Zyr: Snow
Something moved in the snow-lit twilight, shifting through the gaps between falling snowflakes and barely leaving a print behind in the fallen snow. Each flake, the dying breaths of the latest blizzard to sweep over this part of Cryce, twisted around the dark form, gliding over a surface nearly identical to the blued haze reflected from the snow, but still half a tint too light.
The cloaked Pterri fought gravity, using Kit to inch down the steep slope, feeling another section of snow give way and slide down the mountain with each step. Zyr’s armor protected him from the deep cold, but he could still feel the barest chill seeping through the layers to brush his gray skin. The HUD in his helmet counted down the cubits until he would reach his target: a vent built into the mountain’s side large enough to shimmy through.
With 10 meters left to go, Zyr crouched and released his Grapple. He slid down, cut through the white powder, and picked up speed. As the distance dwindled, Zyr threw a hand out behind him, and when the mountain disappeared from underneath him, and his equilibrium dropped down into open air, his fingers clamped onto hard crystal. The Pterri easily swung back, clung to the crystal vent grate, and felt the miniature avalanche he started crash around him on its way to the valley floor kilometers beneath him.
Zyr could see his reflection in the grate’s thick crystal teeth. His elongated helmet stretched out even further in the sparkling material. It didn’t last long, though, as he activated the sonic plate in his gauntlet and shattered the material with a high-pitched blast.
Crawling through the vent system took longer than he expected. Thanks to the Krysar’s preferences for crystal construction—not to mention the kilometers of thick rock and snow atop the facility—the scouting team could only map out the first few levels. As he descended, Zyr’s map became spotty and ever more useless. As the mission clock ticked over the two hour mark, the Pterri operative had no idea how far he had gone or how much more was left. With time ticking away, he could only descend.
At one intersection, as he took the larger shaft off to the right, its purpose became apparent. Rather than carrying heat or cool air, this shaft was a discharge route—he could feel the power crackling along the crystal surface, and while his energy armor kept him grounded, Zyr could feel the energy buzzing in his teeth and chattering them together.
The full blast came at him from behind. It was an immense noise, like a mountaintop crumbling into a valley, and the shaft around Zyr turned a bright blue. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a webbed mass of energy bolts blasting toward him.
There was nowhere to go.
Pain washed over him—every nerve aflame and twitching as the massive voltage fried his armor, gear, and skin. Zyr thrashed against the crystal shaft, striking out jaggedly as the power tore through his frame.
He lost his grip and he fell, dropping through the electrical storm. When he slammed into the shaft’s base it was with a cracking thud, as his left shoulder broke and his armor crumpled. Zyr could barely feel the impact, however, as it couldn’t run along his burnt-out nerves. Blood flecked against the inside of Zyr’s helmet as he struggled for breath. His lips formed the only word he needed now.
“Senza.”
In an instant, he was whole. His arm unbroken, lung intact, and nerves fully functional, Zyr scurried down a side shaft. He wasn’t keen to count coup with death a second time.
Zyr later arrived at a wide vertical shaft and peered down. A grate at least twice the thickness of the one outside was at the bottom. So far as Zyr could tell, nothing smoking, burning, or aiming to fry him was on the other side.
Activating Kit again, Zyr clambered down the shaft, stopping just above the grate. He leaned out, peering through the bars at the dim, blue room beyond.
His helmet cycled through a variety of spectrums. Crystal matrix computers, assembly drones, delicate soldering lasers, sonic sculptors, chemical synthesizers and a deactivated rocket engine waited in the long room beneath him, but nothing was active. A thought flickered in Zyr’s mind about introducing the rocket engine to the tactical evaluator who planned this mission, but he snuffed it out with a grunt.
Security remained the open question. Zyr had no idea what awaited him on the other side of the grate, and the idea made his hands unconsciously clench against the smooth crystal.
As the seconds ticked by on his mission clock, Zyr shook his head, reached out, and clasped the grate. Tightening his grip, he fired the sonic plates at their half-power setting. The crystal shattered, straining the noise cancelers in his helmet. As the shards fell to the floor, Zyr released Traction, and he tumbled forward through the newly opened gap.
As he hit the floor the lighting snapped to red. Twin whirrs coming from the ceiling heralded two automatic drones. They trained their barrels on Zyr and fired a volley.
The air cracked as the first tungsten slug fired a millisecond earlier than its twin, and Zyr was ready. He countered the first round, instantly Absorbing it into his gauntlet and firing it back at the drone. It exploded, sending crystal shards flying through the air. Zyr immediately performed Encore, repeating his counter and absorption technique to send the second tungsten round back to its drone. Its remains scattered across the lab, pockmarking and puncturing equipment.
Now the red lighting pulsed, and Zyr could only assume that meant a general alarm was now going through the facility. Time was working against him now.
He sprinted toward the sealed door, shattering it with a sonic blast. Leaping over the jagged remains, he reached for his vortex. It shimmered, releasing a handful of transparent pellets crackling with sealed energy. At each hallway intersection, he threw a few down the hallway. The pellets skipped, scattered, and broke as they careened along the crystal. Their released energy cascaded along the walls, transmitting their findings back to Zyr’s helmet.
