Kyra had never been here before, nor had any of the other QuipNari. They weren’t allowed to roam the node, and the few minutes they had on its decks unplugged was spent on transit from the hangar to their pods. This QuipNari was far beyond her purview now, and every drone that she came across seemed to be retasked with stopping her…or at least slowing her down until one of the sentries could catch up.

  She’d destroyed four of them so far, and her body showed the signs of those conflicts. Her skin was missing in several places, but thankfully the clothing her body still carried from her last mission held an armor value in it, so the wounds were not as bad as they otherwise would be, but at this rate her torso’s internal organs would fail long before she reached her destination…and damage to them would slow her progress considerably.

  But Nevantha had predicted this, and within the memory download he had graced her with were numerous routes to target, so when her mind calculated the odds of a direct route were diminishing she altered course at the next available opportunity…but not before she ran into another cargo lifter.

  They were 10 times larger than her and capable of carrying huge single loads or hundreds of personnel crates coming out of the birthing wards. This one was empty and making good speed towards her from behind. When a collision was immanent Kyra jumped forward and up, twisting downward enough to bring her legs up parallel with the hallway as the drone hit her like the ground slamming into her feet from a fall.

  Her legs took it, and she rolled out of the collision with one hand hanging on to its forward plate, then dropped down onto the base of one of its four arms that was trying to reach back and grab her. It was a bit too slow, for she braced her body between the arm and the sidewall of the drone, then kicked down hard and disconnected the arm at its base, though it was still active and curling towards her as she tossed it to the side before cutting the cords that were all that was still keeping power to it.

  She accomplished that with a chop of her hand as the rear port arm came forward to try and grab her. It suffered the same fate, then she was smashed against the wall as the drone drifted left suddenly.

  That peeled her off and she tumbled to the ground behind it, using her arms and legs as pinwheel defenses to keep her torso from hitting, for at these speeds it would be a lethal impact for her biological organs. Her hands lost what skin was left on her palms, and her shoes ripped in several spots as she spun over and over again like a wheel gradually slowing down until she could launch herself up into the air again and come down into her running motion…though now considerably slowed by the shoe damage.

  The cargo lifted had a harder time slowing down and reversing course, and during that lapse Kyra stopped and produced a cutting device from her right arm that she used on the waypoint emblazoned on the wall. It looked obvious to her, but the wall itself was unremarkable. However, when she cut through enough to bash out a chunk of the wall with several kicks, a blast of warm air hit her and she forced her way through the breach just before the drone could get back to her.

  It rammed the breach, but was far too large to get through. Kyra monkey swung from component to component until she finally came to a catwalk that she landed on from a 20 meter drop, but her left shoe finally gave out despite her graceful landing. She pulled it and her other one off, then proceeded to run on her bare feet that would soon become bloody from the skin loss, but that didn’t matter. The metal beneath would hold up, and right now time was not her ally.

  The catwalk was not straight, but curved ever so slightly around the perimeter of one of the node’s giant reactors. Flocks of tiny drones moved about on anti-grav monitoring and maintaining the various interconnectivity to other systems and entering the reactor itself if needed. Some of them headed her way, but when they got to her the baseball-sized squares didn’t have a chance to latch onto her body and begin cutting as she expertly swatted them out of the air with single blasts, some of which killed two in a row where they occupied the same line of sight.

  The few that managed to get through suffered pokes and arm chops from her limbs, which was apparently intimidating enough that the other tiny drones broke off and returned to their tasks as Kyra continued to run at maximum speed while leaning to her left to accommodate for the curve. Per design protocol, the entire node was pressurized and the gaseous contents were compatible with the PanNari biology just in a case of a hull breach. That put many pressurized chambers between the habitable racks and the outer hull, so the odds of losing individuals before the breaches could be sealed would be lessened.

  It was an ancient mandate, and one that Kyra was making use of, for she couldn’t survive in vacuum. A good portion of her locomotion right now was derived from her torso muscles, and she was very glad she’d chosen to keep the gravity high on her scout ships, otherwise she would be experiencing far greater muscle fatigue than she currently was.

  That said, her musculature was not conditioned for this and would fail long before her mechanical parts would. That calculation had been made previously, and she should have enough longevity to reach Nevantha, but her current route was adding distance due to the curve of the catwalk and the other redirections she would have to take, but the main cargo lifters would not be a worry in here.

  As she sprinted she thought the mini drones had been wise to avoid her, but further up ahead she realized they were not surrendering the effort to stop her…merely deploying a second strategy to physically block the main exits from the catwalk by stacking themselves up into a wall and adding more layers as additional flocks flew in to add mass.

  Kyra knew if she ran into that wall and tried to beat her way through she’d be swarmed and some would attach to her body and start cutting…but again Nevantha had predicted this, so Kyra jumped off the catwalk at a precise point and fell over 120 meters before hitting the side of a large, curved pipe and bled off some momentum before falling again some 30 meters to the floor of the reactor chamber, with it and most of the machinery being suspended above her.

