TS6 - Chapter 39

Gunfire echoed down a half dozen hallways, giving Kat an approximate map of where the Millennium forces were.  She took a left and broke off into a fast jog, slowing down after a couple hundred paces to give Belle and her security detail a chance to catch up.  After so long operating with a team of superhuman aliens, it was hard to tone herself down into the realm of mere mortals.

After about five minutes, they found the defensive team.  Four security guards were manning a barricade, one with an automatic mag rifle that was hooked into a wall outlet as he sprayed fire into a group of mercenaries that easily outnumbered them ten to one.  On the ground around them were another two guards, both with smoking holes in their armor.

Bolts of blueish white energy blurred past the barrier, hitting the wall behind Kats security guards before it erupted into a flash of light that raised the hallway’s temperature noticeably.  Without stopping to think, Kat cast Resist Fire.

She arrived at the defensive position a half second after the spell activated, reaching out with her domain as she ran.  Another pair of light bolts erupted from the crowd of attackers, gravity curling around the balls of light as they streaked forward.  One of them struck the barrier while the other creased the shoulder of the security guard that had been laying down covering fire.

The man yelped in pain, the smell of burnt meat almost immediately filling the hallway, but Kat seen and felt everything she needed.

One shot from her pulser turned the overhead light into a crater, dropping the entire hallway into darkness as Kat leapt the barricade.  Shadow Step drained her stamina as it ate up the intervening space, and before the defenders could think to open fire in the sudden darkness, Kat was amongst them.

Her gravity pushed outward, accelerating all of the mercenaries into the nearby walls of the corridor with bone jarring force even as Kat picked them off one by one.  She cast Pseudopod as she kept moving, varying her position enough that none of the Millennium soldiers could pinpoint her exact location.

The tentacle of water extracted one of her knives, attacking on its own as it began to slash throats on its own blinding speed and pinpoint accuracy.  Screams of panic quickly turned into wet gurgles as she killed her way through the attackers.

Finally, after about five seconds, one of the Millennium soldiers managed to fire their pistol.  A flash of blueish white light revealed a charnel house of dead bodies and dismembered limbs.

Someone screamed, and Kat could hear the sounds of four or five mercenaries barely pulling themselves away from the wall near the edge of her domain.  She didn’t bother to stop them, content to kill the remaining trapped targets near her.  After all, half the point of her making an appearance was to put Millennium on edge and make them pull in more reinforcements.  If she slaughtered everyone without leaving any witnesses, that would actually run counter to her goals.

Five seconds later it was all over.  In the darkness Kat had a hard time making out just how many people she had killed, but it was at least thirty.  The sound of retreating footsteps assured her that she had a couple of seconds, and she used that time to return to the barricade, crouching down next to the injured gunner and Curing the burn on his shoulder.

When she stood back up, Belle was approaching once again, one of the Millennium guns in her hand.  Even through the sealed faceplate of her infiltration suit, Kat could feel the grim energy radiating off the other shareholder.

“Plasma,” Belle said, her voice as cold as a glacier.  “Inefficient, slow to fire and energy intensive, but this is clearly plasma.  That’s a technology that your scientists haven’t been able to unlock, at least on a handheld level, despite full access to the stallesp database and almost a year to experiment with it.  There is no way a bunch of street thugs managed to develop and produce weapons like this on their own.

“No offense Miss Debs,” Belle continued hurriedly.  “Your group of friends were surprisingly innovative and resourceful for a gang of street thugs.”

“None taken,” Kat replied, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth despite everything.

“Very good,” Belle said without missing a beat.  “Dringbek was trying to play both sides.  Unfortunate, but hardly surprising.”

“We should grab a couple of those pistols before moving to the next location,” Kat noted, jerking her head toward the dark hallway filled with dead mercenaries.  “They might not fire as quickly as ordinary guns, but they pack a punch.  I’m willing to bet that they’re significantly more effective against armor and cover than any terrestrial projection weapon.”

Belle nodded slowly.  “That makes sense,” she said looking down at the pistol in her hand.  “I suspect that the alien weapon you're using doesn’t need much upgrading, but for the rest of us, being able to lob a ball of plasma on a moment’s notice certainly would be a useful trick.”

She stepped gracefully over the barricade, walking off into the darkness without a second of hesitation.  Mentally Kat made a note.  No one really knew what Belle’s exact abilities were, but blindsight was probably on the list.

“Ma’am?”  A female voice from Kat’s side drew her attention toward one of the uniformed security guards that was crouching by the barricade.  “Are we going to hold out here or do you want us to redeploy?”

