Dynamo – Part 3
Sleep is getting better. I’ve managed to get down at a consistent time, but I’m still running into trouble. Part of it is the lack of physical activity, part is the difficulties I’ve touched on earlier. Maybe it gets better, maybe it doesn’t, but like everything I do nowadays, only time will tell.
Writing things have tons of good stuff coming up. I’ve got at least three separate projects I’m working on getting done, and I should have my first physical books early next year post-job. I’m cautiously excited, but mostly I need to get back on the bandwagon and get releases flowing. It’s been since July, and while I have credible explanations, there’s a fine line between reasons and excuses.
Mostly, what I want right now out of my life is to get things back in order. I’m dealing with a lot of things that are forcing me into myself, and the last thing I can afford to do is crawl into my shell. It’s cozy, but I know exactly what happens in there. I know where those inner roads lead. It’s not where I want to be. It’s not who I want to be either.
As for Dynamo, I have so many things I need to get done with this project. At least another eight to ten parts, minimum. I have a lot of things to cover, and the verbal notes for this series are at least twenty minutes long, with no less than five or six major plot points. I have tons of material for this thing, so I’m going to endeavor to persevere with it.
That said, let’s get going.
Dynamo – Part 3
Agatha rounded the broken rubble of the explosion hole at a dead sprint, lugging along a ton of plasmic weaponry charged and glowing for round two. She spied the blue and gold armor of the shock troops ahead of her, using all the power they could route through their suits to beat a hasty retreat. They’d expected an incapacitated target, or small arms fire. Not an assault class weapon wielded by a woman in a summer dress.
She sprinted after them, her nanic implants and arcanoservos whining as she put more stress on them, routing power to them as fast as they could accept it. She started to sweat, profusely, as the twin-cycle phase-vacuum power core in her stomach overheated. It was unimportant. Either she would find the assault transport the troops were heading towards in time, or she would be too late and too dead to care. The ground troops might not be able to stand up to an assault cannon, but no sheath-shield in the galaxy would save her from a direct shot of equal ferocity.
The steelcrete flashed by in a blur of colors and symbols as she gained on the fleeing troops. Finally, the rounded into a small country market, the stalls blown away into strewn piles of rubble by exhaust wash from the parked Hypherion-class assault transport painted the same gold and blue of the troops running towards it.
Finally. Now or never.
Agatha came to a screeching halt, raising the weapon and putting all the power it would handle and then some into it as she slid along the small road. Finally, the barrel whined and whirred, glowing a terrible teal, and she depressed the trigger.
The direction of her slide abruptly reversed, sending her backwards and directly into the side of a graphsteel recycle compactor behind her. She let out a whumph as she was slammed into the compactor, making an enormous Agatha-sized divot which caused her to drop the plasma cannon. The cannon was a wreck, the overload buffers and power shunts set along the barrel to prevent catastrophic overload were slagged, and the barrel was warped from the heat of the recirculating energy.
As bad as the cannon was, the assault transport had definitely gotten the worst of the exchange. The entire upper section of the hawk-like transport was simply gone, the shields insufficient for an overloaded shot. She’d managed to catch the cockpit as well as the weapons control systems behind it. Agatha let out a whoop as she extricated herself from the compactor and began beating a hasty retreat.
The troops, their evac vehicle destroyed, had decided to make a fight of it. Gouts of focused laser fire erupted behind her, pinging against the metal of the compactor as she put as much distance between herself and her would-be killers. Her internal circuitry, freed of the burden caused by her pursuit, cooled as she fled. Her power core finished shedding all the heat it needed to, and the nanos in the various joints and servos they called home began hasty repairs.
She would make it to the bolt-hole in time. The op had obviously been blown, but if she had fended off the brunt of the assault, she wouldn’t lose any of her operatives. They were far more valuable than the op she had been running, anyway.
A few dozen kilometers later, she broke free of the metropolitan area she had been trapped in, closing on the small farm they had chosen as the fallback should the op go south. It wasn’t much, but the planetary bombardment bunker built beneath the barn was more than enough to keep her people safe.
As she crested the hill, she came skidding to a halt. The farm, the surrounding vegetation and crops, and the barn were a flattened hellscape. A crater, easily twice the size of the bunker, had been carved into the loam. An enormous, Dreadnaught-class capital ship lay across what had once been her fallback point.
As she stood there, trying to absorb just how much had been compromised for all this to occur, a lance of blue-white electronic scrambler slammed into her back. Everything blurred, and merciful blackness consumed her.
To be continued…
Plasmafully,
Justin
She skidded to a halt
