A cool breeze blows through the dunes, sweeping away some of the grains further away.
Tasha exhausted herself climbing to the top and rolling to the bottom, sand all over her oval-shaped face. She stood up and ran farther from the Federation outpost and closer to the canyons in front of her.
A loud boom resonated from the atmosphere and a bright trail of flames followed soon after, heading into her current position.
Her eyes widen in anxiety as she quickens her pace, running faster than she has ever run before.
The flame trail closed in, and a tall black object resembling a cargo pod landed 300 meters away on a dune. The top of the door was a label drawn in human language, blaring in red all over.
Sentinel B-Y21.
The sight of that name stopped Tasha in her tracks. With eyes closed, she gathered the essence of her mind and readied herself for battle.
The cargo pod's doors were blown open, revealing a black humanoid spacesuit equipped with a variety of weaponry and layers of synthetic armor.
The human took out one of the weapons, a double-barreled gun with optics and a dual trigger. One of the barrels was rectangular and larger than the other, radiating energy pulses from time to time.
"Your actions are deemed traitorous, Tasha. The Authority will not let you go after this." A cold masculine voice echoes within the suit.
He points the muzzle at Tasha's shivering body, a glint of red shining through the rifle's optics. "Or should I say, Ta'hasha Ein'zedo, Penumbra's lone star?"
Tasha's purplish eyes sparkled with a bright, penetrating light as invisible waves rushed out of her body and toward her powerful adversary.
Wherever the waves traveled, space was distorted. Even the sand couldn't help but flow under the raging tides of Tasha's might.
The man in a black spacesuit, Sentinel B-Y21, flicked a switch on his armor, erecting an almost transparent and all-encompassing violet shield.
Turbulent ripples appeared on the shield as the invisible waves crashed through. Despite being held down and unable to fire, his rifle remained pointing at Tasha, and let out a low laugh.
"A sound-type psionic? Heh, that all you've got, lone star?"
The invisible waves surrounded him, blocking out his view. A bad premonition crept down his body, knowing that Tasha was up to something.
"Shit."
Tasha released an ear-shattering voice, bursting down the shield and the armor that the man was wearing and blowing him back hundreds of meters away, rendering him incapacitated.
Scraps of natural or synthetic metal settle on the sand, along with his odd darker-than-red blood, which soon returns to his disfigured body.
His body jolted as it began to mend the damage caused by Tasha's strike.
The muscles squirmed with long fibers spinning into existence and connected back to the rest. The joints reattached to the bones, producing a firm click sound.
It was a painful process indeed, yet a lifesaving one at that.
Not long after, he stood up buck naked, his black eyes fixed on the canyons in the south.
"You won't get away, lone star."
Metal shards from the sand accumulate on the surface of his flesh, reconstructing into the spacesuit armor he was wearing before.
He reached out his hand into the air, and the gun from earlier returned for him to hold. The booster on his back flared up, and the scanners in his eyes caught Tasha, who was now limping and bleeding from her nose and lips.
He landed at the top of a dune, crouching in place.
His attention concentrated on the target as he gently pulled the second trigger at the back. The energy barrel at the bottom received a surge of power as it unleashed a concentrated laser strike that hit Tasha's left hip.
She grunted, disregarding the burn on her flesh, which was quickly drowned under her streaming blood. She pushed her mind to the extreme and sent her consciousness into her immediate surroundings.
Two muffled laser shots rang in the air.
Silent as they were, Tasha's drawn-out power detected their presence. She gritted her teeth, sending out two invisible waves that obliterated the laser strikes.
Sentinel B-Y21 lowers his gun.
"Target's life signs are dwindling. Now, how do we finish this without her dying? Psionics are so hard to capture..."
Death was a sentence too light for these traitors. The Authority had made clear that this woman be brought alive.
He switched to a different kind of weapon, its barrel composed of several electromagnetic coils, and closed in on Tasha who was still drawing out the last of her mind.
He trod carefully, afraid that he was on the range of Tasha's strikes. Letting her unleash another one would surely end her life.
His full concentration on the task kept him from discovering the distortion on the dunes not far away.
A sharp glint from an optic sends a shiver down his spine, alerting him of the immediate danger.
When he turned around to the source, a laser strike almost found its way to the center of his chest. A bluish-white barrier blocks it in time, creating huge ripples on impact.
Another laser struck his back, blocked by the barrier again.
"Shit, a kill zone!"
He flared up his boosters in an attempt to fly away, but a missile target lock was displayed on his spacesuit's helmet's screen.
