Star Force: Trials (SF68) (4 page)

Jason flew through the air and landed in a telekinetic
grip as Blade stopped his fall, bringing him down into the shallow pool of
water alongside him with the overhead sun glaring down on both of them as they
looked out over a huge forested valley from what appeared to be a mountaintop.
Jason spun his head around, seeing the same thing stretching out behind him in
all directions without a wall in sight and with the water splashing down behind
them coming from a magical hole in the sky.

“What…the…hell,” Blade said, looking around and seeing
miles of countryside stretched out before them and all at a lower altitude so
they could get a grand view of it all.

Jason stood up and took a few steps forward, enough to
see a piece of the pool spilling over the edge of a drop off into a long but
thin waterfall that transitioned into a quickly flowing creek that disappeared
into the greenery. “This has to be holographic at some point.”

“What the hell is Wilson playing at?”

“I don’t know, but…”

Run!
Greg’s
voice said telepathically with a mental arrow pointing them over the waterfall.

Jason and Blade exchanged glances then took the
trailblazer’s warning at face value and dove over the waterfall as a buzzing
sound suddenly overwhelmed the noise of the falling water.

4

Jason went over first, with Blade stepping off the
edge of the waterfall as he clicked on his Pefbar and noticed a cloud
approaching from their left. He didn’t have time to analyze it, for a moment
later he was in freefall and landing in a churning pit of water half a step
behind Jason, who slid down the incline and underneath the vegetation as he
traveling along the water flow. When Blade hit he submerged up to his shoulders
before being carried off in the flow between a series of rocks, noticing the
cloud overhead coming down after them.

Don’t let them
touch you
, Greg’s said just as Blade saw the tiny little dots shoot through
the leaves after him.
Come to me.

Blade stayed in the water flow, feeling Jason just
ahead as Greg’s mental impetus showed them where to go. He clawed at the rocks
to get him more speed, for the amount of water was low enough that it wasn’t pulling
him along rapidly and the cloud was catching him. Before they got to the second
waterfall the first of the little bugs pushed through the thick branches and
leaves overhead and into the tube-like tunnel that the water was flowing
through underneath. There were dozens of them at first, with thousands more
visible on his Pefbar, and they were all headed towards him.

Blade threw a telekinetic push back towards them,
scatting those closest but they were coming at him from multiple angles. He
seemed to still be ahead of the swarm but could feel another section of the
cloud moving on ahead, as if they intended to ambush him further down the line.
That was when he felt a battlemeld prompt and he linked up with both Jason and
Greg. A moment later a repulsor conduit was created between Greg and him, with
Blade jumping off the next waterfall and swinging on it like a vine. He put up
a bioshield and rammed right through the little stun bugs, knowing from Greg
that it would protect him.

But with each contact his shield weakened, for every
mechanical bug carried a stun charge and they were all detonating against his
bioshield. He made it through the open air and was reeled in partially as Greg
landed him in a pile of brush 20 or so meters up from the water flow and near
to where Jason had also landed. Back under the brush again, Blade scrambled to
get his footing as he climbed up what was left of the small ravine until he
came to a path where Greg was waiting, with Jason stepping into the open a
moment later.

“Follow me,” Greg said, throwing several Lachka fields
up into the open air above the path to knock back the stun bugs as he led them
on the downhill portion of the dirt trail. “And knock them down every chance
you can get. Smash them if there are only a few.”

“How long have you been here?” Jason asked on the run
as the three of them moved single file with Greg in the lead.

“A few hours, but they got Dina. If even one of those
things hits you it’s the same as a full stun shot from a pistol. They only have
one charge, but if three of them land on your arm you’re unconscious. We didn’t
know what was happening until it was too late and they got her. I managed to
get a bioshield up over us but couldn’t sustain it and had to run.”

“Where is she?” Blade asked, throwing another
invisible wall up over their heads and using it like a fly swatter. These
stupid bugs were fast in air and looked to be able to match their foot speed.

“Captured. The bugs stun you then the drones haul you
off. I couldn’t get close enough to stop them.”

“What the hell is going on?” Jason asked, linking up
with Blade and using a combined Lachka field to encircle and then compact a few
dozen of the bugs into a mechanical snowball. They double crunched it, making
sure the damn things were destroyed, then dropped it and swatted away some more
tendrils of the ever growing swarm that had to number in the hundreds of
thousands.

