Chapter Twenty-Six

Portal Ship, Alliance World Arkhana

Trying to smoke me out, Sorilla thought as she was forced to move out ahead of the advancing security detail. Smart.

Without using the advanced scanner she’d stolen from them it was considerably more difficult to stay clear of the enemy movements, but she was managing thus far. What was more of a problem, however, was that they were succeeding in keeping her away from the drive core.

The Ross had clearly worked out her strategy, or at least her immediate goals, which was going to be a problem.

Sorilla ducked down an empty corridor, one that looked like every other empty corridor she’d seen ad nauseum over the last little bit, this time managing to get a little closer to her target. It was clear that she wasn’t going to be able to get there entirely undetected, the enemy security was moving around in far to great number for that.

She just needed to pick the best possible time for exposing her position, so that she could try to get the best results from her actions possible. That was, of course, far easier said than done, but as her buddies in the Teams liked to say... the only easy day, was yesterday.

She came to a stop at a junction corridor, and knew that there were security forces not to far beyond. They weren’t remotely as quiet as she suspected they might wish to be, but she wasn’t going to be complaining.

The drive core was one deck down, almost directly under her, and the ramp to that deck was just on the other side of the security.

No way I’m sneaking through…

Sorilla gritted her teeth under the helm. Her body was sore, her mind and body both were tired, and she just wanted this to be over. It wasn’t going to end, however, until either she, or they, ended it.

Sorilla was determined to make the ending on her terms. One way, or the other.

She was already moving when she re-activated the scanner, her muscles screaming at her in protest as she began a loping run that slowly turned into a full sprint. The sound of the security coming to alert was almost on her before she got the first images back through the scanner, fed directly into her brain by her implants.

One at the corridor, swinging to intercept…

Sorilla dropped into a slide as she slid out of the side corridor, the big Golem’s swinging fist passing right by overhead as she fired two heavy blasts up into it’s joints as she passed.

She heard metal and ceramic crack, but was already moving on before she could see the results of the pass.

Goblins, bringing their pulse weapons around. They’re charging to fire… doubt they have any safeties currently running.

She sat up as she slid, leveling the weapon at the line of enemy mechanoids, and fired a continuous stream of warp pulses, tearing the line to pieces before they could fully orient to strike at her.

Sorilla could feel a dozen more Goblins turning on her from other directions, though, and their weapons were preparing to discharge.

More targets converging on the area of operation, she noted dispassionately as the signals filtered through her brain. They’ll saturate the entire area with fire in less than two seconds. Nothing will survive.

She didn’t pause as she moved from sitting to standing, her feet back under her and pumping hard to keep moving. She threw herself forward into a dive as the world behind her exploded in a chaotic mass of warped spacetime even as she vanished down the ramp, sliding along the deck, and tumbled out onto the floor below.

Sorilla killed her scanner, hoping it might delay them a bit if they thought she’d been killed in the attack.

Probably wouldn’t, but she could hope if nothing else.

*****

The conclave didn’t even have time to blink, despite being in a compressed time field.

The assault had happened so quickly and been over so fast in turn, that from the time it began to when the area had been saturated with fire was only a few moments even for them.

Is she dead?

Scanner has been deactivated. Area is currently unscannable due to interference from the weapon discharges. Unknown.

Subject Entropy is alive until we have her body in our custody. Bring in more security to replace the ones we lost.

Lost to our own fire.

Irrelevant. If it ends Entropy, it is worth it. Has the core been secured?

Several security detachments are there now, more are on their way.

That would be a no, then.

*****

Sorilla edged around the corner, looking at the enemy formations through her suit sensors, mostly leaning on the secondary visual gear rather than the primaries that were mounted roughly in line with her own eyes.

The core was just beyond the next line of security, but frankly she was running out of tricks. The enemy weren’t exactly hyper skilled, but they did learn from the past and they were disciplined beyond anything she’d ever want to see in actual living soldiers.

The mechanoid part of the equation coming out, of course.

She took a few breaths, easing her tension somewhat, and winced as the deep throbbing pain returned.

When in motion, the pain tended to be pushed down, but it was coming back stronger, and faster, every time she slowed down. Sorilla knew that if she didn’t end this soon, she was going to stop one of these times and just not be able to start again.

Pain might be weakness leaving the body, but that didn’t help much when your body was generating plenty of weakness to spare.

