by Aer-ki Jyr
6
May 23, 128549
Unexplored Frontier
Beta Temple
Paul and the other 56 trailblazers crossed the Bridge in a single travel orb, leaving them extremely vulnerable to attack, but they arrived without incident and quickly joined the others who were already a step ahead of them. They’d gotten the Paladin update detailing the location of some of the potential hidden portals and had done some scouting on their own, but they didn’t know that Davis intended for them to use them.
“He said what?” Sara-012 asked, mildly shocked.
“We can’t wait,” Paul reiterated as he met her privately in one of the Star Force outposts while the other trailblazers were out talking to their kin in person. “The longer we do, more people die. If we can get in this way, we’re going to.”
“And he sent everybody?”
“If this works, we’re going to need the most skilled people going first.”
“No Golden Knights?”
“Not for scouting. If this works, they’ll be coming along with everyone else small enough to fit.”
“You’re serious about this?” she asked cautiously.
“Very.”
“Even though we could be walking into a buzz saw.”
“I’m tired of waiting, and so is Davis.”
“It’s reckless, Paul. Extremely reckless.”
“So why do I see a hint of a smile that you can’t completely suppress?” he asked deadpan.
“Because it will be ridiculously badass if it works. What makes you think we can piggyback?”
“They have to use an Essence bubble. If we get inside it there should be no problem.”
“Do they have to be spherical bubbles?”
“That’s one of the many things we’re here to find out. So are you going to guide me through or make me figure it out on my own?”
“We’re going in pairs?”
“Yes. Singles are too risky, and depending on what we find, we might need battlemeld.”
“Hopefully not. Alright, I’m your date. How do we know where we’re going and how do we get back?”
“We don’t. We just surf the Caretaker grid and map it out as we go.”
“Long term supplies?”
Paul nodded. “We brought plenty.”
Sara bit her lip. “We really are going out on a limb, aren’t we?”
“You’re welcome to stay here.”
“Not my point. But some of us might not come back.”
“I don’t think the Vargemma are that smart. It’ll just be the Caretakers and whatever else the Founders built. We can handle that.”
“You hope,” she reminded him.
“Thrawn is going to keep shooting holes in Alpha, so hopefully if we follow the supply flow we will end up there eventually.”
“Assuming there is a supply flow to follow and they’re just not going out in the backyard to some mining outpost to draw resources from.”
“We need to find out regardless.”
“Wait, why aren’t you going with Jason?”
“He has his apprentice, and I didn’t want to break them up. Morgan brought Ginsi, and we have a few other hitchhikers, but I wanted an original.”
“And you’re still level 1 Saiyan.”
“Not the best for this kind of mission, but you know my reasons.”
“I know, Admiral. Don’t worry. I’ll hold your hand.”
“Sooner rather than later. The others are leaving as soon as somebody figures out how.”
“Give me 20 minutes and a pack, then I’m all yours.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Paul said as she ran off to do whatever.
He waited in the hallway by the cupola that led onto the small landing pad atop one of the many research outposts set up near, or in this case, on top of a Caretaker facility. This one, according to the battlemap Paul was surfing while he waited, was set over a Responder. Sara had probably been training or testing out with her Essence skills, which was something she couldn’t do in the main base. Other stations were set up where Neo-level Archons were helping armies of techs analyze, record, and break down as much as possible, though some facilities resisted being tampered with and sent out Caretaker guards to stop the techs from prying too much.
The Knights of Quenar were also here en mass and helping with a variety of things. Paul hoped they behaved themselves, for the last thing they needed now was a stab in the back…which was why this mission wasn’t being input into the battlemap or even told about to the local personnel save for a handful of trustees staying here to coordinate who went where and service them when…or if…they came back.
True to her word, Sara showed back up some 17 minutes and 21 seconds later with her armor armbands glimmering in the sunlight coming in through the open archway door to the landing pad.
“Where’s our gear?”
“In the dropship,” Paul said, falling into step with her as they jogged out. Neither one wanted to get beat by the others in being the first pair to make it out of the Temple. “I’ve got us a prospective exit point. Have you been there?”
“No,” she answered his telepathic location data. “But if it’s like the others, the first barrier is a shield and then you’ve got a lot of monitoring equipment inside that activates Hound units. If you can avoid detection then you’ve pretty much got the run of the Caretaker areas.”
“How much of a cloak?” Paul asked as they ran into the rear of the dropship.
“Level 19 was what did it,” she said as the trailblazer mentally triggered the ramp to rise and seal, then she caught a heavy geodic hexagon as Paul tossed it to her.
“Level 28,” he said.
“I didn’t know we had a 28,” Sara said, pressing it against her right forearm gauntlet and waiting as it melted it into it. The material made her gauntlet extra thick, but it still covered no extra skin on her arm.
“It’s pieces of 28. The most the Mastertechs had finished. Figured we needed all the advantages we could get.”
