The blast echoes in the tunnels like the end of the world, hurling the maintenance door inward to clatter on the interior gantry. A clatter of reflexive gunfire peppers that smoke-haloed doorway; but no soldiers are there to receive it. Instead, 5th Squad slips under the rattling shutter and into the huge Vult workshop beyond. It's no trouble rushing to cover from the door - there are pallets of cast steel parts stacked and spaced by the door, one with a pallet jack still stuck in its side; an orderly person's attempt to force clutter to the extremes of the room, incidentally providing cover for enemies advancing by that vector. Not a defensive layout; an auteur's spread.

Past this wide entrance, flanked by the rough hewn stone calls of the carved cavern, the room opens up into a vast, wide, tall complex; a hangar as much as a workshop, with the stone walls patched in places where structure is concerned, but otherwise left raw. There are benches and tables to support many artificers working here, though most have been stripped of tools and projects and abandoned in the flight of the occupants. But not all; not nearly all. Dominating the room, a hundred feet in from where 5th squad moves into cover, a cluster of eight Kreiger technikers peer up from where they have hunkered at the sound of the explosion; rattleguns in hand from their mechanical work, bewildered and variously fumbling for holstered pistols or gazing dumbly at the plumes of smoke. Two squads of the same clean-faced young recruits in uniform caps and unstained greys reel in response, too; two of them have started blazing away blindly at the burst maintenance door, their korporals shouting at them to cease fire. And just beyond them, quivering with fear and rage, is a shorter man in a white coat, with a hard-working comb-over, circular spectacles, and a lined face suggesting a life spend in consternation and focus: the very stereotype of a german lab coat.

"Verzögert sie, ihr Idioten! Verzögern Sie sie! Wir können den Angreifer nicht zurücklassen!"

Spoiler: Kreigspeil Speakers
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"Delay them, you idiots! Delay them! We cannot leave the Assailant behind!"


The Angreifer, it seems, is the machine to his left, upon which the teknikers have paused operations. A huge, bipedal machine of cast steel and exposed cabling; twenty feet tall and broad at its greatest dimentions, easilly. Retrograde legs lead up to a bulky, soft-edged core with a loose coffin shape that, coupled with the huge legs, gives it at first a sort of froglike sihuoette. But off to the left and right of the core are welded hardpoints, that beg the imagination to suggest what powerful weaponry might be intended to mount there. As it is, only a pair of guns visably exist on it - two chin-mounted heavy machine guns, fixed to a limited swivel. Incomplete, it looms huge and terrible as a spectre of what you might have needed to fight on Naphto beach, if the operation had been delayed just a little longer.

The twenty startled Grenzsoldat animated at the incensed command, charging toward the intervening space and throwing themselves behind chunks of abandoned machinery where they can, toppling desks for cover where they can't. The technikers, appropriately harangued, get back to whatever assembly or disassembly they were performing on the Angreifer, trying hard not to focus on the storm of death happening behind them.

Spoiler: Alarm! Alarm! Schnell, Schnell! OOC
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Breach successful. You've earned a surprise round. Right now, you're facing down twenty active enemies - the same kind you ambushed on the tram. They're moving to take
cover in the field of desks and artificer goods occupying the hundred feet between you and them; but your surprise round occurs before they get into any kind of cover, and they are loosely clustered. A grenade or similar blast into the area will catch 1d4+1 enemies.

There are also eight technicians working on the machine, and one classic, furious scientist half-oblivious to the mortal danger.

The enemy's initiative is 11. So give me an initiative roll in the OOC. If you beat or meet an 11, you can act twice, on account of preceding the enemy in initiative and them spending their first turn surprised.

You begin this round in hard (+5) cover. After that, there's about 40ft of open space, and the best cover you can get from that point on is soft (+2), behind whatever desk/stack of steel elbow brackets/whatever you care to describe.