The pilot grimaced and slowed the transport’s speed when it approached the mountains in an attempt to keep their distance. Fear and hesitation drove him to not provoke what was quickly unveiling itself to be a hornet’s nest waiting to erupt with fury by the circling cybernetic wyverns.
“Don’t think I could punch through, sir,” the pilot spoke.
“Fighters?” Chevallier suggested.
“All available fighters are still occupied with the battle near the beach and the city,” the pilot said.
“I’d rather not pull them away from that, our troops could use the air support,” Boyd said.
Maxwell scowled at the mountains via the opened transport doors. “And so could we.”
Chevallier did the same and eyed the circling wyverns with contempt. They looked as if they were flying around to stand watch rather than prepare for an attack. Hell, any one of them could have broken out of their formation and attacked the lone transport that hovered in the air debating their next move. They didn’t.
The circular flying patterns and lack of aggression . . . They were protecting someone, or something, like the target that teleported into the region. Chevallier glanced at her rifle’s batteries charge. They were at near full power after the battery swap she made when they left the beach.
“Pilot, bring the sides of the transport to face those dragons,” Chevallier yelled toward him.
“Chevallier . . .” Boyd said in a condescending manner.
Chevallier stood next to the wide-open transport door, aiming her rifle forward with its particle fire mode selected. “We just became the air support we needed.”
Maxwell grinned. “As much as I hate this girl,” he said, joining her with his weapon. “I love this girl!”
Boyd and LeBoeuf reluctantly stepped next to the two, also taking on an offensive stance. She felt no shame in undermining Boyd like many COs before her, deep down Chevallier knew she was right. Balls-to-the-wall recklessness, that’s what got the job done in the face of non-human enemies, especially hive-minded ones like the dragon invaders.
The transport returned on its original path to the mountains. Their imposing nature grasped the attention of a dozen wyverns that broke away from their circling to intercept the human transport. The pilot shifted the transport to the side and allowed its opened door to face the incoming wyverns. A steady spread of particle beams and psionically powered energy rifles streaked across the skies to greet their targets.
The enraged wyverns that weren’t partially vaporized broke away, Chevallier counted at least eight. The battle that ensued played out with little words spoken from all parties aboard the transport as there wasn’t much time to communicate, only time to improvise and work on the fly. The second set of doors slid open from behind, it was another spot where the four could stick their rifles out to attack.
Chevallier was the first to switch places, knowing that within a matter of seconds they would have wyverns swarming them from all directions, breathing deadly plasma fires from their mouths. She was right, she hated when she was right at times.
Her particle beams fired rapidly with short bursts to prevent her rifle from overheating too quickly. One wyvern yelped and spiraled down to the landscape below with embers blowing away from a hole in its chest. The shields of the transport flashed blue, and, in some areas, psionic purple. LeBoeuf used her powers to create a weak overshield, understandable as she needed to reserve what power she had left to power her rifle, and telekinetically push away wyverns that might get too close.
Boyd joined Chevallier and added his particle beams into the fray. She suspected he was trying to show off by downing the attacking wyverns on a transport engaged in complex maneuvers, dives, rolls, and spins. It was no easy task. Thank God for inertia dampers and artificial gravity, we would have been flung out of this craft ages ago!
The vaporization of the last wyvern gave a non-verbal signal to the pilot to continue on course and triggered four separate stress-relieving exhales from the EDF members and their smoking rifles.
The transport landed at a clearing close to the mountain’s summit. The four leaped out before it came to a solid rest on the grassy terrain, ready to search for the two psionics responsible for the unexpected teleportation.
“Alright, you two, lead the way,” Boyd said to LeBoeuf and Maxwell.
LeBoeuf’s eyes shut to focus and enter a quick ESP trance. Her augmented finger rose, pointing to where her mind directed. “This way; keep in mind whoever teleported in might have moved by now.”
“But they didn’t teleport out, right?’
LeBoeuf’s eyes opened. “No, not that I can sense, they should still be in the region.”
