Star Force: Trials (SF68) (6 page)

“We estimate about 10g and they’re only 2 meters wide,
but if you’re running from the stun bugs and hit one of those they’ll swoop in
and nail you before you can recover.”

“Ambrosia?”

Jason laughed. “Not a drop so far.”

“Now that’s just crossing a line,” she said, balling
up her hands into fists.

“Most of us are low or out now.”

“My Jumat feeds off of it. I won’t be very powerful if
it has to recharge naturally, so if there’s something you want me to bust up
now is the time.”

“I would say take down some of the swarms,” Paul
added, “but it looks like they’ve got an unlimited number, so thinning them
isn’t going to be an option.”

“Why do you say that?” Sara asked.

Paul glanced at her. “It’s Wilson.”

“We assume,” Greg corrected.

“No one else would have the balls to do this to us,”
Morgan said definitively. “And going in cold just makes for another element to
neutralize our abilities. If you do find any ambrosia I non-greedily suggest
you send it my way, but I doubt there is any. He’s taking us back to day one as
much as possible.”

“There are also
dinobots
,”
Jace
added with a smirk.

“Fitting,” Morgan said, rolling up her left sleeve and
snugging it above her elbow, then doing the same to the one on the right to
expose her forearms to make it easier to throw Jumat blasts without having to
take her clothing into account…that and it was plenty hot, not to mention that
her clothes were still soaked. “Did anyone get a bundle through? Mine was
yanked off me in the transition from tank to tunnel.”

“I got yanked when I tried to melt the door open for
the rest of you,” Jason said after there were a few nods of agreement from the
others. “I think they wanted us here without any goodies or help.”

“How are we on food?”

“Low now that we lost the mountain stash.”

“You said it was guarded by these bugs?”

“A whole lot of bugs,” Paul corrected. “I don’t think
even with your help we’re going to fight our way through them.”

“How about I fight and one of you sneak your way up
and grab the stash?”

Jason and Paul exchanged glances.

“We don’t know where they are or how many there are,”
Greg answered.

“Or if they’re going to stay put,” Ace pointed out. “I
volunteer to play rabbit and try on our terms before they make a move.”

“I’m game,” Morgan said, flexing her arms, “and on the
clock.”

Paul sighed. “Alright, but we all go…everyone here
anyway, save for one. That one stays just below the threshold and yanks you out
if you go down. No reason to make this distraction anywhere else. We can preposition
and do some sneaking up through the brush, then give you the signal to unleash
hell on the swarm. If you get bit we can at least recover you before a drone
swoops in to pick you up.”

“Lovely,” Morgan said, tossing her hand palm up in an
open gesture. “Lead the way.”

6

Mark-084 stepped up to the null void in his Pefbar and
touched the open air in between trees with his hand, finding nothing. He took a
step forward and his fingers touched the soft wall that an intricately designed
hologram was placed over. The more he pressed the deeper his hand went, but the
stiffer the resistance he encountered.

The Archon pulled his arm back, with it returning to
view and the jungle brush ahead looking very real to his eyes. He guessed it
was overlaid onto a restraint field, and at least that meant if someone ran
full on into it they wouldn’t smash themselves against a hard surface. This was
more like a rubber band and would throw you back out after impact, but the
field was also invisible so it allowed the hologram to set up in real space
rather than having to try and put it on an actual wall.

As Mark looked past the nearest brush he could just
faintly detect a misalignment in the trees. It wasn’t much, but it was enough
to know that they were in fact holographic rather than the real ones behind
him. He glanced to the right, then the left, seeing that there were no trunks
on the approximate border line, but there were some branches sticking out. He
walked sideways over to them and reached for the invisible wall…but it wasn’t
there.

Backtracking he found the original point and ran his
hand along it as he walked until it suddenly disappeared. Feeling it out he
found that the field made a sharp turn inward, and following it he discovered
that it was a nook in what otherwise would have been a flat wall that ran
around the circumference of this tree and its branches.

That was smart, otherwise there would have been a line
of daylight marking the edge where the branches failed to meet the hologram.
The deviation would be minimal, but it might be detectable from above. Wilson
had gone to great lengths to make this park as seamlessly real as possible, but
Mark had just found one none the less.

He reached out with his Ikrid and found
Nik
where he’d left him, then sent him a telepathic report
of what he’d just found, including images, that the other trailblazer viewed
and copied with Ensek, sending out the same Ikrid message to everyone within
his range…who then in turn sent their own copies, making for a Human relay
system to cover the vast stretches of the park. It was hard to measure with all
the varied terrain, but Mark guessed he was somewhere between 5 to 7 miles away
from the mountain at this point and only now was encountering a boundary wall.

