Star Force: Trials (SF68) Page 6

  Dina was yanked to her feet with her fellow trailblazer’s Lachka grip and the Archon stumbled her first step off the stone platform where she had been laying…but it was the sight of a pair of mechanical raptors running towards them that shot adrenaline through her body that flushed out a chunk of lingering stun energy.

  “Get behind me,” Larisa said as she stepped in front of Dina just in time to block a mouth shot of stun energy from the closest raptor. The blue dot spread out into a ring that was over a meter wide by the time it hit Larissa’s bioshield, but she took enough of the blast to keep both of them clear…then all of a sudden Dina saw the raptor lifted off its feet and its legs and arms crumple into its body with shrieks of metal breaking.

  The other raptor charged them and Dina stepped up beside Larissa, throwing a small Lachka hold around its left foot and yanking its leg to the side. It stumbled and nose hit the ground as it very agilely got its balance again and jumped at another nearby trailblazer…who dove out of the way after deflecting it with another invisible blow.

  “Don’t touch them or you’ll be stunned,” Larissa told her as she pulled a still groggy Dina her way. “Run with me.”

  “Oh this is fun,” the green-haired Archon said as she kept a wobbly pace behind Larissa, dodging another row of flat pedestals as she saw a few others being revived. The rest of the Archons were spread around the area engaging what looked to be an army of metallic dinosaurs…including a huge brontosaurus that was just now tromping its way into the clearing out of a jungle path.

  “Not that way,” Larissa said, throwing a hand against Dina’s bare chest to stop her as a swarm of stun bugs flew out of the formerly clear section of forest they’d been running to. “Damn, we’re going to have to do this the hard way. Hope you’re awake.”

  “More or less.”

  “Link up…and cross your fingers.”

  Dina accepted the battlemeld link and the pair ran off across the chaotic battlefield as there were Archons moving about everywhere confronting any number of threats that she didn’t recognize, but what little she remembered from her entry she figured everything here was equipped with stun weapons.

  From the information flowing to her through Larissa she sensed the threats each posed, along with the plan to run directly at the worst of them, which was the brontosaurus. Even as they took off the long necked dinosaur sprayed a curtain of stun shots down across the ground like a broom, hitting two Archons that survived beneath bioshields, but Larissa knew they couldn’t last long under that amount of energy and now so did Dina, yet that was exactly where they were heading.

  Dina knew Larissa would match her speed, so she tried to pump as much juice into her waking legs as she could while linking her psionics and pushing away some more rabbit-sized machines as another raptor came at them from the right side, sprinting across the clearing surrounding the pedestals. It fired as it ran and both Archons created a telekinetic crash bag between them, forcing them apart to allow the stun ring to pass through the gap, then Larissa pulled Dina through a hop leap with a short lived Bataf conduit as Paul and Jason sprinted in from the opposite direction and punted the raptor back with an invisible clothesline as they ran on either side of it, yanking it away from Dina as Larissa was doing her best to get her to safety on only a partial destunning charge.

  The girls headed directly for the brontosaurus again, intending to take the trail it had come up on, but the dynamic duo circled around and got ahead of them, drawing the next head blast while leg turrets opened up and fired smaller, rifle-sized rounds at all four of them. Dina slid in behind Larissa and they used their Cerden to link bioshields in order to increase their strength, with the first trailblazer’s silhouette blocking all the incoming fire. Dina could feel how each stun shot ate away at their shield strength and knew that they couldn’t stand up to the rain that was coming down on Jason and Paul.

  There was no time to wait and watch, with the girls suddenly up near the giant’s legs and darting left directly past the walking turret shelf. Dina got hit once, but the speed of both Archons made them hard to target and they flashed past the rear legs…then Dina found herself being thrown up into the air by Larissa as the tail whipped around into their faces.

  The fully awake trailblazer dove underneath it, then launched herself into a Yetu-enhanced jump as it reversed direction with a flick and swung its tree trunk thick limb back at her. It passed under and made one more reverse, trying to flick her with the tip, but Larissa shoulder dove over it at the last moment before somersaulting back up into a run next to Dina as she got hit with a rear turret.

  Their shared bioshield held up and they raced off down the trail, but they weren’t out of trouble yet.

  “Don’t stop running,” Larissa insisted, leading her down the length of dirt road and scanning ahead with her Pefbar as a giant roar sounded from behind them.

  “Wasn’t planning to,” she said as Larissa darted off the trail and into the brush. Dina followed a step behind and dived in with the brush sliding over her bioshields and not tearing into her exposed skin…for sometime during her nap her clothes had disappeared, which she groggy head barely noticed until she stepped on a rock and did a half jump into the air, after which she shunted some bioshield beneath her feet, though that made her movements slippery and even slower.

  “Almost there,” Larissa said while sending her a telepathic warning. “Just gotta get past the sentries.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Dina said as they broke through the edge of the forest and onto a sandy beach that stretched a good quarter mile up to a body of water separating the forest on the other side. There were three T-Rexes out there with a host of smaller raptors, all of which seemed to be holding their positions until the two Humans hit the sand.

