by Jyr, Aer-ki
Which was where they ran into a brick wall, so to speak. There were underground defense stations guarding the access routes into the skyscraper-sized complex. The lizards might be stupid, but they weren’t stupid and knew that if a battle broke out Star Force would be more than willing to undercut any surface defenses and backdoor the big tower.
They were stupid for having subsurface access routes at all. They should have completely sealed off the tower aside from a handful of access doors several meters thick. Instead, there were large archways allowing road-like access inside…behind a wall of gun turrets, barricades, and loads of infantry.
“We go up,” Sonya answered before anyone voiced the question. “Quietly.”
Iden followed the mage on a short backtrack then up above ground inside a nearby building. It wasn’t the closest, but a row back from the tower that was smashed into the infrastructure. That did provide it with some building blockers from lateral attack, but it also gave them jumping access to the exterior if the shields were down.
He wasn’t sure how she was going to play this, but the tower itself had a very robust defense shield covering its moderately armored exterior. There were even sporadic anti-infantry turrets clustered around its base and anti-air varieties higher up, but no window access for them to come in at altitude. That meant only the street level access points were left, but those, he knew from past Clan missions to destroy these beasts with mechs and strike-level infantry pushes, had even more formidable defenses around the base of the tower than they’d just seen beneath it.
He didn’t think they would be going in that way, but then what was left? Climb up to the top and go in through the gun mechanism itself?
Once on the dark roof and crouched down amongst the limited urban terrain there, Iden saw Chrissie pull out a compact sniper rifle, swinging out the front section on a midpoint hinge and snapping it into place. She dialed down the intensity, then shot off a very thin sammy beam towards the tower. The beam disappeared to his vision halfway there, and hopefully it wouldn’t draw too much attention amongst the rest of the city’s night lights.
“Shield’s down,” the padawan confirmed, packing up the weapon and returning it to her back rack.
“Target,” Sonya said, with a waypoint popping up on Iden’s battlemap, bringing a rueful smile to his face. She’d tagged one of the anti-infantry batteries five or six stories up from the ground, but considerably below the anti-air variety. “I’ll come last and throw the rest of you. Chrissie goes first and cuts an entry hole. If we can’t get in drop to the surface and run like hell. We’ll rendezvous here.”
Another waypoint several buildings away popped up and Iden’s helmet stored the marker for future use while diminishing its aura in the rest of the map and giving him an easy toggle ‘find me’ visual button on the left of his HUD.
“Let’s go,” the mage said, jumping out of her crouch and running to the building’s edge where she leapt across to the next one.
Iden followed second to last, making the jump that was just at the edge of his range on half a charge. He upped his jump pack’s anti-grav duration a bit more to be safe, landing on the far roof and following the others across it to the far side where Sonya stopped ahead of the others, knelt down on one knee, and extended a battlemeld link out to everyone. While they all didn’t have the same psionics, especially the rangers, they did all have the basic ability, which was one reason why they’d been chosen for this mission.
Iden accepted the link from her and extended the ‘handshake’ to the others. Soon they were a 10-man mind with him having to numb up his senses a bit to keep from overloading from all the shared stimuli. The rangers had it worse than he did but this was something he’d practiced before, as most of them had. Going beyond 10 was unusual, and holding a 10-man link for a long period of time was just as rare.
They wouldn’t be needing it for long, Iden knew, with him combining his Lachka with 6 of the others and using it to shove Chrissie off the building as she ran up to the edge and jumped, using her pack, muscles, and a repulsor conduit from Sonya to shoot her out like a missile across the extra-long distance. Acting as one mind their timing was perfect, and Sonya feathered the conduit enough to land her two meters above the wall turret where she stuck on impact with her armor’s gloves and boots, then she slid down a bit and began cutting into the weak armor around the edges of the battery.
Iden couldn’t feel what she was thinking, for they’d thrown her beyond their battlemeld range…but not beyond Sonya’s. It was weird, because even though his link to Chrissie was gone he could still get a few snippets relayed from the mage’s mind. Whether that was intentional or not he didn’t know, but as soon as Chrissie landed the rest of them started going across one by one at slightly staggered intervals, with the two rangers going next and leaving the most psionically capable Archons for last.
Iden went 7th in line, feeling the push from behind but unable to create a repulsor conduit because he hadn’t yet learned that ability. He compensated by goosing his jump pack to maximum and floated across the gap until he smacked the edge of the tower, bouncing off it and only grabbing on with one hand. There was no leverage whatsoever, but his fingers stuck to the wall and he thumped against it as his body finally bled off the momentum of the bounce.
Chrissie was below him and to the right, and he realized she had a specialized cutting tool as their battlemeld links reformed that was literally melting the plating away, with the pieces being held up in the air nearby telekinetically by the others, with Iden also grabbing a piece to help out so they wouldn’t fall to the street and alert anyone to their presence. Before she could get them a man-sized hole, Chrissie paused what she was doing and braced herself against the wall in a three point stance, then reached a hand out toward Sonya, using a repulsor conduit to help reel her in with no one left to push the mage across.