Boyd’s rifle rose. “Alright, eyes sharp, everyone.”
The four moved quickly, taking two steps forward, and then screamed in pain, holding their heads, and collapsing to the ground. All except Chevallier, who altered her body’s mass in preparation for what was coming next.
A brilliant flash of light.
A body formed from within.
It was the Dragon Knight.
Chevallier didn’t wait for what would come next and threw the first punch in the form of white beams of energy from her rifle. The Dragon Knight’s psionic barrier flashed before it jump ported behind her, standing on top of their idle transport. It heckled and laughed at her, drawing her attention to something that was different about it.
This one was different. A female, unlike the last one she fought, which was clearly male. The feminine-sounding laughter and voice was the biggest give away, followed by a closer inspection of her armor. Like the male counterpart, she wore formfitting armor that highlighted her feminine, toned body and curves. Though her armor was more of an armored dress, and like her male counterpart, the surface of the armor resembled the skin of a dragon as her long blonde hair slithered out from the back of her helmet shaped like a dragon’s head. Her hair blew in the mountain’s winds elegantly like a femme fatale straight out of a fantasy novel. She was a young deadly maiden, a Dragon Maiden.
The Dragon Maiden brandished her Voelika staff weapon, while the jets from her boots made her body hover and drift off the top of the transport and over to Chevallier, giving her a look of death and hatred. Chevallier’s particle beams shot forward, each shot missed as the Dragon Maiden jump ported away to safety, laughing hysterically each time.
One moment the Dragon Maiden was behind, the next she was off to the side, and then she was nowhere to be seen. Chevallier’s rifle battery power was nearing its end. She’s trying to get me to waste ammo . . . Chevallier’s teeth gritted as she sprinted to the transport, the only source of fresh batteries. She didn’t make it far. The Dragon Maiden’s jump port placed her in between Chevallier and the transport, swinging her Voelika like a staff-wielding martial artist.
Every blow landed, every blow caused the staff weapon to glow brighter as psionic energy built up within it. Chevallier’s rifle was utterly useless at this range. Even if it wasn’t, how could she target an opponent that danced circles around her, performed backflips over her, or straight-up leaped out of range then appeared behind her?
Chevallier let go of her rifle and placed her back to the side of the transport, effectively removing one part of her body away from the Dragon Maiden’s attacks. There was silence as she shifted her eyes from left to right, scanning the terrain for her absent attacker and their psionic trickery. Must have jump ported away, but where?
The Dragon Maiden appeared from its jump port, twirling its Voelika above its head in preparation for a massive blow. It went in for the strike, Chevallier went in for a head-butt, the shields of the two ferocious, fighting women flashed and crackled. It was a move the Dragon Maiden was not prepared for as she staggered and lost control of her Voelika. Chevallier’s hands wrapped around it and instigated a tug of war for the staff weapon, a war neither of the two was going to give up on.
Chevallier pulled.
The Dragon Maiden pulled back.
They both pulled at the same time.
The vertical glowing weapon was their key to victory.
An explosion further up the mountain instantly made their two faces shift to the side to identify its source. Chevallier saw the exposed mouth of the Dragon Maiden cringe with concern. Something wasn’t going according to her plan, and that explosion was the source of it. The distraction from the blast loosened Chevallier’s grip on the Voelika just enough for the Dragon Maiden to pull it from her grasp.
Shit.
Chevallier stood fast, ready for another bout, ready to improvise and counter whatever bag of tricks her adversary was going to throw at her. Instead, it briskly folded its arms and flashed away from sight and didn’t return. Seconds later, Chevallier’s downed comrades in arms rose to their feet, groaning.
“My head is going to explode . . .” Maxwell moaned as he stood.
“Let me guess . . .” Boyd said. “Our Dragon Knight friend is back?”
“There’s another one,” Chevallier said with displeasure. “Something over there got its attention.” She aimed her index finger at the summit of the mountains.
