Star Force: Trials (SF68) Read online

  Morgan hardly noticed the pain save for when she stepped on something new. She was getting near to her return window when she came back across her own trail, realizing that what she’d just run had been a circle, bringing her back to her previous fork in the trail. It was hard to tell from the geography, but her footprints where there to be seen and settled her fatiguing mind. This region had the highest concentration of the bugs, literally with so many that she could have reached out with a hand, swiped it through the air, and came away with a fist load of them.

  Crunching her fourth bean and knowing she had about 2 minutes before turning back she dove off trail and into the brush and getting all kind of cuts on her naked body as branches whipped back at her after being repulsed by her hurricane. She couldn’t put up a bioshield for it would block the concussive energy, meaning her smooth skin was about to turn into a bloody mess of cuts and scrapes.

  It wasn’t as bad as she expected, for the Jumat kept most of the contacts off her body, but those that did hit were always strong ones, branches rather than leaves, and some of them definitely had thorns on them. Morgan had to dislodge a few that the Jumat didn’t push out of her body and was beginning to question this wild goose chase when the concentration of stun bugs, momentarily diminished by the closeness of the forest, escalated beyond anything she’d encountered yet.

  That told her to press on, even as her mental clock guessed it was time to head back. Saying to hell with it, Morgan decided to go all-in and gave up on the retreat option. Upping her flow rate to compensate, she literally pushed aside buckets of stun bugs out of her sight, which was virtually gone. Between the trees and the bugs she was walking naked through brush in nearly pitch black conditions despite the overhead sun. Her Pefbar allowed her to see through it all, but with so many objects moving about in chaotic fashion she had to mentally filter out the moving stuff else start to suffer vertigo from the sensory overload.

  She focused on the ground and tree trunks, walking blindly through the brush that she could no longer see, but what was still scraping her up, even stopping her when she walked into a bush that wouldn’t move out of her way. That set her back, having to backtrack a few steps and find another way around, literally stumbling in the dark trying to see any large objects out there in the aptly titled ‘storm.’

  So numbed up from the mental mess and Jumat fatigue, Morgan took her next step and fell right into the source of the stun bugs, dropping some ten meters down a tube to land on a hard floor onto her left shoulder…that popped from the impact that she couldn’t see coming. Her head also banged into the ground, disorienting her into a state of punch drunkenness, but fortunately that made her mad and she reflexively upper her concussive energy flow, blowing back so many stun bugs that they literally ran into each other and broke, for there was so little air for them to move about in.

  Morgan coughed, with a senzu bean stuck in her throat as she rolled over face down. With a telekinetic tug she pulled it out and chomped down on it, chewing it and the last one up and finally clearing her mouth. Her shoulder hurt, but far less than it should for being dislocated, telling her just how doped up she was right now. Turning off her Pefbar for a moment the mental storm disappeared, letting her focus on her energy flow and her major injury…as well as the sum total of all the cuts across her formerly attractive body. She couldn’t see it now in the pitch black conditions, but she was a sliced, nasty mess.

  Getting a telekinetic grip on her shoulder she tugged it back into place, but forgot to pull her tongue in. She bit it with the pain spike, tasting blood and cursing herself for being so dumb. The Archon rotated her shoulder around, finding it hurt but was still functional as she stood up and turned her Pefbar back on and saw the snowdrifts of dead stun bugs on the floor around her and a snowstorm of active ones surrounding her at no more than a meter distance.

  Morgan held position and scanned the area, finding three tunnels heading out from the vertical tube she was now at the bottom of that was itself the size of a small room. Walking on gratuitously flat floors she headed down one of the hallways and came to a dead end some 50 meters away…or so it looked until she got closer. There was a large room that spread out sideways from the tunnel width, and on both sides of that room were equipment banks in the wall that had numerous vents that were spewing out more stun bugs.

  In the middle of that room was a circle on the floor that Morgan almost missed save for the fact that she stepped on a slightly raised ring, bringing her attention down to her feet. Depressed below the surface of that circle was a hidden switch that could only be accessed via Lachka…or by breaking through the floor. She used the former and flipped it, with the vents on either wall shutting and cutting off the flow of stun bugs.

  With an angry sneer she threw her arms wide and punched the entire room with a much larger Jumat blast, throwing the tiny bugs into the walls and crushing most of them. They scattered around in the maelstrom like bits of debris, eventually working their way to the floor and piling up there as Morgan walked back out to the center tube and headed down another of the three hallways. She found an identical room and switch there, turning it and the stun bug production off before heading over to the last chamber.

  When she hit that switch the vents closed but the swarm around her was still active. She sent out another burst and took down most of the ones in that room, but there were so many coming down from aboveground that the air was still thick with them, though she had a tiny respite that she did not allow herself to linger in. Morgan kept up the Jumat flow, knowing now would be an ironically bad time to let one slip through and take her down, as she headed back to the entrance, not sure if she could jump high enough to get out in her present condition.

