He stuck the stasis pod on his back, taking a moment to find a spot where it wouldn't interfere with his movement.
I had lots of questions, but most of them could wait. Regar's comment reminded me just what kind of situation we were in. With care, I stuck the Tempest to my thigh, making sure that the weapon's charging contacts were in the proper place. Regar nodded with approval.
"You're right, let's get out of here," I said. "If we can make it to the outside, I can fly us back to the outpost. I'll attach my safety line to you, and you won't even have to hang on."
"We can't leave yet," Regar said. "Kiril, Danner, and I fought our way up this Spike and we need to finish what we came here for. We're so close. If we leave now we might as well abandon the outpost. It'll be overrun in a month, even with the turret. Danner will have given his life for nothing, and I can't abide that."
The Interface flashed a warning at me.
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Warning: Extreme power draw.
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The Tempest was taking every bit of spare power the armor's internal supply and my Augment were generating, drinking it down. If it had been the Gazer charging that fast, recharging would be complete in less than a second. The Tempest was still at 15% charge. No wonder he'd run out of juice if he was relying on an internal Augment to charge it.
"Alright, I'm game. What are we doing here?"
"Good man. We'll need to get closer to the top. The top five percent. Once we're there, we'll deploy the device Kiril made. It will block the barrel of the railgun. The next time the Shard fires, the explosion will destroy the Spike."
The theory was pretty clear. If you blocked the barrel of a gun near the firing chamber, the result wouldn't be nearly as catastrophic as if you blocked it at the muzzle. When the gun in question was a railgun accelerating a giant payload to escape velocity, you had a recipe for one hell of a bang. Too much.
"Hold on, if we're anywhere nearby when that happens it will cook us," I said.
"Yes, it will. So let's make sure we aren't."
Chapter Four: Spiking the Spike
A MINUTE LATER THE Tempest was fully charged and I handed it back to Regar.
"Nice and fast. Glad to see that armor isn't just pretty."
"That's one thirsty weapon. It's not Union tech, so what is it?" I asked.
"Come on, let's get moving. We can talk while we climb," Regar said. He moved to the edge of the platform and leapt upward, landing nimbly on a crossbeam far above my head.
I floated after him, using the gravity plates to neutralize my weight and the propulsion plates to maneuver. It was becoming surprisingly intuitive. The perks of higher Mental stats.
"The Union is pretty new, relatively speaking. Before that the Galaxy was a chaotic mess of species, each of them fighting the other. When the AIs rose up, that all stopped. Mainly because most of them died out, and those that didn't banded together for survival.
"The Tempest is what we Seekers call an Artifact. That's just a mystical name for technology not based on Union tech, usually from one of the extinct species. This one is from the Murgas. I had an engineer friend modify this baby to integrate it with my Interface and let me charge it."
Regar and I reached another ring around the outside of the Spike. Nagite Soldiers swarmed out of the doorways, dozens of them.
"Crap!" I yelled.
I brought the Gazer up and fired. The bright beam cut deeply into the clashing teeth of the Nagite Soldier's torso mouth. The drones opened up as well, needles shredding the vulnerable snake bodies while a second particle beam dropped another. That made a small dent into the horde coming at us.
Regar calmly raised the Tempest and lined up his shot. I fired again and cut a Nagite into two pieces.
"What are you waiting for, Regar?" I yelled at him. The horde was nearly on us, bunching up into a wave of clashing metal teeth and writhing flesh.
Space visibly warped in front of the Tempest, a cylinder of distorted light covering the attacking Nagites. The effect was immediate—the horde smashed together as the distortion in space pulled them in. The ones in the center twisted strangely before exploding in torrents of black ichor and hunks of metal. The less fortunate Nagite Soldiers swirled around the distortion like water down a drain, except this drain was tearing pieces off of them, the limbs and chunks of flesh disappearing into the nothingness in the center of the distortion.
The distortion disappeared a second or two later, and the swirling mass of what had once been an attacking force splashed to the ground, a soup of ground-up metal, flesh, and black blood.
Two stragglers in the rear had been missed by the Tempest's effect. Almost casually, the drones and I shot them dead.
"Wow, what the hell was that? How did the Murgas die if their tech could do that?"
"Like everything, it has limitations. Loot your kills and let's go."
I extracted the Nanite Clusters from my five kills, adding another one hundred to my total. My internal storage was almost full now. I hadn't planned to be farming.
I looked at the puddle of dead Nagites as I returned to where Regar was waiting.
"Don't bother," Regar said. "The rift destroys all the Nanites. There won't be any in that mess to extract."
"Limitations," I mused. Regar nodded.
We passed two more of the rings without incident when I saw another one of those limitations.
There was the boom of an explosion. I flew sideways, colliding hard with a horizontal crossbeam as something moving very fast hit me. My HUD flashed a warning.
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Countermeasures: Blades—active. Reserves: 85%
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I had
