by Aer-ki Jyr
from the shipyard ring down to the planet’s surface. It was pitch black save
for the bit of light spilling in from the wall panel they’d cut through,
because it wasn’t meant to be traveled in. It was null space around the
numerous lift shafts with equipment bundles and a very irregular geometry.
“You can stay here if you want,” Paul answered her as
the other Archons caught up with them.
“Not what I asked,” she clarified.
“They won’t know we’re coming. The tough part is what
happens when we get on the ground.”
“That’s easy,” Ginsi said, nudging past Riona and
glancing down the dark shaft. “We kick ass.”
“It’s a one way trip unless we can take down all the
anti-orbital batteries within range,” she said, scoffing at the upstart mage
who nearly equaled her in Commando skill scores. “And that’s a lot of ground to
cover.”
“That’s why we’re going,” Ginsi said, glancing back at
the other high level Archons behind them.
“If ego were a weapon you’d be invincible,” Riona said
grimly.
Paul snickered at that then glanced over at the dark
blue armored mage. “We’re letting you tag along, youngling. Try to keep up and
not get killed.”
“Will do, boss,” she said, looking down the chasm
again. “Can I go first?”
Paul reached an arm out and lazily threw her back into
the group. “No.”
“We go first,” Megan said as she and Jack came to the
front.
“Right,” Ginsi said sarcastically, making way for her
betters. All of them wore equipment packs of various makes, with only a few
Archons equipped with death sabers. The rest had ammunition for convention
weapons while others carried specialized gear and supplies. Riona wasn’t wrong
about this being a long mission, with some 46 sites that they had to pluck the
anti-orbital batteries out of before Star Force could even send a single ship
down to the surface…and even if they did managed to get them all, there’d only
be a very small column of ‘safe’ airspace to travel through with the curve of
the planet blocking the other big guns’ firing lines.
“I’ve got point,” Jack said, stepping off the edge and
slowly falling down a few inches in freefall. The ring wasn’t quite in geosync
orbit, so there was just a touch of gravitational pull exceeding their lateral
velocity, all of which meant there was a very small noticeable gravity effect
up this high, though it’d increase the further down the miles of crawlspaces
they had to travel…with the only way back up being the lifts that had been shut
down and blocked off, unless you wanted to crawl up the walls using the
adhesive panels in your armor for 26,000 miles.
“Keep within Ikrid range at all times,” Megan said as she
gave Jack a tap on the shoulder and pushed him down a bit quicker. When he
dropped below the edge of the floor she knelt down and put herself into a
handstand that she walked out over the edge, then used her hands to pull
herself down the wall and get some speed going herself.
Paul offered Riona a battlemeld prompt and she
accepted it, unnecessary for a mission like this but it was a friendly way of
declaring they were going to be sticking together on the way down. The two of
them let Megan and Jack get a little bit of a lead, then they both dove head
first over the edge, arcing down and towards the far wall where they bounced
off it and began ricocheting their way down until they got themselves
straightened out.
“After you,” Ginsi said to the other Archons,
preferring to stay put and be last car on the train. A line of golden armor
passed her by, leaving the only mage to follow in their wake. She was glad
they’d included her, especially given that her Commando skills exceeded some of
theirs, for she would have been royally pissed if she’d missed this mission.
Three trailblazers, 34 titans, and one mage on a
secret mission behind enemy lines facing off with everything the planet could
throw at them in a race to get the orbital guns down before the lizards
realized they were there or decided to start taking down the support columns to
prevent them from doing something like this with the lift systems. It was a
ballsy move on their part, and frankly they were going to need her help to pull
this off.
Not that she’d be all that helpful given the combined skillset that she was traveling
with, but she definitely wasn’t going to fall behind and could contribute to
the group enough to warrant her inclusion. Ginsi was just a little surprised
the Archons felt the same way.
When the last bit of golden armor disappeared Ginsi
sat down on the edge and slid off head first, pulling on the edge to get her
some speed as she scanned the darkness ahead with her Pefbar and Ikrid, seeing
that the others weren’t wasting any time. She also got an Ikrid ping sent like
a chain through the others marking an obstruction ahead. The leaders would pick
them out and let everyone else know where to avoid, with Ginsi simply having to
stay up and make sure she didn’t hit anything on the way down.
She had a straight line of descent several hundred
meters before an outcropping forced a detour of a few meters to the right.
