Breaking into a Ssykes industry

Gerald lost his lemon lunch into a row of bushes as they touched down outside of a heavily fortified bunker complete with armed guards, laser turrets, and automated sentry drones. Everything about the place gave a clear message that someone was very serious about keeping people out of there.

Ilrica's eyes glowed with a white light as her claws crackled with energy. She reached into the air before her and burrowed into it with her claws, then tore open a wound in reality. The gray world Gerald had seen before spilled out from it and everything froze in place except for them.

Ilrica grabbed his arms and led him forward through the now thick air.

"Um, this seems a lot more dangerous then you described on the way over here," he commented as they walked past the frozen guards, advanced pulse rifles held at the ready.

"What are you talking about?" she said, flicking a guard on the nose. "See? They are perfectly harmless. Go ahead, give him a punch in the gut. When he unfreezes, he'll keel over in pain. It's pretty fun to watch."

"I think I'll pass."

Ilrica raised up a finger and her claw glowed red-hot, like steel. She slid it down the reinforced door, cutting through it like butter.

While she worked, Gerald looked up at a frozen security camera, pointed right at him. "Are you sure they won't see us?"

"Not unless you stand in place for five minutes."

Gerald chuckled nervously. "I've been meaning to ask, those creatures your people prefer to hunt..."

"Ruavu Mammoths."

"Yeah, just how big are they?"

She thought for a moment.

"Don't you know?"

"Sorry, I can't link to Central while we're accelerated, so I had to do the math in my head. About sixty meters."

"Holy cow, that is bigger than Godzilla. And your people hunt them in packs?"

"Packs? No way." She glanced over her shoulder at him. "It only takes one Bertulf to take a Mammoth down."

Ilrica tore the doors open and led him inside. They strolled past a security checkpoint, past statuesque officers, retinal scanners, automated laser turrets, and through weapon detectors as if they were doing nothing more than walking down a grocery isle.

Gerald looked around. The Ssykes logo was everywhere. "I really don't think we should be here. We should go."

Ilrica reached out and tipped a guard's helmet down so that it covered his eyes. "Oh, don't be such a baby."

Gerald stopped. "No, I have a bad feeling about this."

"I'm doing this for you."

"Yeah, but you made it sound like we'd be breaking into a storage shed. This is a high-security facility."

"Compared to the places I've broken into, this is just a storage shed. Look." She waved her hand around. "The cheap trogs don't even have aerosoled nano-tracers to detect temporal displacement. Now THAT stuff is hard to get around."

Gerald turned around. "I'm going back to the temple."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Something in the way she said it made him stop.

"If you get more than a few meters away from me, you'll decelerate and be stilled like the rest of them. From their point of view, you'll simply appear in front of them right in the middle of a secure area."

She elbowed a guard drinking a cup of jaffe in the ribs. "And they'll think you did that, too."

Gerald's face pinched. "You know, I'm getting a little tired of being forced around. You've been strong-arming me to do what you want all day."

Ilrica polished her claws against her uniform. "Yeah, it's been a good day."

"No, it hasn't. I told you earlier that I think of you as a friend, but it's obvious you don't see me that way."

Her ears folded down. "What do you mean?"

"You don't treat a friend like a pet, or a piece of luggage. That's not how it works."

"But... you're just prey."

"And that means I don't have any feelings?"

Ilrica looked surprised, like she had never considered it before.

Gerald rooted himself defiantly. "You can't make me go with you."

Ilrica looked away. For a moment, she seemed genuinely hurt. "Fine. Just stay there. It's not like I care. A hunter doesn't need friends, anyway."

She turned around and tried to look glib. "It was only a matter of time before you turned on me anyway. Better to do it now while I'm prepared."

"I'm sorry you feel that way," Gerald said. "Because I would never sell you out."

Ilrica looked up, a strange look on her face. It was as if she couldn't make herself believe him, but she desperately wanted to. She reached out to say something, but the device on her wrist beeped, grabbing her attention. She looked over and saw a tiny fly stuck in the gray air. Its tiny wings began beating, slowly increasing in speed.

"Frakk."

She ran over and scooped up Gerald, tossing him over one shoulder.

"Hey, what are you doing? Put me down!"

"Sorry, I'm running out of time, have to do this the hard way."

She took off running through the thick air.

"This is humiliating! Put me down!" he yelled, kicking with all four limbs.

"I'll say. If the Bertulf saw this, they'd think we were a couple."

"That is not what I meant! This is embarrassing, now let me go!"

Ilrica reached a circular staircase and slid down the handrail. "You're a man aren't you? Deal with it."

