Everyone jumped nearly out of their skin—or carapace, in K’aia’s case—when she suddenly thrust her chair back and leapt to her feet.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Let’s go already!”
She grabbed Trey’s free hand and took him into the Etheric. Gabriel emerged beside her with K’aia in the next instant. Their journey was short but hard on the twins.
They emerged in a niche in an empty corridor a few moments later, K’aia and Trey with their guards up while the twins took a moment to recover from the exertion and replenish their energy levels.
Trey glanced at the corridor beyond with a distinct feeling of “meh.”
“Not impressed?” K’aia asked.
“It’s so…ordinary,” Trey explained, indicating the utilitarian grays the corridor was appointed in. “I thought we’d see some of the cool crystal structures like in the factory vids.”
“The lack of them just means there’s no Ookens here,” Gabriel told him. “That’s something to be thankful for.”
“Which way?” Alexis asked Gabriel, counting down the seconds until stage two of her digital attack was in full effect.
The lights flickered, drawing a soft snicker from Alexis. “Okay, the cameras are down. We can move.”
Gabriel checked the map he’d downloaded to his internal HUD and pointed the way. “We go up three levels. There’s an access shaft on that deck that takes us down to the engineering deck. From there, it’s a straight shot to the reactor room, as long as we don’t run into any trouble.”
“Would a little trouble be the worst thing?” Trey asked with a mischievous grin as they made their way along the corridor after Gabriel.
K’aia slapped the back of his head. “Damn right, it would. We want to get in and out without them knowing we’re here.”
Trey rubbed the sore spot with his free hand. “Says you. A little pew-pew goes a long way.”
Alexis raised an eyebrow. “What does that even mean?”
Trey sighed. “It means this is going to be a pretty boring mission if all we’re doing is sneaking around.”
“Just wait,” Gabriel promised. “I can guarantee we’ll run into something riiiight when it’s vital that we don’t. There’s a law, you know?”
“I’m not sure Murphy’s law applies here,” Alexis countered.
“You’re kidding, right?” Gabriel argued. “You know, Uncle Scott once told me that he reckons one day scientists will figure out that it’s a universal constant. Whatever can go wrong, will.”
He heard footsteps in the near-distance and ducked into a recess near the intersection of the corridor, motioning for the others to do the same.
They waited nervously as the footsteps got closer. A pair of armored Kurtherians with their helmets deactivated clomped through the intersection, unaware of the four interlopers pressing themselves out of sight in the tight space.
“And you thought this was a good idea,” K’aia grumbled after the Kurtherians passed out of hearing.
“It is!” Alexis whispered.
Gabriel indicated a door on the other side of the intersection. “The stairs through there take us up, but we’ll have to be careful.”
Getting up the stairs went without incident, as did getting to the hatch they were aiming for. It was only when they were about to climb inside the maintenance shaft that they ran into a problem.
Alexis was the first to get eyes on the bots. “Dammit, there’s hundreds of them!”
“Can’t you deactivate them?” K’aia asked, uncertain she wanted to get into the shaft with robots bearing power tool appendages.
Alexis shook her head. “Take a look. There’s no pattern to their movements. They’re not being controlled by any system.”
K’aia could have told that from the way many of them were spinning on the spot without releasing whatever mechanism kept them adhered to the vertical shaft. “Then we’ll have to find another route because there’s no way my epitaph is going to read ‘killed by insane maintenance bots who thought she was a faulty processor.’”
Gabriel snickered. “It won’t come to that. Alexis, you say they’re not connected to any network? Does that mean we can destroy them without alerting anyone to our location?”
Alexis shrugged. “Sure, but what we can’t do is let off a bunch of Etheric energy to do it.”
Trey leaned into the shaft with his staff at the ready. “I can take care of this.” He loosed a low charge that coated the shaft in baleful red light, and the bots fell away from the interior, to the relief of them all.
They watched them rain down the shaft and waited to see if there was any response. Gabriel decided they hadn’t triggered a high alert, probably because Alexis’ and Gemini’s attack had everyone tied up elsewhere.
“Anything on the system?” he asked Alexis.
Her eyes unfocused while she communicated with Gemini. “No,” she told him, confirming his suspicion.
“Great.” Gabriel gave the order to move, and they followed him onto the ladder one at a time.
K’aia grumbled something about the unfairness of a world designed for the two-legged as she descended.
“Could be worse,” Trey consoled. “There could be a shitload of armed guards after us again.
“Don’t tempt fate,” Alexis warned. “And by fate, I mean Eve.”
Gabriel wasn’t so sure Eve was still making additions to the game. Their situation felt too severe and lacked the unexpected twists they had experienced previously for him to think it had been tweaked by her hand. He led the team down the seemingly endless shaft, keeping his mind clear and his attention on the map.
He slowed as they passed an access hatch, behind which they could hear frantic activity. “Your attack?” he asked, looking up at Alexis.
Alexis winked. “You know it. I designed a gift that keeps on giving. The more attempts they make to dig it out, the more times it replicates. The more they vary their counterattacks, the more my little program learns and evolves. I expect it’s gotten quite large by now. We should start noticing—”
The shaft, and therefore everything in and around the shaft, lurched.
