Star Force: Trials (SF68) (8 page)

“I think the trainers already know every move we
make,” Megan commented. “This whole park is probably full of sensors.”

“No need to invite trouble,” Jason cautioned. “And if
Wilson is willing to punish us for tardiness by denying us clothes, then I can
imagine him sending something after us if we failed to silence a transmitter.”

“True,” she conceded.

“You still think this is all Wilson?” Kip asked. “Or
are you wondering if it might be a bit Davis too?”

“This is Wilson,” Paul said with certainty. “Davis may
have given him permission, but this level of ‘kick you in the balls’ is
definitely telltale Wilson.”

Just then a thought struck Jason that was profound
enough that all the others heard it through the battlemeld link.

“Oh my god,” Emily said with dread. “He would,
wouldn’t he?”

“It fits,” Randy admitted. “And if he’s here he’ll
have armor, I can guarantee it.”

“What about the weapons? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Decoy?” Paul guessed.

“They won’t do much to him anyway. We need a game plan
if he does show up,” Ivan said, knowing how
bad
this
could get if they were right.

“In the meantime,” Jason cautioned, knowing they were
getting ahead of themselves even if they were right, “we’ve got some
dino
hunting to do. Let’s bag some more prizes and hope
Wilson isn’t as devious as he could be.”

“
Wanna
put credits on that?”
Emily scoffed.

8

“Look what we found,” Greg said holding his hand out
as he came back into the trailblazer’s camp where the 2s, 3s, and 6s were
either sleeping or building, using the components from trashed
dinobots
to create a variety of tools, including some
physical shields to help block stun blasts.

Jason raised an eyebrow at seeing the six senzu beans.
“Where the hell did you find those?”

“Inside a T-Rex.”

“You took down a Rex on your own?”

“Nobody takes down a Rex,” Rex said with a sarcastic
smile as he walked past Greg and pulled a makeshift bottle of water out of a
stash they’d made and hauled up here from one of the creeks.

“The 8s helped,” Greg answered. “A little.”

“Perfect,” Morgan said, telekinetically pulling all
six beans out of his hand and flying them across into hers, which she then
cheeked.

“Hey!” Greg complained. “That’s all of them.”

“You won’t need them, hopefully,” she said, pulling
off her left shoe and tossing it to Dina who’d just returned with the 7s. She
took off her right and did the same, then proceeded to take off her jog bra.

“Whose birthday is it?” Rex asked, staring at her as
she also pulled off her pants and rolled both garments up in a bundle and
stashed them next to a tree, now completely nude.

“I’m going up the mountain,” she said, glancing at the
others who were giving her questioning glares.

“Jumat or not you’ll never make it,” Greg said, not
sure what she was thinking.

“Continuous emission?” Jason asked.

“That’s the plan,” she said, not caring one bit that
she was naked, knowing her clothes were going to get in the way of her Jumat.

“You don’t know where to go,” Dina said, slipping on
the second shoe and giving her bare feet a badly needed break from roughing it.
Both she and the other former prisoners had a variety of cuts on their soft
feet, with a generous bioshield usage the only thing keeping them from being
totally torn up and their attempts at raptor hide sandals failing badly enough
that she’d chucked them earlier.

“We know what sector,” Morgan said, looking a little
like a chipmunk with the beans stashed in either side of her mouth. “The only
one the bugs have been in this entire time. The others we got a chance to look
around before they swarmed the top. That leaves the few places in that sector
that none of us have ran through to look.”

“You haven’t been up there at all,” Paul reminded her.

“Show me what you’ve seen, but I’m the only one that
can go short of fighting a war that we very well might lose.”

“And if you get caught then what?” Greg asked.

“At least they won’t be stealing my clothes,” Morgan
said as she started to walk out of camp.

“How long can you sustain with those six?” Jason
asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, pausing and glancing back.
“Depends how much force I need to use. I’ll turn back before I run dry, and at
least get a scouting run out of this.”

“Don’t you think we should wait until everyone gets
back so we can be standing by at the border?” Greg insisted.

“No, but I’ll take Rex with me as an Ensek relay. He
can stare at my butt on the way there, and if I do go down he can let the rest
of you know to come break me out of prison. Just don’t try it on the mountain.
I think this is Wilson’s way of thinning our numbers, and I think I can counter
it solo.”

“Have to now,” Greg said deadpan. “You just saliva
claimed the senzu beans.”

Morgan smirked and looked at Rex. “Come on.”

