by Aer-ki Jyr
Part of her wanted to panic again, but another part argued that the shield would also keep the infantry out…while most of the rest of her was still freaked out by just being alive. She should have been dead, her mind knew that, but since she wasn’t she might as well do what she could to stay alive a little longer.
Morgan pushed off and headed back inside. A quick look around with her blurry eyes confirmed there was nothing more to the building than the perimeter hallway and the large central chamber with all the equipment, most of which was clustered in the middle and reaching up to the pointy roof. The bottom portion of it was where the explosive damage had occurred, though Morgan had no idea how her pistol shot could have reached it with all the banks of equipment in between.
As she floated from point to point she examined the blast crater, seeing a lower deck partially exposed. Bouncing off a couple of points to get there, she finally grabbed hold of one of the still warm, warped casings and pulled her face down to the breach point, seeing a narrow tube underneath about twice the width of her arm length. When she reached a hand inside to touch it she got shocked, but nothing more than what static electricity could have accounted for.
She pulled her bloody sleeve up over her cracked hand and touched it again, feeling just a nip. The Archon tapped it twice more, then released her sleeve before touching her fingers to the side wall again. Apparently the charge had bled off.
She didn’t know where the tube led, or if there was another exit somewhere, but it was her best option so she crawled in, cutting her hip in the process on a jagged edge, then began hand propelling herself down the slightly bioluminescent passageway.
9
Her eyes were still blurry, but Morgan couldn’t be sure if there was anything around her to see or not. The tube she was floating down had no shape, symbols, or markings of any kind, it just kept going and going until the still bleeding Archon bumped into the base of a Y-branch.
A few droplets of blood oozed out from her nose as it smashed against the divider, then Morgan was able to determine by feel that the tunnel split in two. She followed the right branch for no particular reason other than knowing that she needed to keep moving. She’d been near death before and not much of her strength was returning. If she had to fight, hand to hand in zero gravity, she wasn’t going to be able to do much. As it was she could barely keep herself moving without passing out, though the elation of still being alive and the fear of what lay hopefully behind her kept her focus ahead as she paddled her way down the tube.
A long time afterwards she hit a dead end as the tube rounded off, sending a sinking feeling through Morgan’s already damaged gut. The hope of escape was all that was keeping her moving, and now it appeared that she was going to have to go back. The stress of it all sent hot, burning tears out of her eyes, and in a brief moment of clarity she saw something on the wall of the tube to her left. She turned her head to look but nothing was there…until she reached out a hand and felt for the wall.
It took a moment of almost blind touch/feeling the area before her hand landed on a handle that her eyes couldn’t see. She pulled and twisted it at different angles before something finally clicked and a hatch opened up, giving her an exit that she could have sworn wasn’t there a moment ago.
A moment of reflection passed and she realized she was probably in some sort of a maintenance shaft and there was a good probability that she had passed several other hatches along the way, but with her eyesight being what it was had missed them all.
That also told Morgan her body was worse off than she was giving it credit for. Banishing all ideas of combat she set her mind into slinker mode and set off through the hatch and into a pentagonal hallway whose edges blurred together so much it appeared almost as a curved line. Not knowing where to go she tried to keep a compass heading back towards where the hangar bay had been and moved through the hallways, zigzagging where necessary, and hoping to stay ahead of the Nestafar that had apparently cleared out of these areas for the heavy gravity zones to push through.
Were they coming out now or waiting for more Alliance troops to board? She didn’t know, nor was the analytical part of her mind functioning well at the moment. Most of her focus was on maneuvering her weightless body down corridors that hadn’t been built for the task, forcing her to bounce from one wall to the next as she came up on one of the Nestafar’s ‘elevator’ shafts.
Remembering that the hangar bay they’d used had been halfway up the side of the internal ravine she floated her way up the shaft, hoping dearly that they couldn’t turn the gravity back on until they repaired whatever device it was she’d blown up. After climbing up what felt like high enough she got off the column and bounced her way into a side deck, still heading back towards the way they’d come…or so she hoped. Disoriented as she was there was a possibility she was headed in the wrong direction, so she tried to keep her mind awake as much as possible to navigate accurately.
Morgan had no way of measuring time, given that she didn’t wear a watch under her armor and the chronometer in her helmet was long gone, but the minutes that passed by seemed to stretch into hours with a nervous panic hanging at the back of her mind telling her that she was about to be discovered at any moment. The compression damage done to her body made her tight and awkward, her ears were ringing, and her eyes blurry, all of which only enhanced her panic. Archon that she was, she pushed it to the back of her mind and kept a small place of focus to drive herself on from.
Seemingly at random, after what felt like hours of moving through rooms and passageways, she poked her head out onto a platform that looked out over the huge ravine. In a moment of crisis she found herself floating towards the opposite wall on the small landing and made sure her feet hit first while twisting her down so she didn’t careen off into the chasm.
The downwards momentum placed her on the floor for a second, but before she could rebound up and away Morgan clawed laterally with her hands and transformed the direction of the bounce into a low ‘V’ that sent her back towards the entrance where she was able to loop her hand down around the ceiling arch and null out her momentum…while clunking her head on the wall in the process.
