Star Force: Trials (SF68) (5 page)

“He’s not dead. As soon as he went under a drone flew
in and yanked him out of the water. Same thing happens everywhere in this park.
They’ve got traps and stun bots galore, including little flying bugs. You go
down and you get picked up. We’ve tried to stop them but only succeed once. You
can’t mess with those swarms, and the lemmings are the worst.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Paul said, not
fully catching on.

“Little agile robot rabbits that stun to the touch…and
they come at you with lizard-like numbers.”

“Sounds fun,” Brian said with an ironic laugh. “What
was that back with the mech?”

“Multitasking. This little hideaway actually had a few
prizes for us on those ledges,” Randy said, pointing at the empty slabs now.
“Foodstuffs, a touch of
destunning
serum,
comlinks
…which will just lead the swarms to you, so don’t
use them…a few weapons, ammo cartridges that don’t match, and a lot of other
little challenges. We’re finding and collecting as much as we can, and that
mech was guarding a big underwater stash. When someone comes in the fish
congregate in a specific place in the pond and it draws them off from the mech
location, so we had to wait until someone else came in to jump it. Look up.”

Randy tilted his chin upwards, with both Paul and
Brian extending their Pefbar through the ceiling and thin layer of soil to the
forest above…where a cloud of tiny objects was passing by.

“Those are the stun bugs. They fly in swarms and
should leave this area shortly. We need to stay here until they do. They can
move as fast as us and will drain your bioshields with too many hits. You have
to use Lachka, but miss even one and you’re in trouble. Single charge,
equivalent to a pistol shot.”

“Damn,” Paul said, realizing his day had just gone
from bad to horrible. “What’s the objective?”

“We don’t know. We’re just trying to collect everybody
and not lose any more
newbs
falling into traps we’ve
already sprung.”

“Thanks,” Brian offered.

“Ditto,” Paul echoed.

“Do either of you know when Morgan was supposed to
arrive?”

“Not specifically, no,” Paul said, with Brian likewise
shaking his head in the negative.

“We haven’t found her yet, and I’m really hoping she
didn’t come in first and get captured. We need her Jumat to take down these
swarms. The weapons we’ve found are pretty much a joke. No area of effect. Just
a tease from Wilson, we think.”

“Sounds like him. Is Jason here?”

“Yeah, he was one of the first in, and the sooner I
get you back to link up with him the better. We really need the dynamic duo out
here.”

“Guess that makes me a cheerleader,” Brian quipped.

“You’re not hot enough,” Randy said with a smirk as he
sensed the area over them clear. “Let’s get moving, but stay tight and follow
my lead until you get the lay of the land…and don’t touch any of the berries.
They’re stun-laced too.”

5

“We’ve found where the others are being held,”
Jace
said, pointing to a scribbled map in the dirt with a
few pebbles highlighting key locations as Paul, Jason, and a half dozen other
trailblazers looked on. The rest were out continuing the scouting efforts and
trying to locate supply clusters while the tunnel in the ridge had become their
storage area, which they were standing just to the outside of on the ‘safe’
side away from the bug zone.

“Held?” Paul asked.

Jace
nodded. “They’re
unconscious and laying out on pedestals like prizes…and there are 100 pedestals
in total.”

“That’s our mission fail,” Jason said with certainty.
“And probably bait.”

“We didn’t get too close, but were able to make Ikrid
contact. They’re the real deal, not
holos
, but the
place is guarded to the hilt. We spotted every known trap laid out on this
mountain and then some. It’s going to be almost impossible to get in there and
out with them, and we might lose more than we rescued.”

“Highlights?” Sara asked.

“They’ve got
dinobots
.”

“What?”

“Oh crap,” Jason said, knowing what he meant even
before
Jace
sent the telepathic memory to all nearby
so he wouldn’t have to explain in words. “That’s something
Jax
was working on with Cora. They’re experimental mechs they’re using to try and
map out the movement idiosyncrasies of the V’kit’no’sat so our own mechs don’t
get blindsided.”

“And they’re both prisoner…wonderful,” Sara said with
a sigh.

“Well these were patrolling the perimeter and we could
hear more inside the compound. All Rit’ko’sor and Era’tran models with no
obvious weapons.”

“They’re not automated,” Jason said. “That much I
know. They have to be remote-controlled using a neural interface, and I bet
Wilson has a host of trainers on the other end just waiting to pound…oh shit, I
bet he even got the ones that we had in basic. That’d be just like him.”

“The patrols looked automated.”

“Maybe for walking in a circle, but if they’re going
to fight they have to be driven. Next gen rovers I’d guess.”

“The old rovers couldn’t step on and squash you,” Page
pointed out. “Don’t suppose they have a target sphere?”

