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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5350005" data-attributes="member: 143">Session 30 (November 24, 2008)Chapter 141The Alphas drew back, readying their weapons.  Vasily helped James to his feet, supported him as the doctor tried to ignore the crippling pain of his injured hip.  They shared a look; both knew their chances.  But James took his plasma rifle back as Vasily handed it to him, and together they turned back to the corridor, waiting for the inevitable alien surge. Jane let go of Mary, leaning her against the wall of the passage so she could ready her own weapon.  Mary had heard James’s warning, and she felt a cold chill in her gut, but she forced through her fear, closed her eyes, and activated the psi amp.  The aliens appeared as faint golden outlines to her perceptions, all save the sectopod, which resolved as an ugly shadow that was darker than the surrounding black.  It was close and getting closer, but she ignored it, focusing on the mutons until she found what she wanted.  It only took a slight tweak, a bit of pressure, but it still felt like trying to grasp an eel with her bare hands.  There was no time to warn her companions, she just did it. A wall of flame exploded down the corridor, sweeping around the bend, flinging the Alphas onto their backs.  It was followed by a dense cloud of thick, blinding smoke, which swirled around them as they staggered back up, those least battered helping the others to their feet.  Vasily stumbled forward through the smoke and flames.  As he rounded the corner he came to the wrecked outline of the sectopod.  One leg of the alien mech had been sheared off by the blast, and flames shot from openings in its body, but it was still moving, sparks flying and metal grinding as it tried in vain to get up.  Vasily barely paused to fire a plasma bolt into a broken gap in its armor before continuing forward.  It took him a while to get through the next stretch of passage; the metal plates covering the walls and floor had buckled, and a good eight-meter stretch had been nearly vaporized, leaving a slightly glowing crater that the Russian dutifully crunched through before reemerging on the far side.  He could hear his name being called, although thick static over the communicator masked the identity of the speaker.  He kept going, past the bodies of the dead mutons, past the wreckage of the alien door, blasted off its moorings, the spiral plates jutting inward like broken teeth.  One came off as he pushed past it, clattering as it landed on the floor.  There were more aliens on the far side of the door, all dead.  He passed a sectoid that had a metal wedge at least a foot long jutting from the wrecked faceplate of its helmet.  Still he continued, until the smoke began to clear, and he found himself staring out over a vast open chamber. The place was vertically organized in several stacked tiers, accessible via narrow catwalks that looked more than a little treacherous, sized more toward sectoids than to armored humans.  Dozens if not hundreds of niches were visible along the walls, most of which held the brilliant blue radiance of an Elerium storage crystal.  Vasily registered those in the back of his mind; his attention was drawn to the impressive sight in the center of the chamber. There, suspended in the open space by dozens of silver struts, was a huge irregular crystal.  Shaped like a dagger, the crystal had to be at least six meters tall, and was as thick as a full meter across at its core, tapering almost to points at its ends.  The glow from within it made the brightness of the smaller crystals seem pale by comparison, and the vision filters on his VDU automatically kicked in to compensate, dimming the crystal until it was just a gray outline on his visor.  He heard the others come up from behind him, take it in.  Meanwhile, he reached into the cargo compartment in his armor, and took out the demolition charge within. “Get ready to run,” he said, though the looks the others sent him told him that they understood what he had, that time had all but run out. “This way, there’s another door over here,” Catalina said, leading them around the edge of the room.  Hadrian lingered behind, moving over to one of the smaller crystals, while Vasily moved forward to the edge of the central shaft.  He carefully made his way down to the next-lower tier, looking for a way to get close to the huge central crystal.  Short of climbing out onto the struts, however, there was no easy way to access it, and he decided it would be better not to use his jump packs to try to leap over to it.  Instead he looked at where the struts anchored, and found that each was surrounded by a matrix of six smaller crystals, all pulsing with energy as they either fed or were fed by the central shaft.  He went to work there, rigging charges, making his way around the entire tier until his kit was empty.  He’d initially set the charges for twenty minutes, but as he held the master control in his hand, he sighed, and turned it down to five minutes.  He waited until he was back up to the main tier, and then triggered the control, tossing the device into the chasm behind him.  Hadrian and Jane were waiting in the open doorway; the others had gone on ahead.  “Go!” he yelled.  They ran, for what it was worth.  The corridor twisted, took them through an empty room, then into another passage.  They caught up to the others quickly; they weren’t moving very fast, with James supporting Mary, or perhaps the other way around, and Catalina barely able to keep from toppling over.  The British agent kept them moving, however, following the twists and turns that flashed on her VDU.  Doors closed behind them, but Vasily knew it was an empty gesture at best.  From what he’d seen of Elerium explosions in the past, there wouldn’t be much left once that master array went up.  “Where we going?” he shouted, as they came to an intersection, and Catalina took them to the right without stopping.  She didn’t get a chance to respond to the question, as the ground started to rumble under their feet, the very fundaments of the base trembling under their feet.  Vasily frowned and looked at the timer in the corner of his VDU; only two minutes had passed, not long enough.  “Too soon!” he said. “The ship!” James said.  “It must be lifting off!” They hurried down the long tunnel.  This part of the base did not seem to be powered; their lamps were the only illumination as they made their way down the length of the passage to an armored door at its end.  Catalina was the first to reach it, and by the time the others had all caught up she had overridden the controls.  The layered panels opened slowly, revealing a cavernous shaft, maybe twenty meters across, which rose up into the darkness above them.  The chamber was deserted, with even the fittings in the walls for machinery and conduits gaping empty. Catalina stared up the shaft, clenching her fists at her side.  “Damn!  This came up on the map as an ancillary hangar; I’d hoped there would be a ship here, or a lift, something!”Mary leaned against the wall of the hangar, her eyes closed, her brow furrowed.  “Now what?” Hadrian asked.  The rumbling had continued, and now it deepened, bits of stone dropping from the walls of the shaft, clattering noisily as they spattered on the deck at their feet.  There was another sound as well, a faint, echoing shriek, originating from the long tunnel behind them. “Company coming,” Jane sad.  Vasily opened the barrel of his cannon, tossing the half-discharged cell aside, dropping a new one into place.  He said nothing, merely turned to face the dark tunnel.  In the corner of his VDU, the seconds continued to tick down, passing to double digits as the timer dropped to under a minute.  “It’s been good serving with you,” Jane said, stepping forward to join him.</blockquote>

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