by Aer-ki Jyr
That is bad, Paul agreed. Let’s get a lot of light sparring in here before we move on.
No. That will make it worse. I mean, it would help my body, but my mind doesn’t want to go through the wind down again. I need to turtle up until I can get in the clear.
I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have taken the mag jumps.
It’s the fastest way to find out what’s going on out here. If we’d stayed local, we probably would have ended up back in Beta with only a map to show for it. I’m not doing this for peanuts.
But you’re regretting it.
Too late to bitch now, Paul. My eyes are ahead. Let’s keep moving.
Paul knew that was because she couldn’t stand to think backward about what had already happened and calculate what might be ahead. She had to live in the moment and let her natural endurance carry her through this absent calculation, otherwise her subconscious mind would start freaking out.
I count three launch bowls on this one, but I have a feeling there might be portals inside.
Why do you say that? she asked as they finally got to the entryway and got into the artificial gravity again, with Paul stretching out as soon as he did, but Sara just stood still and watched. Definitely not a good sign.
Just a hunch. Let’s find out.
What are you thinking? she asked as they walked with Paul in the lead and Sara following a step behind and slightly to his right, with both of them still cloaked.
Our mag jump range is probably less than theirs, and if there are as many Temples as we suspect, then I’m just doing the math and guessing that they wouldn’t want to put extra waypoints in if not needed.
So you’re hoping this is somebody’s doorstep?
It doesn’t look like there is anything of value in this location. No mining assets, no black holes, no nothing. And the direction those bowls are pointing suggest stuff away from that direction, Paul said, gesturing to his right.
I’d hope you’re right, but right now I’m too practical for it. Let’s find the Caretaker flow and see what they do with the ship we came in on.
Already on it, he said, with the duo walking for another 14 minutes before finding one of the autonomous drones. They paced it all the way back to an access point into the spear where it joined a lot of its buddies unloading crates that Paul was able to sneak a scan of. He left Sara behind for a moment and got his head on the side of one of them, then used his Pefbar to peek inside. It was a risk of setting off alarms, but he did it anyway. Had it been something other than ore the destination might have been unclear, but since they knew ore was coming into Alpha to help repair the damage, then there was a good chance this was heading to that Temple or another, for it seemed the refinement factories were within those giant Spheres and not out here in their own separate facilities.
Ore shipment, Paul confirmed when he ran away from the crate before the Caretaker who was carrying it turned a corner. Follow the rocks.
Sara caught up with him and the two of them paced this drone while staying out of the way of the others trailing it in convoy fashion. When they got to a bottleneck they had to crawl/fly underneath them again, but to both of their relief the packed line did end at a puddle jumper terminal that held multiple portals.
See, I told you so, Paul said, trying to wake Sara up a bit. As the days had added up, her talking had likewise diminished. He had it rough too, for his body was rebelling against the tiny tidbits of activity he was feeding it, but so far it hadn’t gone into full revolt the way he figured hers had. Pick your chariot.
Sara didn’t answer, other than to crawl out from under the line, get to her feet, then almost reluctantly jog over to one of the side parked puddle jumpers. Paul saw her outline jump up and crawl into a niche unnecessarily soon, which meant she was trying to steel herself for the stagnation ahead. The puddle jumper allowed them inches to move around, while the spear ship had let them crawl for miles if they wished and stand up inside the empty ones…though technically the second one they had to ditch some of the cargo to make room for themselves inside, and they couldn’t do that here and now without risking damage to the Essence bubble-holding technology, wherever it was inside the craft.
“Damn,” he said to himself as he crawled up in another one, then reached a hand up over the edge and stood up to make the extra distance. Something he couldn’t do during transit. He grabbed Sara’s hand and triggered his armor to peel back a little. She did as well, allowing them a little skin to skin contact without exposing themselves to vacuum and Paul made direct contact with her mind.
