The last shot had been different. The anxiety and stress had started to crawl into Korl’s head as he watched the massive wash of the beam flow by less than a foot from his body.
He wasn’t a coward but he hated being in a situation where he couldn’t do anything to help. Not having anything to do let the worm of helplessness find its way in. The tears began to pool at the edge of his vision.
That’s when the turret ahead rapidly fired low-power beams. He flinched and his right arm, movement limited from the Medjel that locked his shoulder and his arm moved a half-beat behind the rest of him. It went from bright red to dark, then deathly pale as it started to uncontrollably grow with tumorous masses.
Without a word of warning Tule turned and brought his Toothpick down to slice Korl’s arm off just above the elbow.
From the head of the line a packet of Medjel flew and hit Korl in the chest. He held down tears of shock as he used a Nano-magnetic tether to pull his dropped sword to his left hand and quickly rejoined the line. He sheathed his sword and slathered Medjel over the stump of his arm.
Was this unaspected Medjel? Darn it.
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Jonah knew what it was when he saw it hit that kid’s arm. That was degenerative energy. Uller indian-skipped the line and sidled in behind him. “That was a hot shot.”
“Yeah, degenerative. Nasty piece of tech.” Jonah needed time to think, time that he didn’t have. He did have someone who thought on his wavelength though.
“I was trying to assemble a concealment bomb but with how much power the SI would have to push towards a cannon like that there’s no way that the SI didn’t cover every wavelength.”
Uller thought then took out a Magno-Tube. “Have you thought of using Nano?”
Nano… why didn’t he think of that? He briefly looked backwards and saw Eilien helping keep the near constantly-cursing woman with the cannon on her feet. Her healing abilities came at a cost; it would covert her own Internal Nano into little regenerative machines that could be injected into another person on contact.
The Nano in her body could genetically match its aspect to another, she had specced for capacity and efficiency. But like any changes to one’s Nano, it was always a trade-off.
Her overall Nano Capacity was substantial but took a long time for her Nano to repropagate or regenerate. The lower she brought her capacity the longer it took to recharge outside of a Terminal. If she overdid it, as her Nano-Trace levels dropped, her Allocation and Personnel level would follow if she kept going past that point.
She looked like she was close to overdoing it. He estimated that she would start burning Allocation in the next half hour.
“I don’t think that will be enough.”
“It’s the only one I have left. With my Skills I can aspect external Nano that I come in contact with and change it. Mostly explosively.”
Jonah was a bit taken aback at hearing him describe his Skills, he then looked around at the situation they were in; if Uller was sharing his Skill information that just meant that he wasn’t expecting to survive much longer. Humans just didn’t share Skill information in the Labs.
“I don’t have any on me, we won’t be able to close the distance in time, and we don’t know what else the SI might have in store.”
Before Jonah could quite finish making his point, Jack’s companion, ‘Yuma’ he had heard him call her, handed back two filled-to-the-brim Nano-Tubes.
She took them both in, in a moment that seemed longer than it really was. “Do you need more?”
Uller was a bit quicker than Jonah on the uptake, he grabbed them, “No, this should be fine.”
She paused again, “Make sure electricity won’t set it off.”
Both men nodded, “Good then hurry up and stop flirting with each other.”
Another wash of green static punctuated her words and cut off Uller’s sure to be witty protest.
As they continued the ‘run, stop, brace, run, stop, brace’ pattern they cobbled together a real “beaut” as Uller referred to it. A round ball that sat somewhat large in the hand, made of patchwork metal that Jonah had melted and sculpted into place with a small jet of white hot plasma that fired out from the tip of his index finger.
In the center of the mass of welded metal were two completely full Magno-Tubes facing opposite directions.
They stared at it in appreciation for a second too long and Yuma snatched it from their hands. “How does it work?”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“Well the Magno-Tubes are charged with different polarities so upon impac…”
“No idiot, do I just throw it or what? How does it do what it’s supposed to do?”
“Ah! Yes just throw it, the impact should probably destabilize it enough.” She stared at Jonah.
Uller hopped in, “You just need to throw it, hard.”
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Jack was getting annoyed. Tanking repeated, heavy fire from some radioactive or gross mutation cannon wasn’t on his list of things he wanted to keep doing. At least at this point he could just barely make out the originating point of the beams.
Lord that was far away. He wasn’t even completely sure if it was actually the cannon or some sort of horizon point in the distance.
Yuma was busy doing something, he hoped it was important. She had been able to roughly make out where the cannon was aiming.
Her warning usually came too late but it was helpful to know when the cannon was trying to angle the beam and when it was a straight shot. She also helped overcharge his shield when he called for it.
He tried not to ask her though, every time she did that he would have to turn around and shock her with the Zappa or else she’d be sluggish.
He felt her lightly zapp him and he knew her attention was back, she was getting good at those.
“I need a moment to throw it. It will cover us.”
