Andrea flew back from the table, the cracking and popping and bursts of light filling the air as she was launched backwards, obliterating the chair she was sitting on moments earlier. For an instant Andrea seemed to hang suspended in the air, dust and debris floating along with her. Then the moment ended with a rush as Andrea landed on her feet by the back wall of the tent with her arms raised in a fighting stance. Her appearance had undergone a significant alteration during her short flight. Her uniform gained a number of new holes as multiple self-defense systems discarded fashion and propriety for the sake of survival. From their ports in her shoulders ten mini-drones had burst out through the fabric, zipping into an shifting and undulating formation to provide enhanced battlefield awareness and targeting. Erupting from both her upper arms near the shoulder and from either side of her hips the short blunt spikes of personal point defense laser emitters had punched out into the open air. Andrea’s visible skin had taken on a confusing swirl of patterns and colors designed to complicate and slow down the work of auto targeting weapons systems. Finally the entire center of Andrea’s upper chest, around the collarbone, had blasted out a shotgun-like spray of tiny hexagonal hatch covers erupting through the layers of skin and clothes covering the honeycomb-like appearance of her micro missile launch rack. A close inspection would reveal that several had already been launched, Andrea’s automated combat responses had detected high velocity projectiles and used a small flight of missiles to intercept the threat, using the detonations of their warheads to send what turned out to be several flechette rounds into a tumble. Those same systems are what had moved Andrea’s body into a violent evasive maneuver back through her own chair and across the tent.

  By the time Andrea’s conscious mind was able to respond, her implants had already fed her a back projection of the projectiles. They’d come from Unla-Ela! Andrea was tracking everyone in the tent closely: Orna, Lori, and Olan Lunere seemed surprised, only just beginning to leap to their feet in shock and confusion. In contrast Unla-Ela had already begun to swing their left arm to line up with Olan Lunere. Andrea decided that any action her attacker was attempting was probably not in her best interests and launched another flight of micro-missiles. With another series of rapid hiss-cracks they slammed into Unla-Ela’s left arm and detonated. To Andrea’s surprise, instead of blowing the arm into fragments they only managed to slightly deflect Unla-Ela’s aim. Despite the lackluster results, the deflection still meant that when the next flechette flew out of a barely visible slit on the back of Unla-Ela’s forearm, whipping past the back of their hand and into Olan Lunere, it slammed into the right side of the Olan’s chest instead of hitting them center mass. The Olan began to collapse to the floor, hands reaching up to grasp at the wound, their eyes wide with pain and shock even as Unla-Ela turned back in surprise to Andrea. Now Unla-Ela’s appearance began its own rapid transformation. Their skin shifted into a much darker segmented appearance like a cross between fish scales and tree bark, even as half a dozen blunt bone-like structures erupted from Unla-Ela’s head, two from the lower jaws, two above the ears, and two from the temples.

  Andrea guessed that the bone structures were part of some kind of point defense system like her own. Looking to probe that possibility, and keep Unla-Ela’s attention on her rather than the other far more vulnerable people in the tent, Andrea launched a spread of three more micro-missiles targeting one at Unla-Ela’s feet, one at her hips and one at her upper torso. Sure enough once the missiles streaked across the short distance and closed to about two meters, needle thin, eye searing beams of screaming incandescence coalesced a few centimeters off the ends of the bone spikes and quickly swept out to intercept all three incoming missiles. The small mass of the micro-missiles worked in Unla-Ela’s favor as it took the merest fraction of a second for even these small heating beams to liquefy or incinerate various parts of each projectile. The outgassing and deformation caused them to tumble off course and in one instance actually reached a high enough temperature to detonate even the highly stable explosives of the micro-missile warheads. What little of the scattered debris that reached Unla-Ela would have been nearly harmless to even a completely unprotected person, let alone when it bounced off whatever sort of armor Unla-Ela’s skin had morphed into. Barring a reckless saturation bombardment with her limited missile complement, it was clear the micro-missiles would not be useful on the attack. Andrea’s combat analysis systems suggested using her point defense laser emitters offensively as an alternative since closing range against those heat beams would be suicide. The heat beams were clearly limited in range by their compact size, the probing attack having revealed their reach only extending a bit under two meters. Meanwhile Andrea’s laser systems were capable of delivering combat effective rates of energy transfer at up to a kilometer in a breathable atmosphere at standard pressure, with clear weather of course. The last of the micro-missile debris was still pattering onto the ground when Andrea began rapidly back pedaling away from Unla-Ela and began lasering their right side bone spurs and left eye. With a cry of pain Unla-Ela began attempting to evade and close with Andrea, leaving the sprawled form of Olan Lunere as well as Orna, and Lori. As long as Andrea managed to survive then the others seemed likely to remain safe, Orna and Lori had by now had begun to run for the entrance flap. The next few seconds were a deadly game of tag with Andrea managing to just barely outmaneuver Unla-Ela while continuing to try and burn away at vulnerable points. While Unla-Ela tried to close the distance, evade Andrea’s invisible assault, and burn as many mini-drones down as possible. Unla-Ela didn’t even bother attempting to use their built in flechette weapon again, likely judging that time required to line up their arm for a shot was simply too great. Before long they seemed to realize that if they continued as they had been, they’d soon be rendered vulnerable; they couldn’t see what Andrea was hitting them with, but they could certainly feel it. Over the course of the next couple of seconds Unla-Ela’s figure began to grow translucent and indistinct even as it continued to violently maneuver to close the range. Soon they had vanished to both thermal and infrared detection. Fortunately for Andrea she, and her drone swarm, had echolocation systems that screamed at her in warning as several howling lines of fire erupted, appearing to connect to nothing on either end as the still invisible Unla-Ela managed to finally just get into range of Andrea. Without the split second of advanced warning Andrea would have died right in that instant. Instead, two of the three beams missed entirely as she jerked to the side at the last moment, the last beam hit her in the right shoulder, slagging the point defense emitter and several of the mini-drone ports. Andrea could feel little trickles of molten metal running down the layer of skin covering the armored surface of her arm even as she ejected thermal-electric smoke and launched all of her remaining micro-missiles, half attempting to strike the tentative echolocation return and the other half scattering in a random bombardment pattern to confuse and disrupt. Though Andrea’s move had been made as a last resort, Unla-Ela clearly didn’t realize how close they were to victory. There was a sudden burst of light as heat beams shredded one wall of the tent before the burning tatters of fabric were displaced by the otherwise invisible form of a fleeing Unla-Ela. Charging out after them, Andrea was just in time to witness the flashes of light as short lines of plasma transfixed every member of the contingent of guards Unla-Ela and Olan Lunere had brought along. Her three remaining mini-drones burst out of the tent behind her and swept out blasting echolocation pings frantically in an effort to avoid another sneak attack. Andrea was just starting to think she’d better check on Olan Lunere when there was a rolling rumble like distant thunder and an instant later Lin sent her an urgent warning. “There have just been a series of massive detonations near mountain peaks around the valley, it looks like everyone in the valley has at least one peak on the slopes above them that’s about to come down!”

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