  Down here there were only supports bolted into the superstructure and a thin floor covering everything with insulation against the heat that would develop if the reactor needed to be further powered up. As it was Kyra had been sweating profusely ever since leaving the cargo lifters behind, and it was no better down here, for there were cooling conduits sucking heat from above and passing down through the floor, into which some extra heat was bled off.

  Her feet felt scorched, but there was no biological material left on the undersides, only mechanical sensors that indicated she was well within tolerance. Kyra ran through the forest of supports until she found another waypoint over a patch of floor that she stopped over and began cutting with the small plasma torch in her arm. Thankfully she’d been fully powered when leaving her pod, for there was a limit to what her augments could achieve power wise, for she didn’t have a central reactor of her own. Her heart and lungs occupied that portion of her body, and those were no good for power production.

  To save energy she cut in segments, leaving bits of material intact that she knew she could hammer her way through, so when she completed the dotted line around a circle just larger than her body, she climbed up one of the nearby supports and jumped off it, landing in the center of the circle and hearing a large crack, but it didn’t give way.

  Kyra jumped four more times before the metal panel finally gave out and she slipped a leg down into the cooler area below. She had to hammer with her right arm to get the rest of it to pop loose, then she slid down out of the reactor area and hung there by one hand over another drop some 318 meters down.

  Her organs couldn’t survive that impact, but she didn’t fall. Less than half a meter away from the hole she’d made was a track attached to the ceiling for small supply cars to travel on. There were three rails spaced into a triangle, with lateral braces between them that were open to the outside. Kyra swung over and grabbed one of the supports, then kicked her legs back to get some momentum and proceeded to start swinging from one to another traveling underneath the track.

  She was vulnerable here and she knew it, but there were no drones stationed in this part of the node…nor was there any active surveillance, for Nevantha was jamming it. He couldn’t access the drones to override them, but they had to get line of sight on her to know where she was, and right now she was currently invisible to them as she monkey swung from rung to rung as one of the small triangular cars moved by just over her fingertips without even knowing she was there.

  Fortunately her mechanical arms were attached to her shoulder joints, whereas her mechanical legs did not go all the way up to the still organic hips. That portion of her body was hanging loose and thoroughly fatigued, and had her shoulders been organic there was no way she could have traveled like this for the next two hours, but Nevantha had calculated all variables, including her body’s specifications and current status updates, which was the primary reason she had been chosen. Her use of gravity enhancement to increase her body’s organic capabilities had pulled her into physical range of this mission whereas all others had bodies that could not do so. She had exceeded hers through a process known as training, which the Architects had no understanding of.

  The Elloquim had made sure they did not, filtering the reports from the Elloquim to remove such lessons learned. Biological adaptation did not follow a completely predictable path, and the slight omission of Kyra’s memories involving her gravity enhancement had been enough for them to overlook this slight variable…a variable that was going to allow Kyra to make the cross node journey where no others were permitted the stamina to achieve.

  The Elloquim were known to be master strategies. They were built to be such, yet Kyra did not have an understanding of how much until her brief contact with Nevantha. She was now operating off of plans far beyond her own logic, but once presented to her they made perfect sense. Nevantha was allowing her to operate beyond her level with his assistance, and it was an empowerment that came with the knowledge that she had been groomed for this mission without ever being told of it, nor the rest of the PanNari knowing of it. She had been built a rogue, operated in the field as a rogue, so that she would know and understand the roll of separation and independent operation, because right now she had no connection to Nevantha, the Dominion, or anything else.

  The QuipNari had not been allowed wireless interaction within the node. They could transmit out and receive within their scout ships, but they didn’t have the components installed in their bodies to allow exterior override, and their range and type of transmission was designed for only a few meters inside the confines of their ships, including their receivers geared to a single, secure multi-directional operating channel. So that meant she could not hear Nevantha even if he transmitted to her, but she knew that he could not, for his primary communication systems were in lockdown mode along with the rest of him. His only communication was through the Dominion and the few hacks into node systems they had achieved over the long years they’d been imprisoned here, meaning Kyra was completely on her own, which was a state that PanNari could not comprehend, let alone operate in…yet she was completely comfortable with it.

  When Kyra had traveled far enough on the interior rails she came to a boxy corridor that stretched out below and crossed paths with her track. Once over it she dropped 8 meters down and landed on the roof, then she cut her way inside using almost all of her remaining plasma, but that would no longer be a concern.

  Kyra dropped down inside the passageway, landing on the metallic balls of her feet that had dried blood on the sides. No more leakage was occurring, for her skin had sealed up along the tears, but her blood level was low enough her head was hurting slightly. It wasn’t enough to stop her, and she took off running again, and within 42 seconds windows popped up on the left side as she flashed by them.