  “Blow through and jump. Do…not…swim,” Larissa said a she slowed a bit so the pair of them could share one shield again as the beach erupted with various forms of stun blasts. The raptors sprinted towards them while the T-Rex nearest on the left turned its giant head and blew out a stream of air at hurricane speed, kicking up a wall of sand that threw down a line in front of them. She sensed form Larissa that they had to go in, but as soon as they hit the wall of moving air and grit Dina was knocked off her feet and cartwheeling to the right.

  Larissa formed a Bataf conduit with her and that kept both of them from spinning completely out of control, so that when they hit the ground again they were able to walk through the storm slowly, then when it stopped they took off running again, but not before a trio of raptors got to them. Larissa ran towards them, distracting them away from Dina as she signaled for her to sprint on ahead as the trailblazer began to dance around the mechanical bipeds in a series of jumps and flips, all the while avoiding touching them to avoid the stun charge their body plates would render on contact…which would knock her immediately unconscious with even the slightest brush.

  When Dina got within a few steps of the water’s edge she knew it was too far to jump, but she was determined to get as far across the moat as she could and launched herself up into a pathetic leap having no shoes and with her feet sinking into the sand and sucking away her pushing power. As soon as she was airborne she got a shove from Larissa, then a Bataf conduit that telescoped out and delivered her to the other side.

  The nude Archon dropped into the sand and turned around, ready to help Larissa get across. It took a few seconds for her to evade the raptors, then another sandstorm covered them all. Thanks to their battlemeld she could still sense where Larissa was and vice versa, essentially giving the other Archon her senses to use. A moment later she hit the shore and jumped, with Dina pulling her across as much as possible.

  It wasn’t enough and Larissa splashed down three meters from safety, landing face first in the water and scrambling to get back up as a swarm of tiny machines swam up towards her. Dina pulled her out with their invisible rope, but not before Larissa got ‘bit’ on the leg by two of the little fish bots.

  That brok
e their battlemeld link and sent Larissa into a wash of dizziness worse than what Dina was still feeling, so the less groggy trailblazer pulled the other the rest of the way up and out of the water with her Lachka until she got a physical grip on her arm and hauled her up a safe distance onto the sand, watching the robotic dinosaurs to see if they could come after them or not, not to mention the forest behind them that was an unknown.

  “Da eet,” Larissa said, her words slurred by the stun as she tried to shake her dead leg with her loopy right arm.

  “I’ve got you,” Dina said, picking her up in a fireman’s carry and almost losing her balance. She held it together enough to get them both up the short sandy incline to the forest and set Larissa down against a tree trunk a few dozen meters inside as Tom contacted her telepathically inquiring as to their status.

  She told him where they were and how incapacitated Larissa was, with him telling her to stay put until someone got to them.

  Dina hunched down on her bare feet, keeping the rest of her smooth, pale skin from touching the dirty ground as she took a series of deep breaths and tried to slip into a bit of Sesspik to clear the rest of the grogginess from her body. She had no idea what was going on, nor where her clothes had gotten to, but she got the feeling that some major badassery had just gone down to get her out.

  Then her full bladder finally registered and she slipped over behind a bush to take care of that problem before the others arrived.

  7

  Morgan peeled off her uniform top and flicked it to Dina, who caught it telekinetically from two meters away and pulled it to her as Morgan stripped down to her underwear but kept the shoes for herself, with several other Archons doing likewise to give the escaped prisoners some clothes.

  “Thanks,” she said gratefully, pulling the uniform on and looking around at the others who were clustered in a clump of trees not far off from where they’d been held while most of the Archons were deployed in a distant perimeter looking for threats and buying some time as those who were stunned recovered. Five were totally unconscious, with six others being partially awake but numb like Larissa, but everyone had been pulled out, bringing their team strength back up to a full 100. “How did we end up naked?”

  “Probably our fault,” Morgan said, standing in a jog bra and skin tight short shorts. “When we first found you laying out there you had clothes, but we didn’t want to risk a rescue until we figured out where the dangers were. I think losing your clothes was a penalty for us not acting sooner.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Jason said, walking up beside Dina as she flicked her long, loose green hair out of the neck of Morgan’s uniform. “Probably made some trainer’s day getting to take them off you.”

  “I feel so much better now,” she said dryly, stepping into the pants but still being barefoot. That was going to be a problem going forward, bioshields or no.

  “What’s the situation?” Boris asked as he pulled on Paul’s uniform. “And how long have we been out?”

  “None of us has a watch,” Jason answered, “and the sunlight is on constantly, so we don’t know how long we’ve been in here. The situation is we’re a cold insertion two at a time, with those getting snagged by the stunbots being hauled off by drone and deposited in the prison we just sprung you from. There are supply caches hidden around this very large park, but only a handful of destunning serum injections. We used all that we had to wake you guys up, so those who got hit on the way out are going to have to sleep it off.”

  “Ouch,” Dina said, knowing that meant a load of pins and needles. Fortunately she’d skipped that stage, but was still feeling a touch groggy despite the wakeup run. “No extra shoes in those supplies?”

  “Unfortunately not, but I think we can make some crude sandals. There are enough thorns around here that I wouldn’t want to risk going barefoot even if it meant slowing me down a bit.”

