Part 46

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Chiana stared in dazed astonishment. Only Sikozu's rough grasp around her waist prevented her from falling forwards into a perplexed looking Nebari Enforcer.

"Contain the perimeter!" Sikozu croaked at Authority Guide Gulmac, closing the doors behind her with her foot while trying to keep Chiana and Oshana from falling over. "They're in there" she threw one arm out and pointed back at the doors.

The Authority Guide's muskeg stare fell on Chiana for a moment before he gestured at his pristinely armored Enforcers. Some began moving others into positions and filing out of doors to either side, heading behind and in front of the Cordon Wing.

"Thank you" Sikozu barely muttered, suddenly hurrying Chiana, Oshana and herself between some Nebari Enforcers and right out the door leading to the front of the Cordon Wing. Pulse fire and neutralizer blasts immediately exchanged between Clan's small group hidden in the overgrown bushes and trees and the Enforcers that Sikozu, Chiana and Oshana were hurrying away from.

Once behind Clan's line, Chiana, Sikozu and Oshana collapsed onto the grassy garden bed between some massive trees. "Good plan" Chiana managed to compliment Sikozu between breaths. All three groaned and struggled to get themselves back up.

"If it's so hard to say, then don't say it" Tannac's voice preceded her landing on the ground from a branch above.

"Fine I won't" Bursamen argued back.

Tannac turned and stopped, seeing the three women looking up at her, her eyes widening at Chiana. She offered to help Chiana up, but Chiana leaned on Oshana to help her up. "Bursamen!" Tannac shouted, but Bursamen was already hurrying over to help Clan. "Impulsive narl" Tannac complained, firing her pulse pistol to light her marnnat pipe. After a luxurious inhale, she looked around and rested on one side of her rear on a boulder. "We've got to find Orren. Anyone seen her yet?"

"She is dead" Sikozu replied, staring beyond Tannac to John, who was sitting and holding Tannac's multi-facility pulse rifle in his lap while watching the Scarran.

"Oh her" Tannac shook her head slightly with regret and slowly drew in and exhaled a draw of smoke from her marnnat pipe. "She was very beautiful and strong....and dear" Tannac stared off. "I would have loved her" the sparkle of a tear nestled in her eye. "And she was the only one" Tannac glanced up to Sikozu for an instant "who knew what was really going on. I believe. Did she say anything? What did she say?"

Sikozu opened her mouth but held from speaking for a moment. She looked away. "Nothing."

Tannac nodded slowly, taking another draw.

"What is the safest route for us to leave this estate?" Sikozu asked Oshana.

"Leave?" Oshana asked, as if the thought hadn't occurred to her before.

"You're not leaving until she's found!" Koresh shouted as he hurried up, glowering at Oshana. Oshana looked to Koresh with open, hurt eyes. "You will!" he lifted a pulse pistol to her head. "Her life depends on it" he urged her, more entreatingly.

"I c-c...." Oshana tried to speak. "Her life here is over" her gaze trailed limply to her feet. "But that may be the best way for us to leave" Oshana looked up just around Chiana. "Down there, the outer laboratory. It may be passable to the outside, the outer biodome and the abandoned areas...."

Tannac and Sikozu followed Oshana's stare to a place between the high central garden forest they stood at and the wing destroyed in the explosion. "There's an entrance to a laboratory down there in the gardens, and we can escape through the laboratory?" Tannac asked to clarify.

Oshana made a small nod to the affirmative.

"Krew" Tannac nodded. "Surprising my forearm isn't swelling after breaking like that" Tannac looked over her forearm. "Not that I blame it for not bothering."

Chiana watched Oshana, her liquid black eyes warmed with admiration for the Stakira. After a life of manipulation and manipulating, the woman was now learning her way around what was right and what was not.

Koresh stared wildly through Oshana, now truly lost.

"If it, the body's there" Chiana told Oshana "ask her." Chiana pulled her shoulder to her ear in a shrug and flex along her back. After a moment of looking back, horrified, Oshana cast her eyes down in thought.

