by Aer-ki Jyr
The cameras on the tips of the speeders picked up the aerial traffic easily enough, with ships coming and going constantly from other cities delivering troops and supplies that would then be sent on ahead to the front. No infantry convoys were present, however, but there were a lot of rapidly moving hovertrucks coming in, apparently shuttling the hordes of lizards to this rendezvous point where they could gather and then approach en mass under their own power.
That meant the four speeders had to be careful when approaching to choose a vector that didn’t have traffic, but a couple of miles shy of the outer buildings they stopped their approach and flew low in a wide circle checking the terrain and keeping off the rocky mounts. Eventually they found a bit of cover and set down, hiding two of the bikes there and doubling up on the others. They planned to fly their way over the buildings and through the streets rather than trying to huff it on foot, but if something went wrong and they lost their rides they didn’t want to get caught out in the countryside on foot, for their evac point was far from here.
It didn’t hurt to have a backup plan, but it was a very tight fit underneath the cloaking sheaths with Jyra having to almost lay down around Mace’s waist to fit. Her head wasn’t upright, but then again she couldn’t see anything other than the camera transmitting to her HUD, and that didn’t matter since she wasn’t driving.
The Arc Commando did watch as Brandon and Mace flew up to the outer ring of buildings, picking their spot carefully as they eased up to one and all but landed on the roof of the 4 story tall structure. It didn’t have windows, which was common for their low lying structures. They knew enough about lizard infrastructure to know it was an industrial warehouse of some sort, the contents of which they didn’t know, nor were they going to find out. They had a variety of targets available to them to hit, but right now staying hidden was all that mattered.
Creeping from roof to roof and zipping across sections of city where they found a hole in the traffic patterns, the two speeders stayed together and traveled far inside the outer perimeter, avoiding the heavily defended infrastructure and zigzagging across the mundane structures. Most of those were residential or more warehouses, and they set down on the roof of one residential complex when their primary target came within sight.
Or rather the top of it, most of the hatchery was situated below ground but the entrances were fairly well defended. They were going to have to sneak their way in from here, and the best way they knew how was to go underground themselves and travel over to the facility via the tunnel network.
Jyra slid out from under the cloaking sheath along with Mace and jogged over to one of the roof entrances that Leo was already working on cutting into, for it wasn’t a personnel entrance, but rather an exhaust vent. The Archons might be able to walk down through a lizard building, wave their hands and make all the occupants forget seeing them, but the Arc Commandos’ Ikrid abilities were not so advanced. With the cover of night and luck having allowed them to get this far, and their bikes wedged up against roof outcroppings where they would hopefully not be noticed, they were going to take the ventilation system route to get into the substructure and therefore hopefully preserve the anonymity of their exit point.
But in truth, from here on out they were making up everything as they went.
Leo lifted the grated cover off and Jyra slid into the meter-wide shaft first, having to wiggle around to get her pack to fit inside. With her legs and arms spread out like a vice, she lowered herself with a controlled slide all the way through the building down into the substructure where the environmental systems where gathering the excess heat produced within the building and shunting it outside so the lizards wouldn’t cook themselves in the close confines of their packed city.
This wasn’t the first time she’d been in such a shaft and Jyra knew what to do at the base, using a cutting tool to make a hole just above the bottom that led into a maintenance crawlway. One good thing about lizard infrastructure was that it almost never changed, and each planet had identical buildings created from a very large playbook. Learn it, and you’d be able to get around anywhere within their cities no matter what arrangement they placed the buildings in.
“Clear,” Jyra said over their short range comm as she kicked her legs through the opening and slid out of the shaft as the other three started to come down. Maneuvering with her pack on was difficult, but it was something she’d gotten used to on previous missions and didn’t hold her up much now. Leading the way into an empty room, checked beforehand with her Ikrid, she slid out of the crawlway and got onto her feet, brandishing a pair of stun pistols and walking across to the nearby open doorway and held position there while the others caught up.
“How we doing?” Brandon asked, bringing up the rear.
“Not a peep yet.”
He passed her by and took the lead as the foursome began to move through the bottom of the residential complex until they came to the interconnecting tunnels buried deep underground. There they found their first live lizards in the form of a line pushing hover crates down a long, highway-like lateral shaft.
“Can’t go that way,” Mace commented.
“No, we’re going across,” Brandon said.
“Across?” Jyra clarified.
“We’ll have to distract them.”
“There are too many.”
“We wait for a gap…it’ll work.”
“Too risky,” she urged.
“Not sure what you’re thinking, bro,” Leo added.
“I’m thinking that if we have to take a detour around this we’re going to waste a couple of extra hours and probably have to go back topside anyway.”
“There might be some auxiliary shafts crisscrossing this main,” Jyra offered.
Mace gently shook his head. “It’s a main for a reason. If there are auxiliaries they’ll be power lines or other utilities. We could spend hours looking and find nothing. He’s right, we gotta get across here. I just don’t know a good way.”