Gripping the 90 degree angle where ceiling met wall of the arch with her left hand she wiggled around and pulled herself back down to the floor using very small motions. From there she held on with both hands and scooted back out onto the platform about half a meter and looked to the other side…seeing little more than a blur. She had no idea where the hangar was, or even if it was left or right of her position. The jumpship had dozens of hangars and storage facilities in the ‘wings’ and the Calavari had chosen only one of them to breach through. How she was going to find it she didn’t have a clue if she couldn’t see.
“Oth…” she started to whisper, but she suddenly discovered her throat was raw. She started coughing, holding onto the wall as tightly as she could so it wouldn’t jar her loose, sending another spray of blood off through the air in tiny red projectiles.
Other side then, she mentally finished her original thought.
Clenching the wall tightly she eyeballed the spot on the opposing wall that she was aiming for and backed up a bit…then pushed off with one foot to get her moving before picking her feet up and letting her arms propel and aim her momentum before she released, with her feet slowly swinging up in front of her.
Morgan timed it approximately right, with her shoed left foot landing on the wall, from which she pushed sideways at an angle, pinballing her to the right and against the back wall of the platform where her right socked foot landed gently. She bent her leg to absorb the impact as she brought her other foot up alongside, then before the pressure completely dissipated and sent her careening off uncontrolled she unfurled her legs and kicked off the wall as hard as she could.
She didn’t end up with a straight trajectory but it was close. Her body zipped out of the platform and into the free air, suspended over the ravine in the zero g as her ample momentum slowly carr
ied her across, twisting as she went. With her eyes blurry and her head hurting it was difficult for her to get much situational awareness, but fortunately she rotated around face first a few meters before impact and was able to reach out and grab an edge.
Using it as a lever she redirected her momentum and pole vaulted her body up, over, and around her head until her hand slipped off and she drifted into one of the openings on the far side of the ravine, having killed about half of her momentum with the maneuver. The rest kept spinning her around until she bounced off a side wall slightly before smacking into an archway.
A palm reaching out to the side cut her reverse momentum, as well as leaving a bloody smear behind. The Archon pushed up off the floor and the wall, moving her further into the short connective tunnel and to the arch where she gripped the edge and steadied herself, desperately trying to blink away the blurriness without success. Still, she could make out the images of Nestafar walkers lined up across the bay in tight rows…with the nearest one floating a few meters off the floor.
Which way? she thought, having two options. Inset from the edge of the ravine was a narrow hallway running the length and connecting the bays to one another, as well as running across the staggered vertical ‘elevator’ shafts. It was enclosed enough for her to bounce her way down, but which way should she go and was she too high or low to match up with their entry point?
From her reckoning…which was probably way off…she should have been left of the hangar, so she opted to go right, pushing off from the archway and snagging the edge of the tunnel and pulling herself in at a quick clip, still painfully aware that she wasn’t alone on this jumpship, no matter how deserted it felt at the moment.
She pushed her way down the hallway, stopping so she could get a look at each bay she passed. They were set well apart from one another, with at least two entrances on the smaller ones, so Morgan did more traveling than peeking as her eyes still did not want to lose their haziness. She passed over several of the vertical shafts, wondering if she should make a guess and head up a little, then every surviving nerve in her body twitched as she passed over one and saw someone below her.
“Stop!” a booming voice yelled, tossing her into a panicked spin off to the other side. Her hand hit the ground and twisted her around, floating her up towards the ceiling of the tunnel to where she scrambled for traction as a blurry image floated up the shaft and into view.
“Calm yourself, Human,” a Calavari soldier said evenly as he caught the edge of the ceiling with his upper right hand and killed his momentum. “You are among allies.”
Morgan bounced off the ceiling, pressing an arm against it to null out part of her spin but the rest sent her slowly spinning back down to the floor as the stress and pain she was keeping contained burst forth in a moment of relief when her malfunctioning eyes and ears confirmed that she was looking at a Calavari and not a Nestafar. Bloody tears gushed out, along with an involuntary sound from her throat that sent her coughing again, spraying the floor with blood as she bounced back off it.
The Calavari came forward and caught the mess of Human in three arms, trying not to squeeze the bloody thing too hard. Grabbing the ceiling as they went up he pushed them back down hard enough to give his legs a moment of traction on the floor and sent them back towards the shaft where he grabbed the edge and pulled them up it.
“I will get you to a medic,” the deep voice said from directly over Morgan’s head as she was wrapped up in muscular arms she couldn’t have extricated herself from if she wanted to. “Can you speak?”
Morgan didn’t try, but she did squeeze his insanely big arm in response, though he barely felt it.
“Stay alive a little longer, small one,” the Calavari said, pulling them through section after section with Morgan oblivious to most of it. “You are safe now.”
Some minutes later the trailblazer saw other soldiers flashing past, then large ships that she guessed were the troop transports. She was taken up into one and suddenly felt the crush of gravity on her once again, forcing a yell that came out with more blood splatters as she was laid down on a flat surface.