Kat thought over her options.  On one hand, her understrength team wasn’t really enough to turn the tide.  Sure, she could massacre isolated groups of mercenaries, but as soon as she started running into higher level players, the story would change.  Having a couple extra soldiers, especially if  they had some of the plasma guns that Belle was looting from the corpses, could be a big help.

On the other hand, four or five soldiers wasn’t going to change anything drastically.  Her plan involved speed and unpredictability.  The more people she had to lead through the narrow and winding hallways of the laboratory complex, the slower she was going to move. In the end, it would probably hurt rather than help.

“Hold out here,” Kat said, watching as Belle re-emerged from the darkness with an armful of futuristic looking pistols.  “Mine your position.  I expect Millennium to send reinforcements before long.  Put up some resistance and then destroy your barricade to cover your retreat.”

The security officer gulped, Adam’s Apple bobbing up and down but she nodded resolutely.

Belle tossed two of the plasma pistols to the guards that had been positioned at the barricade and another three to the guards Kat had brought with her before tucking the final gun into one of the many carrying pouches built into the infiltration suit.

“Ready?”  Kat asked, drawing a nod from Belle.  That was all the acknowledgement she needed.  A second later, her eyes were closed and Kat was tuning into the sound of gunfire and shouts from around the facility.

Without another word she took off jogging again.  About three minutes later she was slowing her team down as they approached one of the lab’s cafeterias.  Gunfire cracked back and forth, accompanied by the zap and smell of ozone that Kat had begun to associate with Millennium’s plasma weaponry from her short encounter with them.

Kat paused, closing her eyes for a second as she silently began casting Illusory Clone followed a moment later by Shadow.  More gunfire chattered from the cafeteria followed by someone barking orders as one of the two sides tried to reposition their forces.

A copy of Kat broke off from her body and bolted through the doorway in front of her.  Almost immediately shouts and flashes of heat erupted from just outside the doorway as Millennium samurai began taking shots at Kat’s clone.  With a flex of her will, Kat released the spell, letting the illusion dissolve a dozen or so paces inside the cafeteria.

She pushed a little more mana into the ability and a second clone burst out into the open.  This time there were confused shouts from the room.  One or two shots splashed against the wall, but this time there wasn’t anything like the volley of plasma fire that had consumed the first clone.

Kat released the image, waiting a half second before summoning a third. This time she dove through the doorway on her side, gun pointed toward the center of the cafeteria as her clone ran into the open.  A single bolt of plasma passed through the illusion, carving a hole into the armored wall behind her.

The cafeteria itself was as large as ever, a hundred pace by thirty pace rectangle.  Kat was on the upper floor, a rest area with couches and vending machines connected by a large glass staircase to the eating area below.  Soldiers on both sides had tipped over tables and were using them as cover.  From the number of tables half dissolved by plasma blasts and dead Millennium mercenaries that had been shot directly through the table counters, it evidently wasn’t working too well.

Her pulser kicked in her hand twice.  The first shot destroyed a table that two of the Millennium soldiers were hiding behind, sending shrapnel flying everywhere.  The second caught one of them in the chest, turning most of her torso into a wet red mist.

Kat pushed mana into her domain, using a quick tug of gravity on her upper body to pull herself up.  Down on the floor, mercenaries were shouting and pointing upward toward the balcony as Belle rushed out into the open followed closely by the rest of Kat’s personal security team.

A couple plasma shots streaked upward, blowing holes out of the ceiling and glass railing, but Kat and her team were moving too quickly for the surprised soldiers to draw a proper bead on them.

Kat grabbed control of herself with her gravity domain and lifted off of the balcony.  An eyeblink later she was in the open, Shadow clouding the air around her as she wove in an erratic serpentine pattern over the cafeteria, raining death from her pulser down on the cowering and panicking mercenaries.

They fired back, an avalanche of blueish white light that gouged craters from the ceiling, deforming the smooth stallesp inspired alloy into something that more closely resembled the surface of the moon.

The temperature ticked upward as the missed shots liquified the alien metal, and even through air conditioning built into her infiltration suit, Kat began to feel herself sweat.  Still, her bobbing and weaving was doing its job.  Barely any of the Millennium mercenaries were firing at Belle or the security teams, giving the defenders the time they needed to find real cover.

Kat’s sixth sense tingled, and that was all the warning she got before a blast of plasma hit her shield, burning away the magical Shadow covering her and causing the gauntlet on her left hand to whirr ominously as its capacitors struggled with the load.  The machinery drank deeply from her mana, pulling the energy from Kat with enough speed to make her feel slightly light headed.