Alexis would have clapped with delight if she hadn’t been clinging to the ladder in an attempt to avoid being thrown off it. “We should hurry,” she told the others. “Engage your helmets. Things are about to get nasty in the life support systems.”
K’aia touched the button on her armor’s collar to activate her helmet. “If you can mess things up that badly, why couldn’t you have the battlestation blow itself up? I would have been happy to provide the popcorn.”
Alexis sighed. “If only it was that easy. Eventually, the Kurtherians will find a way to stop my attack, and they’ll regain control of their systems. My guess is that we’ll get to the reactor room and find all of their engineers working to reverse the damage to the core.”
“That’s when we’ll throw them a curveball,” Gabriel enthused.
“You mean, that’s when we finally get to do something useful,” Trey put in with feeling. He paused to shift the weight of his staff.
“Watch where you’re pointing that thing!” K’aia exclaimed when the butt swung dangerously close to her helmet visor.
“Oh, crap. Sorry.” Trey shifted the staff again. “Guess I’ve gotten used to working without it. It’s like I have to remember to direct a third leg that doesn’t tell me it’s in the way.”
K’aia snorted. “Try having four legs and a team who thinks it’s the peak of hilarity to have you climb a never-ending series of ladders.”
“You would see it that way,” Alexis told her amusedly.
“We’re getting close to our exit,” Gabriel assured her. “Only eight more decks.”
“Only eight?” K’aia repeated flatly. “Yaaay.”
Trey picked up his thought again when he was sure he wasn’t about to brain K’aia by accident. “I mean, wiping out the Ookens was fun and all, but it can’t replace the thrill of close
combat with someone who’s intelligent enough to think about more than the urge to eat my face.”
“Empress forbid that happens,” K’aia continued in the same snarky tone. “You’re far too pretty to end up a snack for an Ooken.”
“Don’t I know it,” Trey agreed amiably.
“Besides,” Gabriel added dryly, “what would we do without your sparkling commentary on these missions?”
Alexis had too many balls in the air to join in the shit talk. Apart from keeping track of her physical actions, she was fighting off a number of Kurtherians who were getting ever closer to locking her and Gemini out of the battlestation’s systems.
We just got locked out of secondary life support, Gemini informed her.
We’d better not lose primary, then, Alexis replied. Do what you can. I have to concentrate on the numbers.
The numbers in question were the equations she was inventing as she went to figure out how to open the microscopic rift she wanted without tearing a huge-ass hole in reality she couldn’t handle afterward. She’d had no opportunity to learn about the rift her parents had experienced at Qu’Baka since her mother had been preoccupied with arranging a funeral and making arrangements for the influx of Bakas to talk about her experience in the short time they’d exited the game after the event.
There was the added pressure of her wanting to get this right the first time since she had an inkling the game would have learned from everything they’d done this time around if they got killed and reset. There was a chance that nothing they’d done this time would work on the next go-round.
Her HUD was struggling to run at the speed of her thoughts while Gemini was borrowing from her memories as a database for context pertaining to intuition, and she was getting frustrated with the lag in her internal computing speed. Gemini, can you operate independently for a few minutes? Maintain a connection, but back out of my neural chip so it can run fast enough for me to think.
Gemini receded, and Alexis had what she needed to concentrate. She tuned the external input down until her concentration was reduced to hand over hand and don’t misstep, while the back of her mind whirred.
Gabriel called a halt at the access hatch marked on his map. He left the ladder for the slab of metal jutting out from the hatch and slid the dead bot off it with a push of his foot. With the platform clear, he checked each of the team as they reached the platform. “Alexis, you good?”
Alexis held a finger up without changing her faraway look as she stepped onto the platform. “Shh!”
“You’re fine, then,” Gabriel remarked dryly. “Trey, K’aia?”
Trey hopped off the ladder, his fist held ready for a bump. “Ready for a fight, that’s for sure.”
Gabriel bumped fists, then opened his hand to point at Trey. “Have your HUD check your endocrine levels and adjust them if necessary. I want you clear and cool, you get me? Good decisions only.”
Trey nodded, realizing he’d been sounding like more than one of his uncles pre-attitude adjustment. “Good choices,” he promised. “Doesn’t mean I can’t be happy about the opportunity to kick some Kurtherian ass.”
“We’re all happy about that,” K’aia cut in as she left the ladder with a small jump.
Alexis snapped out of her half-trance. “I’ve got it.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Never doubted you for a moment,” K’aia told Alexis. “Which is why I have to make sure you understand what you’re messing with.”
Alexis shook her head as she opened the Etheric over her palm. “I really don’t. There’s tried and tested science out there, but it’s in the hands of the Kurtherians who opened the real rift. All I could do was haul my ideas together and kick them into shape with a mathematical language I made up as I went along. Now all that’s left is to bring it into being with the force of my will.”
K’aia saved her arguments. She would have to be blind to miss the strength of Alexis’ will. It was in her steady gaze and the set of her jaw. This wasn’t the pre-teen she’d first met, nor was she the reckless post-adolescent who was so quick to act before considering the full consequences. This was a woman who had the power to save the day, and she knew it. “You realize we’re going to lose our cover?”
