Chapter 47: Scramble
There were two kinds of knowledge.
The first was the one you knew intimately, had made a part of yourself on the deepest of levels, available with nary a thought.
The other was something you just kinda sorta maybe remembered if given the right prompt, but was seemingly ejected from your brain at the first hint of adrenaline.
A rather prominent example of the latter category was the exact meaning of the hellish screech the comms panel emitted for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, making Derek jump and slam his head into the ceiling.
“What the hell ...” He groaned, more annoyed than hurt, a spell getting the coffee stain off his shirt and removing the puddle it had made on the floor, while he slid the toe of his boot under the metal cup the beverage was supposed to be inside and kicked it up into his hands.
Then, before he could reach it, the comms panel screeched again and Ye-in burst in, her hair in a state of utter chaos, Mimi following shortly after, fox ears flattened against the top of her head, and finally Atticus shot through the door past them, bouncing off the roof above the pilot’s station to land in the table in the center of the room upside down, before finally rolling off it to come to a halt next to the comms pannel, just as Derek reached it, the phrase “Emergency Response Request” splashed across the screen in bold, bright red letters.
Right, that thing. Basically, it pinged all comm nodes connected to the military system in any way whatsoever, asking for a positive reply from anyone in the relevant area, and then sent the alert to anyone whose computers gave such a reply. Which meant that they were, in fact, in the area of whatever was happening.
Shit. This felt like it’d be an “opportunity to excel” in the worst possible interpretation of that phrase.
He tapped the “accept” command.