THE SECOND CRADLE - BOOK TWO OF THE IRON CRADLE SAGA Chapter 14: CHAPTER FOURTEEN - A lot of responsibility

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN Roslyn Research Center -- Earth Roslyn watched the cradles ascend into their active perch positions, then lost visual access to the chamber as something above interfered with her line of sight. She redirected her attention to what remained of the invaders and materialized beside Colonel Dmitri as he pushed down the tunnel toward the cradle chamber, his men methodically clearing the remnants ahead of him. "Colonel, we've got one more of those bipedal constructs tunneling down, along with a handful of the smaller ones." She glanced toward the breach. "It might be a good idea to pull your men back. They're making that hole a lot bigger than it needs to be, which tells me they're planning to drop something through it." Dmitri glanced back at her. "Drop what? More of these things?" "No." She paused. "I'm thinking of something a lot more explody." "All right, that's it." He raised his voice, turning to his men. "Everybody back! I want everyone back in the main corridor and taking cover right now!" He raised his pistol and put three quick rounds into a heavily damaged spider construct still twitching on the ground, then fell back with the rest. Roslyn had feared that when Gavin reentered the cradle, she might lose the expanded area of influence his control nodes had granted her. Instead, she retained full access to the entire facility. The initial anchor he had placed in what remained of her old lab gave her approximately two hundred and twenty-five feet in every direction. Additional nodes pushed that range further outward, but the central anchor sat near the heart of the underground complex, and that was enough to give her access all the way up to Sublevel 1. The more pressing question was, what would happen as Gavin and ARi's abilities continued to develop? Would her range extend here on Earth? It was something she would need to monitor closely. For now, she was just going to have to make do. Without access to the surface facility, she was blind to whatever the invaders were preparing above. She would only know when it passed through her range. Her projection materialized beside the colonel again. Dmitri had managed to make it all the way back to the barrier in front of the cafeteria doors, and was still out of breath from the run. "Colonel, you need to get all civilians and survivors to the back of the cafeteria. Everyone needs to take cover." As she spoke, the constructs broke through into the tunnel below. Roslyn looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then turned and gave the colonel a faint smile as she phased three small metallic drakes into existence on the ground in front of them. The constructs turned toward Roslyn, waiting for instructions. She pointed down the corridor toward the tunnel entrance. "Destroy them." They launched forward in a blur, darting across the barrier and down the corridor with unnatural speed. Brief flashes of beam fire strobed through the tunnel, and the metallic shriek of tearing and scraping echoed back toward them. Roslyn followed the Colonel and the rest of the Marines back into the cafeteria, looking around at all of the stunned people. There were parents holding their kids. And some of the adults were flipping additional tables and piling up anything they could, to build up the makeshift cover they had been hiding behind. "All right everybody, listen up. I need everybody to take cover now against the back wall and shield your eyes!" She felt it a moment later. The object dropped past Sublevel 1 and entered her range. She reacted without hesitation, phasing a dense shell of material beneath it and catching the device just before detonation. The explosion followed immediately. The ceiling shuddered. Dirt rained in a thick curtain, and a deep, rolling concussion tore through the facility. The colonel peeked up from behind a barricade of overturned tables and supplies just in time to catch the blinding surge of fire as it tore from the mouth of the tunnel and roared into the cor