“That’s the approximate area of the teleport,” LeBoeuf said, having noticed where she was pointing.
“Shit, I’m going to call in a strike, let’s get out of here,” Boyd said.
“An airstrike?” Chevallier said. “Didn’t we just determine fighters are busy?”
“Not an airstrike,” Boyd said as he approached their transport. “An orbital strike.”
Chevallier shook her head, objecting. “Hold on—”
“Stop. I know the chain of command means fuck all to you, but it does to the rest of us,” Boyd’s voice was irritated. “You even said so yourself, there’s two of those Dragon Knight things which can hack our HNI. If those two are up there, then this is our chance to blow them to hell without getting our brains fried.”
“That Dragon Knight left in a hurry,” Chevallier explained. “There’s something going on that has it worried.”
“Put it in a package and mail it to, not our fucking problem. We’re taking those two out, now.”
“We don’t have any forces in the area, right?”
“No, we don’t, all the more reason for an orbital strike.”
“Exactly.” Chevallier took back her rifle and made a quick battery swap from a stash in a storage compartment within the transport. “Don’t you want to know what got it spooked so much that it had to run over rather than finish me off?”
Boyd snorted. “Not really.”
“Let me go and find out, please. You guys stand watch here.”
Maxwell chuckled as he entered the transport. “There she goes again.”
“Alone?” Boyd said. “You’re crazy.”
He eyed Chevallier up and down, probably thinking about the fact she had minimal training and experience with their weapons and armor and lacked HNI.
HNI will get them killed, but not me. “Quick recon, nothing more, just so we know exactly what we’re up against,” Chevallier said.
“Fine, thirty minutes, after that—”
“If I’m not back, I’m dead, feel free to blow the place up.” She leaped back outside and sized up the quick mountain climb she would need to make. “It will save you the hassle of having to bring charges against me.”
A thirty-minute countdown ticked down across Chevallier’s HUD while the adrenaline flowing through her set her body in motion to make the rapid ascent to the summit. She lowered her mass periodically with her MRF in unison with her jump jets. Steep hills were ascended in seconds, and rock faces were climbed and scaled swiftly. Every minute, every second, had to count, there could be no missed steps on her climb to the top to uncover what was going on.
Boyd didn’t understand the position she was in. Her memory had been wiped out along with the Carl Sagan’s crew, and these alien invaders were responsible for it, no doubt about it. There were too many mysteries about them, clues needed to be uncovered, no matter how small, such as the ones she was quickly gaining on as she made her last mass-reduced jump jet that took her to the summit.
Her body soared softly to the ground and she charged into what appeared to have been a battle. There was a lone attacker caught in a pincer’s attack, the Dragon Knight duo on one side, and four invader troopers on the other. In the middle of it all was a large boulder where someone with psionic powers hid and launched relentless attacks upon the two forces.
Chevallier ran with her rifle, yelling at the Dragon Knights and dove over to the cover of the boulder where the lone psionic was, and hoped they were friendly once she slid in behind.
They were.
“Tolukei?” Chevallier said with shock.
Tolukei’s four eyes gazed at her. “Master Chief . . . you are alive.”
Lying on the ground below Tolukei was an unresponsive, young, and skinny Aryile woman. “Who’s the girl?”
“Odelea, she is a scholar.”
Tachyon beams discharged from the invader soldiers further down the summit. Their missed shots sent plumes of smoke up from the ground below their feet. Chevallier’s arrival and chitchat brought distraction to Tolukei’s psionic mayhem. It also prolonged their stay on the mountains . . . she needed to get him and Odelea to safety before the orbital strikes.
She checked the countdown on her HUD.
Fifteen minutes, not good.
“Sergeant Boyd, this is Chevallier, I have Radiance personnel on the mountain tops.” Chevallier heard static as the reply. Whatever the Dragon Knights use to fuck with HNI must be jamming my signals. “Tolukei, are you able to get us out of here?”