At the periphery of his vision was a larger-than-average mecha suit, complete with a machine gun on the right shoulder and a rocket launcher on the left, with smoke drifting out of the long barrel.
Flares pop out of his suit, distracting the 40mm rocket away. The rocket explodes with a shockwave, sending him flying off course.
The booster disengaged and he landed 200 meters away.
The cracked bones healed in the blink of an eye, allowing him to throw out smoke on his position.
Sentinel B-Y21 could hear rustling in the sand, his pursuers closing in. "Disengage shield. Switch to thermal and enable the IWA. Send in the Hermes too. I need that additional firepower."
He cocked up his two-barreled gun and recognized a bunch of robots carefully looking in his direction. The cold muzzle points at the adversaries, blasting an energy round into the robot's chest and drilling a hole in the process.
"Target reacquired. Retaliating."
The sound of laser charges filled up his surroundings.
Sentinel B-Y21 rolled away in advance and started moving around, trying to avoid as many attacks as possible.
'0.5 concentrated lethal kilovolt laser rifles?! What sort of power is this?!'
He cursed inwardly. Even though his rifle's laser was a quarter less powerful than that, it could destroy an entire metallic robot.
At that point in time, another loud boom resonates in the atmosphere. A streamlined spacecraft darts through the air, performing a strafing run that downed five of the robots attacking him.
He burst out laughing, but only for a moment.
A hail of.50 cal bullets knocked him out and destroyed his rifle.
His regeneration kicked and was about to rise up when he noticed a blue-eyed automaton running into him and punching his face. The weight of a hundred-kilogram robot crushed all of his resistance, putting him unconscious.
The spacecraft turned around and prepared for a strafe again, but Tasha, who had been hiding earlier, came out into the open and confronted the supersonic metal.
A massive invisible wave gathered around her head and propelled it into the spacecraft faster than it could evade. The spacecraft crashed into the ground and drifted along the sand.
Sparks of electricity could be seen in the spacecraft's exposed wires. The engines slowly shut down, releasing their last breath.
Tasha smiled broadly, pleased with the outcome of her work. Her breathing became shallow, and she collapsed, unconscious.
One of the automatons attended to her and reported.
"Successor, her vital signs are weakening. What shall we do about her?"
In the shadows of the night, a large combat mecha suit appears on the dune and stares right at Tasha.
"Get her to the lab, immediately. We'll deal with her later."
The automaton gently carried her away, guarded by three on the way back.
On the other hand, Julian reassessed the situation. This was an unexpected outcome he had overlooked.
He turned to the unconscious man not far away and his downed spacecraft. "This must be a rookie sentinel and that thing should be one of the Hermes, a classic spacecraft purposefully designed for every sentinel member."
"The successor appears to be familiar with the man in a black spacesuit. May I ask the successor about him?" Intellus' voice rings in his VNI.
"This guy's a part of the Sentinel Program in the Federation. I was supposed to be enlisted to that unit but sadly... some things happened." Melancholy filled his heart, a sensation that Intellus had felt before.
"Is the Sentinel Program a very special one, successor?"
Julian chuckled, a little guilty about the past. "More than you think it is. These guys are professional, almost immortal I say. They have inhuman skills and are proficient in their tasks. They report immediately to their superiors via word of mouth. It's quite difficult to track these guys down using the usual methods."
Intellus' eyes flickered. "Your description of them is very contradictory, successor."
"You tell that to the six robots we've lost," Julian voiced out his dissatisfaction. They should have been able to mitigate the losses but messed up halfway.
The crystal armor that Hesab introduced was useless as a piece of junk. It could not even absorb a fraction of Sentinel B-Y21's energy blast.
"The successor appears to have something on his mind."
Julian solemnly looked at the dark sky. "This Sentinel Program thing started with a guy named Baker on the planet where my parents died. If he's related to this, then he should have arrived here at any time now. Maybe I'll get the answers I need to know about what happened back then."
"That must be the second anomaly that Secturus has detected," Intellus added. "Shall we retreat or continue our advance?"
"Detain this sentinel, rid him of everything in his body, and put them very far away. Don't kill him as we can make use of him later." Julian pointed at the spacecraft with interest. "And get that thing back up and running."
"Orders received." Intellus cut off the connection, leaving Julian back with the automatons.
His eyes fixed on the Federation outpost several kilometers away. "The rest of you, come with me to the outpost. There's no time left. We'll attack it tonight. Pronto."
If his intuition served him right, a civil war should have broken out in the Federation's outpost.
Otherwise, that woman would not have left unnoticed and alone.