Oh lord, what I wouldn’t do for a remote drone with a shaped charge or twelve.

That wasn’t in the books, unfortunately, which meant that she was going to have to improvise.

Sorilla found an access panel near on the doors, like the ones she used to fry the door control circuits and pried it off with her armor shod fingers. She wasn’t looking for the door controls, however. Instead, she looked for a larger source of power.

The corridors were well lit, with more than just visible light, she’d noticed. Her armor and cybernetics didn’t require much light but unless she wanted to use projection systems, which would certainly give her position away to anyone with the right senses, she needed some.

She was willing to bet that the enemy was in much the same boat in that regard, otherwise the ship wouldn’t have lighting in the first place.

Finding the power conduit, Sorilla pried it out and managed to break open the protective covering. Keeping her hands well away from the open flow, she found another conduit and repeated the process before deftly looping the pair and ducking out of the way.

She wasn’t really well versed in how the Ross power management system worked, but in her experience with human systems it was pretty rare that power systems reacted well to being shorted out in such a way, and as it turned out she wasn’t disappointed this time either.

Rather than sparks blowing out from the interior of the wall, the whole wall warped visibly, giving her the impetus to get the hell out of dodge in a big damn hurry while the warping behind her continued.

Just before she was certain it was going to blow out, and maybe up, everything around her went black.

Not dark. Completely black as pitch.

Sorilla blinked, signaling her armor and implants to bring up the passive IR mode and initiating night stealth on her armor. It helped, a little. The walls and decks were roughly the same temperature, but the air wasn’t, and the security up ahead was a good deal warmer than ambient.

I can work with this.

Sorilla edged forward, moving as silently as she could. Her armor wasn’t exactly built for it, not on steel decks at least, but it wasn’t some clunk mech either. She was able to keep her sound profile low enough that the enemy ahead didn’t seem to notice her approach, her own body heat currently being masked by the stealth settings.

That wouldn’t hold for long. However, she was already noticing her internal temperature was climbing now that cooling had been killed on the inside and was being redirected to bring the external radiators back down to ambient as quickly as possible.

The security seemed able to see each other, she noted as she approached, but she wasn’t reading anything that looked like radiated energy, in any frequency, so she assumed they were using passive. Thermal, perhaps, maybe something else.

Sorilla just hoped that whatever it was had been covered by the tech geeks who built her armor. Otherwise, this was going to be one of the shortest sneak attempts she’d tried since boot camp.

*****

More chaos. Entropy is on the Core Deck.

None of the others of the conclave bothered to comment, the statement was patently obvious. The question wasn’t where was the subject? the question was how in the abyss was the subject constantly managing to slip through their grip in the manner that she did.

The entire section of the deck was now down with no power. Lights and the like were the least of the issue. Communication was also crippled with only emergency systems running and half of those were nearly useless because the pulse that took out the power was still resonating across eight decks and filling the entire area with interference that was all but impossible to punch through.

Signal evacuation of primary assets.

That order brought them up short, and every mind turned to the one who had spoken.

We cannot assume she will not achieve her goal. Primary assets must be protected, or the plan will be at risk. Entropy is a minor player. Irritating, but for all the damage she has done, she has never introduced risk to the plan. At this moment she is, unwittingly. I will not help her do so.

Well, put in that manner, they couldn’t really argue. The conclave issued the orders to have primary assets pulled from the ship and brought to safer locations through the Paths.

It… rankled to have to make that declaration, however, and the Conclave felt the frustration build as it swept across each of them.

One being.

It was… unthinkable.

*****

Sorilla slipped slowly past the security, back to the wall as she moved along sideways. They were sweeping the area, looking for her she assumed, but had shown no sign that they were seeing anything but each other.

Good enough for me, she thought as she pushed off the wall and slipped through the access way, heading finally for the core.

The lights were out there as well, mostly, but the core was still active as were the machines, which provided a low light environment that her armor and cybernetics had no problem amplifying.

Sorilla checked carefully before she slipped across the room and made her way to the machines that controlled the ship’s drive core. They were locked out, of course, though she tried to access them it was clear that while the controls were present under her touch, they were entirely unresponsive.

Pity, would have made this a little easier. Ah well…

Sorilla unslung the pulse weapon she’d captured a while back, and started to tinker with its settings.

