by Aer-ki Jyr
Brandon deactivated the water flow, then took out a cutting tool and began slicing open the top of the pipe after insuring that the pressure on this side was reduced so it wouldn’t spill up out onto the floor, but that didn’t stop a small geyser of water/steam to shoot out for a few seconds when he punctured through it the first time. He waited for it to subside, then turned the small hole into a line that eventually circled back on itself until the chunk of pipe fell down into the water, splashing out more onto the floor from the manhole-sized breach point.
“We’re coming back out this way if we can,” Brandon told Leo, “so keep this location secure.”
“Understood.”
“We’ve got about 300 meters to swim, so give me a couple minutes head start. No point in your wasting oxygen while I’m cutting on the other end,” Brandon said as he climbed up on top of the pipe and straddled it.
“Where does this lead?” Jyra asked.
“To a lot of smaller pipes that we can’t fit into, but we’re getting out early on the other side of the wall.”
“If you say so.”
“Not the best idea, but it’s the only way I know of to stay hidden.”
“Let’s make it work then.”
“Mace second, you third. Trade out your gear for Leo’s explosives.”
“On it,” she said, disconnecting her pack from her armor and setting it on the floor as Leo did likewise.
Brandon took a deep breath, realizing that he was going to be on the clock here, then let it out slowly as he readied himself. Leaning forward, he let himself fall down into the water, which gushed out onto the floor from the displacement, then he began crawling/swimming down the dark pipe using his Pefbar to see the circular walls as his helmet’s air vents automatically closed against presence of the water and his backup oxygen supply kicked in.
His battlemap sensors mapped out the tube as he went, giving him distance markings so he knew approximately how far to go before pushing out his Pefbar to look beyond the pipe. He passed by several chambers that were on the wrong side of the main wall, but he wasn’t sure exactly where it was. Taking his best guess he went a bit further than that, then started looking for minds nearby.
He eventually came across one room that had none in it, with the pipe traveling mostly in the walls and ‘thick’ sections of infrastructure were a person couldn’t fit, leaving him with only a handful of rooms to choose from. Taking his luck for what it was, he stopped his movement and stretched his Pefbar out as far as he could to see what the room was like. It too didn’t have a door on it, just an opening to the hallway beyond, but he didn’t sense any minds nearby at all, so hopefully this section of the hatchery wasn’t staffed.
From the librarian he’d learned where exactly the workers were, with most of the facility being made up of equipment that had to be looked after rather than operated, making chunks of it ghost towns save for the random visit. Hopefully this was one of them.
He used his cutting tool and got to work on the top of the pipe, not wanting to flood the area by opening up the side or bottom, for there was still a whole lot of water in the tube, though he was noticing a few inches of air up top now. Those inside the facility may have noticed the lack of water pressure, and if they did hopefully this room wasn’t where they’d check first.
The water vaporized around the tip of the cutter as he seared through the casing, beginning to trace a slow path around another man-sized hole and making sure to make it large enough for them to exit with their packs on as Mace swam up behind him and stopped just shy of his feet. Jyra showed up as well before Brandon got finished, then the hard casing fell down into the water and he pushed it further down the tube before standing up and having a look around with water gushing out onto the floor but not spreading as far as the doorway.
The room was dark save for indicator lights, which was a good sign. No minds were within his sensing range, so Brandon stepped out and let his oxygen supply begin to recharge as he started taking in outside air again.
“Clear,” he reported, taking up station near the doorway and sneaking a peak outside. Both directions of the hallway were empty, with him breathing a sigh of relief. This was actually doable now.
Mace and Jyra joined him, then the three of them moved out and heading in different directions to start building a battlemap and looking for the nearest minds, spending a few minutes orienting themselves before Brandon got a feel for where they were in the hatchery. This one was larger than the one Star Force had built from lizard tech, but the basic layout was the same, only redundantly made larger.
“Alright,” Brandon said when they’d pulled back to their entry point, making sure no one had stumbled onto their hole in the pipe or the water on the floor. “Time to hide the easter eggs. Set for remote and timer. 10 hours or…let’s just make it 3 am. Place as many as you can, but do not be seen.”
“Sneaking as ordered,” Mace confirmed, with the three splitting up and heading to the periphery of their scouted area. When Jyra got to her section she kept her limited psionics engaged constantly, looking for nearby minds as well as using her Pefbar to see through corners to look for security cameras. She took her time and eventually came to one of the inhabited sections, requiring a bit of sneaking by with the lizards opening up fully developed pods and releasing the adult, but just ‘born’ lizards one at a time.
She noticed one that came out shook violently when it was exposed to the air for the first time, with the three others around it having to physically restrain it as it lashed out wildly until it came to its senses and saw that it was with other lizards. Jyra mentally noted never to wake one up and expect a ‘good morning,’ for it seemed they were always wired to fight as their basic instinct. It was still impressive though, how the brand new lizard actually spoke to its greeting party. That meant they did have knowledge preprogrammed into their genetics…either that or there was some sort of download occurring within the pods.
