Chapter twenty-two: Draklor and the benefits of a good head for mechanics
' It cannot end thus.'
Basch staggered against the metal, power conduit lined silver, red and blue walls of the laboratory, collapsing under the Imperial assault.
Vaan threw himself into the midst of the Imperial forces they had encountered on the sixty-seventh floor with a wordless battle cry, Bastard sword severing air and armour alike.
'I can't…..'
Penelo gasped, sinking to her knees, Ras Algethi falling from her limp fingers, blood pouring from a vicious blade wound that had pared the flesh from her right arm down to the bone.
Ashe screamed wordlessly and whirled her Gokuu pole in a wide arc, forcing the Imperials back and punching the end into the stomach of one insufficiently armed soldier.
Inside room 6704 Fran and Balthier worked as swiftly as due efficiency allowed to open the red bulkheads.
Pulling out wiring and cables, splicing mechanisms and by-passing fail-safes with deft efficiency they worked in synchronicity without needing to utter a word.
Fran was bleeding from a shrapnel wound to the leg, where one of the Imperial Hoplite's guns had shattered some of the plating from the wall and sent a piece of steel to embed in her left thigh.
One side of Balthier's face was covered in blood, his hair mussed and sticky from an oozing scalp wound caused in the same shrapnel blast that had injured Fran.
' Finally.'
Balthier hissed as the mechanism rolled over, the screens glowing blue and the hordes of Imperials pouring out from the corridors cut off as the doors crashed closed.
'What took you so long?' Vaan demanded as he administered aid to Penelo.
Neither Balthier or Fran answered. Basch, revived by his princess, finished off the last of the Imperials caught on the wrong side of the doors when the mechanism changed over.
'Perhaps we should have waited until the alert had passed.' Basch suggested, his eyes shifting from Balthier to Fran.
'To what end?' Balthier asked flatly, neither angry nor amused.
'Had we waited we would have been the sole target for the guards attention; this way at least their focus is split.'
Fran, who had initially opined the view that caution was better when they discovered another attempted to breach Draklor as they did, could not fault Balthier's logic. Though she would like to.
Ashe, brilliant in her ferocity, swiped blood and sweat soaked hair from her face and looked down the corridors.
'Which way?'
Balthier jerked his head northwards and the Princess started to lead the way down the shimmering whitish corridors; Vaan moving up after her and Balthier following him.
Fran remained in the rear to keep an eye on Basch and Penelo still recovering from their individual healings.
'This place scares me.' Penelo admitted in a whisper.
' Aye.' Basch agreed. ' I like it not, also.'
He managed a wane smile for the girl who seemed heartened that a man of Basch's calibre would also be unsettled by such a place.
For her part Fran liked Draklor not one bit. Balthier had once described the place to her, on the rare occasions he felt moved to reminisce.
He had described a place of high science and Hume endeavour. A place where the greatest of Hume minds gathered and worked alongside each other towards a common goal. It had sounded, by his words, an almost noble place.
The silent corridors, the triangular patterned doors, the throb of red and blue power relays and the cold sterility of the place they found themselves in, had not featured in his recollections.
Was this, therefore, a physical representation of the corruption of Draklor's chief of staff? Dr Cid's descent into madness and cruelty reflected in the very walls of his laboratory?
Fran did not let herself be over much troubled by worry ordinarily for it did no good to ponder intangibles, yet she found herself troubled by what they would find when they confronted Dr Cid.
'Gods save us!'
Ashe recoiled as the huge, chittering Lab Rats poured out of the opening of room 6811, red eyes winking under the unforgiving artificial lighting.
Balthier raised one foot and bought it down with savage precision on the neck of one of the largest rats. The snap of the creature's spine was clearly audible.
He kicked the furry body aside as the other rats recoiled, squeaking intolerably, into a corner of the room.
' They're just rats, Ashe.'
Fran was already at work at the terminal. Balthier rubbed at the dried blood on his face and took a deep breath.
All the humes she travelled with were glassy eyed, dull and jittery from too many injuries, too much blood lost and the cumulative effect of too many healings in too short a time period.
Fran worried over this, also. The healings and the magic bothered her least of all, as Viera she had higher tolerance, but her hume companions would need their wits about them to face Cid.
Ashe and Vaan were eliminating the last of the rats, Vaan grinning with the familiarity of once more fighting rats and Ashe grimacing in unconcealed disgust.
Fran left the console to Balthier and strode across the room, pulling loose the wall panel for the locking mechanism and splicing the wires. The doors locking mechanism hissed into place.
'We rest here.' She stated firmly.
No one argued. Balthier pulled out a handkerchief and started scrubbing at his face; Ashe kicked rat corpses away from her and sat down onto the steel plated floor.
Vaan squatted down beside Penelo who was pale and trembling from her injuries. Basch walked over to the console.
'It is as well we had two pirates with an expertise in mechanics among us.'
He remarked attempting a smile, he looked over the mechanism.
'The same system as in the Henne Mines.'
