, not to mention that the swelling black eye was rather hard on his complexion. "Excuse me for a moment, Sergeant," he told Cortez. Fist balled, he began striding towards Corporal Winter with a not so pretty look in his eyes.

And Winter received a souvenir of the encounter in the crimson Niagara Falls now pouring from his bloody nose.

_________________

Carson found out he had run out of bullets again. Fortunately, most of the aliens had been killed, or at least wounded quite badly. He dropped his hand down to his side-how the Marines kept their weapons up without their arms getting tired, he didn't know. He looked around the room, hoping to find the other scientists standing.

Abruptly, the fire escape door opened and a strange-looking alien walked in, acting as if he owned the place. "Is the fight over?" he asked, then twisted his head up, looking curiously at the Marines.

Holly sat up, putting a hand to her head. Her normally neat blonde ponytail had come completely out, her white lab coat was now a color more accurately described as greyish maroon, and she appeared to be sitting amidst a heap of debris - but other than that did not seem seriously hurt.

"Judging from the fact that there aren't any aliens in our immediate vicinity," she piped up, her usual know-it-all demeanor not subdued in the least, "I would say yes."

_________________

Winter blinked. Thanfield had punched him. Again. Why did he do those sorts of things? All Winter had been doing was beating the aliens away from Thanfield. The chance of him helping the ungrateful private in the future was rapidly decreasing.

Giving his make-shift club a thoughtful glance, he tossed it away. It was tattered, now, which wasn't that great of a state for a club to be in. Still, it had served its purpose.

The Sergeant walked by, hollering something in his odd way again. What did he mean by 'the seriousness of the situation?' He wasn't making sense again. As far as Winter could see, the situation was under control. That ever-so-fun battle was gone, but--oh. The pretty, swirly, blue-ish portal was gone. The aliens had turned it off. Maybe that's what Sarge had meant by 'the seriousness of the situation.'

Winter wiped the blood trickling from his nose on his very-dirty sleeve, not noticing that he had smeared it across his face at the same time. He did look rather frightening, now--his typical not-quite-sane expression on his face, with blood splattered across his face, and alien guts on his uniform. He certainly wouldn't be picking up any date like that, though they couldn't really do that anyways.

"What do we do now, Sarge?" he asked, glaring. It was always best to glare.

_________________

Immediately after conceiving the fry-the-aliens idea, Alanna Yeh had become extremely occupied with the aliens, realizing that it was perhaps more profitable to ponder the process of remaining alive.

Aim, shoot, aim, shoot. Her world had narrowed down to her, her autorifle, her cover, and the Bhorki, leaving scant room to notice miscellany such as soldiers and fellow scientists - until the Portal was unexpectedly powered up and the time crystal was rapidly but effectively spirited away. Too late, she sent a barrage of plasma towards the Portal - it was already closing.

And then more aliens, but less of them, followed by silence, and now this Grey.

Slowly, the engineer levered herself up from aching knees to dump the nearly-empty rifle on the battered desk. What she was wearing could have once been called professional attire; now the only thing that one could tell was that it was stained.

She recognized the Grey. Siym, one of the senior advisors on the CSEA program. Alanna had a certain amount of amused affection towards the little alien, which he didn't seem to understand. It might help, of course, if Greys had more of a sense of humor.

"Well, look who's here." She thought about drawling it, but he wouldn't understand, and she was tired. "What have you been up to, Siym? Nothing too dangerous, I hope. We've been having some problems."

_________________


<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

"I can see that." Siym said. "I have been waiting outside."

Carson shook his head. "You've been waiting outside that door, while we've been fighting for our lives in here?"

The Grey nodded- a human gesture he had picked up. "I had no weapons." he said.

Alanna reached for the shard of crystal, still warm from the energy that had been pumped through it. Turning it thoughtfully in her fingers, she said slowly, "I'm not sure we can even open a wormhole with this. It's not as if it were a battery - it doesn't store energy that can be used up.... No, wait."

Finding a chair that was still reasonably intact, she rolled it up to her semi-melted desk and sat down, elbows on the desktop, forehead braced on her hands. Once in her favorite thinking posture, she remained immobile for several minutes, oblivious to the world, as the others began conjecturing about the Bhorki's destination.

And the station shifted.

"It's the focusing element," the engineer muttered finally, half to herself and half to anyone else in the vicinity. Her voice was slightly muffled, as her hands were covering her face. "The larger crystals work more effectively because there's more volume, so the change of energy over area - the flux - is greater. So with a smaller crystal, the process takes longer, but it's still possible. As long as the crystal doesn't overheat and explode..."

This would be tricky, even if they knew where the aliens had gone. Add that to the fact that they couldn't exceed the energy threshold of the crystal, and the problem had very few solutions, and no margin for error. But wasn't that what engineering was about?

(It *probably* will turn out to be a one-time use thing because the crystal will *probably* "burn out")

_________________


<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

Get this thing primed? Yes, it was that simple, wasn't it? Alanna bit her lip, not lifting her head from her hands.

How the heck was she going to cool it? The lab was shot to bits; they didn't have anything designed for that anyway ... good grief, was she a magician or something?

She raised her head to meet Cortez's gaze. "It'll take time," she snapped, and lifted her hand to forstall the question of "How long?" that he would inevitably ask. Half an hour to conceptualize a solution for cooling; another half hour for implementation. She doubled the estimation out of habit. "Two hours at the very least." It was a standard engineering trick. If you really needed the extra time, you had plenty of leeway without anyone blaming you; if you met your true estimate, you were automatically a genius and talking salary raises. Unfortunately, the usual reaction to the double estimate was one of impatience, and Cortez didn't look like he was going to disappoint her.

Alanna dropped her head into her hands again. The easiest thing to do would be to run a liquid over the crystal to facilitate the heat transfer process. They probably had more coolant than they could ever want in the lab storeroom - but how to pump it? Well, not too many things here had a pump ... but the decorative fountain in Yenkovich's adjacent office did. The tricky part would be having the computers correct for the refractive index of the coolant, but it could be done. Carefully.

_________________


<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>