Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66) (7 page)

Chrissie was below him and to the right, and he realized
she had a specialized cutting tool as their battlemeld links reformed that was
literally melting the plating away, with the pieces being held up in the air
nearby telekinetically by the others, with Iden also grabbing a piece to help
out so they wouldn’t fall to the street and alert anyone to their presence.
Before she could get them a man-sized hole, Chrissie paused what she was doing
and braced herself against the wall in a three point stance, then reached a hand
out toward Sonya, using a
repulsor
conduit to help
reel her in with no one left to push the mage across.

The set of dark blue armor smacked the wall three
meters to the right of Chrissie and more than a story below, bouncing off like
Iden had but holding both hands to the wall and keeping them there. Her legs
rebounded and flopped against the wall as Chrissie got back to work, soon
prying loose an entire section of the weapon and diving in head first, with
more parts coming back out as she dug like a gopher through the equipment with
her cutter leading the way.

Iden took a moment to look around. There were no
fighters nearby angling for them, and no one down on street level looking up.
In fact, there was no one down there on the plaza surrounding the tower, with
all the defensive troops tucked into overhangs that would protect them from
aerial bombardment…and fortunately now cutting off their lines of sight upward.

“I’m in,” Chrissie said over the
comm
after cutting the battlemeld link.

“Junk first,” Sonya reminded them, telepathically
steering a few floating pieces through the gap. Iden passed the two that he was
holding aloft and felt Chrissie take them, sucking them inside the hole along
with a steady flow of others.

Sonya went in after the parts, then the
master/apprentice pair began clearing out the immediate area, putting lizards
to sleep from afar but finding only a few nearby as Iden and the rest of the
Archons slowly climbed inside. When he got to the opening he saw how tight a
fit it was, having to press his chest down as low as he could to keep from
snagging his weapons rack on bits of machinery. His Pefbar allowed him to see
it all so there were no unintentional snags, just a lot of slow, deliberate
movements up until he came to the proper wall and the hollow space inside.

From there he slid along without broken components
trying to grab him until he came to another hole, this one cut by Chrissie that
led out into an internal hallway. As he ducked down to crawl out he felt a
telekinetic tug hasten his transit, with him throwing the ranger on the other
side a ‘thank you’ gesture with a wave of his free hand while he reached back
and took his rifle off the safety hook on his pack with the other.

He waited for the others to come through, then stepped
over the junk pile and followed Sonya’s waypoint, running to catch up to the
pair that had already moved three floors up and wasn’t slowing down.

7

Iden dug through his pack, which he’d disconnected
from his armor and was now laying on the ground as he pulled out his portion of
the explosives all the Archons were carrying. They’d worked their way up to the
top of the tower, intent on scrapping the weapon itself rather than the power
supply. Conduits could always be replaced, but the actual array would be more
difficult to rebuild and so far none of the other colonies that had come under
attack had managed to replace theirs…though this one was going to be sitting
here for a long time, meaning they had to wreck it as much as possible.

They weren’t bringing down the tower. It was far too
big for that and the small amount of explosives they’d brought, plus the fact
that they were still inside. What they were aiming for was wrecked components,
with the fist-sized cubes Iden was pulling out and tossing into the center of
the small room he was crouched in being telekinetically caught by another
striker and pulled inside an open maintenance panel.

Four other Archons were doing likewise in the room,
with everyone feeding the explosives into the base of the main gun and the
Archon placing them inside at the most pesky spots. To date no one had gotten
inside one of these things to figure out how it worked, for all the other
towers were just being blasted from the outside, but placing explosives was more
about breaking things than understanding them on this trip, so anything that
looked fragile or combustible got a cube stuck to it.

Iden emptied his pack and tossed the last pair into
the air, seeing them disappear inside the open panel along with a stream of
others as he picked up and reattached the mostly empty pack to his armor. There
were still some foodstuffs and ammo left, but most of the bulk he’d been
hefting around was now gone and he felt noticeably lighter as he retrieved his
plasma rifle and stood guard until the other striker climbed back out of the
assembly.

“We’re good to go here,” he said, with Iden giving him
a moment to grab his pack before the group headed out. The others were split up
between defending their lower flank and placing explosives in other key areas
nearby, all of which would be on a countdown once triggered.

A waypoint flashed on his HUD, indicating where Sonya
wanted them to come. As Iden and the others moved down through the defense
tower’s upper levels, which were mostly maintenance access, he saw a countdown
pop up at 15 minutes .There was still a ‘boom’ button that Sonya had, but
should they get out of range of the small transmitter the countdown would take
care of giving the final order on its own.

