14 January 2838
Eidolon was running again. The guards were closing in and her cloak of invisibility would be sure to run out long before she reached the streets of the city, and safety. And even if she eluded the guards, how would she get past the five meters of electrified wall that surrounded the Imperial Knights' base?
A shout behind her: she had been spotted. She sensed danger and leapt aside, and an electromagnetic pulse ripped through the space she had just occupied, striking the wall in a shower of sparks. She ducked behind a parked Paladin tank next to the entrance, considering her next move.
She did not get the time to consider. The Paladin was occupied; the turret slowly spun to face her and she found herself staring into a pair of particle beam weapons. She lurched backward just as they fired, and she felt the blistering heat on her face. She would have sunburns-- or deeper radiation burns-- if she survived this.
Fortunately the Paladin's tracking systems were set up to calculate vectors of large, fast-moving war vehicles, and not tiny, slow-moving people. Eidolon ducked around the vehicle's massive tread, and ran off. She could hear the vehicle's engines powering up, but she entered the field of weaponry on the west side of the base. Massive cannon and ammunitions containers littered the ground, and the tank would not be able to get through.
The shouting died down as she rounded the main barracks, then came back threefold when she passed the white-painted, red-striped trapezoidal building. Another contingent of guards was approaching from the other side, and she was pinned against the outer barrier.
She looked up as the whine of metal on metal screeched through the air.
A turret, mounting a pair of fusion turrets, was turning to face her.
She jumped backward as it fired, and the shots ripped into the ground next to her. The shockwave knocked her off her feet, and she fell on her belly on the hard tarmac. She rolled, looked up to see the weapon about to fire again, and braced herself for annihilation.
Her death came to life as a pair of slowly growing fusion explosions, approached her as they accelerated under the impulse of the weapon's magnetic impellers. Eidolon closed her eyes as the light grew blinding, and heat warmed her body as the hot plasma drew near. She surrendered to her imminent death--
And with a hard jerk, she found herself yanked out of the weapon's sights, and the fusion globes struck the tarmac where she had been. She opened her eyes and noted that she was hanging from a grappling claw attached to a screaming Banshee fighter. Before she could register precisely what had happened, she was pulled upward, over the barrier. Her dangling feet missed the electrified metal by centimeters, and she reached up, holding the chain of the grapple in a death grip.
She began to pull herself up toward the black-painted flier, feeling the hot wind of the fighter's exhaust stinging her already-burned face. As the fighter juked left suddenly, she cried out as she found herself swung in a wide arc. She got to see more of the city that she really wanted to, and she felt quite nauseous.
The nausea was forgotten as she spotted a pair of red-striped Knights' Banshees trailing. Blobs of green plasma lanced past her, shooting sparks off the hull of the flier. Eidolon shrieked as the Banshee did a tail flip, cracking the grappling cable like a whip. The shock nearly knocked Eidolon unconscious... but then she would not have had the pleasure of watching the Banshee skate between a pair of tall buildings, less than ten centimeters from the western one, at some two hundred kilometers per hour. Eidolon's foot tapped the other building, and she was flicked into the Banshee's hull like a bothersome insect.
"Well since I'm here anyway..." she muttered, her words lost to the wind. She grabbed the Banshee's upper hatch control bar and raised it upward, and the hatch slid open. She dropped inside just as the vehicle's mad pilot dropped the Banshee into another series of stomach-churning maneuvers, and Eidolon was bounced around inside the airlock like a pea in a poorly-fitted pod.
"Argh!" she cried, and popped the inner airlock, accessing the cockpit. She leapt for the empty co-pilot's chair, grabbing the seat restraints and wrapping them around herself.
Gasping, she leaned back in the chair and turned to look at the pilot.
"Hello, my friend," Maria said without looking up, her fingers dancing on the control console. "You needed a lift."
"You broke the cycle! But how--"
"Later," Maria said. "You need to be here..." she added, tapping a particular spot on the console. "See you in a few months. Bye." She poked the console with a smug grin on her face.
Eidolon grabbed the arms of the chair as it vomited out the belly of the Banshee and fell toward the city far below. As the thrusters in the ejection chair kicked in, she stared up into the sky as the black Banshee receded, easily out-distancing its pursuers.
