"Come on evil voices, you hacked the elevator, hack the turrets!" Jack cried out.
As if they had been waiting for him to ask, the turrets all suddenly shifted targets from the two escapees to the guards and researchers.
"You were waiting for me to say that weren't you?" Jack asked. He cursed.
The only response was the now present thumps of missile detonations.
"Well, at least we can leave now," Jack said as he started towards the freighter, only to see it lifting off.
He cursed again.
Then he saw Alma open up her mech and get out. She stood next to it and staring at the freighter with was over ten meters in the air by that time and was starting to accelerate way.
He aimed at the freighter and fired everything he could at it. [i]He needed that ship![/i] And if he couldn't have it to get off the planet, then no one else would.
Alma clearly agreed, because the ship suddenly crashed into the floor of the hangar, as though something had swatted it down. With a deafening, continuous crash, it plowed through equipment and people before colliding with another freighter which had been, and still mostly was, obscured from Jack's vision.
"I hope the other ship still works," Jack commented. Then he saw that Alma had collapsed to the ground. "Dammit, she burned out!" He hit the open button and jumped out of the EPA as soon as he had a chance.
Running over, he saw her still breathing, so he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder and leapt behind a nearby crate so that they wouldn't be as likely to get shot.
Taking a moment, he looked Alma over. It looked like her collapse had split her skin, but he didn't think it was anything major, and he could feel her psychic presence this close but it seemed less intense, likely due to burnout. She'd probably be fine after some rest.
"I guess I'll just have to wait an – oh wait, I'm going to die, thanks earsplitting sirens, I would have forgotten otherwise," Jack said as he looked back up at the two mechs. He seriously doubted he had time to take both mechs to whatever ship could carry the two off planet, so it came down to which did he want to take with him, at least to the ship? He wasn't going to go out there without some protection if he could help it and he was pretty sure that they could both fit, if uncomfortably, in one of the cockpits.
A rocket exploded nearby and he realized that this was a really stupid decision to waste time on. He hefted Alma over his shoulder and dashed to the closest mech, the REV8. Slipping inside, he managed to position her on his lap in such a way that she didn't get caught in the closing canopy, though she did make it awkward for him to steer. "Now for the ship."
He steered the REV8 forward, but due to Alma being in the way he couldn't see clearly and the mech ended up walking through a wall of containers large enough to store bodies in. "I guess you don't have to steer this thing either."
Eventually he managed to round the crashed freighter to find the cargo door for the other freighter open with several guards and other armed personnel in cover around it exchanging fire with a small REV6 powered armor equipped with lasers. Jack didn't consider it a mech because it was both not big enough and not cool enough, but that wasn't really important at the time so he sent rockets into the center of the group of Armacham goons before sweeping the area with his lasers as he stomped towards the door. The REV8 ignored the panicked fire from the guards and the REV6 seemed focused on other targets for some reason.
Jack wasn't really sure what was going on at this point, but he assumed it was something else the voices did. Which was somewhat worrying on its own, but with everything else going on he was hoping they'd keep doing whatever it was they were exactly. He take all the help he could get at the moment.
In several long seconds Jack managed to pilot the REV8 to the cargo door to meet several outbound rockets and grenades. They brought down the shields and damaged the hull, which at this point wasn't too worrying because he quickly responded in kind, firing rockets into the guards and then using the mech's lasers to cut through a crate and hopefully hit another guard.
He proceeded into the ship, the doors closing on his mech before reopening when he was in the doorway, and proceeded to kill the few guards that didn't run further into the ship and seal the door behind them.
Jack frowned. "Well now what?"
He couldn't just sit and wait in the mech. Even if the guards couldn't hurt him in it at this point, they could still keep him trapped in it until they were ready for him. Likely at another Armacham base where the voices wouldn't be so much help. Which brought up the question of how they had helped.
If they had wanted to break Alma out, why hadn't they done so earlier? If they could use the altar to somehow hack into the base, why hadn't they done that earlier? Jack was pretty sure that if all of the turrets in the base had turned on the guards and the voices had hacked the other systems during Alma's last breakout attempt, then she would have made it to a ship.
He shook his head clear of those thoughts for the moment. He needed to clear the ship before they could prepare. That meant opening that door. Which he did pretty easily with the REV8's giant laser cannons.
Seeing that he couldn't fit the REV8 through the doorway and as time was of the essence, Jack had to leave the mech to proceed, but he took a tense moment to wait and see if the guards would try to fire through the melted door. They didn't.
That was bad. He was still a bit lightheaded from his earlier psionic strain, and he couldn't afford to burnout like Alma, so killing everyone else on the ship was out. The guards had armor and ID locked weapons, so that precluded both taking one of their weapons and melee combat. Not that he had any doubts that he could take on and entire freighter of people in hand-to-hand regardless of their armor.
He he'd need to see if the grenades were ID locked. That might work.
He opened the cockpit and carried the still unconscious Alma with him behind cover near a lasered guard.
Then there was the sound of military grade lasers firing very close and the stomp of powered armor. Jack looked back towards the cargo entrance and saw the REV6 looking in his direction. He cringed, pulled Alma closer and rolled out of the way.
The REV6 proceeded to fire at them again as it approached.
Jack managed to scramble behind the REV8 which blocked the enemy powered armor from shooting at them, but Jack and Alma were now exposed to the guards if they chose to look back into the cargo hold to see what was happening. Which they did.
Jack bit out a curse as he dodged behind another crate only to feel a sharp spike of pain blooming from his left leg. He looked down and saw that one of the guards had shot him there. This wasn't going well, though at least the REV6 was now fighting the guards. Hopefully they'd kill each other.
