Twin Stars 1: Ascension (6 page)

“Can your Squire tell us what’s happening inside?” He asked the older man.

“Esther?”

The Squire turned to look right at Tysen, making his breath catch in his throat for a second and a shiver run down his back. He was starting to get annoyed with himself- what was he? A first year cadet with a crush?

“Sensors in the room are still offline; however, I am detecting the passage of six individuals with similar chemical scent patterns through this corridor in the last two hours. Five are armed with newly artificed weapons, the other has a Battle Array.”

Tysen noticed that the mention of a Battle Array brought a quick end to Sir Fawn’s seemingly endless good humor. Not that Tysen didn’t agree with him- a Battle Array made the wearer into an armored mobile weapons platform, and clearly explained the devastation they had seen as they’d made their way here. These were highly illegal for civilians, but perhaps if it was a pirate raid…

“He’ll be the one to watch for, then.” Fawn said, drawing out his long gleaming blade. Tysen could see the sword had a dark, oily sheen to it that seemed to absorb rather than reflect light. “No notes on what kind of Array? There’s quite the variety.”

“Energy based, I can detect ozone where it was activated before they went in. Assuming it’s a based on a standard template it will likely have the expected defensive and offensive capabilities.”

“If that means a military template,” Tysen put in. “We can expect he’ll have a defensive field and be able to generate shock weapons for close-in fighting and probably energy pulses for ranged targets.”

“Quite so, Lieutenant.” Sir Fawn nodded. “I will watch for those.”

“But sir, even if you get close, you can’t penetrate his defense fields with just a sword.”

Sir Fawn gave him a knowing grin. “Leave the battle tactics to me, Lieutenant. I have been doing this for a very long time. You and Esther will follow me in after I have them distracted- try to see what they’ve been up to. Don’t engage unless I ask you to.”

“Sir, I’m a trained combat officer of Noble blood, I can help.” Tysen protested.

“I will let you know if you’re needed, Lieutenant. Let us just hope they’ve only brought one Array…”

* * *

The shock saber’s energy blade passed through the deck where Ping An had stood like it was going through water, filling the air with the smell of burnt metal and plastics as it vaporized everything it touched.

If that had been an outer wall, we’d be in hard vacuum right now!
She thought as she landed some distance back on the upper observation decks from the lunatic in the Battle Array.

The air was heavy with the smell of death and the cries of the hundreds who moments before had been trying to board ships to leave the colony and had been caught up in the attack. At first, she and her people had thought a bomb had gone off, but after finding the remains of Camus and his people the hulking bald man wearing the battle Array had appeared.

He’d come flying through open space of the multi-level promenade like a shimmering red god of death come down to inspect his handiwork, and when he’d found his work undone he’d made right for them.

Ping An had sent her people running for the shuttle or whatever they could find, then stayed to try her hand at holding the attacker off.

It wasn’t working out quite as planned.

That barely missed me!
She thought.
With that Battle Array on he’s almost untouchable and he hits with the force of a power loader. I’m just lucky he hasn’t thought I was worth a gravitic wave yet, or I’d be a stain on the wall.

But she didn’t have time to worry, he was floating up to the level she’d landed on. She grabbed a piece of nearby metal railing and with little effort twisted it free to use as a club. When he drew up to the edge of the landing, she leapt off it at him, bringing that metal pipe down into that smiling face of his.

She might as well have tried to do that to the side of an asteroid for all the good it did her- the pipe bounced right off the defense field. He brought his energy blade around at her, and she was forced to kick off from his chest to avoid being cut in half.

Somersaulting backwards through the air, she dropped back down to the main deck three stories below, feeling something give a little in her left leg as she hit the floor. She ignored it.

“It’s no use, child.” He called down to her. “My barriers make that club as effective as a baby’s touch. Come, stop struggling and join The Black. The others in this docking ring did, and soon the whole station will join them.”

“Like hell!” She yelled, and then turned and began to run.

She needed to buy more time, Justin still hadn’t called in yet, and that meant she had nowhere else to go- she was trapped on the docking ring.

“You’re too fast to be a standard human,” he was flying after her and quickly catching up thanks to her damaged leg. “What are you?”

“None of your business,” she called back as she dodged around an overturned loader.

Think Ping An, think!
Her mind raced. There had to be a way. There had to be a way to deal with his field-
but she had nothing to break it with.

Then, as she passed a docking port it occurred to her.

There was a way.

"We all come from The Black, child.” He said in his beatific voice. “Let me help you return to it.”

“Ha!” She called back to him. “The only black around here is in your head!”

That earned her a shower of sparks as an energy burst tore into the deck just in front of her. He really wasn’t a good shot, but with that level of power he really didn’t need to be.

Yes, that’s it!
She encouraged.
Let’s play- follow the person pissing you off!

Finally, Ping An saw what she was looking for, and made a sharp right turn into a boarding tunnel and raced to the end.

There was no ship docked to it, and the tunnel ended in a small two-door airlock zone with a window that looked out on the swirling green and gold planet below.

“You have nowhere to run, child.” His feet made a buzzing sound as he landed in the boarding tunnel behind her. “You have found your own door to salvation. How appropriate.”

She turned to face him, backing slowly into the airlock chamber as he advanced on her.

“Care to throw me out personally?” She goaded.

He paused, clearly sensing something not quite right, and their eyes met. For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to do it, but then he smiled again.