Tannac rushed over to the tree trunk and whistled for John. Then she started hurrying for Bursamen. "Let's lurch the drazz out of here if we can, before everybody gets Enforced" she told Chiana and the group while passing them. "And before we drop dead here."

"Right" Chiana seemed to hop into a run, heading towards the rocky slopes and waterfalls she'd found Oshana at a few times. It also had the advantage of being the opposite direction from the Enforcers and offered the possibility they'd lose the pursuing Enforcers among the landscape. "This way leads down there" she looked back and gestured everyone to follow.

The tech, Mish, sprung at Chiana's words, tearing out from the bushes he was hiding in. He dropped his pistol like it was infectious, glancing at it with horror. Dodging to barely avoid a few streams of fire around him got him alert to his situation again and he hurried up to Chiana. "Can I follow you?" he nervously asked.

"Aaah" Chiana hurried over to pick up his pistol for herself and hurried back. She looked him over and smirked. "Anywhere you want."

"Come with us or stay and tell the nice Nebari officials all about it, lady" John told Takshaek, hoisting up the multi-facility rifle and hurrying to join Chiana. "You're free to choose your own mistake."

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Clan took another distraction fire behind. She hurried from the rear of the group to stand on a boulder to risk getting a better view. The unit of Enforcers was being spread out by the woods and general disarray, which was a good thing. But she couldn't relax since they were still staying close behind. Leaping down, Clan hurried to get the stragglers to speed up.

Chiana looked back and saw Oshana and others lagging behind, or at least not going any faster than the Enforcers probably were. Hearing the growing roar of a waterfall, Chiana remembered an obscured little path and tunnel she'd gone through during one of her numerous wanderings around the grounds. She ran to Clan at the back. "See if you can stall them about here, just for a few microts" Chiana told her.

Once some fire from the militia had made the Enforcers stop to cover and counter fire in a temporary position, Chiana scurried to the front and gestured everyone to a detour. To her amazement, everyone actually followed her directions. She kept gesturing and blinked, impressed.

Spying a couple of bushes, Chiana ran to them and tried pulling them up. Failing that, she pulled a tiny cutting laser out of a fold at the waistband of the white pants Larran had dressed her in. "Always wanted one of these" she told a curiously watching John.

"Where'd you pilfer that from?" he asked. "Never mind, my artful Dodger, what's the plan?"

"There's a path down that way, we might lose them, wanna block the frelling path with this frelling-! These. Well, that was the idea. Not very good" she judged the laser.

"Scaly!" John called out. "Hang on" he told Chiana "Gonna get lizard lady." He gestured Takshaek over. "It'd help us all get out of here if you can pull these up."

Takshaek was gasping with raspy breaths to keep up and obviously in bad shape, but pulling the bushes up was no real effort for her. The Scarran sneered. "Where do you want them?" she asked with a sarcastic bow.

John tried to figure if the sneering was because that's what they always do, or perhaps because she was disgusted with getting her hands dirty pulling weeds. "Didn't you people have a big horse head looking off branch and you're the upper class? I seem to remember seeing some of the others when I was....damn what was I doing there?"

"What are you doing here?" Chiana rhetorically asked, taking his elbow and starting him in the direction they needed to go. The path led over a rocky stream and around to the opposite side of a waterfall. Well hidden in the overgrown stands on either side of the waterfall was a small opening, leading to a tunnel. Once everyone had passed into the opening, Chiana gestured to Takshaek to place the bushes down. Once they were in place and Takshaek stood back, Chiana nodded, satisfied the bushes did a good enough job of hiding the opening to throw them for a least a few thousand microts.

"Come on" Chiana passed by the group and went into the tunnel. "It shows the waterfall then leads out the other side behind the hill, heading the other way" Chiana hurriedly explained with a trace of a crafty satisfaction in her smirk.

John pointed a thumb to the side at the tunnel opening underneath the waterfall. "Cool. Backside of water. Went on a boat ride with a long line at Disneyland to see that."