“All part of the plan,” Gabriel told her with a nod at the hatch. “That opens out, so if we can get them to open it for us, all the better.”
K’aia grinned. “Ah, I see where you’re going with it. Fair enough. It’s been a while since I got a real workout.” She got into position by the door, ready to catch it and use it as a weapon.
Gabriel tapped the Etheric and manifested a sword and shield, He and Trey took the other side of the hatch, their weapons at the ready. Gabriel would have preferred Jean Dukes Specials at this moment, but in the absence of the best, he’d rather rely on his skill than a weapon made by a stranger.
Alexis shielded herself and began the operation. She started by weaving Etheric energy into a sphere. She built it from the bottom up, layering the energy to ensure it would hold the components she’d created separate from each other until she and Gabriel had dragged K’aia and Trey through the Etheric to the Gemini.
Her actions in the Etheric drew some attention at last. The hatch swung open, removing the need for any efforts to get it open, as per Gabriel’s plan.
Unfortunately for the two unhelmeted Kurtherians who rushed out, K’aia hadn’t had the opportunity to use her full strength in a while. She slammed the door when they were two paces out, and the pair of them brained themselves on the solid metal hatch.
Trey zapped them with his staff, while Gabriel covered him from the next one who was foolish enough to dash out after the first two were downed.
The third’s delayed reaction to Gabriel’s sword puncturing his chest cavity made Alexis laugh.
The Kurtherian looked at the glowing blade lodged in his ribs with incomprehension, then collapsed with his mouth stretched in a surprised O when his mind was belatedly informed of the damage that’d been done to his body.
Gabriel pulled his sword free at the same time he smashed his shield into the face of another attacking Kurtherian. This one almost got a return blow in before Gabriel whirled to take his head off with an upward swing.
“Save some for us!” Trey complained.
“Get in here, then,” Gabriel invited, moving over a bare inch as the rest of the Kurtherian guards rushed the door. A couple got through, but the rest were jammed in unless they wanted to get hacked to death by Gabriel. All of them recognized the modified tech Trey wielded well enough to be wary of it.
K’aia got a glimpse of panicked-looking science-types rushing around the reactor room as she moved to protect Alexis from the soldiers who’d gotten through. “How long until your weapon is ready?”
“Nearly,” Alexis told her distractedly, barely noticing the fight around the outside of her shield. The sphere was almost complete. She had to be extra careful here. If the last part wasn’t exactly perfect, they’d all get blown to bits along with the battlestation.
At last, the compartments were built and only the space between atoms was left until Alexis compressed that also. Alexis was working entirely by instinct by this point. She was far beyond the transmutation of the elements. For all she understood of the forces she was manipulating, she might as well have been doing magic. Yet, she would succeed where the alchemists had failed, even if her goal was much more challenging than pulling gold from thin air.
She was playing with the fabric of the universe.
Alexis commanded the energy in the compartments to shift. She gave it no choice but to obey.
Each compartment was filled with a different component that, when combined with the others, would act as the catalyst to spark a rift. Finally, she checked her calculations for the nth time to ensure she’d gotten it right, and that the energy field would collapse at the right moment.
Again, simple, but it was no harder to design something to fail than it would have been for her and Ga
briel to close a full-sized rift. Alexis sighed with relief when she completed the last layer without incident.
The fabric of the universe would tear. That was a given.
It just wasn’t allowed to happen before she was ready.
Gabriel felt more than saw that Alexis had completed her whatever-it-was. There was a noticeable drop in ambient Etheric energy, which told him it was time to unblock the door and clear her path to the reactor core. “Trey, I need a space.”
Trey shifted stance at Gabriel’s quiet order and used the powered end of his staff to blast the Kurtherians back from the door.
Gabriel slid into the gap, killing two Kurtherians before they’d even realized he’d moved. The others burst into action, discharging their staffs in what they thought was Gabriel’s direction.
There was just one problem with that plan. Gabriel wasn’t occupying any particular space. He phased in and out, employing the technique he’d come up with as a little kid to copy the way Izanami moved around the ship to compliment the kata he was moving through.
Each brief materialization coincided with the deadly execution of a technique he knew as well as breathing. Each peak was accompanied by a drop in the Kurtherians’ morale as another of them fell lifeless to the floor.
It didn’t help their cause that a number of them fell to friendly fire.
K’aia folded her arms, her front right foot on the throat of the soldier who’d gone for Alexis. She grunted and snuffed him out with a twist of her ankle. “This is what Addix meant,” she murmured, thinking back to the conversation they’d had when Addix had told her she would be obsolete by the time Gabriel was fully trained. “They can’t touch him.”
She still had her role to fulfill as protector of Alexis, however. There would always be moments like this where the twins were playing to their opposite strengths, and K’aia would be required to be there for one or the other. That was a bodyguard’s life—to know where she was most needed and be there.
Even when the bodies she was responsible for guarding went into battle.
If All Else Fails (The Kurtherian Endgame - Out Of Time Book 2) Page 11