  “How crude is the question,” Landon asked.

  “Depends how inventive you are. But big picture, we’ve finally got a mission assignment, delivered via ghost Obi-wan. There’s a big mountain full of stun bugs and apparently we have to find their lair to disable them, then we’re supposed to know what to do next.”

  “That’s it?” Dina asked, finishing tying her hair into a knot on her head in lieu of the hair tie that had also been stripped off her body.

  “More than we had previously, but yeah, that’s all we know.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Getting you guys out…then going from there.”

  “Peachy,” she said, throwing in a few stretches, for her body was very tight after lying on that rock for who knew how long.

  “We need to investigate the area beyond the mountain,” Morgan said, getting down to details. “There may be items to be obtained that will help us assault the mountain. We recovered some grenades from taking down an aquatic mech earlier, and I’d bet there are more goodies out there.”

  “Stun grenades?”

  “Nope. All the weapons we’ve recovered are the real deal…and next to useless against the swarms. Wilson’s mockery, we think.”

  “Why didn’t you use any against those robotic dinosaurs?”

  “Smash and grab op. We weren’t sticking around long enough to try to take down any of the big ones, and if we so much as touch them we get stunned.”

  “Now that’s just not fair,” Dina added, stopping her overhead stretch to glare.

  “Not much here is,” Jason added. “Which I think is the point. There’s also no ambrosia, so we’re all running on empty by now.”

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, looking at Morgan.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Dina huffed. “Where do you want me?”

  “Same,” Zak said, with the others waiting to hear or simply nodding in agreement.

  “We’re splitting up by teams and going after what objectives we can find,” Jason said as the last of them finished dressing and walked over to the group that was forming. “We’ll get to the mountain later. Right now we’re going shopping…and the 2s are going to try and bag a raptor.”

  Megan sprinted out across a dirt path that held numerous lemming holes, drawing a stream of the speedy little bots out of the ground and heading towards her as she jumped over a boulder, tapping the top theatrically with her hand mid flip, then landed and kept running into the perimeter of the dino zone that surrounded the prison.

  When the lemmings followed her Dan and Brian came through at nearly the same spot, crossing the dirt and heading off into the forest in the opposite direction towards the raptor bot they’d scouted. There were probably more of them in here than just the one, but they’d adjust as necessary to what they found…which didn’t take long, for a partial stun ring flew out from the left, hitting Dan’s bioshield and sucking a good measure of strength out of it as the pair pushed their Pefbar to the max and saw two more raptors nearby heading to their direction.

  “That one,” Brian said, changing targets and running directions, sending a mental ping to the team as they raced towards the raptor closest to the dirt boundary. They ran quickly, dodging trees and brush while spreading out slightly. When the raptor got within line of sight it fired at them once before jumping into an aerial lunge intending to land on Brian, but the Archon was quicker and rolled to the left as he ducked, causing it to overshoot with the help of a telekinetic shove from Dan.

  Both Archons used their Nemsa in battlemeld to shove it down into the ground for a moment, but they couldn’t hold it there for the machine’s leverage was too strong. It stood up and shot at them again as the other two raptors got close to firing range themselves.

  A ping from Paul told them to hold position, and before the raptor approaching on the left could get to them he and Jason emerged from behind and knocked it away with another of their invisible clothesline attacks. Jack and Randy came up on the other side a moment later and did the same thing, diverting the other raptor while Ivan, Emily, and Kip linked up into a 5-w
ay battlemeld with Dan and Brian. As one they lifted the pinned raptor up off the ground where it could only kick at the air, then they threw it through the trees all the way out to the lemming dirt clearing.

  The Archons followed, but Emily and Kip split sideways to push back the lemmings coming at them from even more holes in the ground. The other three Archons lifted the raptor again and chucked it across the boundary and into the trees on the other side before sprinting across the gap and going after it before it could get away.

  Megan showed up and joined the trio after circling around and losing her lemming horde. The four of them pinned the raptor in place again, then got close to it and carried it in the air through the trees another 60 meters before they lost strength and had to put it down. It staggered in place while they restrained it partially while their mental strength regenerated. It lunged towards Dan, but came up short and got its face planted in the dirt so it couldn’t fire off another stun blast.

  A moment later Randy and Jack caught up and they added their strength to the battlemeld and carried it again, this time more than 100 meters and further away from the dino zone. After another pause they decided to throw it again, with Dan and Brian going ahead to ‘catch’ it when it landed and hold it there, more or less, until the others caught up.

  Bit by bit they moved it through the forest for nearly a kilometer until Paul and Jason signaled that the others had finally retreated, apparently giving up on it or sensing a trap…with the latter being more likely if there were trainers on the other end remotely controlling the things.

  When the duo caught up with the others they all linked up and pinned it to the ground as Randy used his Pefbar/Lachka to look inside the thing and start pulling bits apart. It managed to shoot another stun ring into the ground near Paul’s foot, but shortly thereafter Randy was able to cut power to the weapon. A minute after that the entire thing went slack and was pancaked to the ground by the combined telekinetic power of the 2s.