Further down there was another few, until they got to a clumping of cables that
only had a small pass through. It was wide enough for a tank, but given how
large this null space was that was about as thin of a bottleneck as the
schematics said there was going to be.
Which was why they were constantly speeding themselves
up by grabbing on handholds as they passed and slinging themselves forward. When
Ginsi suddenly was falling behind a bit she got a battlemeld prompt from the
Archon closest to her and they bonded for a moment, just long enough to extend
a Bataf column to her. The energy field linked them like a rope and it pulled
her forward with a surge of speed while simultaneously slowing down the titan.
Ginsi caught up quickly while he managed to speed himself back up with what she
guessed where tugs from others up ahead.
Ginsi used a telekinetic ‘crashbag’ to shove her off
one wall and over to another, grabbing a stubby outcropping and using it to
swing herself forward a bit faster. She couldn’t get much speed from it now
since she was falling quickly, but up ahead she managed to find another bit of
terrain in the form of a support strut along the wall and veered over to get
her foot on the far side of it and push off, accelerating her a bit further and
closer to the 3 Archons ahead of her as one of them shot forward again, with
the other two following shortly thereafter.
Another battlemeld request came and she had to take
it, getting yanked ahead to even more speed as another diversion order got
bounced back from mind to mind and she telekinetically wedged herself off
another wall to avoid a cross beam that would have hurt like a mother if she’d
hit it, for she guessed they were doing better than 50 miles an hour now and
most of that was not due to gravity, making her wonder how the trailblazers
were getting the speed necessary to pull the rest of them along.
Maybe the ‘youngling’ comment was well deserved after
all.
8 hours later…
Ginsi braked herself against another Bataf conduit
from below, counteracting the continual tug of gravity that was trying to speed
them up faster than they reasonably could go. There was no air in the null
spaces this far above the planet, so that meant there was nothing to slow them
down if they didn’t do it themselves and there was only so much speed they
could handle. Fortunately they were passed the tricky section up top near the
shipyard ring, with the connections now being little more than evenly spaced
gaps with occasional supports jutting out in their way. Hit one of those and
they’d be squashed, armor and all, so the trailblazers were holding back on
gaining any more speed as they spotted the obstructions ahead and maneuvered
the group around them.
But they couldn’t be using psionics, the support
struts were flashing by so fast Ginsi only saw a split second blur on her
Pefbar. They had to be using schematics to navigate by and hoping that the
lizards were as meticulous with their construction as Star Force was. Miles
were whipping by so fast it felt like they weren’t even moving at all. The
walls appeared a bit foggy, but other than that they were just smooth
obstructions on either side that Ginsi knew she could not touch at any cost.
The friction would eat through her armor like a chainsaw and send her bouncing
from one wall to the other in a death spiral, and shields wouldn’t do much to
delay that death.
Fortunately her psionics operated differently than
matter. Her telekinesis was able to give her the ability to push against the
moving walls without it dragging her backwards and sending her out of control,
which she needed when the Bataf adjustments came, for they always threw off her
orientation no matter how precisely aligned she thought she was with those
below her.
But everyone in this group was a professional and they
worked the quiet danger without incident, flying a predictable pattern around
the various lift shaft tubes and avoiding the support struts as they continued
to fall miles after miles. The danger was real, but it seemed so quiet and
nobody was talking on comms or telepathically…at least not to her. She worried
that she might fall asleep and bump a wall, for this was boring as hell once
you got past the first hour.
But this was the mission and she was game to see it
through no matter how the challenges presented themselves. Focus was something
that an Archon was used to maintaining in all variety of situations…and in this
one, if you slipped up even once you were probably going to end up dead. And if
you went careening into others you’d take them with you.
Which was probably another reason why it was good that
she was at the back…from their point of view.
13 hours into their fall and the Ikrid orders came for
them to start slowing down, with them nearing the atmosphere and Ginsi knowing
that if they began to hit that the turbulence would put them into the walls.
Not waiting on the others, Ginsi pushed both arms out to either side and
created crashbags off each, touching the walls with her energy fields and
trying to force the contact down ahead of her at an angle. She pushed the
fields out, forcing herself to go higher with the process and feeling the first
tinglings of gravity in half a day, indicating that she was succeeding in
bleeding off at least a little speed.