  Windows on the node seemed pointless, but whoever had designed them had done so in order to reveal the grandeur of the Elloquim, for Nevantha sat on the other side with his many tentacles curled up in a ball beneath his mass that was connected to the node at various hard points, the closest of which was a half mile ahead, but it didn’t contain an access way for the Craniems to board, for there were none inside Nevantha now, yet when the Elloquim were eventually released into the galaxy to battle the Hadarak they would carry a crew to assist them, and they had to get onboard somehow.

  The nearest of those locations was 18 miles ahead, and Kyra had a clear running path there down a straight hallway with no drones currently in it. Had the Architects not anticipated her route? Nevantha had expected they would, and true to form, when she was less than 2 miles away from the docking port she saw a bit of a sentry sticking out into the hallway, though the rest of it was hidden within the entry wall niche.

  Kyra powered up her weaponry, but kept her movements as silent as possible. The sentry didn’t know she was here, otherwise it would have come out and began firing its long range weaponry. It couldn’t see her yet, and that gave her one chance. She had no shields and no armor other than her battered clothing, none of which covered her head. Against what she assumed was a level 3 sentry in hand to hand combat she’d have a chance, but at range she would be deleted without much effort. The others she’d defeated were small level 1s meant primarily for detection and intervention, not heavy combat.

  Nevantha had predicted this, and as long as the sentry stayed hidden in the niche she had a pathway to victory. But as soon as it heard her footsteps and came out it would torch her…yet it should have by now. Why wasn’t it? Nevantha had expected it to remain in the niche but he hadn’t said why. Had he been able to tamper with it? If he did he could just have had it open the door and do the work Kyra was needed for. This didn’t make sense, but then again she was operating off of superior logic and she just had to trust. She was almost to Nevantha, and if he thought this was possible then there must be a way.

  And with every step she took she got a little closer to her objective, but the odds of her success were still less than 0.0037%, and that number would not rise above 1.0% until she got within 27 meters. After that they would quickly even out, for she was built for melee combat and the level 3 sentry was primarily a floating gun turret.

  Another minute and 29 seconds was all she needed, but right now Kyra was helpless to control her fate. All she could do was run and hope the sentry stayed where it was until she got up into ass kicking range.

  5

  Kyra twisted, cutting into the sentry with the short inferno blade in her right forearm as it continued to spin and try to throw her off its back. Its arms were merely gun barrels and couldn’t reach up to peel her off, meaning that as long as she stayed where she was it couldn’t grab or shoot her. The problem was she’d already lost most of her left arm on approach, but with her blade dug in deep the spinning actually enhanced the cutting.

  She twisted it around inside the armored covering as her feet clung to its back, wedged into whatever niches she could find. Her left was actually stuck between the twin barrels on the rear gun and was moving about as it tried to pry her loose, but her blade struck first as a large section of paneling finally fell free as a very crude circular cut was completed.

  Kyra deactivated and retracted the blade, diving her hand inside and wrenching whatever she could out. It finally gave her a solid handhold as the sentry reversed its spin again and tried to smash her into the wall for the 29th time, but the gun barrel she was standing on hit first and reduced the blow, though this time it did crunch her a bit as the barrel finally penetrated the wall and she got smashed between the two.

  The sentry held position, no longer trying to peel her off but to hold her in place until help could arrive. Kyra couldn’t wiggle free, so she reignited her blade and moved it around everywhere she could inside the hole, hoping to hit one of 8 critical points Nevantha had highlighted for her, but when she neared one her blade ran out of fuel and the glow on it dimmed rapidly. She could still use it to cut in its mundane mode, but it wouldn’t penetrate the outer armor anymore.

  Kyra didn’t need it to, for she couldn’t get her arm out of the hole in its back if she wanted. Instead she grabbed one of the internal supports and pulled, dragging her shoulder a few inches upward while pushing with her feet. The clothing on her back ripped from the strain, as did her skin underneath, but she didn’t relent and gradually pulled her upper torso partially into the hole before the sentry moved again and tried to spin her free.

  Her legs flew wide, no longer having their grip points, but her single arm held firm even as the sentry bashed her into the ceiling. Kyra flipped her legs up and pushed herself down and further into the hole, then a moment later the entire thing fell limp to the floor and rolled over, pinning her inside.

  The primary and secondary conduit from the sentry’s computer system was now cut, meaning its body couldn’t communicate with the control system. It was no longer a threat to her, just a dead weight pinning her legs to the floor as she was only meters away from her objective.

  The sentry began to rock back and forth slightly as Kyra applied what leverage she had, and eventually one leg disappeared from the outside. More rocking followed and the second slipped in a bit, then a bit more. A violent jerk to the right saw it disappear entirely, then the sentry flipped all the way over leaving her stuck head first inside with her feet in the air…which arced back over and planted on the edge of the hole to help pry her out of it.

 

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