As he dodged, countered, and Absorbed tungsten rounds from dozens of automatic turrets, the picture became clear: a large lab was just beneath him.
Zyr fought his way toward a wider corridor, or what his map said was a corridor. When he rolled out of the hallway, he realized it was a lecture hall. Row after row of seats were molded into the crystal floor, all flowing toward a raised dais with a holo display. Zyr leapt and rolled toward the lowest point—the section just before the dais. Tungsten rounds zipped past his head, some coming so close his energy armor crackled against them, others biting at the crystal and sending shards bouncing off his helmet.
As he neared the dais, a drone zipped so low it flew between his outstretched legs. Its barrel moved with a certain grace, spinning into position as the drone pirouetted in midair. It fired.
Throwing his hand up, Zyr Absorbed the round, rolled off the bench, and fired. The tungsten shot cored the drone and a second behind it. Both pieces of ruined machinery crashed in a shower of sparks as Zyr twisted through the air.
Landing flat on his stomach, Zyr cranked his sonic gauntlets to their maximum setting, placed them flat against the floor, and fired.
The world broke, becoming a twisting storm of mirrored fragments.
Zyr fell straight down, surrounded by sharpened, whirling crystal daggers. While his energy sensors had correctly told him the main lab was under the lecture hall, they hadn’t come close to estimating the distance—he was at least 15 stories above the lab and fast approaching the hard stone floor.
Somersaulting, Zyr aimed his sonic gauntlets at the far wall and fired. The recoil rocketed him backward, slamming him into the mountain’s granite core and knocking the breath from his lungs. Not wasting a moment, Zyr used Grapple and dangled from the wall by one hand.
The Pterri estimated he stopped around halfway through the drop. Below him, the floor glittered with powered crystal and odd shards continued to rain down from on high. As he scanned the area, Zyr realized a single Kryar was standing directly beneath him. Blue laserlight pulsed in the Krysar’s hands—so bright Zyr’s helmet darkened his visor a fraction. The Pterri could only assume it was a master wright, and that called for caution.
Sliding down the sheer wall, Zyr let himself build up momentum before fully releasing Kit and kicking off from the stone. He arced through the empty air, twisted, and activated his vortex. The small disc gleamed and Zyr drew forth a Pterri combat sword with sonic overlay.
Spinning around, and falling now, Zyr grasped the sword in both hands and aimed the tip down. It was only a moment before the blade sunk into the Krysar’s translucent collar crystal and the hilt threatened to jump out of Zyr’s hands. Planting his feet solidly against the floor, he tore the blade clean through the master Krysar, splitting it in half from shoulder to hip. Except for cracking apart, the master wright never made a sound.
While thin red light faded from the dying Krysar’s eyes, Zyr took stock of his surroundings and realized he was exactly where he needed to be. Set into the opposite wall, towering over the Pterri, were crystalline matrix computers. Each column, a delicate web of finely spun glass, pulsed with silver light. They spanned the entire opposite wall and ran so far back into the mountain’s base Zyr thought he could see the curvature of Cryce. This was the brain of the Krysar, he realized, as he approached the network.
Zyr’s vortex glowed as he pulled a crystalline memory rod from its depths. Sliding it into a column’s base produced an instant effect: the entire crystal matrix glowed green, and the memory rod projected a holographic display, awaiting a command.
He tapped out the necessary commands, selected the files that he needed, and a few that were simple guesswork, and waited. Column after column glowed green for a moment before setting off in an eye-searing, strobing display of green flashes as they processed the requests at near lightspeed. Within seconds, the memory rod glowed green, and Zyr extracted it from the column.
He’d been ordered to sabotage the computer with a brace of sonic grenades, but Zyr didn’t see the point. Given the computer’s vast scale—grander than he’d even imagined—a few grenades meant nothing. Only an orbital strike had any hope of destroying the entire computer.
Toward that end, he approached a column several rows back. Working quickly, he sat a thick black box into the center, hiding it underneath the strands of glass. Plugged into the memory port, such as it was, the homing beacon would only draw power and send out its coded, high-frequency signal when triggered, which ensured neither the Krysar nor Zyr’s superiors would ever discover the device. That was all he wanted, for the moment. His battleship, when Zyr had one, would do the rest.
By the time a Krysar transport rolled up to the facility’s entrance, Zyr was already climbing back up the mountainside, fighting snowdrifts with as much determination as the destroyed swarms of automated turrets he left scattered in his wake. His mission clock had only minutes left as he fought the increasing wind and shifting snowbanks. A blizzard was returning to this northern area of Cryce and his evac window would slam shut when it arrived.
When the Krysar squads found their decapitated master crystalwright, Cixarli, the Pterri commando had freed his shuttle pod and rocketed into space. The spot transmitted his mission’s success to the cloaked destroyer in stationary orbit above the planet, but what it didn’t mention was how it had copied the memory rod’s contents onto a Pterri standard memory blade.
Zyr twirled the small slice of aluminum and silicon between his fingers as the pod approached the destroyer. One day he would have the power to bring the Krysar to heel, and if they didn’t bow to him, Zyr would give them oblivion in return.