Jyra avoided that pod and several others that had lizards prepping them for release, instead sneaking over to some that were still in waiting, lined up on a long bay floor in rows that gave her ample cover if she crouched down. She could tell from the construction that they were moveable, with the empty one that the brand new lizard had come out of confirming that suspicion as it sank down into a hole in the floor and disappeared into a recycling facility that would prep it for another occupant.
A moment later another one appeared in its place, coming down from the ceiling, meaning that Jyra couldn’t place the bombs on the pods themselves or they’d disappear with them, and if they did get through 598 a day then most of these would be looked at before the timers expired. That meant she had to find someplace else to stash her first little gem, with a bank of what looked like support lines and tanks on the far wall being the obvious second choice.
As she stalked her way over to them, doing her best Solid Snake impression to avoid the few lizards walking about checking on pods, she pulled a small square ‘hockey puck’ out of her pack and linked to it via her HUD, activating it and programming it accordingly with a few quick commands. The Arc Commando dropped all the way to the floor and scooted as far as she could get between several small pipes, then slid it back under them even further before using her full Lachka power to nudge it along the floor sideways until it was out of sight and resting behind a support strut.
One down, 35 to go.
Brandon had reserved the busiest section for himself, heading to the embryo stages where genetic material was being inserted into tiny pods full of gel that would begin the development cycle. That process was actually pretty simple and quick, but there were teams of lizards moving around prepping empty pods with the gel and hooking them up to the support infrastructure, making it very hard for him to move around unnoticed, with him having to use a mind trick twice to get by bottlenecks.
Being patient and stealthy, he moved around from ward to ward, hiding an explosive or two in each, then moving on to later stages
of development. Many of the chambers were the same, but once they reached a certain point in the timeline they were transferred to the larger pods, which was also a beehive of activity. He made sure to drop a present everywhere it would do a lot of damage, not enough to bring the building down, but to junk the internal equipment and cause them to replace all of it. It would also kill the developing lizards, and as much as he hated spawn point camping this had to be done.
These lizards hadn’t done anything against Star Force yet, and if they’d been another race they wouldn’t have been using this type of tactic, but never in the history of Star Force had a lizard not wanted to kill them. These developing here would do the same when they got released, so it was best to kill them now before they could fire their first shot. They were going to be enemies regardless, every last one of them. If there had even been a shred of doubt about that they wouldn’t be here doing this, at least not in this way, but Brandon and the others were sure. They had to be, for one didn’t want to make a mistake and kill someone who wasn’t going to try and kill you.
That was one disadvantage the lizards had…they were all united with a common purpose. After so many centuries of warfare for Star Force to learn about them through, they no longer needed to be careful to not target the innocent bystanders, for the lizards had proved there were none within their race. This planet had been given the opportunity to surrender, which it hadn’t taken, and wouldn’t as the offer was repeated over the coming years, so that meant it all had to be destroyed, right down to every last lizard, including the ones in these pods.
Brandon and the others did keep running through the logic in their minds though, rather than taking it as a foregone conclusion. They had to make sure what they were doing was right, and in this case, on this mission, it was, leaving Brandon without any regrets or doubts. He just hated killing like this, but the lizards weren’t giving the galaxy much choice. It was kill or be killed, and when it came to that Star Force could and would prove itself superior in that skillset…it just didn’t usually show it off, out of caution to make sure it stayed on mission.
But today, on this planet, that mission was destruction, pure and simple.
Brandon kept moving around planting explosives and calibrating them to the clock in his helmet to insure that they’d all go off simultaneously, but there was one more place he had to go and that was in the genetic repository that held the precious little hand-sized crates that could create an army for each and every one of them. Typically the lizards didn’t have many of those on hand, and guarded them carefully against destruction…but since they didn’t know anyone was here, and this hatchery was still fully operational, they should be located in the control areas where the monitoring staff were.
That was going to be the hardest to sneak into, which was why Brandon left it last on the list, for he was going to need the others’ help to get in there.
6
Jyra walked ever so softly in her armor’s boots, coated in dampening treads over top the hardened under soles, trying to be as smooth as possible as she strode past a lizard at a work station. There were 8 of them in the room, all doing this or that with 5 of them staying put. Three others were roaming from station to station, based on the patterns the Arc Commandos had been monitoring via Pefbar through the walls and nearby rooms before sliding a tiny remote camera in through the doorway. They’d used it to get more info on the control room, including the placement of two security cameras that Jyra was walking around…right in view of the rest of the lizards.