“The doorway on the other side is clear, we just have to sprint across when they’re not looking.”
“They’re all looking this way from the left,” Jyra argued, “and who knows when someone will come back from the right side.”
“Mace, you’re up first.”
“First for what?” he asked Brandon, but stepped up alongside him just shy of the doorway and out of sight to the left of the lizards passing by.
“When I say go, quietly and quickly cross to the other side.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
Mace sighed. “Ok, buddy. You better know what you’re doing.”
Brandon closed his eyes and concentrated all his focus in one direction, reaching out with his Ikrid and touching the lizard minds closest on the left. Within his range he could sense six, with a seventh approaching as another crossed their path and he discounted that one. So long as he and the others didn’t turn around they shouldn’t have to worry about them.
It was the ones pushing the crates in their direction that could see them, so he gently froze their perceptions with a light haze, causing their thoughts to wonder a bit while their actions remained the same. They could see ahead, but weren’t paying attention to what was around them, and as soon as he was sure it was working he double tapped Brandon on the shoulder and the Arc Commando jogged out into the open directly behind the lizard that had just passed him.
He crossed two meters behind him, stepping as quietly as he could over to the far doorway and around the corner, getting out of sight.
“We clear over there?” Jyra asked.
“Standby,” Mace said, then after a long moment he added, “Clear.”
“Son of a bitch,” she said in amazement.
“We’re not done yet,” Brandon said, keeping rudimentary contact with the minds to the left but releasing one that just passed them by and picked up another one as it came into range. “Leo, you’re up.”
“Ready,” he said, taking a knee nex
t to Brandon around the corner. He got the double tap on the shoulder then jerked backwards instantly when Mace called him off.
“Wait!” he warned.
“What’s up?” Jyra asked so Brandon didn’t have to.
“30 seconds. Got a roamer here.”
“Just one?”
“Yeah, and he’s taking his time.”
“You ok?”
“I’m out of view, but the doorway isn’t.”
“Standing bye,” Leo announced as they waited…then they sensed a pair of minds coming up behind them.
“Jyra, you’re up next,” Brandon said, changing his mind. “Leo, deal with those two.”
“On it,” the second strongest psionic among them said, backtracking a few meters and ducking into another maintenance chamber with a host of pipes running up and down through the closet-like room. Leo reached out with his mind and caused one of the two lizards to hear something behind him, causing him to turn around and look, buying them a couple more seconds. After that he used a few more Jedi mind tricks to delay them as best he could.
“We’re going to have to move,” he eventually reported. “They’re coming to this doorway.”
“Clear,” Mace reported.
“We can use that,” Brandon said as he sent Jyra on across. “Hide.”
The remaining duo pulled back further and ducked into different side chambers, waiting for the lizards to come to them and having stun guns ready if they happened to be headed for one of those locations. Killing them would send up a smell of blood that the rest of the lizards wouldn’t miss, so stun weapons were what they were carrying for the most part, though the sound alone would be trouble enough.
When the pair got to them they walked on past, out into the subsurface ‘highway’ with Brandon and Leo stepping out behind them and numbing their minds to their footsteps. So long as they didn’t turn around to see them they’d be ok, with Leo keeping both of their minds under his scrutiny while Brandon tricked the crate pushers into ‘seeing’ two more lizards in their place.
The real pair crossed in front of one of the crates and turned left, heading the opposite direction and prompting the Arc Commandos to scurry their last few steps so they didn’t get within their peripheral vision. They ducked into the far doorway and got out of sight from everyone save for the single crate pusher that happened to be passing at that moment. Keeping the ruse in place for him was a bit more difficult because the real lizards were now out of view and there was nothing active for Brandon to copy, but he dampened his mind enough to allow him to pass without looking to his left and seeing them as they disappeared into side nooks.
“See,” Brandon said as he stood next to a bulky pillar that was supporting the structure above them, “no trouble.”
“I wish I could do that,” Jyra said in envy.
“One day, youngling. One day,” Brandon said as he stepped out of his nook and walked down the hallway, turning the corner as the others came out and followed him through the much smaller hallways. They got about 20 seconds before having to backtrack and hide briefly, then it was more of the same moving onwards and navigating by guess given that they didn’t have any blueprints for these lower levels. Orbital sensors couldn’t penetrate beneath the shielding that all lizard cities seemed to have nowadays, so there was no way to know how long it’d take them to get to their target.
It was entirely possible that they would have to spend the day down here hiding out before night came again, but for now they had hours to work with and didn’t intend to waste them if not absolutely necessary.
Unfortunately that didn’t happen, with them having to backtrack multiple times as they ran into bottlenecks that they couldn’t bypass. Too many minds in one place and not even all the mind tricks the four of them could produce would be enough to avoid detection, plus the security cameras that popped up here and there had to be avoided, but those at least were predictable. These were low security areas and not under potential scrutiny up until they got close to the hatchery.
