Onward

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Here we go... hopefully.

She climbed out of the river with no idea where she was or how she got there. The last thing she remembered was pain, a tearing in her mind, then blackness. Suddenly she was underwater, fighting for air and clawing for the surface. When breath filled her lungs again she saw she was in a river and swam to shore. She stood and as the water streamed down her she looked around, the place looked familiar but she didn't know why. Then it came to her, the shadowy land, the river, it was the place from her dreams. Dugree knew if she followed the running water she would come to a sea of lights and she remembered the dream where she saw Jestr walking in the shallow water. He stepped into one of the lights and was gone, Dugree thought, perhaps, one of the countless lights there was her way out but she didn't know how she'd find it.

She walked along the river for days, several times she saw the flashes of light that had attracted her bird self, she knew the lights belonged to creatures like the one she'd injured in her panic. Dugree was wrong to harm it, she knew that action had somehow brought her to this land but she didn't understand the connection.

~|~

Joel's team had not only strengthened the shields and modified the blasters to shield cut, they came up with a new firing system. Blasters can't be fired from behind raised shields, the back of a shield is unstable and blaster fire there can easily cause it to explode. Shields have to be dropped to fire and that leaves the shooters exposed, the team came up with a way to minimize that. Timers on the shields caused them to drop halfway for microseconds and set off auto-firers on the blasters, all the shooters had to do was pick out a target and wait. There was still some exposure and to further minimize it the timers were on a random sequencer so the enemy couldn't figure out the timing of the shield drops.

The cybers came up with the new shields, the blasters lined up behind them and then the psionics. Because of all the shielding, including that given by the rocks and the door at the other end of the tunnel, the crew only had to worry about the effects of the three enemy psionics in the tunnel, the thirteen behind the door wouldn't be a problem until about halfway down. Line-of-sight was important to some types of psi but it was fairly certain that the enemy had talents inside that could affect them before Goren brought the door down. The monk didn't need line-of-sight but Goren had to see what he was manipulating, Arleen and Den didn't need line-of-sight to shield. The monk and Goren started things off, the monk sent amplified fear emotions while Goren concentrated on a rock-outcropping where he sensed three guards hiding. The firing timers were set and the blasters started picking out their targets. Most of the crew had little to do for the first part of the assault, they were to cover the rear and wait for the door to fall to begin the close-in work.

Excerpt from Shadow Stalkers by S.E.Estes