Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (21-24) Read online

  Kara looked back at where Dre’for lay, thinking that she better move him off or else the thing might think about making a snack out of him. Deciding that was for the best she walked over and pulled the heavy alien off into another chamber, which the ridged floor made exceedingly difficult…plus he weighed a ton.

  After getting him removed from the area Kara came back and took her best guess at a revival sequence and shut down the four active systems.

  A flashing green light appeared underneath a small morphing hologram that she guessed was a countdown clock of some sort. Probably an automated release now that the life support was down. She wasn’t sure if hitting the button would speed it up or reverse what she had done. Flying blind she just went on instinct and pressed the damn thing…then a groan sounded and the clear barrier between her and the giant lizard retracted up into the ceiling, releasing a foul odor that made it all the way inside her helmet’s filters.

  The lizard lay still, just as it had been, though the frost covering its body began to melt. Kara just stood there and waited, not sure what else to do. Maybe she had accidentally killed it, or maybe it was going to take a while to revive. She had no answers so she just stayed back and watched, circling around a bit to get various views, looking for any signs of life.

  After nearly 5 minutes she saw it take a breath, much as it had been before, so she knew it wasn’t dead, thankfully. A minute later another breath followed, then another, and another…each with shorter intervals until it was up to one every ten seconds.

  That was when Kel’sad came in so quietly that Kara didn’t detect his presence until he was only a dozen meters behind her.

  “What have you done?” the Scionate growled, poised in a defensive lean backwards away from the sleeping giant, as if he was ready to run at the first twitch.

  “If you don’t want to be here, leave,” Kara warned. “Take Dre’for with you. He’s napping around the corner.”

  The Scionate’s face crunched up in a confused look, then he sniffed the air to confirm the proximity of his den brother. “You assaulted him?”

  “We had a difference of opinion,” Kara said, keeping one eye on the Keeper and one on Kel’sad. “He’s unharmed, just unconscious,” she said, pulling out her pistol and pointing it at the Scionate. “It will stun through armor if necessary, but I would prefer I didn’t have to shoot you as well.”

  “Have you gone mad, Human?”

  “We’re all about to get killed when the base is overrun. We aren’t going to get another opportunity for this, so I had to act now.”

  “What’s done is done,” Kel’sad growled. “Put your weapon away.”

  Kara stared at him for a moment, then decided that he was genuine and slipped her pistol back into its storage slot. “The Nestafar are landing additional dropships. We don’t have much time. If this thing can help us, we need to find out.”

  Kel’sad growled again, this time more so than the first, but not at Kara. The Nestafar bringing in more troops was a bad sign and he recognized as she did just how bad of a situation they were in.

  On the opposite side of the lizard’s head, where neither Human nor Scionate could see, a crack appeared in the beast’s eyelid at the name ‘Nestafar.’

  5

  Ashley held up her hand to get the others to stop behind her as the tunnel suddenly branched off to the left. She approached cautiously, with nothing else in sight ahead of her, then poked her helmet around the corner and was suddenly staring directly into a row of ball-form protomechs parked in the side tunnel. They looked like perfectly smooth chrome orbs, but whether or not anyone was inside them she didn’t know…nor did she know where the entry hatch would be, because at a glance she couldn’t see any seams in the spheres.

  They didn’t fill the entire tunnel, but it would be next to impossible to climb around one of them without scrunching through. She doubted Ske’rar could make it in his armor, and even though they didn’t intend to head off to the left Ashley was worried about what would happen if the protomechs followed them down the tunnel ahead.

  “Trouble?” Terry-1055 asked.

  “Have you seen Indiana Jones?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember the giant rolling boulder?”

  “Protomechs?” the Archon guessed.

  “They’re parked to the left. I don’t know if anyone is in them or not, but if they come after us down the tunnel they’ll crush us.”

  “You want to turn back and try another tunnel?”

  A muffled growl from the Scionate indicated that he wanted to know what was going on, given that he wasn’t keyed into their helmet comms.

  “Move back,” Ashley said, also giving the appropriate hand signal. “Time to poke the bee hive.”

  The three other Archons did as instructed and retreated back up the tunnel a ways. Given the incline she hoped that if the protomechs came after them they’d be slow enough that they’d be able to run and stay ahead of them on their way back up to the surface. Going downhill further into the mountain would be suicide given that the rolling balls wouldn’t even need to propel themselves to gain speed.

  Ashley jumped out into the side tunnel and shot the first protomech three times with her plasma rifle, putting tiny melted divots in the hull but otherwise having no effect. The thing didn’t move, at all, and Ashley fired five more times trying to provoke a reaction…but the thing was as dead as a giant marble.

  “Ok, I guess they’re unmanned,” she said, walking up closer, ready to run at the slightest twitch of movement.

  The others came down into view, Ske’rar included, as she tried to slide her body through the narrow gap between giant orb and tunnel.

  “What are you doing?” the Scionate asked.