That easily made it the largest interior park in Star
Force, and gave the now less than 100 trailblazers a huge region to explore
looking for supplies, threats, and their mission objective. With this point
finally plotted Mark continued to work his way around the perimeter, keeping a
hand on the invisible wall at all times and seeing where it led.

Rafa
was also out on
scouting duty, but on the opposite side of the mountain and nowhere near a
boundary wall when he stumbled across a clearing in the forest. Approaching it
carefully sensing a trap, he scanned everywhere he could with his Pefbar and
slowly walked out into the daylight towards the single object at the center…or
rather buried beneath the grass. It was hidden underground and when the trailblazer
neared it a hologram formed in front of him in the image of Obi-wan Kenobi.

“Greetings, younglings,” it said in a reasonable
knockoff of the original. “By now you’ve obviously realized that these aren’t
the Trials you were looking for. Be that as it may, it was decided that the lot
of you deserved a greater challenge. And for any proper challenge you must have
a mission objective, which I will give you now. Be wary, for I will state this
only once, then you’re on your own.”

“Find the heart of the storm and quell it at its
source, then the light of day will guide your path onwards…oh, and did I
mention you should run now? Farewell, and
may
the
Force be with you,” the hologram said as the dirt beneath its feet burst up
through the grass and a series of tubes emerged, out of which flowed little
mechanical quadrupeds by the dozens.

“Shit,” Mark said as he turned and ran, diving into
the underbrush and pushing through it with his bioshields. He wasn’t near a
path so he was just going to have to improvise. The lemmings were damn fast and
if he couldn’t get out in the open he wasn’t going to be able to evade them.

Then again, if he delayed to fight them more would
catch up to him, so he decided to just try and make a run for it.

The first little rabbit-sized machine that caught up
to him got picked up and hurled backward telekinetically, followed by others as
Mark pushed his way through a wall of vines. He’d been trying to run the way
he’d come, but these hadn’t been there so he must have already veered off course.
The forest was so dense off trails that it was almost impossible to keep your
bearings without a battlemap and right now all he had to work off of was a pair
of mental signatures that were both more than a kilometer away.

As he ran Mark relayed the hologram’s message just in
case he did get caught and stunned, then did his best to lose his pursuit,
hoping like hell they didn’t have any flanking units ahead of him or he was
going to run square into a trap at the pace he was being forced to move at.

“Heart of the storm?” Paul repeated, exchanging
glances with the others in their new base camp.

“Like…cloud storm?” Kerrie suggested.

“Oh hell no,” Morgan said, realizing what she meant.

“There’s still a lot of the park we haven’t searched
yet,” Greg pointed out.

“She’s right,” Jason disagreed. “It means the
mountain. We have to go back up there.”

“We barely made a supply grab. We can’t go exploring
up there.”

“We’ll need everyone,” Kerrie insisted. “And maybe
some specialized equipment is hidden out there somewhere for us to find. If a
return to the mountain is the endgame, then the size of this park suggests us
doing a lot out there before we get to it.”

“It didn’t say endgame,” Paul pointed out, drawing a
few cringes of agreement.

“Regardless, it’s where we have to go eventually,”
Morgan said, dropping into a crouch and resting on her ankles. “But we’re going
to need everyone, which means a prison break has to come first.”

“I get the feeling we might be in here for a long
time,” Rio said, sitting down on the ground next to Morgan. “I’d prefer getting
the others back sooner than later, so if it’s possible at this point, we need
to get them out now.”

“If it’s possible?”

“There could be time locks, in the form of unbeatable
challenges. Or like Kerrie said, maybe there’s something else out there that we
need to earn first to be able to take those
dinobots
down.”

“Oh we can take them down,” Morgan said dangerously.
“We just have to link up into a massive battlemeld.”

“Which puts us all in the same place at the same
time,” Paul added.

“Let’s start with the small ones and see what
happens,” Jason suggested. “And let’s split up what supplies we have in case we
lose this firebase as well. I don’t want to have to make another bug run,
especially with Morgan low on ambrosia.”

“I’ll be out within a day, two tops if I don’t use it
again.”

“When’s the last time you trained dry?” Sara asked.

Morgan shook her head. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, that’s a big middle finger from Wilson,” Jason
said, punching his palm. “He trained without ambrosia for so long he’s used to
it. Us…not so much.”

“We’ll adjust,” Paul said with a reassuring tone. “We
always do.”

“Meanwhile the others are stuck in nap time,” Sara
reminded them. “I agree, we get them out first.”

“At least we finally determined one thing,” Andre said
as he suppressed a smirk.

“What?” Greg asked.

“There are only 100 trailblazers. Kara’s not here, so
apparently Wilson doesn’t consider her one of us.”

All eyes turned to Paul.

“She’s busy, and if I used her in the Trials you’d all
complain about her jewelry anyway.”

“Just saying that Wilson didn’t con her in here
either.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Morgan said dismissively. “He got
us without our armor. You can’t disconnect hers.”