Those lizards were attending to their work and she wasn’t noticed, for Mace and Brandon were working them over with psionics during what they thought would be another few minutes of inactivity from the roamers. Right now two of them were seated and the third was standing in front of monitoring displays. It had been doing that regularly before transitioning over to check another, more formal station.
Jyra and the others had spent over an hour watching their movements in order to plan this out, and now that she was doing it she could feel the danger around her. One look was all it would take to blow their cover and they’d be on the run, but they really wanted to make sure the genetic material didn’t survive the explosions and the only way to make sure of that was detonating one of their little hockey pucks directly on them, else their protective shells would more than likely keep them intact.
The three of them had planned this out prior to her entry, and Jyra was walking a very deliberate course around and through the workstation. The lizard directly to her left all but had its eyes on her, but they were tilted down slightly to look at his station screen and a heavy dose of Ikrid influence to make him keep them there.
Jyra moved slowly, at approximately the speed the roamers moved, with that image being put into the minds of any of them that happened to turn in her direction. They couldn’t psionically dampen all 8 at once, so they were working on the ones most likely to spot her with Jyra’s psionics being used as a backup in case something went wrong.
She made a hard left past its station, then ever so carefully dropped to the ground and crawled past another station that had a security camera over it, she turned right and went within a meter of one sitting lizard’s tail that was sticking out the back of its chair, twitching lazily in the air a few inches off the ground. She made sure not to touch it and kept moving.
After a few more zigzags she ended up in the back room where another security camera was covering the genetic repository, which was basically an elaborate closet indented into the wall. The second camera was there, covering it, for which she opened her hand and a small piece of material they’d scrounged from the cover of a supply canister in the pod prep area gently floated up into the air. Her psionics might not be that strong yet, but make the object as light as a big pebble and she could work it around just fine.
It rose up and put its flat width in front of the camera mount, blocking the view and held it there. Both of the others were busy keeping the lizard minds occupied, so it was her job to multitask and keep it aloft in that precise space while she dug into her open pack and pulled out her last bomb. There wasn’t much in the way of places to hide it, but they knew from experience that the genetic material was so dense that multiple canisters would not be needed for months, so the likelihood of someone coming over here to pick up another one anytime soon was slim.
There was a small lip behind the cartons that held the protective canisters and she set the explosive there, making sure it was out of the line of sight of the camera. There was nothing covering it, but Jyra could only make out a bit of it from above when she pulled her arm back, and fortunately the lizards were shorter than her. Confident that it would go unnoticed despite not being hidden well, she began to make her way back out into the control room, tugging the little piece of thin material back into her hand.
If someone was actively watching the cameras then they’d notice an interruption, but they wouldn’t see her black armor. Given how low level the security was here, for there were no invading troops in this city anymore, they’d wagered that not every camera in the entire city would be monitored and were probably there for use in an active situation or for replay after the fact. It was a bit of a gamble, and if someone was watching and came to check on the camera it would increase the likelihood of the explosive being found, which was why as she backed away she toggled the explosive’s settings to include movement detonation.
Hopefully this planet didn’t have earthquakes, for aside from that it wouldn’t go off unless someone picked it up or something really big crashed nearby and vibrated the floor. But if there was going to be someone to find the explosive before the timer expired, it would be best for the rest of the lizards not to know what was going on and give them a chance to search for more. Dead men tell no tales, and that would certainly be the case with anyone who found this one, though the others spread throughout the hatchery were not so set, for some of them were in locations where there could be vibrations, plus they were hid a l
ot better.
Jyra walked/crawled her course in reverse, then casually stepped out of the control room and turned the corner, breathing a huge sigh of relief as Brandon signaled danger to the right. She stretched out her senses and found another mind approaching from that direction so the Arc Commandos went left down the wide hallway and ducked into a side room to let this lizard pass one way or another.
I can’t believe we pulled that off, Jyra said telepathically as they hid out. It never should have worked.
Never underestimate the stupidity of a lizard, Mace responded.
Or the power of psionics, Brandon added as the one they were mentally watching turned to the right and out of their hallway headed away from the control room and into one of the growth chambers. Let’s go.
The three of them played their now familiar game of hide and seek, crossing the hatchery and taking their time doing it to keep their cover secure, all the time wondering if/when someone would show up to inspect that camera. They didn’t pass anyone that looked to be in a hurry on their way back to their entry point, but the sooner they left the better.
Psionics said the room was empty before Brandon rounded the corner and looked inside with his eyes. The puddles on the floor had since dried, but apparently no one had come in here to see the damage. How long the lack of pressure would go unnoticed he wasn’t sure, knowing that this was only one water feed into the facility. Had it been the only one an immediate problem would have arisen, and in truth he didn’t know whether or not a lizard team was already on the case, for looking at this mundane section of pipe was probably not going to solve their problem…unless they expected an invasion team to cut their way out of it.