  “Trying to find…never mind. There’s a walkway carved into the wall. Looks like they dug this offshoot just to store these,” she said, dropping into the narrow shaft that ran parallel with the tunnel. It stretched out down to what looked like a cross tunnel, suggesting that the Nestafar had been digging much more than a single route into the base, but rather establishing their own outpost of sorts inside the mountain where the Alliance fighters couldn’t get at them.

  “Chase, Less, come through here,” she said, waiting for the pair to squeeze through the gaps and into the walkway. “Go cause trouble.”

  “Happy to,” Less said, rubbing against the wall to get by Ashley with Chase right on his heels. She went back out into the protomechs tunnel and scrunched her way back through to the others.

  “They’re the diversion, we press on to the digger,” she explained to Ske’rar.

  The big cat nodded and followed her and Terry down the shallow angle of the descending tunnel towards the ever growing rumbles of distant machinery.

  Boen tapped Mark’s shoulder twice, indicating that it was time to move again, then he reached down and offered his hand, into which the trailblazer put his wrist. With a heave Boen picked him up over his shoulders and stumbled his way through the debris field down a zigzaggy valley between big sections of what had once been the freighter and one of the spider walkers. He eventually set the Archon down underneath a hollowed out piece of the spider’s leg, then jumped off across the ‘road’ where he slid underneath a narrow overhang just before the wing beats of another patrol became audible.

  Both Archons stayed perfectly still and waited. Before long one of the Nestafar flew by a meter off the ground, flapping hard to maintain its subtle hover as it danced from one point of view to the next, then slowly disappeared out of sight and sound. The pair waited longer, knowing that they couldn’t afford to get careless, then Boen moved Mark again, just another 50 meters up to where he found a tent-like overhang where two pieces of wall had fallen in on each other. It didn’t appear to be the safest location, but it was large enough to cover them both with room to spare.

  Boen laid Mark down and dragged him inside, then reached back out and smoothed the singed dirt to try and erase the footprints and drag marks lead
ing in. Everything was so fresh that most of the dirt was covered in bits of debris, but erasing even the smallest of signs tipped the odds away from the Nestafar finding them and the Archon was intent on making those odds as lopsided as possible.

  “I can’t believe they have patrols this close to the base,” Mark whispered when Boen pulled off his helmet so he could hear better.

  The Archon cringed. “Sorry boss,” he whispered back, “but we’re nowhere near the base yet. We’ve only moved about a quarter mile since we left the underground. We don’t exactly have a straight line back.”

  Mark pulled off his helmet as well, then lowered his voice to make sure his normal compensation for the dampening effect wouldn’t carry over into his unhelmeted speech. “Where did you first encounter the patrols?”

  “About halfway in…” he said, falling quiet as a soft rumble sounded. The faint noise gradually grew louder and louder until the foot beats were unmistakable. Boen put a finger to his lips, a reminder for Mark to stay quiet and still, then he gently poked his head out of the hole to have a look around. At first he didn’t see anything, then a bit of motion off to the left caught his eye. It wasn’t fully visible, given the debris in the way, but through several gaps he saw the flank of a protomech along with at least two Nestafar infantry flying just above its shoulders.

  He pulled back in before they had a chance to spot him and moved over next to Mark. “Looks like they’ve added some firepower to the patrols.”

  “Protomech?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re not going to halt the assault forever,” the trailblazer reminded him. “We need to get clear of here before they come back en mass. I’d say that was more of a scout than a patrol.”

  Boen frowned and glanced around, more out of habit than trying to look, because there wasn’t much visibility available from where he was crouching. “How’s the leg?”

  “Still no go.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  “It’s bad and not getting any better.”

  “Dizzy?”

  “Aside from the screaming pain…yeah.”

  “You’re low on blood,” Boen commented, which both of them knew was bad. “We’re going to have to risk some longer runs. I was thinking about dragging you, but I don’t know how to do it without making your leg any worse.”

  “Please don’t do that…” Mark pleaded in all seriousness.

  “Yeah, didn’t think so. You got any ideas?”

  “Follow the mech,” he said, leveraging himself up. “Now.”

  For a moment Boen didn’t understand what he meant, then realization flashed in his eyes and he quickly pulled his helmet on and ducked out of the hideaway. Mark crawled out on his own and Boen picked him up again, listening for the location of the protomech and then heading that way, intent on getting in behind it.

  He heard Mark groan several times from the bumpy ride, but he had to be quick to get in position and the erratic terrain wasn’t helping. It was daylight, which made their being spotted even more likely, but odds were they wouldn’t have one patrol following on the heels of another, so if they got in behind the protomech and its escorts, from far enough back, they might be able to have a clear run through the debris field…or at least in whichever direction the patrol was headed.

  Boen remained silent, but he felt like uttering a whoop of joy when the backside of the short mech came into view briefly, then disappeared behind another pile of junk. He worked hard to stay close enough to it so that the sound of its footsteps would mask his own, but far enough away to keep out of sight most of the time. As it was, the Nestafar flying along with it had eyes front and to the side, not bothering to look behind where they had just passed.