He looked down at the leg wound. He really wished they'd taken some medigel with them. "Well duh," he said and started looking around from his position of cover, trying to locate a nearby dead guard. They would have at least a small amount of medigel that he could use.
He eventually spotted a small emergency medical pack on the belt of a nearby guard. He focused on the pack and managed to unclip it, causing it to start to slide to the floor, but he stopped it with his mind.
He then focused on moving the medical pack to him during a particularly intense exchange of fire. Hopefully it meant no one would notice him.
Once the pack was in reach he quickly grabbed it and started applying the medigel to his wounds. It contained coagulants, so he didn't have to worry about bleeding out, but now he would have trouble doing much and he still needed to clear the ship and get it off the planet. After all, the alarms were still blaring, so whatever the voices did hadn't stopped the countdown and he had no idea how much time was left.
He needed to try to use the grenades to get to the cockpit. Hopefully that would work. He telekinetically picked up one of the grenades. With his analysis, he could feel the trigger, and they were light enough that holding it wasn't much of a strain on him. Good. Especially with Alma still down for the count.
He had a plan by the time the REV6 stomped through the doorway deeper into the ship. Once it was out of the cargo hold, he took off the lab coat he was wearing and picked used it to carry as many grenades as he possibly could. He wasn't sure if the grenades were ID locked so that they would blow up if someone not authorized tried to hold them, but he didn't want to take the chance.
After spending too long limping around the cargo hold collecting grenades, he went over to the door to the outside and tapped the holographic panel next too it so that it would close. At least everyone else was too busy fighting to get to it before then.
Next he limped over to the door into the hallway. This cargo hold was one of the back rooms, of which there were several. He wasn't too clear on the layout of the ship as he'd never been in one before, but from the outside it looked like there was some sort of larger room separating the back rooms from the front few where the bridge was located.
All he had to do was clear out a ship full of guards and some psycho in powered armor with six grenades and then pilot the ship into orbit and use FTL before the gamma bomb went off.
Wonderful.
Alma drifted in a cloud of painful fuzziness, unable to clearly sense anything or do anything, and even the act of sensing psionically, which she did automatically, was painful.
Not only that, but she couldn't move her own body, everything was leaden. She could barely even think.
She drifted in the painfully disorientating yet numbing cloud for a long time, trying and failing to do anything.
She knew she had to do something, something urgent, but at the same time she couldn't summon the strength to remember what was so urgent.
This went on for what seemed like forever, until she felt a psionic jolt.
She knew what it meant. Someone had died near her, within her reach. She felt a trickle strength flow into her, clearing her mind in a wash of foreign memory and dying suffering.
She was still too weak to do anything, but she was aware of the slowly dissipating cloud within her mind.
Then another death came to her and she regained yet more strength. She could perceive the room around her vaguely. She could tell it wasn't where she was before. It was smaller. She could also hear, vaguely. There was a loud thump and another death came to her. She focused and felt the floor she lay upon.
Concentrating, she was able to move each of her limbs, but it was hard and they wouldn't hold her weight. Instead, she sent out her aura, to expand her reach so that more deaths would come to her, and so she could find Jack. He had to be there somewhere, even if she had trouble finding him in her current state.
It turned out that the REV6 pilot had not forgotten about Jack like he'd hoped. Instead, they had apparently instead decided to go into the hallway to kill the guards before turning back around. He'd had to waste half of his grenades to kill the pilot, and then been forced to go to the dangerous edge of burnout by snapping the neck of a guard that had somehow ambushed him from behind. He had probably been hiding.
Now Jack was crouched around the edge of the doorway of one of the side rooms. He had taken the all too risky gamble of actually picking up the grenades to manually toss and detonate because everything was getting fuzzy and lights were appearing in his eyes from intense overuse of his abilities, but he had definitively determined that for some reason Armacham had not seen fit to ID lock their grenades. Lucky him.
He chucked another grenade through the doorway, into the corridor and then into the main cargo bay. "How did I do that?"
Whatever answer he was hoping for didn't come, instead his reply was a burst from an assault rifle from beyond.
A moment later there was a loud boom of a grenade going off, but no screaming or anything else to indicate it had been effective.
"Damn." Jack looked away from the doorway into the main cargo hold and down at his makeshift grenade bag. He had picked up two, so he now had three left. He didn't feel lucky. Then he noticed a barely perceptible figure standing in front of him. He looked up and saw glowing red eyes.
He cried out in shock, threw the bag into the specter and lunged away. He wasn't able to make the landing though due to his numbness and the fuzziness of a near burnout. However, he was able to trip and hit his head.
Dazed and desperate, he lashed out psionically, trying to stop the thing from killing him.
Unfortunately the sudden blinding pain of overusing psionic abilities caused him to pass out before he knew if it worked.
It had been a long time by the reckoning of some, but for this being it was only a moment, a pause between the brief times of action.
It did not truly sleep; rather it became physically quiescent as its mind, its true nature, withdrew to Their home.
But the call had gone out, and They had answered, as They should. Now it was time to wake and begin Their sacred work again.
The Resplendent Sovereign of Nazara returned to the waking universe and watched the small lifeforms go about their lives as its body came online.
Throughout the galaxy, it saw the glimmering sparks of those with potential, but they were not the ones it wanted. No, in a remote section of the galaxy where the sparks and embers were few and far between, for their kind at least, It saw the one. The one it had woken for, the one that would complete the Cycle.
Nazara issued orders to Their servants and prepared to move out as lives flicker and shifted across the galaxy like candle-lit shadows across a wooden screen.
Then another joined the first on the Path. This was not uncommon, but still unexpected.
If Nazara had been capable of it, It would have smiled. As it was, Its form sent out waves of pleasure across the pond that was the galaxy.