“Short of lopping off her hand,” Greg added.

“Just saying…we’re back to old school,” Andre
clarified.

“Yes we are,”
Yori
agreed.
“So let’s get the others and figure out how to beat this thing.”

Dina woke up groggy as hell with a telepathic shout
echoing through her mind and a person standing over her. As soon as she moved
her body it hurt from stiffness, but it was more the urgent emotions pouring
into her from Larissa than the pain that woke her up enough to sit up and see
where she was.

“Don’t ask, just move,” Larissa said, throwing a
telekinetic wall behind Dina and knocking back a rogue lemming. “Now!”

Dina was yanked to her feet with her fellow
trailblazer’s Lachka grip and the Archon stumbled her first step off the stone
platform where she had been laying…but it was the sight of a pair of mechanical
raptors running towards them that shot adrenaline through her body that flushed
out a chunk of lingering stun energy.

“Get behind me,” Larisa said as she stepped in front
of Dina just in time to block a mouth shot of stun energy from the closest
raptor. The blue dot spread out into a ring that was over a meter wide by the
time it hit Larissa’s bioshield, but she took enough of the blast to keep both
of them clear…then all of a sudden Dina saw the raptor lifted off its feet and
its legs and arms crumple into its body with shrieks of metal breaking.

The other raptor charged them and Dina stepped up
beside Larissa, throwing a small Lachka hold around its left foot and yanking
its leg to the side. It stumbled and nose hit the ground as it very agilely got
its balance again and jumped at another nearby trailblazer…who dove out of the
way after deflecting it with another invisible blow.

“Don’t touch them or you’ll be stunned,” Larissa told
her as she pulled a still groggy Dina her way. “Run with me.”

“Oh this is fun,” the green-haired Archon said as she
kept a wobbly pace behind Larissa, dodging another row of flat pedestals as she
saw a few others being revived. The rest of the Archons were spread around the
area engaging what looked to be an army of metallic dinosaurs…including a huge
brontosaurus that was just now tromping its way into the clearing out of a
jungle path.

“Not that way,” Larissa said, throwing a hand against
Dina’s bare chest to stop her as a swarm of stun bugs flew out of the formerly
clear section of forest they’d been running to. “Damn, we’re going to have to
do this the hard way. Hope you’re awake.”

“More or less.”

“Link up…and cross your fingers.”

Dina accepted the battlemeld link and the pair ran off
across the chaotic battlefield as there were Archons moving about everywhere
confronting any number of threats that she didn’t recognize, but what little
she remembered from her entry she figured everything here was equipped with
stun weapons.

From the information flowing to her through Larissa
she sensed the threats each posed, along with the plan to run directly at the
worst of them, which was the brontosaurus. Even as they took off the long
necked dinosaur sprayed a curtain of stun shots down across the ground like a
broom, hitting two Archons that survived beneath bioshields, but Larissa knew
they couldn’t last long under that amount of energy and now so did Dina, yet
that was exactly where they were heading.

Dina knew Larissa would match her speed, so she tried
to pump as much juice into her waking legs as she could while linking her
psionics and pushing away some more rabbit-sized machines as another raptor
came at them from the right side, sprinting across the clearing surrounding the
pedestals. It fired as it ran and both Archons created a telekinetic crash bag
between them, forcing them apart to allow the stun ring to pass through the
gap, then Larissa pulled Dina through a hop leap with a short lived Bataf conduit
as Paul and Jason sprinted in from the opposite direction and punted the raptor
back with an invisible clothesline as they ran on either side of it, yanking it
away from Dina as Larissa was doing her best to get her to safety on only a
partial
destunning
charge.

The girls headed directly for the brontosaurus again,
intending to take the trail it had come up on, but the dynamic duo circled
around and got ahead of them, drawing the next head blast while leg turrets
opened up and fired smaller, rifle-sized rounds at all four of them. Dina slid
in behind Larissa and they used their Cerden to link bioshields in order to
increase their strength, with the first trailblazer’s silhouette blocking all
the incoming fire. Dina could feel how each stun shot ate away at their shield
strength and knew that they couldn’t stand up to the rain that was coming down
on Jason and Paul.

There was no time to wait and watch, with the girls
suddenly up near the giant’s legs and darting left directly past the walking
turret shelf. Dina got hit once, but the speed of both Archons made them hard
to target and they flashed past the rear legs…then Dina found herself being
thrown up into the air by Larissa as the tail whipped around into their faces.

The fully awake trailblazer dove underneath it, then
launched herself into a Yetu-enhanced jump as it reversed direction with a
flick and swung its tree trunk thick limb back at her. It passed under and made
one more reverse, trying to flick her with the tip, but Larissa shoulder dove
over it at the last moment before somersaulting back up into a run next to Dina
as she got hit with a rear turret.