“Why not? I am not afraid of The Black, it is mother to me. With this Battle Array, it cannot harm me and you cannot get past me.”

He advanced forward, and Ping An continued to retreat, letting him draw nearer and nearer until…

Just as his foot crossed the threshold and into the airlock, she hit the button. Born on a space mining colony, Ping An had been around these systems her whole life. Knowing them inside and out, and knowing what interacted with what, was a matter of life or death in space.

The button she pressed brought up the sealing field on the inner airlock door, a field designed to separate the docking tube from the airlock when the inside of the airlock was filled with a vacuum. It wasn’t a strong field, it didn’t need to be, but it was strong enough that the Battle Array the man was wearing automatically interpreted it as an attack and concentrated its energies around the edges where the two fields met.

Leaving the rest of the wearer less protected.

He was still smiling as she drove the metal pipe through the field and into him.

Then, he didn’t smile anymore.

“Well played child,” he managed, looking at her from where she’d pinned him to the side wall- blood dribbling from his mouth. “But this…won’t save…you…”

“I don’t need anyone to save me, freak, I can save myself.” She said to the dying man with contempt, then turned and headed back up the tunnel.

"Leederman? You get the shuttle prepped?" She sent.

"Ready to go, Bosslady." Came the answer she wanted to hear.

Ping An glanced back at her handiwork, then took off running.

“Then let’s get the flock out of here.”

* * *

The control room for the Miraposa Three OTS was designed to allow many people to work together in a limited space. Control stations were scattered about the main floor in a haphazard fashion, while above them several floating mobile platforms served as work stations for the executive controllers and technicians. There was no central display or focus to the room, as it was designed to be handling a large number of smaller tasks at the same time. A holographic display could be projected as needed if everyone needed to view something in common.

Such as now.

WARNING: STATION ORBIT DECAYING

Under this banner, Sir Fawn leapt from one of the mobile platforms to another, dodging weapons-fire from the assembled missionaries and trying to stay one step ahead of their leader, who swooped after the aging knight in his Battle Array. As Tysen watched, Fawn cut through both a gun and the man who held it with his sword, then bounced away just moments before the missionary leader blasted the platform with a bolt of energy.

“Tysen, we must focus.”

“I know, Esther.” Tysen replied, shifting his gaze back to the workstation in the corner that the two had commandeered. “But, aren’t you worried about your master?”

That got him a quizzical look. “My master is a veteran of many battles, why should I allow him to distract me from the task at hand?”

Tysen shook his head and went back to work. Esther may have been beautiful, but she was as cold as most of the Squires he’d met. They were bioroids- artificial lifeforms combined with advanced cybernetics, and while supposedly Squires were closer to human than machine, they rarely acted like it in his experience.
They’re supposed to be companions; you’d have thought they’d be given more cordial personalities.

The panel before him beeped.

“I can’t get in either.” He told Esther. “We’re totally locked out.”

After Sir Fawn had distracted the missionaries, Tysen and Squire Esther had slipped in and begun trying to learn exactly what the missionaries had been planning. It hadn’t taken much, as the warning that the station was falling towards the planet was on almost every display. Esther had immediately tried to access the command systems, but to no avail. It seems they’d arrived just as the missionaries were getting ready to leave, having already finished their dreadful work.

“Do we have other options?” She asked him.

“Maybe,” he ducked down and began to move towards the central station in the middle of the main floor. “Follow me.”

“This is highly inadvisable.”

If she thought so, Tysen considered, why did she still follow him? But he didn’t have time for such questions as they dashed through the warzone and slipped into the engineering work station. He did his best to ignore the remains of the engineer laying nearby, and laid down in front of the station’s main access panel.

His plan was simple enough- see if he could force the system to reset itself and maybe give him access to the command systems. All he needed to do was hope that this older station still used the operating systems he’d learned in his engineering classes. In this case, his Noble genes and the near-photographic memory they gave him would be a blessing for once. All he needed to do was get the panel off and…

Then his eyes fell on a box placed near the console. He knew what it was immediately.

"Sir Fawn!" He sent urgently. "They’ve placed explosives at the work stations."

Above him, Tysen watched the knight whirl across his view to lance at the missionary leader with his sword. The blade, for all its extreme lethality, was still deflected by the defensive field of the array, but then the knight twisted up and over his opponent. One of the floating platforms, which had been following him, slammed into the terrorist leader. Leader and platform crashed into a nearby wall with a thunderous boom.

The older man landed nearby and looked over at Tysen.

“Is there much time left?”

“I can’t tell, there’s no chronometer!”

There was a loud cracking noise as the nearby crashed platform wall rose up and was tossed aside.

“This station,” Brother Ganymede screamed as he strode from the wreckage unharmed, “and everything on it, will be returned to The Black from whence it came!”

Sir Fawn made a decision. “There’s nothing for it, then. Esther, evacuate and take the Lieutenant with you. I’ll be along as soon as I can.”

Tysen barely heard the Squire’s “understood” answer before she had grabbed his hand in her vice-like grip and was pulling him along.

“Hey! What are you doing?!?” He protested. “We have to help.”

“I am taking you to safety.”

He let her pull him along, the two of them racing through the exit and out into the corridor at the high speeds only a Noble or Squire could move. “But, what about your master?”

Tysen spared a glance back down the corridor just in time to see fire start to pour from the control room exit.