Among other things that SOLCOM had learned during the war was how not to… and, by inference, how to, made the enemy weapons blow up after they’d been captured. It wasn’t really shocking. Weapons of any nature carried a lot of potential energy practically by definition. The more they carried, the more it was possible to turn potential into something… useable.

Luckily, for her current goal at least, the same held true for things like power cores in a starship drive… only far more so. Drive cores, like that on a SOLCOM starship or the Ross one she was currently preparing to sabotage, held immense potential energy, and intentionally kept all of that energy right on the edge of a runaway reaction because stable potential energy was harder to tap into as a general rule.

Incredible amounts of engineering went into keeping those little bundles of power stable despite the conflicting nature of requiring power that was safe and stable yet also ready to blow a planet apart at a moment’s notice (in the case the Ross ships at least), but the thing about engineering was that it tended to be easier to break when you were on the outside looking in.

Setting an overload on her captured weapon wasn’t easy exactly, but like the power conduits in the corridor outside, it was relatively straightforward. Bypassing the safety measures intended to keep grunts from doing exactly that sort of thing was usually the hardest part.

On her own gear, Sorilla was fully aware of at least eight different safety breaks that would keep her from blowing the power supply of her armor, for example, and that would cause a relatively low yield thermal runaway. The protections put into place on higher yield munitions were impressive.

They were also incredibly easy to bypass once you knew how.

Military contractors kept making things more and more foolproof, so grunts kept finding better fools… and Special Forces, like her unit, took careful notes of what the fools accomplished just in case they ever wanted to repeat the experience intentionally.

The Ross weapon wasn’t like that, however. In terms of safety mechanisms, it was quite sparse. Some basics to protect against the weapon accidentally going boom if it were banged around, exposed to enemy fire, that sort of thing… but nothing, as best she could tell, had been implemented to keep someone from intentionally sabotaging it.

Probably because they issue them to Mechanoids, Sorilla supposed. Easier to keep the grunts from finding better fools if you were programming the foolishness out of them in the first place.

So deliberately rigging the weapon to blow only took a few moments. What took a bit longer was finding the ideal place to set the newly rigged charge. Luckily that work had been done for her by SOLCOM. Extensive research had gone into how to sabotage a Ross vessel from within and she, as one of very few human soldiers who’d ever been in that position in the past, had both contributed to the work and benefited from access to the final report.

Sorilla jammed the weapon into a port that was intended to bleed energy off during an emergency, as best they could tell, and made the last adjustments to set her rigging in action. Almost immediately the weapon began to emit a rather unpleasant whine, or actually the room did.

That was the gravitation harmonics of the weapon reverberating everything in the room around her, and it was her signal to get the hell out of Dodge.

Sorilla heeded the signal, spinning on her heel and sprinting for the exit. She just flat out ignored the complaints her body was trying to put up, sore muscles and bruised internals could wait because what was about to happen in that engine room would not.

She hit the ramp to the next deck at full speed, tilting her shoulder down to catch a Goblin in the side as she body checked it into the wall and kept on going.

Now wasn’t the time to get into a fight.

Fighting is going to be kind of pointless in a very short while, after all.

*****

Gravitational harmonic registering in the drive room. She deployed… a space-warping explosive? Humans don’t have that technology.

Try not to be too primitive. She’s using our technology to do it.

The conclave was in a tizzy, dispatching security to try and defuse the bomb while simultaneously evacuating all priority personnel off world through the Paths.

Subject: Entropy had certainly managed to live up to her title, they all agreed on that. One single primitive had managed to throw chaos into a plan that had been operating without fail since they had opted to cease the conflict with the Enemy, and that was a very long time ago.

Of course, there was a growing sentiment that Subject: Entropy, at least, if not her entire species, might not be properly ‘primitive’ at all.

Clearly there was, at the very minimum, potential there. If one among a species could both see and manipulate the universe as they did, then others would have the potential. It was therefore of vital importance that the Ross learn more of these humans, and of Subject Entropy.

That would have to wait, however. They had an upcoming explosion to either prevent, or clean up after.

*****

Security forces were in a bit of a mess, Sorilla noted as she bulled through what had probably been intended to be a roadblock against her escaping. The mechanoids were clearly focused on something else, though, with many of their number having been pulled to deal with whatever it was.

Can’t imagine what that might be.