The next thing she knew a Human face was looking down at her and a cool numbness flowed into her body, starting at her neck and flowing down through her extremities but she didn’t black out. Instead she watched as she was floated through the decks of a Star Force warship and into a medical bay where she was moved onto a treatment table and at least three medics began cutting off her blood-soaked uniform.
She heard one of them swear, then a stick was laid on her bare chest that walked out across her body and pinned her in place. All feeling disappeared from below her neck, then one of the little metallic tendrils snaked its way up over her chin and spread out across the left side of her face.
Morgan knew it had to be the regenerator. One had been given to each of the trailblazers when they deployed into the field, and it was the only one that her quartet of jumpships carried. Two other, smaller models had gone with the rest of her armada, but she’d kept the larger version on the Red Ranger with her…and right now she was very glad she had. She was also glad the techs had learned how to recharge the damn things so they were no longer a limited resource, though they were still precious. If one was lost they couldn’t build a replacement, so they only had the ones originally recovered from the pyramid to work with.
Never before had she used one that covered her entire body. She hadn’t even known it could branch out this far, though to be honest she wasn’t sure what she was sensing other than seeing a blurry pair of faces at the edge of her vision and a blue light on the ceiling above her…then her left eye began to clear and the faces became almost Human, but still dark. One of them seemed to grow in size and after a few minutes she recognized it as a Calavari standing a short ways behind the medics, looking in at her questioningly.
She tried her voice again, knowing that she probably shouldn’t, but found that her vocal chords hadn’t been numbed by the regenerator…at least not yet.
“Ee…va…cuate the ship,” she said in the trade language, getting surprised looks from the medics but an intent gaze from the Calavari who nudged his way forward.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Trap…gravity…all dead. Enemy…still alive,” she said, pausing to cough up another weak spray of blood, for her lungs didn’t want to fully function, numb as they were. “Pull…out now,” she warned.
“You heard her,” another voice said from out of view. “Get your survivors out before they’re counterattacked.”
“There may be other survivors like him,” the Calavari argued. “I will not leave them to the Nestafar. We will hold the hangar and patrol the immediate area, and see if any more make their way back like this one…but we will make ready to evacuate if the Nestafar come out to us. They have a flight advantage in zero gravity, but still, I don’t see how 10,600 of our men could have been killed. There must be some survivors.”
“Look at her,” one of the medics interjected. “Her body has literally been crushed. These scans are showing fractures throughout her skeleton and severe internal organ damage. That’s not from combat, that’s from excessive gravity. If the Nestafar cranked it up far enough it will have killed everyone in a very short amount of time.”
“He survived.”
“She barely survived,” the medic countered, “and not only is she the strongest Human ever to live, she weighs far less than your race does. Her petite form combined with her strength somehow let her survive, but Calavari mass far more, and in heavy gravity that is a disadvantage, no matter how strong your muscles are.”
The Calavari frowned. “The jumpship has no gravity at the moment. Why turn it off rather than return it to normal? So they can hunt down the survivors…which means there are still others alive out there.”
“No,” Morgan said, beginning to lose consciousness as the tendrils on her forehead slowly splintered into dozens more and snaked up into her hair and left ear. “I broke…the g
ravity generator. If they fix it…they can do it again…evacuate.”
The Calavari asked her a question but she didn’t hear it. With that final word she slipped into a semi-conscious state, losing contact with the outside world and remaining only vaguely aware of the damage to her body that the regenerator was methodically eating up.
10
“Wake up, Morgan,” the medic said, gently jostling her bare shoulder as she lay on the cushioned table in the med bay. “Can you hear…” he cut off as her left wrist flashed across her chest and grabbed his wrist, then her right came up and grabbed his throat out of reflex.
As soon as she opened her eyes and saw where she was the Archon relaxed her grip and nervously shook with a twitch-like tremor traveling down her arms and through her body all the way to her bare toes.
“Sorry,” she said, letting him go and looking down at her nude body…which was no longer bloody or wracked in pain, but it still didn’t feel right. She moved her arms around, then her legs, but she couldn’t get rid of the shakes.
Another medic walked up with a stack of clean clothes. “We cleaned you up as best we could,” she said apologetically. “Do you want to dress now or use the shower?” she asked, gesturing to a nearby room.
Morgan squeezed her eyes shut, trying to make sense out of the whirlwind running through her head. “How long have I been out?”
“A little over four hours,” the man whose throat she’d grabbed answered.
“I need a comm,” she said, swinging her legs over the side, only to feel crusty, dried blood in her body’s crevices. She motioned for the clothes and pulled on the aqua-colored T-shirt while she was still sitting. After that she stood up and tested her legs, which held firm but felt odd. She couldn’t put her finger on the sensation, but it didn’t instill in her any sense of strength.
By the time she’d pulled on the matching pair of pants and casual shoes one of the medics returned with an earpiece that the Archon slipped in and adjusted to the appropriate setting.
