Risen: Shatterverse

Chapter 13: Who Ordered Extra Crispy?

I could feel tension tightening my jaw yet again as I tried being patient while my passenger searched for my answer. According to my suit, it was 130 Celsius ambient and climbing. A few more degrees and people will start to light on fire!

To pass the time a bit more usefully, I took another look down at the crowd pressed against the closed door into the mountain. Thankfully the road underfoot was concrete, or I would've already been ankle deep in melted asphalt. I would need a solid surface to traverse if I had to run down there and pick out our remaining people from the AIs crisping all around them. Still, if I waited any longer, the burgeoning heat would start cracking it.

Yup, there were a bunch of them there, scattered throughout the crowd, their auras making them easy to pick out even with the air between me and them shifting sluggishly as waves of thermal disruption rippled through it.

- Thanks to a rogue singularity colliding with this system's star fifteen minutes ago and multiplying its mass by several magnitudes, a nova event has been triggered, - my passenger without warning reported. - We have approximately 45 seconds before the expanding shockwave impacts Earth and destroys it. -

45 seconds?? Fuck!

Putting my head down, I sprinted as fast as my neo-shell body could carry me, nearly 200 kilometers an hour. While I was no juggernaut, able to go several times the speed of sound, I would be able to cover the intervening distance to the gate and still have a handful of seconds to spare.

Hopefully it'd be enough.

- Suit, give me a 40 second countdown on my mark. Mark. -

- T minus 40, - my suit's AI dutifully replied. - 39, 38, 37 ... -

As each number rolled through my mind, it seemed to echo like a chiming bell, ratcheting up the tension with every reverberating gong. Pushing it to the back of my mind, I instead focused on throwing myself forward with as much speed as I could physically muster. At the same time I let my eyes continuously scan over the crowd ahead of me, fixing in my mind where each glowing aura was located. I would need split second timing here if I was to get all of our people out of this hellish place and myself free and clear at the same time.

- Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen ... - the AI droned into my skull as I skidded to a halt in front of a wall of scabbed and bleeding faces, many of them suffering from third and fourth degree burns.

Doing my best to ignore them, I flicked out wormhole keys as fast as I could pull them out of my utility pouch.

- Five, four, three ... -

- T'sang inside! - I mentally shouted as the last Risen prisoner winked out of sight. - Door! NOW! -

****

Grint nodded as another tight group of Risen in scorched armor winked into view with the tell-tale shift of a teleportal.

"That's the last of 'em, General," he said, looking over at a thoughtful Tate. "With a couple minutes to spare!"

Giving the avatar a quick acknowledging nod of his own, Tate returned his attention to the array Legion and Armada were building out in the street.

"Have them report to the ground floor with the rest, Master Walker," he said as he counted the pico-reactors the two neo-shells had cobbled together with the repurposed corpses of the dead k'ethik larva that had once filled the street to a depth of nearly four meters before being slowly consumed by twin omni-fields. Twelve; hopefully that'd be enough to power the space bridge the two neo-shells were building to get the landing force back to the fleet without burning out their company of psyrens trying to ring them out.