by Aer-ki Jyr
Ashley led the short line of Archons down the mountainside through the thick grasses on a controlled sprint, during which the Scionate merely loped along behind in its metallic armor, seemingly bored by the Humans’ pace. As for her, she was running hard the whole way down from the auxiliary entrance that had been held and pacified in the previous hours. As it was the tunnel incursion was the only active assault on the base…probably because it was the one deemed most likely to succeed.
The Archons remained silent during their run, not even bothering to chitchat over the comm. They wanted to be as covert as possible, hoping that their approach might go unnoticed long enough that they wouldn’t have Nestafar spilling back out at the entry point as they came down the slope without cover.
But she shouldn’t have worried, for when they got down to the multiple breach points there was nothing left alive moving about, only trashed walkers from the previous aerial assault that had driven the Nestafar troops inside the tunnels, protomechs and all. During the last few meters of the descent Ashley whipped her rifle off her back and slid to an almost stop before dropping off over one tunnel entrance and twisting around so she landed facing in while absorbing the fall by bending her knees and compressing down into a crouch.
She stayed there a moment as the others dropped down behind her, looking into empty tunnel, with Ske’rar pawing about behind them.
“Which tunnel shall we take?” it asked, seeing six spaced out, dug into the mountainside.
“You’re the one with the ears, you tell me,” Ashley prompted.
Ske’rar retracted his helmet, leaving only a control bit in its mouth. He sniffed the air several times and cocked his cat-like ears, then walked over to each of the other tunnels in turn as the Archons remained still and silent, knowing that any movement on their part would interfere with the Scionate’s senses.
“There is activity in four, the loudest of which is here,” he said, walking back over to the second from the right. “I believe it holds the digging device.”
“That’s our primary target,” she said, running over and past Ske’rar. “Let’s go.”
Kara watched from the Star Force column command center as another line of Nestafar dropships came down from orbit and began depositing more walkers, protomechs, and thousands of infantry into the LZ that slowly began to make their way up towards the base camp where the super dragon and the rest of the assault force were gathered…now revealing the reason why they had paused the assault.
The Archon knew they were screwed. Even if the southern bay doors could magically be repaired it wouldn’t be enough to hold back the coming onslaught. Though the walkers couldn’t all attack at once and would have to pick their way through the debris field, it was only a matter of time before they breached the entrance defenses again and sent in their infantry and protomechs. At that point there’d be a fierce battle inside, for they’d prepared well, but during which the breach in the doors would be expanded upon until the larger walkers could come through, at which point it would be game over.
They’d have to fall back to the columns, which were fairly defensible and thick enough that the walkers’ weaponry couldn’t penetrate all the way through, meaning the Nestafar would have to attack hand to hand inside, though the protomechs were small enough to fit through some of the corridors in ball mode. If they could find their way up to the ceiling hallways they could unfurl and walk about, given the size of the structure, which would force the Alliance to hole up in individual chambers in defensive actions against wave after wave of infantry.
She knew they’d make a good fight of it, and the Nestafar would be hard pressed to take down the Archons in hand to hand combat, but short of help miraculously appearing in orbit Kara saw no way to end this conflict aside from death or surrender…and to her knowledge the Nestafar hadn’t so much as contacted the Alliance to gloat since the backstab had begun, let alone offer terms for surrender.
And with Mark gone, their chances of survival had gotten that much slimmer. The only hope they had now was to take preemptive action before the base was overwhelmed. It was looking more and more like they were going to have to call for an evac from the seda, and getting the dropships by the blockade was going to require them to take the long route around the planet. Fortunately no more Nestafar Valeries had appeared in the skies, thought there were at least a few squadrons left in orbit, helping to assure that another cargo ship didn’t drop down and obliterate their ground forces again.
She knew she had to do something, now, before events escalated beyond their control, but what options did she have?
Kara pounded her fist on the table once and stormed off, leaving a slight imprint where her armored hand had hit.
“Where are you going?” Sandra asked, pausing her earpiece’s audio for a moment as she directed the ongoing construction efforts at the southern bay doors.
“To do something really stupid,” she said, not sticking around to elaborate.
Half an hour later she walked up to the Protovic guards stationed in the Nestafar-dug tunnel, nudging her way past several Gnar and other races wanting access to the Keeper cave. When the other armored bipeds let her pass through there was a clamoring of protests but she didn’t care. The base was about to get sacked and all these poor excuses for pilots could think about was grabbing goodies out of the technological treasure chest.
She climbed down the ridged walls until the ground leveled out and made her way to the stasis chamber where she met up with Dre’for who was patiently guarding the sleeping alien.
“Mark has been shot down,” she said firmly, looking up into the slightly taller cat’s head that reminded her of a saber tooth without the big teeth. “That leaves me in command.”
The Scionate rumbled a low growl as it looked her silver-armored form over. “You want to wake the beast?”
“We’re out of options. The Nestafar just landed more troops and they’re on their way up to the base as we speak. We don’t have enough fighters left to hold them off, and I don’t know if we’re going to be able to stop the tunneling team or not. We need to see this through while we still have time.”