Fifteen minutes though told Iden that they were going
to have to fight their way out, and as soon as he got within a level of where
Sonya and Chrissie were he sensed lizard minds coming up from below. Halfway
down the stairs he got a personal waypoint, along with seeing others popping up
as the mage told them where to go, spreading the group out across the level,
for the lizards were coming up at multiple stairwells.

The striker sprinted over to his position, relieving
Chrissie who headed off another direction. Iden stayed put and gun pointed down
his stairwell for several long seconds, staring at a pile of bodies below
before live ones began to crawl over them.

He fired two shots into the heads of the pair that
came into view, adding their corpses to the pile and caused those behind them
to stay behind the wall and not try to force their way up until they had
greater numbers. Iden could sense them pooling below him, then a plasma blast
zipped past his head from the flank and hit a lizard further down the hallway
on his level that had seemingly come out of nowhere.

Chrissie ran by him to deal with it and Iden turned
his attention back to his stairs just as the group behind the corner below
charged up and onto the pile of bodies, clawing their way over them and up the
incline towards him, eating his plasma streaks and dropping dead or injured to
trip up the others.

But as usual, the tactic was not completely suicidal.
The lizards up front acted as shields for those behind, gaining them a meter at
a time until the horde was almost within touching distance. Iden backed up a
step, continuing to fire down as the closest lizards reached the upper three
steps and began shooting back. The striker held his ground and killed two more,
taking a pink spurt of phaser into his shields before he stepped forward and
kicked one back into the group, causing a domino effect that knocked half a
dozen down before the kinetic momentum was bled off.

More from behind pushed those who had fallen back up
and onto their feet, with Iden going hand to hand and smacking the next closest
lizard with the butt of his rifle. A telekinetic push sent another on the
stairs tipping backwards. Flipping off his shields the striker tossed his rifle
aside on the floor of the hallway and tackled the next closest lizard, emitting
a Fornax field as he did so. The resistance in its limbs and those behind it
vanished, with him pushing the pile of them back down the stairs using his own
momentum and weight.

He kicked himself free and climbed back up the stairs
before he released the field, summoning his rifle back into his grip and using
it to shoot the stack of disoriented bodies below as he got a recall prompt and
new waypoint. A wide Fornax blast as a going away present covered his tracks as
Iden raced down the hallway to the left and joined up with two of the others as
all the Archons converged on Sonya’s position and pushed their way down a
single stairwell.

“We’re going out through the lobby, run and gun,” she
told them. “Stay behind me and Chrissie and shoot targets of opportunity, but
don’t break off. We’re going to have to hammer our way out.”

“What happened to the gun port?” Iden asked.

“I can feel wisps outside, so that’s a no go.”

“Looks like we got their attention,” one of the
rangers noted as Sonya/Chrissie threw up an invisible wall that shoved some 8
lizards back from the base of the stairs at the lower level and into the
hallway, clearing a path for the Archons to continue moving down. Iden snapped
off a pair of shots as he passed, hitting at least one lizard as the others did
the same, with the last man in line throwing Fornax blasts behind them to keep
their tracks clear.

Their route down through the tower was predictable,
with every level there being more and more opposition, but it wasn’t until they
hit the bottom third of the building did they run into the first physical
barricade blocking the stairs. Iden felt a battlemeld prompt and accepted, with
the Archons using
Nemsa
to create a joint telekinetic
push that dislodged the heavy canisters from where they sat, picking one up and
throwing it further down the stairwell where it bowled over or crushed numerous
lizards below. The others they moved into a side hallway one by one, with the
Archons without
Nemsa
using their Ikrid to disrupt
the lizards on the other side and throwing in a few Fornax blasts where they
had clean lines of sight so they wouldn’t hit the other Archons.

Iden had gotten his
Nemsa
not through individual ascension, but from another Clan Jinx striker. Likewise
most of the other strikers had acquired a handful of battlemeld and tier 2
psionics in the same way, with
Pren
being the only
trigger that he’d found on his own. It added to his telekinetic power, which
was then multiplied many times over by combining it with the others’ power
levels. Adding theirs together not only gave them a sum total greater than what
any individual could produce, but by using multiple emitters they gained a
power boost from the overlap, and the more minds involved the larger the boost.

They could have lifted a small tank together if need
be, so they didn’t have trouble moving the makeshift barricades until they came
within 3 levels of the surface and found structural components welded across
the stairwell. Together they tried to dislodge them, with a few openings
sprouting a phaser
blurp
or two before the lizards on
the other side were psionically shut down through one means or another.

