Star Force: Trials (SF68) Read online

  “They’re everywhere,” Jace said in a grunt’s voice as he ran past, prompting a quick laugh from the duo despite the seriousness of the situation. Once Sara was by they brought up the rear, flicking off the stun bugs wherever they could with their Lachka but unable keep them all off their bioshields. As they ran down the mountain and through the twists and turns of the trail that barrier got weaker and weaker, with most of the bugs getting blocked by the telekinetic walls but almost always some would sneak by the cracks, for it was impossible to keep a ground-tight telekinetic wall as you were running and difficult enough to do when standing still.

  Bioshield wrapped around Paul instinctively, with the Lachka much better at remote grapples and flat walls, but it seemed the designers of this little horror park had anticipated that, for no matter how many bugs they stopped more would slip through, and this time there were so many coming out of the vegetation that he honestly didn’t know if they were going to get away from them or not up until they hit the bottom of the loop and jumped across a small hillside of meter-high brush between two marked gravity traps and landed on the opposite trail below.

  “Hold up,” Sara said as they came down, but her eyes were focused behind them. “They’re stopping.”

  Paul skidded his foot across the dirt as he stopped and turned around, adding his normal vision to his already active Pefbar and seeing the cloud of bugs stop like a layer of fog against an altitude temperature barrier, for they literally spilled out above them and did not come any lower on the mountain.

  “There goes most of our supplies,” Jace said, kicking a rock off the trail in frustration, then he and the others all got an Ensek relayed message, for the trailblazers had spread themselves out across the park with various individuals in between the base came and the scouting teams so they could bounce Ikrid messages across them and cheat the distances involved. It reported another two trailblazers had been discovered, including Morgan.

  “Finally,” Sara said with relief.

  “That’s all of us,” Jason noted, glancing up at the swarm. “And I think we’re entering phase two of this little game.”

  “You think they’re going to drive us to the dinobots?” Paul asked.

  “I think they’re just going to keep us off the mountain top for now, but I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

  “How long have you guys been here?” Kian asked.

  “We all got grabbed as soon as we came into the city,” Paul explained, thumbing a finger at Jason. “He was one of the first lucky enough not to get stunned and hauled off to our little prison facility…long story that we’ll get you caught up on later. Right now let’s put some distance between us and those bastards,” he said, pointing to the dark cloud of tiny flying machines as he turned and started walking along the trail to the left and into another curvy mess of path that tried to confuse the heck out of you at every turn.

  “What the hell is going on?” Morgan asked when she finally got to a large group of her fellow trailblazers, though more than half of them were missing from the stomped out section of forest that they’d carved into the underbrush a few dozen meters from the trail edge, and in the center of which was an open hideaway with an array of supplies.

  “About time you finally showed up,” Greg said, walking over to her while the others stood around, some keeping an eye on the surrounding area and the others here to hear what was going on as they figured out their next move. “You had to wait to the last day to get here, didn’t you?”

  “No point in sitting around waiting for the Trials to begin,” she argued, having come straight from her Clan stronghold on the lizard border. “Then again if somebody had mentioned there’d be a pre-party I might have shown up a bit earlier.”

  “None of us knew about this.”

  “What is this?”

  “That hasn’t been told to us, nor has anything else,” Greg explained. “We’ve got search teams out mapping the boundaries of what is a multiple mile park and looking for additional supply cashes like this one. We’ve recovered a lot, then subsequently lost them when the top of the mountain was taken over by the stun bugs. We need your Jumat to deal with them, because they eat up bioshields quickly and can slip past our Lachka. One bug is the equivalent of a stun shot, and there are millions of the things swarming the top of the mountain right now. They were holding to a specific sector, but when the last of you arrived they took over the whole thing.”

  “There were three entry points,” Paul added. “One in a lake, one on the top of the mountain, and the one in the cliff wall that you came out of.”

  “What about the prisoners?”

  “They’re being held northeast of the mountain in a fortified area, and this mountain alone has a lot of nasty little traps. Short story is, if you get stunned a drone comes and picks up your body, and you get added to the trophy case.”

  “Trophy case?” Morgan asked, frowning.

  “From what we could see,” Jace answered, “all the prisoners are still unconscious and laid out on pedestals.”

  “Well that’s rude.”

  “And probably a trap,” Greg added.

  “So you need my help rescuing them?”

  “That’d be nice, thanks.”

  “Bigger problem,” Jason continued, “is we don’t know why we’re here yet. If we all get captured that’s obviously the fail point, but if there is a finish pedestal somewhere we haven’t found it yet.”

  “Any live opposition?”

  “Not that we’ve seen. And the weapons we’re finding are all lethal, so I doubt we’ll be going against anything other than machines.”

  “Are theirs lethal?”

  “All stuns of some sort. Including gravity traps.”

  Morgan’s face darkened.

  “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!”