“I don’t know,” Greg said, jumping over a log and
taking a spur on the trail that led through a tunnel in the rock. Jason and
Blade followed him in, then came up short as he stopped inside. “Keep a field
on that entrance. They didn’t come inside last time, but don’t take chances.”

“Got it,” Blade said, throwing up a bioshield to cover
the door-sized entrance.

“No, use Lachka. Your bioshield will trigger the
charges.”

Blade deactivated the glass-like energy barrier and
replaced it with a completely invisible one as the buzz of the swarm passed it
by but, like Greg had said, they didn’t try to come in through the short tunnel
that had an exit only 15 meters on the other side.

“I was exploring the lovely traps over there,” Greg
said, motioning to the other side of the ravine, “when I felt you guys come in.
This whole place is a cleverly sculpted nightmare.”

“What traps?” Blade asked, keeping his Pefbar extended
out the way they’d come while lowering his Lachka field, ready to snap it back
into place if anything tried to come through.

“Gravity traps, about two meters wide. I’d guess 10g.
If there were bugs on that side they’d leave you a sitting duck. You can’t run
anywhere without taking the chance of hitting one of them and falling flat on
your face. I’ve been trying to map out and mark them, but have only had an hour
or so.”

“Go back to the part where who took Dina?” Jason
asked.

“Big flying drones. They came in and picked up her
body, then flew off in that direction,” Greg said, pointing where he’d felt her
mental signature disappear on the other side of the mountain. “You come in
through a dark pond?”

“Yes,” Jason answered. “Button on floor, door in
wall?”

“Same for us,” Greg answered. “And if the others will
be doing the same once they arrive we need to get to them before the bugs do. I
don’t think we can stand up to them directly. Bioshields won’t last for long
and all they need is one of the little things to slip through to get us in the
head or chest. I got hit on the shoulder and lost the use of my arm on the way
down here, and I’m still a touch numb. No
destunning
serum that I’ve found yet, but this place looks huge and I wouldn’t put it past
Wilson to have left caches of equipment hidden somewhere.”

“So this is some giant new test?” Blade asked.

“Has to be,” Greg said as he stepping through the
tunnel and held up just from the exterior on the other side, with the
artificial sun making his eyes squint. “Our Final Challenge was the same way.
No heads up as to what we have to do and we have to work our way out of it.”

“The Trials are supposed to be Clan versus Clan,”
Jason argued. “Seems like we’re all on the same team in this.”

“Or maybe its survival of the fittest,” Blade
suggested. “No way out and it’s just a matter of who lasts the longest.”

Greg wrinkled his brow in disdain. “If it is we’re
definitely not playing it that way.”

“We need to find Dina,” Jason insisted, “and hook up
with any others coming in. Any chance that this isn’t the only entry point?”

“I haven’t sensed anyone else, and I’m curious to see
just where the walls are. Some of that view has to be holographic.”

“Agreed,” Blade said, looking ahead. “How were you
marking the traps?”

“Stick ‘X’. It gets squashed flat and is easy to see
so long as you stay on the trails.”

“And off the trails?” Jason asked.

“The brush is so thick that you can’t move fast enough
to evade the bugs. I don’t know if they’re programed for only the other side,
but I don’t want to take the chance of getting caught out here. I’ve stuck to
the trails and was working my way around the circuit when you came in. There
are a couple points where you can jump from trail to trail, but it looks to be
a deformed loop.”

“How far down?”

“There’s another trail below it, but my
spidey
senses said there might be a trap in the crossing so
I haven’t explored there yet, but I did get around most of this loop.”

“And no bugs over here at all?”

“Not that I’ve seen yet, but it’s not very hard to fly
up and over this tunnel.”

“At least we can see into the ground here,” Blade
commented, able to stretch out his Pefbar below them and into the rock.

“There has to be more than one pond,” Jason said,
thinking out loud. “No one knew when I was going to get here and the others
will be coming in at random. That room was designed for 2 and I bet they keep
it that way.”

“One of us needs to stay near the top to key in the
others if they do enter the same way we did,” Greg pointed out. “I could sense
you from here, but it’s out of telepathy range. I had to sprint up the trail a
ways before I made contact. If you can find a hiding spot further up be my
guest, but someone has to start exploring the immediate area. The Trials aren’t
supposed to start for 3 days and we can’t assume everyone is going to arrive
today. If there’s food out here we need to find it.”

