Patel ran round the corner at speed her breathing and heart rate not going above resting pace. Her eyes darted over the plywood walls this warren was made of and after flipping a mental coin she went through the door to her left. Flattening herself against the wall she concentrated and a series of orange glowing discs about a foot across appeared making steps up to a glowing doughnut shaped disc over the door. She checked her weapons once more and dashed up the newly formed stairs to the platform. Squatting to fit in the space between roof and platform she got comfortable.
With a thought she banished the steps and listened. The hunters were near. Taking a deep breath she calmed herself putting her rifle on her back and pulling out a sidearm, not used to using one she was relieved to have brought one today. Aiming straight down and into the doorway she waited. Her hearing and common sense agreed, this would not be a long wait.
The pursuers were an experienced team who had hunted this place before, they were not surprised when they came to the T junction. Wordlessly they split into two fire teams one going in each direction. Lacking a flashbang they followed close quarters drill as best they could through the door with the lead looking forward, down and then scanning left to right. Number two scanned right to left whilst number three looked up.
Patel’s pistol fired twice hitting him once in the chest and once in the face, the other two turned to react but were out of position and took two rounds each. Number one took two in the head whilst number two got hit in the shoulder and somehow his knee. Patel dropped through the hole intending to land and shoot at the fourth, instead her rifle got caught in the hole in her barrier and she dangled by her straps in front of a sadistically grinning man.
“Too late to surrender?” she asked as he fired a burst at her chest. The impact hurt like getting kicked by a horse but worse was the paint now dripping down her front would mark her out as losing. A whistle was blown and the three people she had painted earlier came and laughed at her dangling form. She waited a few seconds before cancelling the force field and dropped to the floor. The training squad wandered off laughing about drop boxes in video games whilst she returned to the Major.
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Channing had a serious expression while she approached. “so corporal I see what you mean about mobility but just curious do you think that replacing your rifle straps with bungee cords would make you harder to hit?”. Patel reminded herself that there was probably some sort of regulation about telling an officer to f off. Channing continued “Your aggression was good but we need killers not dead heroes. Next time accept the kills, drop a barrier across the door and see if you can get the rest later. If nothing else it will give them time to watch you untangle yourself”. Unable to argue she didn’t, instead she pulled out a canteen and started to wash off the paint, this was probably it for the running and shooting part of the day.
Channing confirmed that by indicating they should sit and he started to talk “so I have gone over your description of the levelling choices made. For your shields you put one point into varying the number of radiation sources, zero to current level per shield I understand? And then one point to library enabling you to control shapes. After that the rest went to battery enabling you to generate more at a time, current limit of four? Your Radiation source you split between dominance and intensity?”
With each question she nodded at his points and when he finished she replied “yes sir that’s right. As you can see my idea with the force fields was manoeuvrability and lacking ideas I just made the radiation stronger”. She waited for his comments as he clearly had some.
With a frown he looked at her “next level consider making it so that you can generate a weaker source as well, variety might be useful for something but no mind right now. No what I have been thinking about is how advantageous it could be to have low dominance shields”
This was a shock, from what Morgan had said everyone tried to make shields as dominant as possible. It made sense to her, after all, what good was a shield that failed when attacked? Still Channing was smarter than her so maybe he had some sort of tactical judo to suggest.
Channing smiled “Oh yes corporal, failure can be an advantage if you can be sure how and when it will occur. Tell me, have you ever heard of bomb pumped lasers?” Her confusion total she waited while he explained.