The set of dark blue armor smacked the wall three meters to the right of Chrissie and more than a story below, bouncing off like Iden had but holding both hands to the wall and keeping them there. Her legs rebounded and flopped against the wall as Chrissie got back to work, soon prying loose an entire section of the weapon and diving in head first, with more parts coming back out as she dug like a gopher through the equipment with her cutter leading the way.
Iden took a moment to look around. There were no fighters nearby angling for them, and no one down on street level looking up. In fact, there was no one down there on the plaza surrounding the tower, with all the defensive troops tucked into overhangs that would protect them from aerial bombardment…and fortunately now cutting off their lines of sight upward.
“I’m in,” Chrissie said over the comm after cutting the battlemeld link.
“Junk first,” Sonya reminded them, telepathically steering a few floating pieces through the gap. Iden passed the two that he was holding aloft and felt Chrissie take them, sucking them inside the hole along with a steady flow of others.
Sonya went in after the parts, then the master/apprentice pair began clearing out the immediate area, putting lizards to sleep from afar but finding only a few nearby as Iden and the rest of the Archons slowly climbed inside. When he got to the opening he saw how tight a fit it was, having to press his chest down as low as he could to keep from snagging his weapons rack on bits of machinery. His Pefbar allowed him to see it all so there were no unintentional snags, just a lot of slow, deliberate movements up until he came to the proper wall and the hollow space inside.
From there he slid along without broken components trying to grab him until he came to another hole, this one cut by Chrissie that led out into an internal hallway. As he ducked down to crawl out he felt a telekinetic tug hasten his transit, with him throwing the ranger on the other side a ‘thank you’ gesture with a wave of his free hand while he reached back and took his rifle off the safety hook on his pack with the other.
He waited for the others to come through, then stepped over the junk pile and followed Sonya’s waypoin
t, running to catch up to the pair that had already moved three floors up and wasn’t slowing down.
7
Iden dug through his pack, which he’d disconnected from his armor and was now laying on the ground as he pulled out his portion of the explosives all the Archons were carrying. They’d worked their way up to the top of the tower, intent on scrapping the weapon itself rather than the power supply. Conduits could always be replaced, but the actual array would be more difficult to rebuild and so far none of the other colonies that had come under attack had managed to replace theirs…though this one was going to be sitting here for a long time, meaning they had to wreck it as much as possible.
They weren’t bringing down the tower. It was far too big for that and the small amount of explosives they’d brought, plus the fact that they were still inside. What they were aiming for was wrecked components, with the fist-sized cubes Iden was pulling out and tossing into the center of the small room he was crouched in being telekinetically caught by another striker and pulled inside an open maintenance panel.
Four other Archons were doing likewise in the room, with everyone feeding the explosives into the base of the main gun and the Archon placing them inside at the most pesky spots. To date no one had gotten inside one of these things to figure out how it worked, for all the other towers were just being blasted from the outside, but placing explosives was more about breaking things than understanding them on this trip, so anything that looked fragile or combustible got a cube stuck to it.
Iden emptied his pack and tossed the last pair into the air, seeing them disappear inside the open panel along with a stream of others as he picked up and reattached the mostly empty pack to his armor. There were still some foodstuffs and ammo left, but most of the bulk he’d been hefting around was now gone and he felt noticeably lighter as he retrieved his plasma rifle and stood guard until the other striker climbed back out of the assembly.
“We’re good to go here,” he said, with Iden giving him a moment to grab his pack before the group headed out. The others were split up between defending their lower flank and placing explosives in other key areas nearby, all of which would be on a countdown once triggered.
A waypoint flashed on his HUD, indicating where Sonya wanted them to come. As Iden and the others moved down through the defense tower’s upper levels, which were mostly maintenance access, he saw a countdown pop up at 15 minutes .There was still a ‘boom’ button that Sonya had, but should they get out of range of the small transmitter the countdown would take care of giving the final order on its own.
Fifteen minutes though told Iden that they were going to have to fight their way out, and as soon as he got within a level of where Sonya and Chrissie were he sensed lizard minds coming up from below. Halfway down the stairs he got a personal waypoint, along with seeing others popping up as the mage told them where to go, spreading the group out across the level, for the lizards were coming up at multiple stairwells.
The striker sprinted over to his position, relieving Chrissie who headed off another direction. Iden stayed put and gun pointed down his stairwell for several long seconds, staring at a pile of bodies below before live ones began to crawl over them.
He fired two shots into the heads of the pair that came into view, adding their corpses to the pile and caused those behind them to stay behind the wall and not try to force their way up until they had greater numbers. Iden could sense them pooling below him, then a plasma blast zipped past his head from the flank and hit a lizard further down the hallway on his level that had seemingly come out of nowhere.
Chrissie ran by him to deal with it and Iden turned his attention back to his stairs just as the group behind the corner below charged up and onto the pile of bodies, clawing their way over them and up the incline towards him, eating his plasma streaks and dropping dead or injured to trip up the others.