That was when they spent another few hours working their way around the subsurface perimeter looking for a way in and having to choose between several bad alternatives, leading them to run out of night to escape in and forcing them to find a quiet room to hide out in while they took turns making scouting runs of the area and adding it to their battlemaps that they would share when meeting up again. Through that process they began to get the layout of the entire western side of the huge facility while they took turns getting an hour or two of sleep each while another stood watch right under the enemy’s nose.
5
“Alright, Jyra,” Brandon said over the comm. “Go.”
Standing in a wall nook, she stepped out of cover and ran three quick steps down the hall, coming up behind a librarian variant that had just come out of the hatchery complex and stuck her stun pistol into its back and discharged it as quietly as possible. The was a muffled ‘zap’ and it fell over, with Jyra catching it before it hit the ground and dragging the lizard off to a nearby room while the others were providing psionic distractions.
Half a minute later Leo came in, followed by the others with Brandon bringing up the tail end and heading straight for the unconscious lizard lying on the floor. He took his armored glove off and touched the big, angled forehead of the lizard to increase his Ikrid contact and dove into its memories as best he could, looking for recent information about the facility it had just walked out of.
Librarians were always a treasure trove of information, with their minds being the easiest to read of all the lizard types. Brandon only knew about standard varieties from experience, with the librarians being ground crew running logistical operations and kept well away from combat. This was the first time he’d been able to see one in person and as soon as he made contact he felt the difference in its mind. The standard variants were elusive in that their focus lay on the matter at hand, which was always changing. This one was altered, in that its mind was segmented into easily recognizable sections much like a library, making it a simple task to look for and retrieve what you wanted to know.
Brandon assumed that was part of their genetic design, for this one could probably store and analyze data better than the others given this mental structure. It was a thinking mind, not an impulsive one, and thankfully for the Arc Commandos this one was naturally observant, with the path it’d just walked through the facility being mostly intact in its memory, giving Brandon the position of the checkpoints, security cameras, and traffic levels inside the sections it had passed through.
“Damn,” he whispered, looking for some auxiliary information while he had the chance.
“Fortified?” Leo asked.
“No, just impossible to get in unnoticed.”
“Cameras?”
“Several, but it’s the traffic flow that concerns me. Too many bodies around,” he said, then fell quiet as he searched for another way in. “594.”
“What?”
Brandon glanced up at him. “That’s how many lizards this facility produces on average…per day.”
“What’s their incubation time?” Mace asked.
Brandon hesitated a moment. “7 months, give or take.”
“That’s faster,” Jyra commented.
“Looks like they’ve been upgrading their biotech too,” Mace stated with dissatisfaction. “Might not mean a lot planetwide, but if we take this out of commission it’ll make a dent in their future numbers. We just gotta make sure we wreck it good, because you know they’re going to rebuild.”
“That’s still around 120,000 lizards we can kill before they wake up,” Jyra said, doing the math. “Worth it in my opinion.”
“Plus however many they don’t grow while rebuilding,” Leo added as he watched the entrance and stood ready to distract any lizards that veered too near their section of what was a utility promenade around the base of the hatchery, feeding it power, water, and other materials through pipes that passed through this junction. There were a
lot of monitors around them, meaning this was a ‘come and see if there’s a problem’ room rather than a workstation, and therefore hopefully wouldn’t be visited.
“Hold on,” Brandon said. “We might have some relocating to do.”
“Meaning?” Jyra asked.
“Carry him,” he said, releasing the lizard’s head and pulling his glove back on. “Make sure he stays out.”
“Looks like I’ve got a date,” she said to the lizard before pumping another stun shot into his chest with the barrel pushed into his flesh, then she pulling him over her shoulders with most of his weight resting on top of her pack as the others led the way out. They used their more powerful psionics to chart a course through the lizard infrastructure and distract where needed until they came to another one of thousands of innocuous rooms along the labyrinth of small, subsurface hallways, with Leo ducking inside the doorway quickly.
Jyra heard a pair of stun shots, but by the time she rounded the corner the pair of lizards in the room were already down. Both were standard varieties.
“One of us is going to have to stay here,” Brandon said apologetically.
“I will,” Jyra offered.
“No, I will,” Leo said. “Your psionics aren’t strong enough.”
“Take these three somewhere else nearby,” Brandon said as he moved to a specific panel and pressed a few of the lizard buttons that he knew how to operate, “then get back here.”
“I’ve got these two,” Mace said, picking up the smaller lizards as Leo took point and went searching for someplace to stash them. Soon Jyra got a waypoint beacon and she and Mace took their prisoners out of the room leaving Brandon to work on opening up the water pipes that led into the hatchery. Apparently the facility used quite a lot, for there were three different links for water coming in, with this being one of them. A lot of other pipes were routed through this room as well, but it was the 1.4 meter wide water pipe that was going to be their ticket inside.