He recoiled at the horrified state he found her in, but she appreciated the soothing his mind offered. Simply having another perspective to see from was a luxury after spending so many weeks alone inside her armor and her own mind. It actually started to unnumb her, and she squeezed out a few tears in the process. This had been a very bad idea, but she had no way to know beforehand. It needed to be the trailblazers that went, but those that were Level 2 Saiyan or higher were not built for this.
Paul wondered how Ginsi was doing. She was a Level 4 while Morgan was a level 3. Hopefully they hadn’t hopped a mag jump too. As bad as this was for Sara, it would be exponentially worse for that pair if they couldn’t spar with each other every day or so. And playing paper/rock/scissors with fists and feet didn’t truly count as sparring.
But they’d have to deal with that themselves. He and Sara had their own problems, but they were hopefully in the final stages of this mission. They’d found another portal, and in moments they’d be off through the Essence realm for what would hopefully be no more than a few hours trip.
When it came time to leave Sara didn’t want to release Paul’s hand, but they both knew they had to. She clenched her jaw and let go, then flexed against the inside of her armor as she lost his touch on her mind and was returned to her torturous cocoon. If she could have slept she would have, but the best she could do was a Sesspik trance to try and heal some of the damage occurring to her body. At least it gave her something to do, though her mental discord made it hard to maintain the state. She kept snapping out of it and fighting to regain her control for half the Essence Realm travel, then she lost it completely and just laid there twitching nonstop as her body required much more movement than that and was suffering mightily for not having it…
15 hours later…
Sara didn’t realize when they arrived, for her hope at this ending was her undoing. It was pulling her off the Brake enough to make her fight her own instincts and she was losing that battle until her armor’s sensors pinged her indicating that she was back inside atmosphere.
Part of her said to stay still and wait, but she forced herself up and out of the niche to look around, then seeing that they were in a receiving area, with atmosphere, she jumped down and attacked the discord within her. It was painful and chaotic, but the chaos diminished greatly as she now had a mission before her that she could act towards. The waiting was over, and now with something to do she had something to fight back against…and that was a mindset that her body reacted to favorably.
Sara stretched her arms out, then did a very sore backbend as Paul did the same beside her, though both were still cloaked.
“Finally,” she said to herself, remembering not to use telepathy here as she drew in some of the exterior air and relished the different smell to the recycled warm air inside her helmet. The air here was considerably cooler and had a tinge of machine to it, while the inside of her helmet now felt and smelled like part of her body despite the refreshing protocols built into her armor.
Paul signaled to her with his invisible hand that he was going to take the lead and moved along with the path of outgoing Caretakers pulling crates out of the puddle jumper. It took a couple minutes before they found a side passage where they could break off, after which it was just the two of them working their way through miles of Caretaker work areas until they found an exit archway with a shield over it and guards on the exterior.
Paul walked up
slowly, then gradually eased through the shield while letting his cloak and armor systems penetrate while hiding the fact that they were penetrating. Sara watching his outline, then saw a little ripple in the shield as he made contact, but the Caretaker guards beyond didn’t react until she passed through, perhaps a little too fast, and they flew up to the shield with weapons aimed.
She froze inches beyond the shield, playing possum until her own ripple disappeared and the Caretakers had nothing left to analyze. They remained on station for a few additional seconds, then returned to their waiting positions.
Sara didn’t say anything to Paul and vice versa, remembering that some of the Caretaker units had telepathic sensors. They had confirmed earlier that the entry points did have the heaviest sensing capabilities, so right now she and Paul needed to behave as if they weren’t here.
When she finally took a step forward that plan was busted. Maybe the recent ripple had set the guards on extra heightened mode or maybe they were a different model, but as soon as she planted her foot on the dirt off the stone slab that was underneath the shield, the slight depression her footprint made triggered their sensors and they swung their weapons around and fired.
It was a stun blast, but it hit her cloak and disrupted it enough for her armor to be seen absorbing it…at which point she took off running while Paul threw a Lachka wall up in front of the drones to temporarily pin them in place when they tried to pursue, then he and Sara bolted from the area with her cloak reforming and her feet leaving the ground to hop on a few nearby boulders that wouldn’t leave footprints.