“I’ll take care of the newcomers,” Jason volunteered.
“You two go exploring. We’ll make this our base camp until we find something
better. Looks like Dina is going to have to wait until we get a handle on the
geography.”

Further down the mountain, following the water flow,
the ravine spread out into a small crater with a lake in the center. The creek
continued out the far side and continued going downhill at a much softer
gradient, but left the mostly calm pool behind it mostly contained as only a
small opening was available for the water to flow out through a pair of
overlapping rocks. The nearly mirror smooth surface of the water suddenly
rippled as a disturbance in the center pushed up a pipe to just over the
waterline, then it sprayed forth a geyser of water well up into the air that
arched over into a tree-like fountain and fell back down into the pool on all
sides but with a slight list to the south.

A few seconds later a body came flying up with it and
shot 6 meters up into the air before splashing down into the water beside it,
then was followed by another as Paul landed on top of Brian, knocking the wind
out of him and pushing him underwater. The two separated with a stern kick from
the lower Archon and swam back up to the surface, with Brian spitting out a
gulp of water then coughing out the rest.

“Sorry,” Paul said as he treaded water and got his
bearings, seeing a wall of greenery all around the pond they were now in, as
well as the bright sun overhead. “Where the hell did we go?”

“Gravity alterations,” Brian said, swimming over next
to him. “There’s no way of knowing which direction that slide took us. I
thought we were going down, but apparently not…unless we crossed to the other
side of the planet.”

A slight rumble sounded as the tube that had spat them
out shut down its fountain and retreated back below water level, with both
trailblazers watching it go down.

“So now what?” Brian asked.

“Let’s get to shore and find out,” Paul said,
beginning to swim over to the edge. Brian came with him and they got halfway
there before they both noticed another mind nearby…and a familiar one at that.

Randy?
Paul
asked.

No time to
explain. Keep swimming but don’t touch button. I’ll yank you out when you get
close to shore. Ignore the fireworks behind you.

Taking his fellow 2 at his word Paul and Brian both
kept swimming towards shore, then a few seconds later there was a huge blast of
water behind them. Paul saw it in his Pefbar but kept swimming as instructed,
seeing a small aquatic mech rise up from below the surface as not one, but four
trailblazers jumped out from the trees along the shore and on top of it.

Just then he felt Randy’s presence run up near to them
but still hidden behind the greenery, with Brian being lifted out of the water
and deposited on the shore ahead. A second later Paul took flight through the
air and did likewise, landing on a platform of moss just short of the
excessively thick brush.

Randy telekinetically yanked them both through and
into sight of him, with Paul seeing a worried expression on his face.

“Run!” he yelled, taking off through the tree trunks
as a buzzing sound began to overwhelm the noise of the mech.

Paul and Brian both followed him, not having a clue
where they were going but apparently he did, for Randy ran a very evasive
pattern through trees and around rocks and overhangs that Paul couldn’t have
guessed at, eventually leading them to a small creek that flowed into the pond.

“Under,” Randy said, diving in head first and
disappearing beneath a bit of calm water.

Paul took a breath and dove in second, following Randy
as he made his way through a rocky tunnel and into a submerged chamber. He came
up into a pocket of air only two feet high but one that was large enough to
hold ten people. Brian followed him in and the three wet Archons stood on their
knees in the claustrophobic den with their chins just above the waterline.

“What’s going on?” Brian asked.

“A lot,” Randy said, relaxing for a moment. “What day
is it?”

“Last I checked the 21st, but we spent a while in a dark
pond before getting spit out into that lit one.”

“I’ve been here about a day then, and by last count
there were 77 of us already in. You two make 79, but 11 have already been
captured.”

“Captured?” Paul asked.

“Wilson’s got some wicked challenge set up for us this
time,” Randy said, shaking his head with dismay. “The reason why I told you not
to touch bottom in the pond is because some of the others entered the way you
did and got swarmed by stun fish. We think it activates when you touch the
shoreline. A few of those buggers hit you and you’re unconscious, with a lung
full of water to boot. We lost Ben that way, but we’ve learned from it and
several other mistakes.”

“Lost?” Brain emphasized.