“What if all we do is unleash another enemy at our throats?” Dre’for asked, glancing back at the cryo-chamber and the huge lizard inside.
“I know there are no guarantees, but if that thing can help us I’m not just going to stand by and wait while everyone gets killed because of what might happen if we wake it up. By the way, have you figured out how to do so yet?”
The Scionate ignored her question. “The Nestafar once served the Keepers, it is likely that bond will be honored here. You will only add to our list of enemies.”
“They didn’t wake it up,” Kara pointed out. “And if it’s half as skilled as you all keep insisting they are, it could have helped them secure the base. Instead they leave it there, frozen, and start ripping apart tech.”
“I will admit that is a possibility, but not a certainty.”
Kara pulled off her helmet and looked up at Dre’for’s much larger head. “Everyone is going to die unless we do something radical. The Nestafar have us beat. What would you have us do?”
“I do not know, Human, but what you propose is too rash. Mark did not want it woken, nor do the Scionate. Focus your efforts elsewhere. We are not defeated yet.”
Kara dropped her helmet out of her left hand to hit the ground where it rolled off, as it did so her right hand came up into view holding her stinger pistol. With a flash of reflex Dre’for tried to move aside but for once the Human got the best of him. She drilled a green stinger into his forehead then tracked the big cat as it recoiled, pumping shot after shot into its unarmored head until it finally fell to the ground unconscious.
The Archon slipped the pistol back into its slot on her armor with a sigh. “I thought you’d say that.”
Kara walked over and retrieved her helmet, slipping it on before she set herself in front of the stasis chamber’s controls. She’d looked these over t
horoughly when she was down here the last time and had thought she’d gotten the gist of it, but if there was a complicated revival procedure she could very well kill the thing because she couldn’t read a bit of the script on the controls.
She knew it wasn’t completely frozen, because there was active life support in the chamber and she’d stared at it long enough to see it complete a very shallow breath, but there had to be more than just the cold keeping it down, because there were no feeding tubes attached. Kara didn’t know how long it had been here, but even minimal breathing would have required calorie expenditure, so the machinery must have been sustaining it in some fashion.
There were four active systems, as far as she could tell. Without touching any of the controls she’d guessed out the means by which to turn it off and had discussed it with Dre’for earlier, to which he had disagreed with some of her assumptions. He had argued that if the beast had been put here for a reason, then there should have been a plan to wake it up, such as an automatic trigger. He didn’t think the manual controls were meant to be used, but since the thing hadn’t already woken up they were all she had available to work with.
Kara looked back at where Dre’for lay, thinking that she better move him off or else the thing might think about making a snack out of him. Deciding that was for the best she walked over and pulled the heavy alien off into another chamber, which the ridged floor made exceedingly difficult…plus he weighed a ton.
After getting him removed from the area Kara came back and took her best guess at a revival sequence and shut down the four active systems.
A flashing green light appeared underneath a small morphing hologram that she guessed was a countdown clock of some sort. Probably an automated release now that the life support was down. She wasn’t sure if hitting the button would speed it up or reverse what she had done. Flying blind she just went on instinct and pressed the damn thing…then a groan sounded and the clear barrier between her and the giant lizard retracted up into the ceiling, releasing a foul odor that made it all the way inside her helmet’s filters.
The lizard lay still, just as it had been, though the frost covering its body began to melt. Kara just stood there and waited, not sure what else to do. Maybe she had accidentally killed it, or maybe it was going to take a while to revive. She had no answers so she just stayed back and watched, circling around a bit to get various views, looking for any signs of life.
After nearly 5 minutes she saw it take a breath, much as it had been before, so she knew it wasn’t dead, thankfully. A minute later another breath followed, then another, and another…each with shorter intervals until it was up to one every ten seconds.
That was when Kel’sad came in so quietly that Kara didn’t detect his presence until he was only a dozen meters behind her.
“What have you done?” the Scionate growled, poised in a defensive lean backwards away from the sleeping giant, as if he was ready to run at the first twitch.
“If you don’t want to be here, leave,” Kara warned. “Take Dre’for with you. He’s napping around the corner.”
The Scionate’s face crunched up in a confused look, then he sniffed the air to confirm the proximity of his den brother. “You assaulted him?”
“We had a difference of opinion,” Kara said, keeping one eye on the Keeper and one on Kel’sad. “He’s unharmed, just unconscious,” she said, pulling out her pistol and pointing it at the Scionate. “It will stun through armor if necessary, but I would prefer I didn’t have to shoot you as well.”
“Have you gone mad, Human?”
“We’re all about to get killed when the base is overrun. We aren’t going to get another opportunity for this, so I had to act now.”
“What’s done is done,” Kel’sad growled. “Put your weapon away.”
Kara stared at him for a moment, then decided that he was genuine and slipped her pistol back into its storage slot. “The Nestafar are landing additional dropships. We don’t have much time. If this thing can help us, we need to find out.”