Chiana hurried out of the opposite end of the tunnel and stood on a rock to watch everyone come out and to look around. She gestured the way to everyone. Sikozu emerged from the tunnel, shaking her head, probably from the headache of light after the darkness brought on by her condition. She didn't seem to be aware that her pants had slipped down too far. "Hey Sikozu" Chiana called out. "Pants falling" she pointed out and cackled.

Sikozu tugged her pants back up and looked behind herself when Bursamen yelped and came out of the tunnel covering his head. Sikozu looked annoyed and made some mumble about males. Tannac followed Bursamen out in a moment, conspicuously casual while she put another drop in her pipe. Her pipe fell from her lips as she suddenly stared past Chiana.

Chiana craned her head to look behind. From the partial cover of a tree branch in front of the Cordon Wing, now well above and behind, a black clothed Nebari male was holding an elaborate pulse rifle aimed her direction. Almost the instant she saw it, some instinct made the next instants slower and slower. She could see that the rifle was aimed directly between her eyes and that he was bracing the rifle with his right arm. She tossed herself to her left.

While she began reflexively moving out of the way, she could see the sniper's patient, determined frown as his finger activated the rifle. In a leisurely slow sequence, she watched the rifle's indicator light, energy lighting all along the barrel of the rifle, and finally, a slow charge of the blue and white bolt of energy crackling in the air in a path directly towards her. The sniper was moving the rifle to anticipate her movement even as the charge was leaving the rifle, but moving it against his right arm limited the speed and range of his correction.

Slowly, but quicker than the pulse fire could reach her, her vision intensified and then faded to a milky blur. She moved very slowly from her position, wondering in silence if things would return to normal or if she'd already seen her last and would slowly pass into death, whatever death was or wasn't.

"Chiana!" John shouted in shock, running toward her with his hand stretched out for her. He saw the shot glance the outside of her upper arm and pass by, exploding impotently on a rock near the tunnel exit. Standing on Chiana's other side, Mish caught her and fell with her onto his back into a bush.

"What the frell!" was all Bursamen could say, looking around for the source of the shot.

Tannac drew the last pistol she had with her, jumped to the bottom of the boulder Chiana had been standing on into a laying position on her front and aimed the pistol with her only good hand, resting it on the top of the boulder. Up in her sights, the sniper saw her as well and hurried to aim. In a bare moment, she fired. She could see a look of disbelief on his face for an instant before she let her exhausted eyes blur. The sniper fell from the tree.

"Damn great shot, Tonic!" John stared at the tree the sniper had been sitting in as he got onto his feet.

"Tannac" Chiana said to herself, blinking blindly and nodding as Mish lifted her back up onto her feet. "Who....?"

"Inton" Tannac said to herself. "He never doubted."

"Are....you all right?" Mish asked, letting go of Chiana before realizing she was blind.

"Yeah. Thanks" Chiana stumbled a few steps and tried to get her bearings.

"Oh crap" John took a good look at Chiana's eyes. "Blind again. Where do we go?" John asked Oshana. The Stakira just stared in tears at the place the sniper had been. "Well, Pumpkin" he put a hand on her shoulder. "We had a saying back home. What if Jesus came back as a bum? Anyway, I'm sure there are going to be people who'd sooner shoot her as a fraud to safeguard their ideals than ever think she could be the real Dr. McCoy. Well she's not what they think, and now I think about it, that doesn't help things either. Come on."

John led Chiana in the direction she'd gestured. "Okay" she said. "O-oposite the wing. Cordon wing. Should be a little hill and a bunch of sickly looking persimmon bushes."

"Persimmon sick in a bush?" John looked around.

Mish walked up, working on a data pad. "That's left. To our left, somewhere, is....biologic maintenance?" Mish looked. "All I see are denser, larger trees."

"Yeah, that's it. To the, the bigger trees" Chiana nodded.

"Aye aye lumberpip" John gestured everyone. "This way, gang."

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