A couple more shots followed their trail, then the pair either lost their pursuit or the Caretakers weren’t programmed to pursue once they drove the interlopers away from the secure area. Either way, Sara and Paul kept running under cloak for several miles before finally coming to a stop and looking around.
I think we’re clear, Paul said amidst the forest landscape that was a mix of grass and snow between the trees.
Sara decloaked, with Paul finally laying eyes on her for the first time in what seemed like ages, then she waited and waited, wanting to make damn sure they were in the clear. When nothing happened Paul finally did likewise and removed his helmet. He sucked in a deep breath of badly needed air, though the awkward gulp that Sara made when she removed hers made it clear she was still a mess.
“How bad do I look?” she asked aloud when she noticed Paul staring at her.
“Umm, not that bad,” he lied in an obvious way. “Shake it off.”
“As ordered,” she answered, triggering the rest of her armor to peel off save for a vest that held her backpack on, but after a moment she ditched that as well, dropping it to the ground then letting herself fall to her knees on the snow-covered grass…then she flipped over and started to make a snow angel.
“You’ll be fine,” Paul pronounced, hopping past her so he could climb a nearby rock pile and get a better view of their surroundings. He wasn’t picking up any battlemap signals, and that worried him.
“Sara, get up here,” he said gravely.
She sighed, still on the ground and looking up at the partly cloudy sky. “What now?”
“We have a problem.”
“Wonderful,” she said, hopping up quickly and relishing the movement as her mind and body began to unpack all the damage done to it. She felt the activity start to act like a healing agent, with a cool wave running through her muscles as they seemed to melt away a layer of stagnation.
Sara ran up to where Paul was, then when she got to the top and saw the view down the mountainside where they had come out of, she blew a raspberry on her lips.
“Not where we hoped,” Paul said, referencing the huge city some 100 or so miles away rising up off the inner surface of the Temple, one that was made of a technology not cataloged by the Paladin in Alpha.
“At least we have air, and the Caretakers will give us food,” Sara said, mentally refusing to even think of getting back into the interstellar traffic flow. “Let’s find a quiet corner and take a vacation…please.”
“I need to recover too. And we’re a little too close to that for comfort sake. You up for a cross country hike?”
“My legs are begging for it.”
“No flying until we get further away,” Paul said, looking at the mysterious city. “Vargemma or somebody else?”
“Unless it’s the Wizard of Oz I don’t care. Let’s just get moving.”
“Guess we’re making this up as we go,” Paul said as he jumped down from the pile, with Sara moving twice as fast to grab her armor that was still laying on the ground. Paul took off away from the city and she caught up with him, both visible and with their arms and legs bare as they ran in shorts and T-shirts with enormous turtle shell-shaped packs on their backs that they carried almost effortlessly.
Sara ran two steps behind him for several miles, then when she was ready she forced herself out of the last bit of the Brake and her hair turned blonde…with her sprinting ahead of Paul and leaving him in her snow dust for a moment.
He smiled, glad she was recovering quickly, as was he. He activated his own transformation, with his body ratcheting up to movement and metabolism levels that a regular Human could never hope to obtain and chased after her, catching up a few seconds later and letting her lead as they moved as two blurs across the landscape doing better than 80 miles an hour over the semi-rough terrain of the now third discovered Temple, unknown to the different races of Vargemma who lived here.
They were now behind enemy lines with no easy way of getting back to Beta Temple, but this is why all the trailblazers had chosen to go on this mission. They were now where no man had gone before, and if they had to make everything up on the go in order to survive, then you needed to send your best troubleshooters and most skilled warriors out into the uncertain galaxy, for they, if any, had the best chance of not only surviving, but of finding a way to disable or at least hamper the Vargemma’s attacks on Star Force territory.
After all, they were behind enemy lines…and that truly was a double-edged sword.
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