“Alright reckless, I’ll humor you,” he said, jogging
up next to Morgan with her matching pace as she stayed a step ahead and ran
barefoot out through the surrounding brush, with her nude form and Rex’s white
uniform disappearing from sight.

“It’s days like this that make me really wish I had
Jumat,” Greg said after they’d left.

“Ditto,” Paul echoed.

When Morgan and Rex reached the bottom of the bug zone
a swarm of the bastards moved in to greet them, spilling against the low
altitude barrier as if it were a glass wall rather than just a geographical
line. The path they were on ran laterally, with the higher one doing the same
across a gap and uphill. When Morgan had shoes on she could have jumped it
easily, but now she was going to lose some power given that her size 8 feet
were already starting to get sore and didn’t give her as flat of a platform as
she needed, with the balls of her feet sinking into the partially soft soil
given the mist showers that had blown in from a nearby waterfall.

“I could use a boost,” she asked.

“Sure thing,” Rex said. “Just jump and I’ll do the
rest.”

Morgan repositioned one of her six beans between her
teeth and chomped it up, swallowing the very dense ambrosia dose to start the
overload process that would kick in after a short delay. She’d already filled
up on ambrosia to her normal levels drinking the limited supply of liquids
they’d obtained from hunting raptors, meaning that as soon as this bean hit her
bloodstream it was going to start giving her overload headaches…but those would
diminish rapidly as soon as she started using her Jumat as extensively as she
was about to.

“Might want to step back a bit,” she warned Rex, who
took two steps to the side. “Maybe just a little more.”

He laughed and retreated another two steps, then
Morgan closed her eyes and focused. She needed to emit from all parts of her
body else some of the bugs might slip through and make contact. Typically she
didn’t do this, summoning up strong blasts from specific regions, usually her
arms, and pooling the energy in a transfer state outside her clothes or armor.
This was going to have to be a direct feed and trying to pool it through a
transition phase would have been adding too much difficulty. She was going
Amazon on this and had to fully commit, else a lapse might form and she’d end
up stung into unconsciousness in short order.

Rex felt a gentle push of air hit him as he saw
Morgan’s ponytail lift up off her neck. It was tied up using a bit of wire from
the raptors and held its form, but her bangs flew about wildly as the invisible
energy flowed off her, quickly increasing strength. A moment later a surge hit
him and he took another step backwards as Morgan was pushing the leaves on the
surrounding trees back and bending the branches like a micro hurricane. She
dipped down into a crouch then launched her naked body up into the air, with
Rex grabbing her telekinetically and pushing her up into the stun bug swarm as
requested.

When she hit it the bugs parted against the storm
winds, part from the moving air,
part
from the
concussive energy that was tuned to hit and move large objects rather than air
molecules. The atmospheric pressure forced many of them to slip back in through
the blasts while the much large stun bugs had no such luxury, being pushed back
and thrown aside gently, not hard enough to damage them unless they flew into a
rock or tree.

Morgan’s air supply also diminished due to the
lessened pressure. She was pushing out so much that she was essentially
thinning the air around her, but enough of a blowback was occurring that she
still got the oxygen that she needed, plus she wasn’t doing anything that
physically strenuous so she wasn’t going to be requiring a lot anytime soon.

She landed on the upper trail and didn’t look back,
blowing bugs, dirt, and leaves aside as she jogged to the right and disappeared
into the tree line from Rex’s position, but she knew he would still be
following her mental signature. If she discovered anything she’d send him an
update so he could pass the information on in case she didn’t make it back, but
right now she didn’t worry about keeping track of him, for all her focus was on
the stun bugs and how close they were getting to her.

The first few wisps of ambrosia overload were now gone
and she pulled back her Jumat flow a bit as she ran through the crooked trail.
The terrain made it difficult to monitor the bugs, for her body movement
affected where they were knocked and every stride she took repositioned her
emitters into different alignments, leaving her with a chaotic energy pulse
that she didn’t hope to predict. Reducing it as much as she thought prudent,
Morgan tried to conserve as much energy as she could while crunching up another
senzu bean to stay ahead of the ambrosia need.

By the time she reached the cave tunnel the headaches
were manifesting themselves, which she took as a good sign. She’d never
sustained the flow this long before so Morgan was in unknown territory and was
glad she hadn’t burnt through two senzu beans already. She ran by and hopped
over a half empty crate of supplies that had been left behind and ducked into
the tunnel, temporarily reducing her Jumat output now that the walls were
covering for her. The air in her lungs dipped a bit and she found herself out
of breath, but as soon as she reached the other side the airflow upped again
back to the formerly thin level.