Kel’sad growled again, this time more so than the first, but not at Kara. The Nestafar bringing in more troops was a bad sign and he recognized as she did just how bad of a situation they were in.
On the opposite side of the lizard’s head, where neither Human nor Scionate could see, a crack appeared in the beast’s eyelid at the name ‘Nestafar.’
5
Ashley held up her hand to get the others to stop behind her as the tunnel suddenly branched off to the left. She approached cautiously, with nothing else in sight ahead of her, then poked her helmet around the corner and was suddenly staring directly into a row of ball-form protomechs parked in the side tunnel. They looked like perfectly smooth chrome orbs, but whether or not anyone was inside them she didn’t know…nor did she know where the entry hatch would be, because at a glance she couldn’t see any seams in the spheres.
They didn’t fill the entire tunnel, but it would be next to impossible to climb around one of them without scrunching through. She doubted Ske’rar could make it in his armor, and even though they didn’t intend to head off to the left Ashley was worried about what would happen if the protomechs followed them down the tunnel ahead.
“Trouble?” Terry-1055 asked.
“Have you seen Indiana Jones?”
“Yes.”
“Remember the giant rolling boulder?”
“Protomechs?” the Archon guessed.
“They’re parked to the left. I don’t know if anyone is in them or not, but if they come after us down the tunnel they’ll crush us.”
“You want to turn back and try another tunnel?”
A muffled growl from the Scionate indicated that he wanted to know what was going on, given that he wasn’t keyed into their helmet comms.
“Move back,” Ashley said, also giving the appropriate hand signal. “Time to poke the bee hive.”
The three other Archons did as instructed and retreated back up the tunnel a ways. Given the incline she hoped that if the protomechs came after them they’d be slow enough that they’d be able to run and stay ahead of them on their way back up to the surface. Going downhill further into the mountain would be suicide given that the rolling balls wouldn’t even need to propel themselves to gain speed.
Ashley jumped out into the side tunnel and shot the first protomech three times with her plasma rifle, putting tiny melted divots in the hull but otherwise having no effect. The thing didn’t move, at all, and Ashley fired five more times trying to provoke a reaction…but the thing was as dead as a giant marble.
“Ok, I guess they’re unmanned,” she said, walking up closer, ready to run at the slightest twitch of movement.
The others came down into view, Ske’rar included, as she tried to slide her body through the narrow gap between giant orb and tunnel.
“What are you doing?” the Scionate asked.
“Trying to find…never mind. There’s a walkway carved into the wall. Looks like they dug this offshoot just to store these,” she said, dropping into the narrow shaft that ran parallel with the tunnel. It stretched out down to what looked like a cross tunnel, suggesting that he Nestafar had been digging much more than a single route into the base, but rather establishing their own outpost of sorts inside the mountain where the Alliance fighters couldn’t get at them.
“Chase, Less, come through here,” she said, waiting for the pair to squeeze through the gaps and into the walkway. “Go cause trouble.”
“Happy to,” Less said, rubbing against the wall to get by Ashley with Chase right on his heels. She went back out into the protomechs tunnel and scrunched her way back through to the others.
“They’re the diversion, we press on to the digger,” she explained to Ske’rar.
The big cat nodded and followed her and Terry down the shallow angle of the descending tunnel towards the ever growing rumbles of distant machinery.
Boen tapped Mark’s shoulder twice, indicating that it was time to move again, then he rea
ched down and offered his hand, into which the trailblazer put his wrist. With a heave Boen picked him up over his shoulders and stumbled his way through the debris field down a zigzaggy valley between big sections of what had once been the freighter and one of the spider walkers. He eventually set the Archon down underneath a hollowed out piece of the spider’s leg, then jumped off across the ‘road’ where he slid underneath a narrow overhang just before the wing beats of another patrol became audible.
Both Archons stayed perfectly still and waited. Before long one of the Nestafar flew by a meter off the ground, flapping hard to maintain its subtle hover as it danced from one point of view to the next, then slowly disappeared out of sight and sound. The pair waited longer, knowing that they couldn’t afford to get careless, then Boen moved Mark again, just another 50 meters up to where he found a tent-like overhang where two pieces of wall had fallen in on each other. It didn’t appear to be the safest location, but it was large enough to cover them both with room to spare.
Boen laid Mark down and dragged him inside, then reached back out and smoothed the singed dirt to try and erase the footprints and drag marks leading in. Everything was so fresh that most of the dirt was covered in bits of debris, but erasing even the smallest of signs tipped the odds away from the Nestafar finding them and the Archon was intent on making those odds as lopsided as possible.
“I can’t believe they have patrols this close to the base,” Mark whispered when Boen pulled off his helmet so he could hear better.
The Archon cringed. “Sorry boss,” he whispered back, “but we’re nowhere near the base yet. We’ve only moved about a quarter mile since we left the underground. We don’t exactly have a straight line back.”
Mark pulled off his helmet as well, then lowered his voice to make sure his normal compensation for the dampening effect wouldn’t carry over into his unhelmeted speech. “Where did you first encounter the patrols?”