Recalibration by Aer-ki Jyr

Author:Aer-ki Jyr [Jyr, Aer-ki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

7

April 2, 2410

Solar System

Earth

Paul raced across the obstacle course, stinger rifle in hand, and ducked down behind a low barricade just as a flurry of shots passed through where his head had just been. He ‘heard’ a telepathic signal in his head, a sort of sound/image that the Archons had developed as copies of their hand signals, with this one meaning to stay down…followed immediately by the wait command.

Paul did as instructed and stayed hunkered down behind the wall as he heard more whiffs of stingers being fired elsewhere on the course. He couldn’t see much beyond the floor in front of him and the wall to his left, so he flipped on his Pefbar and immediately got an image of what was on the other side of the wall, including the turret that had been firing at him. He saw its barrels rotate around and away from him, quickly followed by him receiving a telepathic ‘go’ command.

The trailblazer rose up on a knee and spun, bringing his rifle around and disconnecting his Pefbar as soon as his regular vision crossed the contact…then he reached out and felt for a presence in the turret, finding the mechanical version of a ‘mind’ inside the device. He mentally latched onto it and concentrated hard as the barrels fired a few shots off to the side then began to track back around towards him.

Summoning what felt like all his mental strength he used his limited Fornax ability and sent a disruption beam into the turret, specifically targeting it and not generating an omnidirectional field. The mechanism in the turret registered the telepathic white noise effect and deemed it to be above the threshold limit…which triggered the targeting sphere to quickly rise up out of the top of the turret for a few seconds of vulnerability.

Paul peppered it with green paint splatters then duck-rolled to his right, coming back up just in time to hit it with two more before the target sphere retracted. With enough stun energy delivered to the target it ceased firing, though no other visual sign was given that it was deactivated. The target sphere retracted and the turret remained silent, prompting Paul to launch himself over the barrier and run up towards a vertical pylon just on the other side of the turret where he began climbing a ladder built into the side one handed, as he still held his rifle but without any armor or strapped rack to attach it to for carrying purposes.

Knowing that the turret behind him would eventually reactivate Paul moved quickly, but hesitated when he got to the top.

Clear? he asked Angel-676 telepathically, focusing specifically on her mental location. Like his Pefbar ability, he could sense minds in all directions simultaneously. Some appeared like stars, tiny pricks on the horizon, while others stood out much larger, despite their varying distances. The tiny ones were the telepathically active machines, while the other Archons in this challenge were the larger signatures.

He got the ‘hand signal’ version

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