There was no time to get cocky, or smug, though and she reminded herself of that as she headed for the exit from the ship. Until she was back to the right side of enemy lines, or at least somewhere appropriately neutral, relaxation was a foreign word from a language she could not take the chance of understanding.

Unarmed, effectively, she kept running. Ross protocols would require that they had a way to deploy from their ship, and that generally meant a tunnel judging from personal experience. Which also meant that she had to escape that ahead of any explosion by preference, otherwise things were going to be rather uncomfortable for the rest of her, admittedly rather short, life.

Resistance was thinner as the got closer to the exit this time. Sorilla figured that the warning alarms had security running every which way, other issues prioritized over catching a single person. That would work to her advantage, of course, she just wasn’t certain if it would work enough.

She exploded out of the corridors into the bay that served as an embarkation/debarkation point within the vessel, taking the closest of the security forces by surprise. Sorilla hit the ground in a skid, keeping feet forward as she went right between the legs of a rather slow on the uptake Golem.

It bent down as she went under, trying against the obvious limitations of its design to follow her vector as she went right between it’s legs.

Scanner on, Sorilla felt the locations of everything around her like it was part of her own body. When the Goblins turned in her direction, she didn’t even look their way as she got a crooked leg under her and pushed herself right back to her feet and kept running.

Pulse charges signaled them preparing to fire, but Sorilla just ignored it all.

The deck was still open, she could see Ross personnel rushing back on board, and briefly wondered what exactly they’d been up to on Arkhana. Whatever it was, it wasn’t her concern at the moment.

The little grey goulie at the front of the line point at her, and for the first time since she’d known of them, Sorilla heard one speak.

Or, perhaps, heard wasn’t the right word.

Felt was more accurate.

The… communication that came from it was in spacetime pulses, nothing even approaching a weapons grade power of course, but similar enough that she was almost stunned into inaction as the creature shouted something at her in… gravitational fields.

The moment was so surreal that she nearly thought it was a dream, but it passed quickly as she realized that her body had kept on running despite her sudden shock.

The Goulie dove for cover as she charged the door, and she could see the outer armor plates starting to reform in an attempt to keep her in or maybe something else, but the end result would be the same.

Sorilla slammed into a Goblin, driving her knee into its head to shatter the primary sensors of the mechanoid, then she planted a boot in its midsection and kicked off, propelling herself up and over.

A Golem swept for her, but she was already above its grip, arms reaching out to get a grip on its head and use that for leverage to lift herself up and over the towering beast. Sorilla kipped over its head, then dropped a bit to get bent knees under her as she planted her boots into its back and kicked off with all the force she could muster.

The Golem was driven forward, unsteadily stumbling in an attempt to stay upright as Sorilla dove through the open door and out into the cavern beyond. She arced down from a peak height of nearly twenty meters, descending right into the midst of what looked like a group of stunned Goulies, Goblins, and what appeared to be a human or two.

Sorilla would very much have liked a few moments with any humans who were in the presence of Ross personnel without being obvious prisoners, but she didn’t have the time. She did grab two fast facial recognition profiles, just in case it came up later, right before she hit the ground and rolled with the impact, slamming right into the line of Goblins that had been escorting the Goulies back to the ship.

The mechanoids went down in a sprawl, tangling up with her as she lashed out with everything she had. She didn’t have the time to grapple with them, not this time, and the only thing on Sorilla’s mind was getting the hell out of there.

She nearly fought her way clear of the mess of limbs when a sudden crushing weight slammed down on her from above and she realized that she’d somehow missed the presence of at least one Golem.

The massive mechanoid was holding her tight to the ground, one arm pinned at her side while she hammered and pushed away at it with the other, only barely able to make any movement at all, mostly wriggling around to get her face down to the ground.

Without leverage, however, she couldn’t get clear no matter what she tried. The Golem just kept tightening its grip, her armor alarmedly reporting the increase in pressure as it began to approach the redline for what it could take in terms of constant force.

*****

Security Golem reports capturing Entropy!

Open the doors, send more forces to ensure she does not escape.

There is an issue!

Leave whatever it is to the security forces, we have her!

She rigged a weapon to overload.

We are aware of that. We will repair the damage later!

It was located in the emergency relief port of the drive core!

The conclave stopped, all attention shifting to focus on the speaker.

Disarm it.

Specialists are moving now, however…

A sudden deep reverberation shook everything, including the compressed space in which they resided.

It is too late.

*****

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