But as soon as she got to the other side she had to
pulse a much larger blast into the continuous flow, for the air was so thick
with stun bugs that she couldn’t see the trees ahead. That was a good sign to
her, despite the danger, meaning that this was where she had to go and she
hadn’t guessed wrong. Add in the fact that the lower trail in this section
didn’t connect to any below and that meant you either had to hack your way
through the brush or enter via an adjacent sector. The memories of the others
who had been here guided her up to the top of the mountain, but that’s not
where she needed to go so she headed downhill, plowing a path with her Jumat
flow as her Pefbar allowed her to navigate through the dark cloud of tiny
machines.

As she jumped half a step down her foot hit something
sharp and she reflexively bent her knee to cushion the blow in a one-step limp.
When the object stuck in her foot she telekinetically pulled it loose and let
the concussive energy toss it aside before her next step, unable to stop or
cover her feet with bioshields. Right now it was total body emission or
something far less. She couldn’t do 95% and had never bothered to train herself
for that, though she was adding it to her future workload because right now it
would have been damn handy.

Twenty meters down and the trail split, with her now
being in unknown territory. She took the right fork that ran lateral rather
than down the mountain and pushed her Pefbar out further, not wanting to miss
something in the forest nearby the trail if that’s what she was here to find.
Fortunately she was able to multi-task both psionics, but her body was already
starting to buzz a little from the continuous Jumat production.

Morgan ran as fast as she could without tripping,
following the trail and trying to keep some semblance of her position…which was
nearly impossible with all the switchbacks, so she just
memoried
where she’d come so she could go back if necessary. Get lost here long enough
to run out of ambrosia and she’d be toast.

Traveling the path and racking up meters Morgan looked
for something, anything that might be the source of these things but there was
nothing to be found. She moved through two more intersections before the
density of the stung bugs dipped a bit, which was her first clue. The Archon
coasted to a stop and started to backtrack, heading for the last intersection
and heading the other way. The density of the stun bugs increased again and she
used that as her guide, finding another intersection and guessing wrong only to
have to retread ground and go the other way, crunching another senzu bean and
putting herself on a mental countdown to when she’d need to start back.

She kept looking and looking, starting to get dizzy
from the sustained effort that she had to keep increasing due to the number of
bugs pushing back against her concussive energy, especially across the ground
where they tried to slip in under her waves, but they’d always get repulsed
when they got near her feet, for they were continuously emitting a mist of
blood from the cuts on thorns and rocks as she bled out and the concussive
energy wicked it away from her skin.

Morgan hardly noticed the pain save for when she
stepped on something new. She was getting near to her return window when she
came back across her own trail, realizing that what she’d just run had been a
circle, bringing her back to her previous fork in the trail. It was hard to
tell from the geography, but her footprints where there to be seen and settled
her fatiguing mind. This region had the highest concentration of the bugs,
literally with so many that she could have reached out with a hand, swiped it
through the air, and came away with a fist load of them.

Crunching her fourth bean and knowing she had about 2
minutes before turning back she dove off trail and into the brush and getting
all kind of cuts on her naked body as branches whipped back at her after being
repulsed by her hurricane. She couldn’t put up a bioshield for it would block
the concussive energy, meaning her smooth skin was about to turn into a bloody
mess of cuts and scrapes.

It wasn’t as bad as she expected, for the Jumat kept
most of the contacts off her body, but those that did hit were always strong
ones, branches rather than leaves, and some of them definitely had thorns on
them. Morgan had to dislodge a few that the Jumat didn’t push out of her body
and was beginning to question this wild goose chase when the concentration of stun
bugs, momentarily diminished by the closeness of the forest, escalated beyond
anything she’d encountered yet.

That told her to press on, even as her mental clock
guessed it was time to head back. Saying to hell with it, Morgan decided to go
all-in and gave up on the retreat option. Upping her flow rate to compensate,
she literally pushed aside buckets of stun bugs out of her sight, which was
virtually gone. Between the trees and the bugs she was walking naked through
brush in nearly pitch black conditions despite the overhead sun. Her Pefbar
allowed her to see through it all, but with so many objects moving about in
chaotic fashion she had to mentally filter out the moving stuff else start to
suffer vertigo from the sensory overload.