  Heavy as Mark was in his ranger armor, Boen was more than happy to carry him, feeling like each meter they progressed was an unmitigated victory up until the patrol turned to the east and was no longer helping them along. The pair of Archons ducked off to the north then started heading west before they came to a nook in the debris where Boen finally set him down before jumping off a few meters to the north and grabbing a better vantage point of the area.

  Mark lay where he set him, pulling himself back in a few more inches and grimacing against the pain. It was numb, yet eye-piercing pain at the same time and he could feel his grip on reality fading, but as he lay perfectly still his mind began to restructure itself enough to gain control and bring him back into the moment.

  Boen signaled to him that they were going to stay put a while, then pointed off further to the west, letting him know where they were headed next. After that it was just waiting and listening for more patrols, then back to the lethal game of frogger they were playing.

  “I do not see how this helps,” Kel’sad said. “But here as it may be, let us see where it takes us.”

  “Better,” Kara commented as a fierce headache hit her. She blinked away the pain, wondering what in the world had caused it, then she glanced back at the Scionate and saw him staring at the floor. “Are you ok? I just got a bad headache.”

  Kel’sad didn’t move, as if he were frozen in place.

  “Kel’sad?” Kara asked, walking over to him and gently poking him in the head…without a response.

  Then to her left the lizard’s neck twisted, lifting its head up off the ground and rotating around so it could look at her across a 20 meter gap. It rumbled some language she didn’t know, the sound of which was truly frightening, but she held her ground next to the Scionate. It looked at her for a long moment, saying other things she couldn’t understand, then it seemed to grow disinterested in her and turned its long neck back towards its body as it strained to get to its feet, with multiple joint pops attesting to the length of time it had slept.

  “Can you understand me?” she asked in the trade language, but it didn’t respond. She swallowed hard, then switched tongues based on something Mark had said earlier. “Gar cu ratch bey?”

  As if struck by a bolt of lightning the lizard turned, unfurling huge wings that had been hidden by the way its body had been coiled up, and stared down at her. Kara smoothly pulled her plasma rifle off her back and held it at the ready across her chest, not aiming at the creature but making it clear she was ready for a fight if it was going to make one of it.

  “Are you Ter’nat?” it asked directly, both of its huge eyes staring directly at the Archon’s helmet.

  “Sort of.”

  “Do not trifle with me,” the dragon warned. “Are you V’kit’no’sat?”

  “We are enemies of the V’kit’no’sat, as I have been told you are.”

  “Yet you are Ter’nat, are you not?”

  Kara stared back at the creature, fear running through her veins at the sheer muscle power driving the thing and making her wish she was standing farther away, but she wasn’t about to abandon Kel’sad.

  “We are not Ter’nat. We are descended from Zen’zat.”

  The dragon recoiled a hair and cocked its head at an angle as if looking her over again. “That explains why I cannot access your mind, so you must tell me the answers I seek. Both Ter’nat and Zen’zat serve the V’kit’no’sat. How then can you be their enemy? Has a rebellion begun?”

  “In the distant past, yes,” Kara confirmed, realizing that she was breaking the silence the Archons had kept on all things V’kit’no’sat for centuries, but if this dragon could speak the language then it probably knew more than she did. “A Rit’ko’sor rebellion resulted in a colony world being abandoned. My ancestors were left behind. We had no knowledge of the V’kit’no’sat until we recovered records of the past, and so far we have not encountered them across the galaxy, though we have not traveled far as of yet, but their old borders do not match those of the present. Where they are or what happened to them we don’t know.”

  “Why then do you call them ‘enemy?’”

  “We know that they do not tolerate splinter groups. If they find us, they will either kill or enslave us all.”

  “The
y will not enslave you,” the dragon said as if it were common knowledge. “Rogue groupings are not tolerated in any form and are marked for eradication. Your survival is a feat of luck, nothing more. Whereas we were not so fortunate.”

  That took Kara aback. “Before we get into a lengthy conversation I’d like to clear up one thing first…am I going to have to shoot you or not?”

  A cross between a bark and a growl ripped from the dragon’s throat, then was gone as fast as it had been uttered. “I know of the conflict brewing above and of your imminent defeat. You shall not have to add me to your list of enemies unless you fire your weapon. I am weakened from my sleep and it might even hurt me.”

  Kara recognized the arrogant nature of that remark and smiled. At least they had that in common.

  “Your race was wiped out by the V’kit’no’sat…yet here you are. Explain. And a name would help too.”

  “We are the Zak’de’ron, and I have no need to answer to you, little Zen’zat. You will answer me. What world are you from?”

  “That I’m not saying,” Kara said, the headache suddenly returning. “What did you do to him?”

  “His mind is easy to control, but yours is shielded. He does not know the name of your world, nor do those above. What is it?”

  “We are alive because the V’kit’no’sat don’t know we exist, and we plan to keep it that way.”

  “You believe they still exist, even though you have had no contact with them?”

  “They were too powerful to have fallen.”

  The dragon lowered its head down to almost floor level. “In that we are agreed, Zen’zat. The Rit’ko’sor would have hurt them, and hurt them badly if they chose to strike when and where I think they did, but it would have been little more than a distraction unless others joined them. Do you have any knowledge of this?”