Apparently it wasn’t enough, for she got three
different battlemeld prompts from below and accepted them all before she had a
chance to crash into anyone. Suddenly she was in a tripod of Bataf links
holding her still and slowing her down, leaving her with nothing to do but hold
onto the links. They were making it easy on her, but like she said earlier she
intended to pull her own weight so she kept her telekinetic vice operating as
much as she could manage while multitasking, lessening her weight for the
others to push on or pulling them up, depending on how you looked at it.
She wasn’t connected with all the Archons, just those
closest to her, but through the mind links she could feel that the others had
different battlemelds overlapping. That was something she’d never tried before,
but she could sense through the ripple of one mind to another that all 38 of
them were Bataf connected to one another and slowing as a fixed group to avoid
bumping into each other.
Impressive as that was, they weren’t going to bleed
off this much speed very fast. It was going to take time, and she hoped they’d
got their altitude guesses correct, for the battlemap signals weren’t
penetrating the column to orient themselves off of.
With the wind whipping by her inside the pitch black
null space, Ginsi finally got the signal from the others to split. She’d
already started spotting protrusions on her own Pefbar and from those she could
guess at their speed, but the irregularity was coming back again as they got
close to the surface and the structure altered into what would be a very wide
base, but one bottoming out well below ground level. The lift shafts didn’t run
that deep, but supporting so much weight in such a ‘flimsy’ structure required
some significant engineering chops and a rooting ‘boot’ to match.
That meant more stuff in the way, but Ginsi and the
others were glad to get to do something more than just falling. At these slower
speeds Ginsi was able to touch the walls and bounce off them, dancing down the
null space and following the others as the trailblazers charted their course
through the obstructions. They remained that way, doing their dark acrobatic
dance until she got the signal to start hard braking.
The mage flipped over, using the rushing air to move
her over to the side wall where she dug her heels into it as she pressed
against the opposite wall with a Lachka field and wedged herself into some
traction…though it looked like she was skating a trail of sparks on the wall.
The others decelerated in a variety of means, though
slower than Ginsi. She didn’t want to run up on top of them and need help
again, so she opted for the more extreme deceleration. Eventually the others
below her stopped altogether, with her accepting a final Bataf to kill the rest
of her speed and allow her to grab onto the wall and hang Spiderman style along
with the others below her.
Ginsi waited there until a shaft of light blared into
existence. No one moved at first, allowing their eyes to start readjusting to
the light, then slowly they began crawling down to that level with the light
getting brighter they closer they got to the opening.
When Ginsi got to that level she was on the wrong
wall, so she j
umped across and grabbed hold of the other, then crawled over
beneath the doorway thankful that no one else was sticking around to help her.
The null space continued to fall away beneath her, traveling down to a dead end
block according to the schematics, but it was below street level and not where
they wanted to go.
The mage grabbed hold of the bottom edge of the hole
they’d cut in the wall and pulled herself up and into it, coming out on her
knees as she looked into the bright daylight as the 37 battlemap icons ahead of
her were disappearing fast. She stood up and walked into the lizard city,
taking a few seconds to soak in the view and the startled looks on the lizards
nearby, most of whom were not armed.
Those that were fired at the Archons, but neither they
nor Ginsi shot back. She ignored them and took off running, following the line
of her peers and needing to match their speed. Now she was in her element and
they would not be leaving her behind.
With several pink phaser shots missing her and a
couple actually making contact with her shields, Ginsi sprinted off through the
city, wondering exactly how much damage 38 of the most elite Archons in Star
Force could cause, and how the lizards would adapt to try and stop them.
10
February 18, 3108
Menchet System
(lizard core)
Tess
Paul, Riona, and two other titans clung to the
underside of a lizard transport, out of sight from above and not caring what
the lizards on the ground saw as they flew across kilometers of enemy cityscape
towards their next target, remote controlling the mind of the pilot as they had
been doing for weeks to cross the expanses required to get to all the
anti-orbital batteries within range of the column they’d come down.
So far this one hadn’t been spotted and shot down and
they’d been able to cover a lot of ground while the rest of their 38 man team
continued on to separate targets. There were too many for them all to hit
together, so they’d split up to maximize time after the first one went down
with surprising ease. It’d taken some improvising on site, but the lizards had
plenty of stuff to use for demolitions if you knew where to look. Damaging the
