Globe Tracers 6: Chaos Storm

Chapter 50: Practice

Fay:

After watching the pseudo void of Qton for hours, I finally couldn't take the silence much longer. The endless patches of white and blue, followed by glimpses of normal space- it was strange to take in, but after so long, it was still boring.

Besides, even if only for a few days before landing, I did not want myself and Joran to be stagnant in our skill to protect our son.

I stood in the pilot cabin, reached overhead, and pulled down a pair of large helmets. My husband sat sleeping in his pilot chair, me having left the co-pilot seat next to him. I shook him awake.

"Joran," I handed him one of the helmets as I spoke up. "Whether or not our son accepts us again, I will not have him as a corpse. Before we land, best me at least in the virtual world."

He grinned. "Dearest- if you best me, we'll consider that your mile marker."

"Best six out of ten- honey,"

"Seven if it's me- just to be nice sweetheart." There was a thing about his confidence that attracted me to him like a moon to its world. I put on the helmet. "Computer- VR combat simulation 19, the city of Troodon after the Smile Insurrection."

The simulation started.

It was the site of something terrible. A faction rose up to protest law enforcement abuses on Triad. They bombed a power plant to get attention- they got it. Maybe they had some points, but they had foolish ways of making them. Their members were hunted down and public support dwindled for their cause in a few short weeks after the attack.

I stood in a simulation of the remains of the city after the bombing. All around me, there were homes built in a cylinder style that had become popular in the city at that time- but none of these abodes were closer than five hundred feet from me. I was standing at ground zero, a flat white crater surrounded by the debris of hundreds of homes. The Smile group never died completely and were one of the groups that caused my husband to send Kyle away some thirty years ago.

Dressed in a red cotton shirt with red leather pants torn in several locations, I flexed my leather glove-covered right hand. I didn't see my husband as I was sure he was hidden in the debris. I didn't see him- yet.

I ran out of the crater and jumped over the crater berm, hiding low to the ground. Pressing two buttons on my right shoulder in rapid succession, the staff weapon on my back was released from its hold and fell to the ground beside me. I picked it up and looked down the rod to the football-sized egg-like head. I just needed to sight my target and my canisters would do the rest. I reached down to the bandoleer resting on my side and pulled out a drum of eight canisters, attaching them to a claw three-quarters down the staff weapon. Punching a button, one of the canisters dropped out of the drum and was suddenly sucked up to the egg, and slid into the large hole in the center of the head.

A series of lights that surrounded the egg head alighted red. "Detect signals close to 98 degrees Fahrenheit," I whispered. One of the tiny lights changed to yellow, pointing ahead of me thirty degrees east, into the debris field. Keeping low to the ground, I moved along the berm, moving along and watching the lights change from red to yellow as my target was now 31 degrees, now 32, 33, 34, and on and on until my target was almost straight across from me.

Why wasn't he moving? Joran had to know I was zeroing in on his position. I pushed a button halfway up the staff, my current canister firing into the air with a small puff of smoke and dropping into the debris field some twenty feet away. I held the button and the drum on my staff started to rotate, dropping its canisters at a rate of two per second and launching them into the wreckage blindly, them clanking around into random locations.

I moved up through the field of broken metal and large slabs of wood and stone- where was he? My weapon needed to see his exact location or the canisters wouldn't activate. I walked silently through several slabs of upturned concrete covered in glass. I held my staff far in front of my face so that if he was hiding just behind one of the slabs, the staff head would see him before his human eyes had a chance to behold me. Further and further into the field, the lights continued to tell me what angle he was at, but not the distance to him.

A light suddenly flashed by my eyes and- it was over. I turned my head to see a mirror on a stick sticking out from the opposite end of an overturned metal box of some kind. Joran turned the corner, his dagger pointed at me, and touched a button on one of its hand guards, a laser firing out of the tip of the blade and hitting me.

Pain shot through my body as a green color overtook my vision.

I reappeared in a random part of the debris field, growling in frustration. "Well hubby, you were always better at stealth- let's see what you do if I throw caution to the wind." I quickly dropped my staff weapon to my hand, deployed a drum, and immediately started firing canisters into the air at random angles.

"Activate," I whispered.

Eight loud shrieks went off, as I stood up, looking over the field, watching as at eight locations, debris was sucked into a small space, slamming together hard and then suddenly firing out in several directions. Several small pieces of metal or stone flew at me, bouncing off a red field of energy that surrounded me.

I scanned the debris, keeping my eyes keen for my husband attempting to dodge and- there he was. He shot away from one of the magnetic land mines. I quickly flipped my staff weapon to point the egg head at him as he moved, me making it sight the stone he hid behind by pressing a button near the back. I reached for another ammo drum as- the blade of a dagger smacked into my energy shield.

A loud shriek emitted from the blade as it pushed against the energy field, so loud I had to drop to the ground. The frequency of the blade went up and up, so loud and sharp that I started to scream out in pain until finally- I blacked out.

My body appeared again in the simulation, this time I turned, realizing I had been dropped back into the simulation mere feet from Joran's last position, "Wha-" he started- before I slammed the butt of my staff into his face, forcing him to stumble back into a small section of a brick wall.

The butt of my staff pointed straight at Joran's chest, I sent electric pulses into my arms, increasing the speed of my arms by a factor of twenty- sending the staff end through air, man and stone before my husband could say a word.

I looked away from the impact sight, not wanting to see even a simulated version of my lover's broken body.

Just as I turned right, he appeared mere feet from me, thrusting his dagger forward as I redirected it with my staff, then angled my staff to take his legs out from under him. I spun the staff quickly to line it up to nail him again in the chest as he hit the ground and lined his dagger up with my body and fired his laser straight at my head.

Three to one.