“I won’t argue that,” she said as the dropship lifted off and began to auto-fly to the location at Paul’s mental prompting as he pulled out a similar hexagon and incorporated it into his armor. Then he opened a crate and effortlessly tossed a large square box to Sara.
She caught the backpack enhancement, but she had to deploy her armor across her torso in order to attach it to her shoulder blades. That left her with a Paladin-like vest that saw her forearm pieces moved up and into shoulder-pad position. In truth she could position the armor pieces anywhere on her body she wanted to carry them, but forearms was the norm, except when they needed a pack to fill up with supplies.
Sara opened up another crate, then telekinetically started flying foodstuffs, weapons, and other small, compact bits of equipment up and over her head, then deposited them neatly inside the pack that continued to enlarge as needed to fit them all. By the time she and Paul were finished they looked like Ninja Turtles, with hilariously large packs that would not be well suited to fight in…though for a trailblazer they wouldn’t be all that hindering.
Still, Sara didn’t like the bulkiness…but the idea of running out of supplies and dying from starvation somewhere totally unknown within the galaxy made a little awkwardness totally acceptable. And she could ditch anything she wanted enroute if needed, so both Archons became pocket hoarders all the way up to the arrival point, but they weren’t the first ones here.
The dropship landed in the bitter cold of another Region beyond the one that had fully melted and was in the beginning process of planting, with numerous Caretaker craft zooming all over depositing seeds or seedlings based on some preprogrammed pattern, then other drones would bring in Essence pods and ‘spray’ specific seedlings with it. Not very many, and he was surprised they were willing to use the limited amount of Essence that they’d donated to the Temple so far for plant growing, but the results couldn’t be argued with.
Mature trees, covines, bushes, vines, and ot
her things that were apparently essential grew to maturity in less than an hour, sucking resources out of the ground and air so fast they created mini storms around the site and sank into a depression in the ground during the process…but that only helped with water collection after the growth spurts were ended.
Paul was curious about the patterns, and Sara hadn’t been able to detect a reason for it yet, but they both had bigger things to worry about, though Morgan and Ginsi getting to this exit point first wasn’t really one of them. They just acted like it was.
“Ah nuts,” Paul said, seeing their dropship already on the frozen ground and two icons of armored suits walking across the snowpack into an ancient archway set into a hillside, marked as the infamous Master/Apprentice duo from ages past.
“Guess I shouldn’t have washed my hair,” Sara joked. “Let’s see how well they sneak in. Neither of them has been here to try before now.”
“How many attempts did it take you?”
“Twice after Rafa figured out the cloak needed. They’re really sensitive to sound, so any big footsteps and you get particle sweepers that the cloaks can’t handle.”
“Plasma?”
“Something finer than that. We didn’t get a chance to analyze it. We were trying to hide from it.”
“Step lightly, got it,” Paul echoed as they set down next to a Temple barge that looked to have been parked here a while based on the snow stuck to the shield dome over it. That was probably from a team of techs that had been here studying the site, and Sara confirmed his telepathic question with a simple mental ‘nod’ as they ran down the lowering ramp and passed through their own containment shield keeping the frigid air out of the craft.
Frost formed on Paul’s helmet faceplate, but since it was opaque anyway it didn’t make much difference, but get too much on it and all the little micro-cameras imbedded into the armor might get covered, so a de-icing program automatically kicked in and tiny rivulets of water flowed around to the back of his neck where they were splashed off down towards the ground, keeping his helmet completely clean of water and any other foreign substance that found its way onto it.
But Paul didn’t need the visuals when he had Pefbar to navigate with, though colors and long range objects weren’t detectable with the psionic, and he preferred getting as much information as possible, especially when they were going into the unknown.
Sara jogged ahead of him, with Paul matching her stride so his footprints in the snow fell inside hers. They had approximately the same size feet, so if anyone was watching later it would look like one set of tracks instead of two…though he did notice shallow, almost filled, depressions from what was probably the tech team arriving earlier.
That meant a lot of snow had been falling here, or blowing, which made the exterior conditions even more inhospitable, but as soon as they passed through the archway their feet hit synthetic rock tiles set into an odd triangle pattern with Paul’s external temperature gage jumping back above freezing.
He kept his armor on, save for his helmet that he retracted. Sara did the same, then the two Ninja Turtles jogged up into a room that held 8 techs and the fleeting image of the backside of two more enormous packs disappearing around a corner on the far side.
“Jensen?” Sara asked, knowing one of the techs on sight.
“They’re heading into shaft 1. We figure if we try to get at the portals from different directions it might spread out the Caretaker teams if you’re discovered. Take shaft 4. That’s furthest from them. And good luck. We’ll be here if you come back this way.”
“How will you know?” Paul asked.
“We snuck a few cloaked cameras inside,” Sara admitted.
“How are they transmitting back?”
“Spiderweb lines,” Tech Jensen answered. “The Caretaker surveillance is looking for people, not microline. Not here anyway. Elsewhere they’ve got far more sensitive surveillance. These must not be high priority areas.”