But as usual, the tactic was not completely suicidal. The lizards up front acted as shields for those behind, gaining them a meter at a time until the horde was almost within touching distance. Iden backed up a step, continuing to fire down as the closest lizards reached the upper three steps and began shooting back. The striker held his ground and killed two more, taking a pink spurt of phaser into his shields before he stepped forward and kicked one back into the group, causing a domino effect that knocked half a dozen down before the kinetic momentum was bled off.
More from behind pushed those who had fallen back up and onto their feet, with Iden going hand to hand and smacking the next closest lizard with the butt of his rifle. A telekinetic push sent another on the stairs tipping backwards. Flipping off his shields the striker tossed his rifle aside on the floor of the hallway and tackled the next closest lizard, emitting a Fornax field as he did so. The resistance in its limbs and those behind it vanished, with him pushing the pile of them back down the stairs using his own momentum and weight.
He kicked himself free and climbed back up the stairs before he released the field, summoning his rifle back into his grip and using it to shoot the stack of disoriented bodies below as he got a recall prompt and new waypoint. A wide Fornax blast as a going away present covered his tracks as Iden raced down the hallway to the left and joined up with two of the others as all the Archons converged on Sonya’s position and pushed their way down a single stairwell.
“We’re going out through the lobby, run and gun,” she told them. “Stay behind me and Chrissie and shoot targets of opportunity, but don’t break off. We’re going to have to hammer our way out.”
“What happened to the gun port?” Iden asked.
“I can feel wisps outside, so that’s a no go.”
“Looks like we got their attention,” one of the rangers noted as Sonya/Chrissie threw up an invisible wall that shoved some 8 lizards back from the base of the stairs at the lower level and into the hallway, clearing a path for the Archons to continue moving down. Iden snapped off a pair of shots as he passed, hitting at least one lizard as the others did the same, with the last man in line throwing Fornax blasts behind them to keep their tracks clear.
Their route down through the tower was predictable, with every level there being more and more opposition, but it wasn’t until they hit the bottom third of the building did they run into the first physical barricade blocking the stairs. Iden felt a battlemeld prompt and accepted, with the Archons using Nemsa to create a joint telekinetic push that dislodged the heavy canisters from where they sat, picking one up and throwing it further down the stairwell where it bowled over or crushed numerous lizards below. The others they moved into a side hallway one by one, with the Archons without Nemsa using their Ikrid to disrupt the lizards on the other side and throwing in a few Fornax blasts where they had clean lines of sight so they wouldn’t hit the other Archons.
Iden had gotten his Nemsa not through individual ascension, but from another Clan Jinx striker. Likewise most of the other strikers had acquired a handful of battlemeld and tier 2 psionics in the same way, with Pren being the only trigger that he’d found on his own. It added to his telekinetic power, which was then multiplied many times over by combining it with the others’ power levels. Adding theirs together not only gave them a sum total greater than what any individual could produce, but by using multiple emitters they gained a power boost from the overlap, and the more minds involved the larger the boost.
They could have lifted a small tank together if need be, so they didn’t have trouble moving the makeshift barricades until they came within 3 levels of the surface and found structural components welded across the stairwell. Together they tried to dislodge them, with a few openings sprouting a phaser blurp or two before the lizards on the other side were psionically shut down through one means or another.
“Cover us,” Sonya said, disconnecting from the battlemeld along with Chrissie. Iden and the others stayed linked, for it made for precision Ikrid and Fornax attacks through the physical barricade without them worrying about hitting each other, not to mention it allowed them
to watch their backs via the Archon there, for all could see/hear/feel what the others did. Having the big two out of the link made it less stressful and Iden was able to maintain the smaller group battlemeld without too much effort, even managing a precision plasma shot back through one of the small peep holes in the crisscrossed pile of trash blocking their way.
Both Sonya and Chrissie removed one of their armored gloves, with the padawan grabbing Sonya’s wrist as the mage pressed two fingers up against one of the weld points and held them there for several seconds before the metal began to glow. Using the battlemeld Irod ability, the two overlapped and strengthened their Rensiek fields and concentrated their channeled body heat up to temperatures that neither could have handled individually. It was slow going, but soon the first weld point melted away and Sonya drew her fingers across it like she was smooshing aside sticky, glowing goo.
When they finished with that one they moved their locked arms over to the next point, heating and dislodging it as Iden sensed lizards massing above them and in the nearby halls, closing in on them from all sides.
Suddenly he turned, throwing a mutual telekinetic hold on a lizard coming down the stairs from above them and stopping it dead in its tracks. A moment later the det pack carrying lizard started to fly back up the stairs, and apparently figuring this was as close as it was going to get, hit the trigger half a level up, blowing itself and the surrounding structure apart.
The concussion wave hit Iden and the others, taking down his shields and piling him on top of Sonya below, with two more armored bodies and bits of wall falling on top of him.