'He likes the colours.' Balthier muttered flat and distant.
' Red and blue.' Balthier expanded. ' Dr Cid's favourite colours.'
Fran moved over to him, ostensibly to check on the mechanisms but she knew he would understand her true motive.
Fran considered that under the circumstances magick numbed and dazed may be a benefit to Balthier, yet she would need to watch him when they came upon his father.
Twenty minutes later found the party ripping its way through Imperials and Judges.
Fran swung her sledgehammer in smooth downward sweeps, the blows immobilising her foes and sending them reeling helpless into Balthier or Vaan's blades.
Penelo remained at the back, Aldebarum, borrowed from Balthier while he preferred blade to gun, cocked, and spells ready on her lips. She hurled status ailments like curses down upon their foes.
Ashe was bloodthirsty poetry in motion as she whirled, jabbed, swung and pirouetted with her pole. Basch, stolid, strong, steadfast, shattered armour and bone with his hammerhead axe.
Imperial mages cast vicious spells that Penelo returned with shocking vengeance. As all around Fran the world had condensed into a throbbing, pulsing, sodden whirl of blood and violence.
A mastiff charged Penelo, knocking her to the ground, yet Penelo did not lose her focus on her casting even as Vaan waded in to tear the huge dog off her.
Fran found herself back to back with Balthier as the numbers of Imperials appeared undiminished. The moved as one. She and her partner.
Balthier pivoted and struck an upward stroke of his blade that opened up a Judge from right knee to underarm, her partner knowing from hard experience where Judge armour was at its weakest.
Fran brought her sledgehammer down with monstrous finality onto the top of the Imperial soldier's head. The man crumpled to the ground in a silent heap.
'Fran!'
One word was enough for Fran to understand her partner's intent. Balthier grabbed her around the waist and hoisted her up, while she faced away from him.
Fran brought up her long, powerful legs, as he swung her in a smooth arc.
She kicked out at the three soldiers who advanced on a cornered Basch, her sharp heels sliced across the unguarded eyes of one of the mages and the man staggered back screaming.
Another vicious kick, Balthier holding her up and swinging her around in a complete circle, sent a Hoplite flying into the corridors wall. Vaan, moving with gleeful viciousness, thrust his blade point into the Hoplite's stomach before he could react to the first blow.
The party was left panting in a corridor filled with fallen imperials. Ashe cocked her head to the side and a bloodthirsty grin transformed her features, she cut a glance Basch's way.
'We shall have to learn how to do that, Basch.' She nodded towards Fran and Balthier.
Basch raised his scarred eyebrow looking to the pirates, quizzically.
Balthier had lowered her to the ground, but his hand remained lightly resting around Fran's waist. He removed it when he saw the others watching.
' I wonder is it always Fran who is the one so man-handled?' Basch inquired, gentle humour evident in his tone.
Fran quirked an eyebrow, ducking down to check her heels were still securely fastened.
' Balthier does not like it when I pick him up, and his shoes do no damage.'
Balthier smirked, with a careless shrug, ' I look terrible in heels.'
Penelo giggled and Vaan blinked, his face twisting as he looked at Balthier.
' Oh, great, now I'm going to be stuck with that image in my head. You, ' He pointed at Balthier accusingly. 'wearing Fran's outfit.'
There was a moments silence. Balthier blinked, then he burst out laughing, almost at the same time Penelo split her sides giggling and the Princess buried her head in Basch's shaking shoulders to smother her own laughter.
Fran herself felt her lips twist upwards in a smile. It wasn't so much Vaan's words as the sudden break in the tension the party had been travelling through.
Balthier's tense preoccupation since returning from his old home, the Princess's bloodthirst, Vaan and Penelo's vengeful spite in regards to the Imperials who represented all that had been stolen from them. All fell away as they laughed.
'A-hem.' Ashe swallowed her own laughter and marshalled her resolve.
' We should take stock, and make ready. It looks like a clear run to the elevator to floor seventy from here.'
Levity gave way to tense readiness once more, but it was less desperate and fraught now. What would be would be, but the party was better ready to face it now. Together they stood and Fran was glad of it.
Fran walked alongside Balthier as he strode towards the elevator, card key in hand. He met her eyes just once as he activated the elevator and nodded seriously.
In that one gesture he relieved much of Fran's tension. Since the Uplands they had little opportunity to talk. Fran had worried at his insistence in confronting his father.
Balthier had killed before, but he took no pleasure in the act and did so only when his silvered tongue and quick wits, or Fran herself, could not save him.
To deliberately set out to confront his father in battle? She wondered at his state of mind. It did not seem like him, as he always favoured flight to a fight.
Now, in his eyes she saw a need to see what had become of the man who he once called father and a desire, distant and left unacknowledged in the depths of his soul, to save the man who had been his whole world once, if he could.
Fran, who had never met Cidolfus Bunansa and knew him only as the phantom that haunted her partner's dreams, was determined to make sure that Balthier would not be destroyed by this encounter, even when, as she knew it must, it came time for son to end the life of father.