“Not that we saw,”
Jace
said
regretfully, “but then again, nothing here has. I think Wilson wants this to be
live.”

“The weapons he gave us aren’t stun,” Paul added.
“Let’s just hope these
dinobots
are.”

“Still begs the question of what’s our mission goal?”
Sara reminded them.

“Until we find the edges of this park there’s no way
to be sure unless we stumble across it,”
Jace
said
with a touch of awe. “They really went all in on this one. There’s at least a 2
mile radius around the mountain.”

“Did you get beyond here?” Sara asked, pointing to the
pebble that he’d used to mark the holding facility on the plain to the northeast.

“We couldn’t. Everything past this line,” he said,
dragging a telekinetic finger through the dirt in a very precise fashion, “is
dino
territory. I don’t think they’re just there to guard
the prisoners.”

“Our endgame is probably in there,” Paul said, rubbing
his left knuckles with his right hand.

“Or everywhere around the mountain has them,” Jason
added as a mental signature popped up above them.

“Incoming,” Kent said, running back through the tunnel
and up the mountain on the other side as a pair of Archons fell from the
waterfall in the sky down into the collection pool.

“Get them out,” Jason said as he sprinted up behind
Kent with Paul trailing on his heels, “we’ll hunt the bugs.”

As Kent made mental contact with directions for the
Archons to flee down the creek, Paul and Jason ran further up the trail as the
stun bug swarms gathered near the top, but one group nearby the Archons spotted
them and diverted their way. Paul and Jason both ducked into the thick
vegetation and got off the trail, using their bioshields to push through the thorns
and branches at decent speed and met the bugs further in where the darkness
kept the vegetation a bit more sparse, though the varieties that had been
planted were used to little sunlight, so both Archons were mired in growths
that came up to their waists as the bug swarm came down through the canopy
above them.

The duo linked up and stood back to back, then Paul
threw up a bioshield around them both while Jason corralled the bugs with
cup-like telekinetic walls. When those cups overflowed and the bugs came in at
them Paul added his own Lachka and pushed as many away from the bioshield as
possible so they wouldn’t drain its charge. Meanwhile he pulled a small grenade
off his equipment belt and passed it through the bioshield where Jason then
grabbed it and held it aloft nearby.

After he had gotten most of the bugs where he wanted
them both trailblazers used the linked Nemsa ability to combine and enhance
their Lachka skills, granting Jason enough power to fully enwrap the bulk of
the swarm into an invisible sphere…into which he primed and sent the grenade.
As Paul kept the other bugs off them, both of them squeezed the sphere down as
tightly as they could before the explosion, which overloaded and broke their
telekinetic hold, as well as destroying most of the bugs.

“Well that worked,” Paul said as the pair took off
running back the way they’d come and telekinetically squishing a few isolated
bugs that zipped off after them.

“Unfortunately they have friends,” Jason pointed out,
literally, with a mental prod to their right. The stun bugs that had been going
after the others had finally gotten around to coming back to them, suggesting
that the others had gotten to safety and were no longer priority targets.

Both Archons busted out of the brush and onto the
trail simultaneously, with them turning left and running down the path just in
time to see the other threesome duck around a curve below them. Having gotten
used to the trail intimately by now, Jason and Paul caught up with them before
they made it to the tunnel. Jason threw up a bioshield over the entrance just
in case as they slipped inside, then flinched as a whole swarm impacted and
overloaded his shield.

“Shit,” he said, throwing a telekinetic wall at the
bugs to push them back. “They’re coming through.”

“Other side,” Kent yelled, getting Kian and Hans
moving and smashing his map with boot prints on the other side…only to realize
that the bugs were also coming up and over the ridgeline.

“So much for predictable,” Sara said, with her and
four others linked up and pushing them back with massive invisible walls where
they could spot them, knowing that all it would take would be one getting
through to really mess up her day. “Grab some gear and run!”

“This is fun,” Hans said, grabbing a container of who
knew what and taking off down the trail following Kent.

“They touch you, you’re unconscious,” Kent explained.
“So stay with me until you get up to speed. Kian too. And don’t step near the
Xs
,” he said pointing out one ahead and running to the left
through a section of brush that had been cut out and piled to form an X that
was smashed flat save for the extreme edges.

As he ran around the detour a whole new swarm of stun
bugs came up from somewhere in the vegetation to the left and flew directly
into him. He threw up a Lachka wall and bioshield, blocking most of them but a
few came through and released their charge on his inner barrier, draining it of
power. Paul and Jason threw a combined wall up covering him and the others
across the detour, allowing them to continue on sheathed in bioshields from
head to toe, then the pair threw the wall back into the vegetation and smashed
it all back two meters as the last of the Archons passed the by.

“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.