  When she got back there she noticed a new circle in the middle of the floor. As she walked towards it a pylon rose up from the ground with her first thinking it was a step up to get out of the hollow, but then she saw that it was made of crystal with a glowing icon in the center…that was blue.

  There were no visible buttons to press, nor internal ones, so Morgan just summoned up a directional blast and threw it off her good arm, hammering the crystal and cracking it. She repeated the attack four more times until it broke apart and the blue light likewise disappeared…with every stun bug in the air suddenly shutting down and dropping to the floor, save for the fact that she couldn’t see that with her battering them all over the place. It was the lack of additional ones coming down from top that first clued her in, not to mention the bits of sunlight coming down onto her mauled up body. She eased back on the Jumat flow and the remaining bugs flew into the walls and piled up on the ground, adding to the black snowdrifts.

  She took it down another notch and the air finally cleared. Morgan let go her effort but kept her Pefbar active, just in case something else was going to happen, and felt the blood begin to seep out of her in small rivulets. She nearly fell over with the effort release and stepped forward off the circle in the center. She noticed the rim in her Pefbar just before she fell, not remembering it having been there, then when her foot hit the ground and a piece of crystal dug itself into the center of her foot the floor fell out beneath her, crumbling into hundreds of pieces as a bright gold light burst through the cracks.

  Morgan wheeled about mid fall, grapping the edge of the platform with her bad arm and feeling it wrench again. Her fingers held on past the pop as her eyes squinted against the glare from below. Forcing herself to twist on her dislocated shoulder, she got her other hand up to the rim and one armed herself up until she got her chin on the edge, then worked her way up over the edge mostly with her good arm, slithering onto the shattered crystal and cutting herself up further, but avoiding the fall.

  Come to me, she shouted telepathically, not even bothering to try and find Rex’s mind to send a direct message. I need help.

  9

  On my way, Rex told her, immediately leaping up the gap between paths and sprinting over the black snow on the ground and crunching the little
stun bots with every step. He had a fix on her mental location, and with the stun bots no longer an issue he was able to run freely aside from making detours around the gravity traps.

  It didn’t take him long to get to the cave tunnel, then from there he was in unfamiliar territory and asked Morgan for directions rather than just guessing or trying to claw his way through jungle. She replied with the first turn instructions, then after that her memory was hazy but she said she hadn’t encountered any gravity traps.

  This side of the cave was covered in stun bots like patches of a giant puzzle laid down in various locations wherever a swarm had been at that time. When Rex crossed over a patch of clean ground he was sucked down into a faceplant, smashing his nose into the compact dirt for a moment before he did a slow pushup and got his legs under him enough to crawl out of the gravity trap…which told him Morgan hadn’t come this way.

  Sensing her closer now he decided to abandon the trails and head straight for her location, so summoning up a bioshield he dove into the brush and disappeared beneath the trees. At least this way he wouldn’t run into any more gravity traps, for they’d pull down the brush with them and give away the location. Previously though there had been other things off the trails to worry about, and about halfway to Morgan he found one of them in the form of a little mound in the ground that a slew of lemmings came up out of.

  They chased after him and nearly caught him in the ankles before he telekinetically threw them off, then he broke through onto another trail and kept to it, heading in Morgan’s approximate location with the things nipping at his heels for a moment before he got up to speed.

  Rex lost them eventually, then came around full circle on the path before realizing that Morgan was in the center of it. He got confirmation from her of that and dove in, eventually coming to a hole in the ground that was brightly lit from below with the telltale light that the hologram had spoken of. When he got to the edge he found Morgan at the bottom on a narrow platform around which was the light coming from somewhere below, though he couldn’t make out where with his eyes or his Pefbar, for it was being blocked below a certain level.

  He also noticed that Morgan was covered in blood.

  “What the hell?” he asked, with her glancing up at him.

  “Pull me up, please.”

  Rex got a telekinetic hold on her waist and lifted her up through the opening, though there was an audible groan from the trailblazer as he did so. Her bloody, nude body came up out of the hole and he set her to the side…and to his surprise she let herself drop to the ground rather than standing on her feet.

  “What did this to you?” Rex asked, taking a knee next to her.

  “Running naked through sticks and thorns.”

  “You ran out of bioshield…oh crap, you couldn’t use it.”

  “Nope.”

  “You need to slip into a healing trance.”

  “Already have. Can I ask a favor?”

  “Sure,” he said, knowing it was virtually unheard of for Morgan to ever ask a favor.

  “Take your shirt off so it doesn’t get bloody and carry me on your back under your bioshield while I heal.”

  Rex raised an eyebrow. “I can do that, or we can just bring everyone here and go through that portal when you’re ready.”

  “No,” Morgan said, keeping her body locked in a lounging position so to minimize movement for the sake of the Sesspik. “It’s shielded from psionics. If there’s something nasty waiting for us on the other side we have to be ready first. That means more hunting parties collecting ambrosia and whatever else we can find. That’ll take at least a day and I’ve already lost a fair amount of blood. Most of it blew off with the Jumat, so I need to heal this as soon as possible.”

  “I can stand guard here so you don’t have to move.”

