Star Force: Resistance (SF75) (5 page)

“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.

Brandon deactivated the water flow, then took out a cutting
tool and began slicing open the top of the pipe after insuring that the
pressure on this side was reduced so it wouldn’t spill up out onto the floor,
but that didn’t stop a small geyser of water/steam to shoot out for a few
seconds when he punctured through it the first time. He waited for it to
subside, then turned the small hole into a line that eventually circled back on
itself until the chunk of pipe fell down into the water, splashing out more
onto the floor from the manhole-sized breach point.

“We’re coming back out this way if we can,” Brandon
told Leo, “so keep this location secure.”

“Understood.”

“We’ve got about 300 meters to swim, so give me a
couple minutes head start. No point in your wasting oxygen while I’m cutting on
the other end,” Brandon said as he climbed up on top of the pipe and straddled
it.

“Where does this lead?”
Jyra
asked.

“To a lot of smaller pipes that we can’t fit into, but
we’re getting out early on the other side of the wall.”

“If you say so.”

“Not the best idea, but it’s the only way I know of to
stay hidden.”

“Let’s make it work then.”

“Mace second, you third. Trade out your gear for Leo’s
explosives.”

“On it,” she said, disconnecting her pack from her
armor and setting it on the floor as Leo did likewise.

Brandon took a deep breath, realizing that he was
going to be on the clock here, then let it out slowly as he readied himself.
Leaning forward, he let himself fall down into the water, which gushed out onto
the floor from the displacement, then he began crawling/swimming down the dark
pipe using his Pefbar to see the circular walls as his helmet’s air vents
automatically closed against presence of the water and his backup oxygen supply
kicked in.

His battlemap sensors mapped out the tube as he went,
giving him distance markings so he knew approximately how far to go before
pushing out his Pefbar to look beyond the pipe. He passed by several chambers
that were on the wrong side of the main wall, but he wasn’t sure exactly where
it was. Taking his best guess he went a bit further than that, then started
looking for minds nearby.

He eventually came across one room that had none in
it, with the pipe traveling mostly in the walls and ‘thick’ sections of
infrastructure were a person couldn’t fit, leaving him with only a handful of
rooms to choose from. Taking his luck for what it was, he stopped his movement
and stretched his Pefbar out as far as he could to see what the room was like. It
too didn’t have a door on it, just an opening to the hallway beyond, but he
didn’t sense any minds nearby at all, so hopefully this section of the hatchery
wasn’t staffed.

From the librarian he’d learned where exactly the
workers were, with most of the facility being made up of equipment that had to
be looked after rather than operated, making chunks of it ghost towns save for
the random visit. Hopefully this was one of them.

He used his cutting tool and got to work on the top of
the pipe, not wanting to flood the area by opening up the side or bottom, for
there was still a whole lot of water in the tube, though he was noticing a few
inches of air up top now. Those inside the facility may have noticed the lack
of water pressure, and if they did hopefully this room wasn’t where they’d
check first.

The water vaporized around the tip of the cutter as he
seared through the casing, beginning to trace a slow path around another
man-sized hole and making sure to make it large enough for them to exit with
their packs on as Mace swam up behind him and stopped just shy of his feet.
Jyra
showed up as well before Brandon got finished, then
the hard casing fell down into the water and he pushed it further down the tube
before standing up and having a look around with water gushing out onto the
floor but not spreading as far as the doorway.

The room was dark save for indicator lights, which was
a good sign. No minds were within his sensing range, so Brandon stepped out and
let his oxygen supply begin to recharge as he started taking in outside air
again.

“Clear,” he reported, taking up station near the
doorway and sneaking a peak outside. Both directions of the hallway were empty,
with him breathing a sigh of relief. This was actually doable now.

Mace and
Jyra
joined him, then
the three of them moved out and heading in different directions to start
building a battlemap and looking for the nearest minds, spending a few minutes
orienting themselves before Brandon got a feel for where they were in the
hatchery. This one was larger than the one Star Force had built from lizard
tech, but the basic layout was the same, only redundantly made larger.

“Alright,” Brandon said when they’d pulled back to
their entry point, making sure no one had stumbled onto their hole in the pipe
or the water on the floor. “Time to hide the
easter
eggs. Set for remote and timer. 10 hours
or…let’s just make it 3 am. Place as many as you can, but do not be seen.”

“Sneaking as ordered,” Mace confirmed, with the three
splitting up and heading to the periphery of their scouted area. When
Jyra
got to her section she kept her limited psionics
engaged constantly, looking for nearby minds as well as using her Pefbar to see
through corners to look for security cameras. She took her time and eventually
came to one of the inhabited sections, requiring a bit of sneaking by with the
lizards opening up fully developed pods and releasing the adult, but just
‘born’ lizards one at a time.

She noticed one that came out shook violently when it
was exposed to the air for the first time, with the three others around it
having to physically restrain it as it lashed out wildly until it came to its
senses and saw that it was with other lizards.
Jyra
mentally noted never to wake one up and expect a ‘good morning,’ for it seemed
they were always wired to fight as their basic instinct. It was still
impressive though, how the brand new lizard actually spoke to its greeting
party. That meant they did have knowledge preprogrammed into their
genetics…either that or there was some sort of download occurring within the
pods.

Jyra
avoided that pod and
several others that had lizards prepping them for release, instead sneaking
over to some that were still in waiting, lined up on a long bay floor in rows
that gave her ample cover if she crouched down. She could tell from the
construction that they were moveable, with the empty one that the brand new
lizard had come out of confirming that suspicion as it sank down into a hole in
the floor and disappeared into a recycling facility that would prep it for
another occupant.

A moment later another one appeared in its place,
coming down from the ceiling, meaning that
Jyra
couldn’t place the bombs on the pods themselves or they’d disappear with them,
and if they did get through 598 a day then most of these would be looked at
before the timers expired. That meant she had to find someplace else to stash
her first little gem, with a bank of what looked like support lines and tanks
on the far wall being the obvious second choice.

As she stalked her way over to them, doing her best
Solid Snake impression to avoid the few lizards walking about checking on pods,
she pulled a small square ‘hockey puck’ out of her pack and linked to it via
her HUD, activating it and programming it accordingly with a few quick commands.
The Arc Commando dropped all the way to the floor and scooted as far as she
could get between several small pipes, then slid it back under them even
further before using her full Lachka power to nudge it along the floor sideways
until it was out of sight and resting behind a support strut.

One down, 35 to
go.

Brandon had reserved the busiest section for himself,
heading to the embryo stages where genetic material was being inserted into
tiny pods full of gel that would begin the development cycle. That process was
actually pretty simple and quick, but there were teams of lizards moving around
prepping empty pods with the gel and hooking them up to the support
infrastructure, making it very hard for him to move around unnoticed, with him
having to use a mind trick twice to get by bottlenecks.