Near the opposite entrance to the cafeteria, someone had set up an elongated hexagonal shield, planting its bottom end in the tiled floor.  Three people huddled behind it, one holding the child steady, a futuristic looking helmet about all Kat could see of them.  Another, a woman that was almost two and a half paces tall, was pointing the barrel of a huge silvery gun at Kat, the weapon bolted to the samurai’s shoulder where her left arm should be.

The final target was hard to make out.  Kat couldn’t tell if they were a man or a woman, but there was clearly some sort of ability that cloaked them in shadows, preventing her from telling exactly where the samurai’s body was or what they were doing.

Acting on instinct, Kat pulled herself to the left with her gravity and the shoulder mounted cannon belched a massive streamer of blue-white energy.  Now that she was paying attention, Kat could feel a tightly contained gravity field around the plasma as it arced through the air, somehow tracking her.

Without pausing to think through the significance of her actions, Kat grabbed the containment field and tried to reverse it.  For the first time, she wasn’t able to freely control the gravity in her surroundings.  The sheathe of gravity around the plasma resisted her mental grasp.  If Kat had five seconds to force her will on the energy bolt, she was sure that she could’ve unraveled the force field, but she didn’t have five.  She didn’t even have half of one.

The beam of plasma was on her in the blink of an eye, altering its course midflight in order to track her jukes and dodges.

Frantically, Kat pushed it away with every iota of her mental strength, mana flaring into her domain as she jerked the beam of energy off course just enough to send it flying past her left flank.

Kat’s shield sparkled as the residual heat from the attack triggering it a hearbeat before the plasma’s containment failed and it erupted into a massive explosion that sent Kat rocketing away like a plastic bag on a windy day.

She whipped her pulser into position firing the alien handgun three times as she tried to bring her pinwheeling body under control.  The first shot missed her target entirely, turning one of the nearby lunch tables into confetti.  The second hit the tiled floor a pace to the right of the three samurai, spraying ceramic and alloy everywhere.

Her final shot hit the shield.

There was a flash of mana and the sound of a struck gong, and that was it.  The person using the shield slid back a quarter pace, but there was no actual penetration or damage.

The shadowy figure behind the shield stepped partially out into the open, darkness still clinging to them despite the amber overhead lights.  They lifted a pistol pointing vaguely in Kat’s direction but nowhere actually near her and fired twice.

A flash of premonition was the only warning Kat got.  Without thinking to wonder why she rotated her body and pulled as hard as she could, practically dislocating her arms and legs.

It was almost enough to pull her out of harm’s way.  Both of the bullets appeared about a half pace in front of Kat ignoring all intervening space as well as her energy shield.

The first bullet hit her in her left shoulder rather than her sternum, bruising her heavily as it almost penetrated the ballistic weave of her infiltration suit.  The second grazed her left arm before gouging a small hole in the ceiling behind Kat.

She grunted in pain at the sudden blow.  For a fraction of a second, Kat pondered casting Cure Wounds to try and fix up the damage, but then the woman with the plasma cyber arm stepped from cover once again.

There wasn’t time.

Kat’s gravity domain pulled her sideways, strafing horizontally across the ceiling as she snapped off a barely aimed shot from her pulser at the gunner.  The shield moved with supernatural speed, the telltale red glow of a stamina skill illuminating it as it interposed itself between Kat’s shot and her target.  

The barrel on the plasma tracked Kat as she zoomed across the ceiling of the cafeteria, the ominous whirr of capacitors charging sending her heart racing.

She pushed herself downward, dipping just far enough to catch the furniture and personnel of the room within the edges of her domain even as she charged Improved Laser.

A gravity field sprang into being deep within the barrel of the gunner’s cannon, and Kat grabbed hold of the nearest mercenary with her domain, ripping the flailing man from the ground and tossing him in front of the beam of plasma barely five paces away from the trio of samurai.

Her hapless victim exploded into a cloud of steaming meat.  For a fraction of a second, silence filled the room as time seemed to stand still.  Then her Improved Laser flashed into existence, flickering through the cloud of crimson mist before it struck the cannoneer’s gun.  The metal of the barrel seemed to scream as sparks flew everywhere, but before Kat could do any serious damage the shieldbearer was in position once again.

Improved Laser continued to burn bright, draining mana from the shield samurai as the two skills warred with each other.

She fired three more shots at the gunner.  All of them struck the shield drawing more flares of mana.  The resistance under her Improved Laser began to weaken.  The man’s defenses were impressive, but it seemed like they had limits.

Once more the stealthy warrior stepped out into the open, and pointed his gun in Kat’s general direction.  Before he managed to pull the trigger a volley of blue white light from the balcony washed over the battlefield as Belle led Kat’s security team in a counter attack.

Balls of plasma detonated against the faltering shield, lighting up the rear third of the cafeteria like a flare.  The blast of light ripped the shadows from the stealth fighter, revealing a short skinny man with unhealthily pallid skin.

