When the puddle jumper got to its destination she could see why. It came into a large warehouse, still underground, but with a section of its roof busted in with a cascade of black soot having fallen inside the size of a small mountain. The craft were all moving around it and stacking supplies in the free spaces as she saw a few small units collecting and carrying away the larger pieces of charred material as the hole in the roof remained black beyond the interior lights.
Jasmyn flew up through it, leaving the busy Caretaker units behind, and passed through more than a mile of melted levels in what she guessed had been a surface access conduit. When hit above it had been breached, with the resulting destruction moving down far below ground into the catacombs.
When the Maverick eventually reached the surface everything was dark. The sun was gone, and there were no stars…not that there had been before. The shell of the Temple had always blocked them out, but now there was nothing to be seen except a few fireflies of light in the distance.
Jasymn used her armor’s zoom function and tried to get some visuals on the distant lights, finding they were Caretakers moving about doing what she didn’t know, but there was no point in trying to see in the dark, and her Pefbar only went so far, right now registering dunes everywhere made of the charred material so fine it was closer to silt.
There was no wind, at least not now, and no thermal signatures to stir it up. Jasmyn summoned up her Essence and her bioplasma, then shot a streak of it up high above her head, capping it a few hundred meters away, and pooling it there as she enhanced the burn and twisted it into more light production than heat, creating a miniature sun of her own that spread an orange/red light out across a barren landscape.
Everything was black, and everything was dunes. There was no rubble to be seen. No bedrock. No ships or buildings. Everything was char, but at least the air was clear…though the oxygen was mostly gone, combined into the char that was lightly spilling down into the vertical passage behind her as she walked ankle deep through the very sterile destruction, towing her light high above her and occasionally adding some additional plasma to it.
“So the story is true,” she said to herself, not sensing or detecting any ships above her or around the curvature of the Temple as far as her armor could scan. “They really nuked the whole thing. Including the Vargemma,” she said, realizing that some of the black sand was probably from their bodies.
“What a waste,” she said, turning on her transponder at maximum gain and sending out a location ping. The message the surviving Star Force personnel had carried back said that Plausious had survived inside one of their strongest warships, and that the giant portals capable of moving it had been destroyed. So it had to be here somewhere, and with everything in the Temple destroyed she had line of sight to every single square inch of it now. And with no energy activity of any type, even a small transmitter like hers would reach to the far side and be able to be detected by the advanced Neofan sensors…assuming they were looking, which they might not be.
She decided to give it a try, otherwise she’d have to hack into the Temple systems and try to send a message that way. Jasmyn hadn’t brought many snacks in her armored backpack, and it looked like there were no Caretaker units on the surface waiting to supply her with whatever she required. All of those were undoubtedly destroyed in the blast wave, and it was unlikely the Temple would rebuild those before restarting the artificial star.
But Jasmyn didn’t have to wait long, for a return ping came only minutes later from an object she couldn’t scan, but one that was transmitting from a fast moving position to her left. When it did get in range she saw it was a giant sphere, and one of their Gjardan warships, which made her wonder if her portal activity hadn’t been automatically rerouted to where Plausious wanted it.
The Trinx waited until it came to a stop overhead, barely two miles up and moving the dunes with wind as it shoved the thin atmosphere around, then a hatch opened up and she was directed into it, forgoing a craft to pick her up as she elected to just fly there.
When she entered the well-lit hangar she let go of her glowing orb outside, letting it puff into a fireworks display before going out entirely, then she landed gently on the deck in the thicker air in the ship as several Neofan gathered around her.
“The Reignor sends his greetings,” one of them said with a slight bow. “But he is not onboard this ship. We are indebted to you, Nuv’ernor.”
“For what? I haven’t done anything yet,” she scoffed, peeling back her armor into two forearm gauntlets and revealing loose black robes beneath that encased her legs, making them look twice their size, as she wore a tight fitting tank top with a backpack carrying her supplies.
“House Atriark has no Nuv’ernor. Only the leading House does, and that is Mutavi. Your power is legend, and will give us a significant advantage once you are trained.”
“I’m already trained.”
One of the other Neofan shook his head dismissively. “Star Force knows little about the potential of Nuv’ernor. We have been instructed to share with you all our techniques in exchange