“I am,” Tolukei said as his cybernetic hands hurled psionically generated balls of plasma at the Dragon Knight duo.
“Do it, don’t care where we land, we just need to not be here in a few minutes.”
“Not until I have completed my mission.” Tolukei flicked his hand at the four invader soldiers, and they flew backwards via a fierce telekinetic push. “I made an agreement with the scholar to capture one of these alive.”
“This is really not the time—”
“I will deal with the psionics, please keep the soldiers at bay!”
Tolukei wasn’t listening. Then again, as she recalled from her limited interactions with him, he wasn’t much of a people person due to his limited experience working with humans. This put her in a tough spot. She found the source of the teleportation, though it didn’t yield the clues she was hoping to find. If Tolukei was willing to throw his life away for his mission, so be it, she wasn’t going to end hers for an interrogation. And, as for the girl? She could care less about her. There was no reason for Chevallier to remain as she collected what little intel there was about the unfolding events.
It was time to go. Too bad she drew attention to herself on her climb and run up into the fray. She looked at the four invader soldiers as they regrouped behind large rocks for cover, they weren’t going to make her escape easy, and neither would the two Dragon Knights. Like it or not, Chevallier was faced with limited options. Help Tolukei finish before the orbital strike hits so that he could teleport them away to safety, or thin out the numbers of the invader soldiers, and hope to God the knight duo won’t switch targets and chase her.
Before she made her choice, she shouted to reiterate. “Tolukei, the UNE is planning to obliterate this area with an orbital strike!”
“Tell them to delay it.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?!”
“I have made a pact with Odelea, which I intend to fulfill.” She was impressed on how his psionic powers were able to keep the Dragon Knights at bay. “How much time do we have?”
She checked her HUD, “Twelve minutes.”
“Then we must ensure we are a victorious before that!”
Thin the herd it is. Chevallier brought her rifle forward, selected projectile fire mode, and zeroed her targeting scope’s reticle in the general direction where the
four invaders hid. She pulled the trigger when one of them thought they’d be slick and take a shot.
Four bullets turned one soldier into a bloody mess, only for it to rise like an undead zombie. It brought back the stressful days when she had to battle the undead grunts at Sirius, who were all being mind controlled remotely via a psionic—
That’s when it hit her. She lowered her rifle and gazed blankly at the strange stance Tolukei entered. The soldier that rose from the dead was his doing, the forbidden powers of a Muodiry psionic was at work. Powers Radiance denied in order to make their religion’s history sound truthful. Muodiry literally translated as necromancer for a reason.
Tolukei sent his newly acquired minion to harass the Dragon Knights. It made Chevallier grin as her rifle went to acquire new targets to conscript into Tolukei’s undead mind-controlled army. Her bullets found the neck of one soldier, jets of blood squirted from the jugular while they staggered from the impact. Two shoots to their exposed chest finished the job, and Tolukei’s mind control turned it against its Dragon Knight masters.
“Remember, we require at least one alive,” Tolukei said.
None will be alive when I’m done. The invaders brought the end of her mother’s life, like hell she was going to show mercy to them, especially with time running out.
Case in point, the two remaining soldiers tried to readjust their position and take aim at the two mind-controlled soldiers whom were wearing down the psionic barriers of the two jump porting Dragon Knights and their fancy staff-twirling moves and swings. Chevallier glanced at Tolukei, his shut eyes, determined and focused face, showed her just how hard it was to mind control two dead targets. He was oblivious to the fact that she left her cover as her scope zoomed in and searched for the repositioning invader soldiers.
The Dragon Knight duo was still struggling to rid themselves of the two undead soldiers, not realizing that you can’t kill what’s already dead. The tachyon rifles held by the undead soldiers were making short work of the Dragon Knights’ psionic barriers. Chevallier’s freedom from the hole she leaped into was near. Whether she’d have enough time to make her escape was another story, as the countdown on her HUD began to pulse red.
Celestial Incursion Page 25