Maria is in the Ghost Star system! Eidolon thought wildly as the ground rushed up to meet her. She cannot be here!
She forced herself to relax, so the impact would not tear her tensed muscles to pieces. When she struck the ground, she grunted and flopped free of the chair as the restraints automatically released. She was thrown a few meters down the crisp, green lawn of a large, ornate building. As she looked at it, she found the sign at the top: Nova Columbus Military History Museum.
And she remembered what she had to do.
Eidolon watched the curator as she paraded the group of visitors around the facility, describing all the weapons of mass destruction that littered the shelves. "This here is a captured radiation gun from Venus," she said in a nasal voice that Eidolon found incredibly annoying. "With these babies, the Cybrids would seal off a Venusian arcology and move in with infantry. They'd burn the trapped humans down with the radiation guns. If this didn't work, they would use dissolver nanites--" and at this the woman gestured to another ugly weapon on a nearby shelf, that some children from another tour group were studying excitedly. "And these would cut into the arcologies' bulkheads and let in the Venusian atmosphere."
"Cool," a young man said. Eidolon turned to stare at him.
"I was in one of these arcologies after the Cybrids had done their thing," she said angrily. "I saw the remains, the crumbling pieces of what used to be living, feeling human beings. Not cool."
The man seemed disposed to argument. "Well, you know, the 'brids like, knew what they were doing and stuff. You gotta admit, letting the air, like, do your work for you's gotta be cool."
"Too bad you didn't live in Drachensatem a few years back," Eidolon said viciously, but under her breath so the man did not hear. The curator regarded her with interest.
"You were on Venus?"
"I was all over the place." She did not mention the Ghost Star system, of course.
"Well, perhaps you can appreciate our new exhibit then." The curator led the tour group to a set of blast doors on one side of the museum's main chamber. "We managed to find a Cybrid vehicle, just sitting there on Venus, fully intact and powered but without a pilotform." The doors hissed open to reveal a dark chamber. The lights popped on, and reflected off the silver hull of a polished Goad. Radiation guns much like the one in the display case-- but a hundred times bigger-- hung from the vehicle's hardpoints. Eidolon's eyes widened.
"We think this vehicle is from the mysterious Exemplar Guard, a subset of the Exemplar elite sect. The Cybrids would program pilotforms with the Exemplar protocols for certain difficult missions such as--"
Eidolon tuned out the monologue as she studied the vehicle. She had encountered the vehicle before; of that she was certain. She looked closely at the Goad's belly, and sure enough there was a large, circular depression in the metal. This vehicle had tried to infiltrate Eidolon's hideout on Venus, and she and ShatteredStar had chased it away. The impact crater was from a Swarm missile from Star's Predator. The Goad had been on a hair trigger and had fled before he could get another volley into it.
She and Star had had other things to do, and so had not pursued. Eidolon smiled fondly at the memory, then forced herself to set it aside.
"Hey, ma'am, you have to get away from that." The curator gestured to the perimeter of red tape on the floor surrounding the vehicle, that Eidolon had crossed. "It still has power. We have not extracted the reactor core yet." Eidolon nodded, but did not move. "Ma'am, please step away from the vehicle."
A hatch popped open on the bottom of the vehicle's main hull. The curator gasped, then spoke into her wrist communicator. "Security!"
Eidolon jumped into the open hatch and closed it behind her. She heard the thud of fists on the metal, and a moment later, the crackle of emp bursts.
"Goad, drive," she said quietly, and the vehicle surged to life. Its foot lashed out and swept the entire tour group aside with considerable force. There would be broken bones to fix, Eidolon thought ruefully as the vehicle found its stride and headed for the blast doors.
Through the external speakers she heard screaming, and she looked out the narrow slot window. People were running everywhere, which was to be expected considering most of them knew the power a rampaging Cybrid warform would have, having suffered greatly during the Occupation. The Goad walked through the main chamber, and on its way to the exit it stomped on the table with the radiation guns and the dissolvers, and smashed both into oblivion.
As the Goad left, a young man picked himself off the floor and turned to the others in the tour group. "Whoa," he said in an amazed tone. "That was, like, so cool!"