“Or no one would be stupid enough to risk pissing them off,” Sara noted. “Either way, good for us. You ready?”
“Born,” Paul answered pithily.
“Mimic me and be quiet. Don’t use telepathy or battlemeld. They have sensors for that.”
“Hand signals it is then,” Paul said, resealing his helmet as Sara did the same, then he followed her at a brisk walk down a serious of corridors that led to the point on his battlemap that had been updated as ‘Shaft 4’ with a gleaming purple/blue energy shield covering it. Sara stopped well shy of it, then they both watched as a small Caretaker unit came out carrying a small cubical crate of some kind. It was impossible to say without scanning it, and right now they didn’t want to draw attention.
They let it get further away, then when Paul was sure there was no more sounds of the swooshing air the Caretakers faintly made, Sara lifted a hand and twisted her fingers around in a pattern that meant ‘going ninja,’ after which she activated her cloaking field and went invisible save for a faint outline.
Paul did likewise, then reduced his tracker emission down to a range of 5 meters. It was a very odd and short range type of signal that nearly all races didn’t even know existed, let alone built equipment to track. If they did, they’d have to get close to pick up on it, and because it was so weak it could only pass very limited information between the two of them, and then it was scaled down even further, with just enough remaining so they could see the location of each other’s bodies while cloaked so they didn’t run into each other.
To everyone else they weren’t there, and even the air moving around them was pushed a bit by microshield paddles to make it slide over their armor and reset in a stable position behind them rather than creating a current. It wasn’t perfect, but nearly so, meaning the Archons could run past somebody and they wouldn’t feel the wave of air. The same was true if they fanned the air in front of someone’s face, for it would cling to their skin and then be deposited still once their hand had passed.
It was damn-advanced technology, with a few new tweaks added in this partial level 28 version, including the shield bypass function that allowed them to reroute the Founders’ inferior shield around them so that the equipment producing it didn’t detect a disruption. That wouldn’t work on Star Force’s most advanced and sensitive shielding, but it was good enough to get by these egress shields, which were designed to allow the Caretakers in and out but nobody else.
Paul and Sara got through by disrupting the shields while hiding the fact that they were disrupting them, but there was still a tiny visual blip the moment they made contact, but not on exiting. Both passed through and waited a moment, but they didn’t sense any sounds of activity change, and they didn’t dare risk scanning with their sensors or psionics. Not even their Essence. They had to be ghosts, and in terms of ninja skills, that meant going old school navigating while hiding under their new school cloaks.
Sara reached her hand out to the side, then signaled that they were good to go. After that Paul followed her step for step and let her lead, trusting that she knew a few tricks in this environment that he didn’t, and tried to minimize his interactions with the ground to give his sound-dampening boot treads as much help as possible…
7
The ‘work’ area for the Caretakers was huge. There were miles of passages linking various factories and repositories, all with varying sizes of drones floating around attending to their business as the pair of Archons quietly snuck past them. And there were a lot of them. Far more than were visible on the surface of Alpha Temple, and Beta Temple had far less than that moving around because most of the Temple was still an ice cube.
In addition to horizontal corridors and chambers, they came across a lot of vertical shafts, one of which Sara pointed down, then hand signaled that there was a ‘lot of stuff’ down there. Paul got the message she was trying to send, indicating that these facilities on the surface were just the tip of the iceberg, and most of the Caretaker domain was further down in the crust.
H
e knew from the battlemap that most of these areas had not been explored by the trailblazers that had got here before him. They’d only backtracked the flow of some of the cargo carrying Caretakers to the portals, which were in the surface…or at least near surface underground facilities. That made sense, because they’d be accessible to the flying traffic as well as the depths in as neutral a spot as you could get. Paul wondered if there were other portals in the orbital facilities, or if they only trusted them on the superstructure itself. The main ones weren’t in space, but imbedded into the surface where ships could descend into them, and perhaps there was some unknown reason for that.
He didn’t expect to figure that out today, and eventually Sara and him came to an area with far more traffic that required them to move slower. Eventually they came to a bottleneck of drones that they had to crawl by, for they were all floating but too wide to move through with their packs. The archways seemed to be just slightly wider than the width of the largest cargo canisters they were carrying, so crawling was the only option, whether it be on the floor or ceiling.
They opted for the floor and caused their bulky packs to flatten out as much as possible, making their ‘turtle shells’ even wider as they dropped to the floor, then Sara signaled him to wait. He saw her hands and feet rise off the floor, leaving her floating an inch above it but not moving.
She was either using the anti-grav in her armor or her Yen’mer, Paul wasn’t sure which, and she was waiting to see if they could detect it. Since gravity seemed to pass through everything without diminishing, it shouldn’t alter the anti-grav of the drones directly over them, but when dealing with advanced tech from an alien race, you never knew for sure.
Sara’s body eventually started drifting forward, even as the drones shifted up a position in line. Paul opted to crawl behind her for a few strides, then saw what she had. One of the drones ahead of them was lower to the ground than the others, and it was going to be a very tight fit.