  Morgan sighed. “Just get me back to camp.”

  “As you wish,” he said, pulling off his shirt and rolling it up into a bundle that he held in his left hand as Morgan stood up and climbed on his back. The blood made her warm skin slick on contact, but between his arms looping through her legs and a little telekinetic reinforcement he got her snugged up against him and made sure she could just sit there without having to hold on much.

  “Just veg, I’ll get you back,” he said, slipping a bioshield around both of them and walking off slowly through the brush with it passing harmlessly around her naked body.

  “Thanks,” she said, trusting him enough to close her eyes and her senses and give herself over to the healing trance.

  Many hunting parties later all 100 trailblazers gathered at the portal carrying their weapons, shields, and other knickknacks that they’d constructed out of the debris as Kerrie jumped up over the hole and froze there, tipping face down in midair as the others held her aloft and slowly lowered her down into the chamber below. She had a battlemeld link with Aaron so he could see what she saw as her head dipped into the energy field that was further down around the central platform below and glowing a blinding gold.

  Kerrie passed into it, for it wasn’t a thin layer and her vision was bathed in light so much that she had to shut her eyes. Her Pefbar told her that she was in a short tube, at the bottom of which was a hatch that snapped open as she approached, probably expecting her to fall through rather than float above it.

  With that physical barrier gone she could sense but not see what was below. There was an arching tube curling to the right like a dry waterslide, beyond which she could not sense…

  Suddenly her body was jerked out of the Archon’s telekinetic grip and she disappeared from sight and sense.

  “Damn, I lost her,” Aaron said.

  “So much for intel,” Morgan said stepping up to the edge in her underwear and reclaimed shoes. “Any reason to wait?”

  “Nope,” Bo said, diving in ahead of her. He landed feet first on the platform below then hopped off into the golden light with the others following at slightly staggered intervals.

  Greg came down with a full length shield, tucking it up against his back and riding it through the curved tunnel like a rough surf board made from metallic dinobot hide. He could see Dina ahead of him a few meters and could sense the others behind him as they slid down a long straight decline in the dark until it corkscrewed through one last hurricane-like twist before dumping them out on a short drop of 4 meters into a large chamber.

  Greg landed on top of Kerrie’s unconscious body, seeing her just in time after squinting his eyes against the brightly lit chamber to arch his back and land on all fours overtop of her…which fortunately kept his shield strapped onto his back as a stun sword swung down onto him.

  With his Pefbar adding to his eyesight he knew he and the others were being ambushed as they came in, so he grabbed Kerrie in a telekinetic hold and shot her body away from the landing area as he sprinted away from the guy with the sword, noticing two other Archons already down before he realized that it was an Arc Knight waiting for them.

  The man was fully clad in black/gold armor and had one of the wicked stun swords that the Black Knight had made infamous in their training days. This guy was using it to whack the trailblazers unconscious as they came down, and had it not been for Greg’s shield he would have been taken unaware as well.

  Knowing that had to change now, Greg threw a Fornax blast back behind him and into the Knight as he ran, causing the giant to stumble as another trailblazer came down. He missed Jace by a hair when he swung next, which was when Greg sent a quick telepathic message out to all within range letting them know what was happening. The others would relay it up the slide, he knew, so hopefully they’d be ready to fight the moment they dropped out of the ceiling.

  After getting Kerrie clear he turned around behind his shield and ran towards the Arc Knight as Jace held him back with a telekinetic grip for a moment, only delaying him until he activated his Rentar and melted the Lachka tendrils holding him in place. That delay was enough for Greg to get to him and ram him off his feet with his six foot tall flat
shield, knocking the Arc Knight to the ground in an armless tackle and clearing the exit for the others to come down.

  Jace stepped up next to Greg and held position while Erin came down and pulled Bo’s body out of the way and began to work on the others. Seeing that he was now outnumbered, the Arc Knight rolled to his feet and telekinetically pulled his dropped stun sword towards him as he ran off…but Jace was too quick and used his own Rentar to break the grip on the Knight’s sword, causing it to drop to the ground a meter away from him, then jerk back towards Greg as he got his own hold on it.

  The Knight tried to disrupt that but was too slow and the sword dropped to the ground with Jace running forward and scooping it up in his hand before it could hit. Seeing that there wasn’t a lot the Arc Knight could do now with a fourth trailblazer dropping down behind him he chose to run rather than fight, for which Greg was grateful. Getting hit or kicked by a guy wearing full armor was painful, plus the only way they were going to disable the Knight was through psionics, for there was no way they could hit hard enough to get through that armor.

  Greg backtracked as the Knight ran off across the room that was the size of 6 football fields and disappeared into a door that opened for him. It shut after he went through, leaving the trailblazers in command of the circular chamber with four of their number unconscious already.

  “That was close,” Jace commented, checking the power level on the stun sword and feeling much better for having it.

  “So much for a finish line,” Greg scoffed as more of the others fell down through the opening. “Good thing we took down that Brontosaurus, otherwise we’d be down four right now.”