“Cover us,” Sonya said, disconnecting from the
battlemeld along with Chrissie. Iden and the others stayed linked, for it made
for precision Ikrid and Fornax attacks through the physical barricade without
them worrying about hitting each other, not to mention it allowed them to watch
their backs via the Archon there, for all could see/hear/feel what the others
did. Having the big two out of the link made it less stressful and Iden was
able to maintain the smaller group battlemeld without too much effort, even
managing a precision plasma shot back through one of the small peep holes in
the crisscrossed pile of trash blocking their way.

Both Sonya and Chrissie removed one of their armored
gloves, with the padawan grabbing Sonya’s wrist as the mage pressed two fingers
up against one of the weld points and held them there for several seconds
before the metal began to glow. Using the battlemeld
Irod
ability, the two overlapped and strengthened their Rensiek fields and
concentrated their channeled body heat up to temperatures that neither could
have handled individually. It was slow going, but soon the first weld point
melted away and Sonya drew her fingers across it like she was
smooshing
aside sticky, glowing goo.

When they finished with that one they moved their
locked arms over to the next point, heating and dislodging it as Iden sensed
lizards massing above them and in the nearby halls, closing in on them from all
sides.

Suddenly he turned, throwing a mutual telekinetic hold
on a lizard coming down the stairs from above them and stopping it dead in its
tracks. A moment later the
det
pack carrying lizard
started to fly back up the stairs, and apparently figuring this was as close as
it was going to get, hit the trigger half a level up, blowing itself and the
surrounding structure apart.

The concussion wave hit Iden and the others, taking
down his shields and piling him on top of Sonya below, with two more armored
bodies and bits of wall falling on top of him.

“What was that?” she asked, pushing the others off her
with Chrissie’s telekinetic help. “Damn it,” she added, sensing the pain in her
padawan.

“I’ll live,” the Archon said with a grimace,
referencing the charred hole in her hand where some of the molten metal had
dripped on her in the tumble.

“
Det
pack,” Iden informed
her, given that she hadn’t been linked into the battlemeld to see it coming.
“And we’ve got a hole,” he said, telepathically pointing to the outside wall
that was missing a huge chunk of structure, with a lot of the debris having
fallen through it down to the next level.

“Go,” Sonya said, still being on the bottom with
Chrissie.

One of the rangers beat Iden to it, running up to and
jumping through the hole to fall several meters down to the next level. When
the striker came down there was a flurry of phaser blips crisscrossing the
area, and Iden’s weak shields went down after a few hits, having been drained
of power in the explosion. Adding his plasma fire and psionics to the ranger’s
they cleared out a perimeter around the hole and pushed the lizards back,
allowing the others to come down and form up, with a
regauntleted
mage and padawan pushing into the lead and plowing through the sea of lizards pooling
around them.

They fought their way to the next stairwell, finding
no barricades on it and quickly making their way down to ground level. They
didn’t stop there, but went down further into the subsurface levels until they
got to the security checkpoints that they hadn’t wanted to fight their way
through to get in. Hitting them from the opposite side took some of the turrets
out of alignment, but there was an even larger sea of lizards waiting for them,
with plenty of room in the road-like hallways to stack their numbers and return
fire
en
mass.

“We’ve got the turrets,” Sonya told them as she and
Chrissie leapt ahead, falling into small craters of lizards as they made room
by emitting short range Fornax fields to allow them to leapfrog ahead into the
tightly packed masses. “Plow the road guys.”

Iden and the others knew what that meant and fired
into the lizards closest to them, using the distraction the other two were
making to their advantage but only killing or dislodging enough of the enemy
infantry to create a momentary corridor for them to move through. It felt like
him playing football all those years ago, with barely any gap gained, but even
a little bit was enough for the Archons to wedge themselves in and through,
then killing more just ahead as they turtled up into a group, allowing their
bodies and shields to cover each other’s flanks as they powered their way
through, with almost everyone having their shields at low to no power.

Their armor held though, and with so many bodies in
such a small space the lizards couldn’t get many shots off. They needed a bit
of air between them and their targets to really dish out the phaser blasts and
the Archons weren’t giving it to them. Like a pack of security guards escorting
a celebrity through an animated crowd, the 8 Archons pushed their way up to the
gap between the nearest two turrets that were now smoking with plasma damage.

Both of the elite Archons were already ahead of them,
attacking the other turrets and killing their gunners as they tried to pivot
them around to shoot the opposite direction. They reminded Iden of grunt plasma
turrets from Halo and fired the same, for they oddly weren’t equipped with the
new phaser tech.

Chrissie took one hit square on in midair, with the plasma
blooming to cover almost her entire body as she punched through the green
destructive cloud and landed on top of the turret, swinging her body around and
whipping her armored foot into the lizard’s head who was sitting behind the
protective blast plate. A few shots from her rifle into the control mechanisms
junked that turret, with her armor holding up against both that intense burst
of plasma as well as dozens of phaser hits.