"You know, I hate that phrase. 'Be a man' is just code for 'your feelings don't matter.'"

"See? You do get it."

Ilrica ran through a honeycomb of crystal cores, then finally found what she was looking for. She ran into a small control room and dropped Gerald down on the floor. She pulled a plug out of the console and jammed it into the back of her neck.

Gerald looked out the windows into the empty adjoining rooms. "I kind of expected there to be more people in a place this big."

"Weird, huh? It's almost like everyone is out dealing with a collapsed hotel or something." She pulled her glowing claws apart and created a sphere of color within the gray world, around the podium she had linked with. The strain seemed to hurt her physically, and she nearly keeled over, blood trickled out her nose. The podium came to life, and a three dimensional model of the temple grounds came up before her. She quickly imputed the changes.

"Just, finish up what you are doing and let's get out of here," Gerald said, leaning up angrily against a gray circuit box.

"Done," Ilrica announced happily, unplugging herself.

There was a spark and a whiff of smoke behind Gerald. He turned around, and the circuit box he had leaned against burst into flames.

"Whoa!" he said, backing away.

"What did you do?"

"N-nothing. I barely even touched it."

Distantly there was an explosion, and the floor beneath them shook so violently they nearly lost their footing.

"But how?"

The gray melted away from the circuit board and it exploded, throwing Gerald back against the wall. Little flaming bits landed all over the control room, and everywhere they touched, color soaked into the material around them, soaking into everything.

"The room is decelerating!" Ilrica brought up her claws, but another explosion, this one much closer, threw them both off of their feet. The podium exploded and the halo lights above soaked up the color just in time to shatter, leaving the room in shadow. Ilrica's claws glowed brightly in the darkness, illuminating her wolf-like face, but when she plunged them into the air, something gave out in her body and she slumped over in pain.

The color was now spreading everywhere. It traced over the nearest crystal core, and it sprang to life, releasing an emergency siren and calling out commands.

"Oh great." Gerald tucked his head underneath Ilrica's arm and helped her to her feet. With a heft and a shrug, she was on his back. He tucked his hands under her legs, and moved as fast as he could out of the control room.

"You'll have to outrun the deceleration," she said painfully. "Before the automatic forcefields kick in.

Gerald shook his head and doubled his efforts. By the time he reached the spiral staircase, the color was already spreading two stories ahead of him.

"Faster," she coughed as he ran up the stairs.

"This isn't easy you know? You're pretty heavy."

She pouted. "Don't you know you should never say that to a girl?"

Gerald gave it everything he had, his muscles straining, his heart pumping. There was another explosion, and the staircase came apart around him. He had just a moment to look down seven stories to the ferrocrete below when Ilrica held out her hand, and he fell sideways into the wall. Ignoring the protests of his inner ear, which said this was impossible, he instead trusted his eyes, picked himself up, and ran straight up the wall. It felt like being in a cartoon, but the spreading fires from an exploding tank made him move too fast to care.

With a heart-bursting effort, he caught up to the spreading color just as they passed through the security checkpoint. They ran past a guard just as he slumped over in pain, clutching his midsection, his jaffe spilling everywhere. They ran past a guard as he fumbled about, disoriented by the helmet covering his eyes.

As they approached the entrance, Ilrica lost consciousness, and the gray world began disintegrating everywhere. Gerald yelled in pain, his powerful leg muscles taut to bursting as color crept over the field emitters around the front entrance.

With a pop in his leg, he jumped through just as the emergency forcefield sprung to life behind them, sealing the reinforced doors that Ilrica had cut through.

The two of them landed hard on the ground, just as the guard on the left bent forward, cupping his nose and yelping in pain.

There was a flash of light in the sky above them. At first, Gerald assumed it was the fireworks, until a beam of light rained down from the sky and consumed the laser turret near the bunker.

The shockwave lifted him off his feet. He and Ilrica rolled, the world spinning over and over, until they came crashing into the bushes.

He sat up and checked to make sure she was okay, blood trickling down his face. He was relieved to find her still breathing. Then he noticed that he had landed in his own vomit.

Another beam of light came down from the sky and another defense laser was destroyed. Gerald looked up and saw a dark ship in the sky above the city. Like a blade it hung, black even against the night sky.

Gerald had seen it before.

It rained down destruction as it descended. Beam after beam tore apart every defense turret, every field generator. All over the city, pillars of smoke rose up, but no defenses fired back. The entire city had gone black. The pirate ship opened up like a pinecone, and hundreds of pirates sailed out on long smoky contrails from their maneuver packs, firing their weapons and cackling above the chaos as they descended on the nearby temple complex.