“Hold the Zappa, I’ll do this.” She looked skeptically at the back of his head. “Don’t give me that look, just take it, I have a Skill for throwing.”
It took her a fraction of a moment to process it then she switched items with him. She realized that she only knew about the cutting and shield bashing Mods she had seen him practicing on the way to the Core. Other than that she didn’t know anything about them except that electricity had something to do with them.
“Listen Yuma,” it kind of irked her when he started talking to her with ‘Listen,’ “we’re going to have to wait for a big one and I’m going to need as big of a shock as you can give me after the beam hits. Got it? After the beam hits. Don’t use your zapp to help block the beam, only afterwards, got it?”
She wasn’t an idiot, well, she flushed behind his back as she remembered her IQ Allocation, maybe she wasn’t a genius either. She thought that maybe she should have split some of her last Allocation between EQ and IQ. Her flush didn’t take away from the glare into the back of his head.
In fact, she didn’t realize it at all, but many of her recent actions were credited to her newly advanced EQ. From taking the Zappa out of his pocket and putting it in his hand to immediately throwing one of Jack’s Medjel packets to the boy who lost his arm. It was even used to get the two eggheads to finish their project.
She had a sense for this. She continued to listen.
He balanced the metal orb in his hand, getting a feel for it.
“I need the Zappa ripping into me for the full 6 seconds.” He turned his head slightly to meet her eye, “DO NOT hold it longer than 6 seconds, not if you want to keep all your pieces.”
After he said this he glanced to his left hand and Yuma glanced at his right. They both internalized the point for a fraction of a second before Yuma jammed the Zappa into the back of his neck.
The next beam hit and he knew it was the one he was looking for. The only problem was that the beams usually didn’t fire for this long or hit this hard; he grimaced as he studied his shield under the green energy and saw hairline fractures starting to form in it.
Shit, he didn’t know if it was from damage over time or if it happened from the power of individual shots.
He was somewhat familiar with the pressure differences over the lifetime of the beam. It happened quickly but he could guess sort-of accurately when it was going to shift.
“Get ready!” he called out, “Move left… NOW!” he stepped left out of the beam’s path as it cut to the right and the line of Humans following behind him shifted to the left in almost perfect unison.
It was remarkable how well people followed directions when the only person between you and the green body-popping beam of instant death told you to do something.
It was almost in unison. A few had let the fatigue dull them. Jack heard a wet pop behind him and a splatter that just reached the back of his neck.
He dropped his shield that had been barely hanging on. She zapped him and he almost turned to Yuma in shock. He had no idea that she was capable of carrying that kind of current in her, and, even more surprising was that she was capable of discharging it.
Yuma’s zapp inadvertently flared out his shield again before he moved the electricity away. He cocked his arm back and drilled the orb down the hallway. Jack felt and was instantly grateful for the throwing upgrade, the metal ball’s arc bringing it to nearly skim across the ceiling as it flew out of his sight and far down the corridor.
He put his shield up again as the turret started to fire off rapid low-power shots. He turned to Yuma, unmoving on the ground behind him.
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Both Uller and Jonah had been following the long, outrageously long, arc of their Nano-Mask Bomb as it flew off towards the turret. Their attention was quickly readjusted to the man and his slightly crazy laughter as he pushed a lit Zappa towards Yuma’s chest. She twitched and thrashed, they missed the sheepish glare she threw back at Jack.
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“Sorry sorry I didn’t mean to laugh, it’s like what, the 10th time I’ve had to restart your heart?” She moved her glare away from Jack, behind her and towards the two brains that were whispering between each other.
They were studiously checking their surroundings for new developments.
Jack had turned back around and was picking up speed. He called back, “was that actually supposed to do something?” Before he got an answer a cloud of blackened-silver burst in to a massive cloud that swirled as it filled the corridor far into the distance.
At this he really started to sprint and the Human chain accordioned for a moment as it picked up speed and followed after him.
Finally a break from the beams, he saw a few green glows try to break through as it light up the cloud before the static pressure of the beam’s aim faded and was replaced by newly formed electrical pulses coming from spots in the wall, the ceiling, and the floor.
He felt the electricity flowing to a spot in the floor, he processed the feeling, then agilely jumped over a hole that opened in the floor under his feet and directly into a jet of flame that burst from the wall to his right.
Somewhere in his mind, in a distant, colder part of his brain, he felt a bit of a shock that he hadn’t thought of going a level lower or higher, it was a ship after all, it couldn’t just have a single level.
The heat from the jet cut off as Yuma shot and hit something critical deep inside the mechanism. Only once the sound of a jet engine had faded did he start to hear the screams behind him.
The SI had changed plans, of course it had, he cursed himself. No more sickly green-beam energy meant it had more energy for other surprises. The group’s formation splintered as everyone started to make their own way between the traps.
Someone yelled, “Every Human for themselves!”
It did not help.