Then, the shield itself was overloaded, exploding under the strain of the constant attacks.  The samurai holding it was thrown backward, white hot plasma seeming to cling to his arms and chest even as they stole the screams from the dying man’s throat.

Kat shifted her Improved Laser to the right, slashing it across the unarmored and blinking stealth fighter’s torso before the man managed to summon enough shadow to teleport another bullet it’s Kat’s unprotected back.

The gunner screamed in rage, aiming her cannon at the unprotected guards on the balcony.  Kat swung her pulser toward the woman.  Time seemed to slow down as each of them raced to fire the first shot.  

An eyeblink before her pistol was on target, she felt the telltale pulse of gravity that marked the plasma cannon beginning its firing cycle.  She pulled her trigger just as the beam of gravity and plasma erupted from the end of the barrel.

Kat didn’t bother to check whether her pulser dart had hit its target.  She wasn’t exactly a crack shot, but the samurai wasn’t trying to dodge either.  If her hundreds of hours of range time meant anything, that dart hit the gunner square in the chest.

 Instead, all of her attention was focused on the rapidly moving streamer of plasma energy that erupted from the cannon.  Kat grabbed ahold of the gravity sheath and jerked upward, changing its course slightly.

Rather than hitting the balcony where Belle and Kat’s security were standing, the plasma bolt struck the ceiling a pace or so before them, exploding in a blast of light and shattered metal.  Kat snatched herself out of the air with her gravity domain, pulling herself toward the impact zone as quickly as her enhanced body could handle.

Down below, a cheer went up from her security guards.  Kat could hear the Millennium mercenaries retreating as gunfire nipped at their heels, but she didn’t bother to turn around.  Two of her security detail were dead.  They were simply too close to the blast site and the explosion of heat and force had ripped their limbs from their bodies even as it cooked them alive.

The other two and Belle were hanging on, but just barely.  Belle’s suit was half burned off and she clearly had a broken arm.  There wasn’t any doubt in Kat’s mind that the explosion would have killed the shareholder outright if she hadn’t been in a spare armored suit.

She landed next to Belle, casting Cure Wounds while she was still in the air.  There was still some gunfire coming from the cafeteria itself, but Kat didn’t hear many plasma shots.  It seemed like Millennium’s retreat from this area had turned into a rout.

Kat touched her hand to Belle’s shoulder, letting the golden glow seep out of her and into the older woman.  The burns covering her began to heal and disappear, crawling back up her arms as Kat’s healing magic slowly erased the damage.

Belle hissed in pain as her broken arm reset itself with an audible snap.  She reached up with her other hand, undoing the seal on her face mask so that she could look directly at Kat.

“You know Miss Debs,” she said, her voice faltering as the healing spell began fixing something important in her left side.  “I don’t really think I’m cut out to be a front line combatant.  I think I did a good job assessing when to attack a distracted target, but for all the abilities I’ve earned in the Tower, none of them prepared me for someone blowing up a small sun in my face.”

“After a lot of pain and practice, I’ve learned that it’s best to dodge these sorts of things,” Kat replied.  “Getting shot hurts.”

A sudden twinge in Kat’s shoulder reminded her that she hadn’t gotten through the battle unharmed either.  She ignored the pain for the moment, switching her Cure Wounds’ target to one of the injured security team members.  Both of the survivors were critically wounded and Kat would have plenty of time to heal her bruise later.

“Noted,” Belle responded before breaking into a cough.  She sat up slowly while favoring her right side.  “I’ll try my hardest to avoid it in the future.”

Kat moved on to the remaining security officer, trying her hardest to heal the most serious injuries first.

“Say,” Belle continued.  “I think I can move again.  We should probably get out of here before Millennium sends in reinforcements.  I was a bit optimistic about you being an unstoppable killing machine after that first encounter, but I think most of my enthusiasm has waned.”

“You’re not wrong,” Kat replied as she finished healing the second security guard and stood up.  “I don’t know how many more teams Mr. Jackson has like the trio we just fought, but I don’t like my odds if I have to fight more than six at once, especially if more of those specialized weapons start appearing.”

The two security officers from Kat’s detail groaned and tried to take to their feet, but only one of them managed to stand and he was wobbling like he might collapse at any moment.

“Don’t worry about following us,” Kat said hurriedly.  “Shareholder Donnst and I are going to have to move quickly, and we need to make sure there are enough security officers here to hold out against the inevitable counter attack.  Just remember that the goal isn’t for you to fight to the death.  If you find yourself getting overwhelmed, blow the entrance and retreat.  The goal for now isn’t heroics, it’s to buy time.”

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