Pauls voice broke through the mental silence, anger filling his normally impassive tones.

“We have a choice, the Nozaedi will think we are all dead. Should we let them think this way?”

A ripple of thought passed through the crowd of minds.

“Should we strike back now and let them know that even the weapons of their God failed to break us?”

Another ripple, this one was supplemented by more howls from the demons on the walls. It was obivious they wanted to strike back, and right now.

Paul turned back to Ben: “What do we have?”

Ben joined Paul on the platform and pulled up his design for a guided plasma charge, the fighter design that had been destroyed in the Garage, and a rough design for a capitol ship, which he quickly modified to incorporate the new weapon design.

“I can have another fighter ready for testing in a day, and the guided plasma charge weapon ready by then. A space ship will take a little longer.”

Paul took control again, saying: “We’ve got work to do” and began organizing construction teams to supervise new tunnels, new labs, and more manufacturing rooms. They were going to need more of the now much depended on construction modules.

When Paul had finished the walls were once again the plain gray, but now there were shadows of flames and demons on them. The flames were dancing, the demons were sharpening wicked swords.

The next day found the entire compound still hard at work building, no one had rested. They didnt sleep anymore, they meditated, but not last night. They had rushed through making the parts necessary for Ben to start the fighter build. It had gone smoothly with only one or two errors that were easily rememdied. Ben had activated the module and went back to his lab where the new weapon would be ready. It was impractical for the fighter, but would be useful as a ground based weapon or as a turret on the soon to exist “Wraith” space frigate. Ben entered his lab, walked to his bench with the prototype and picked up right where he left off. It was a joke really, he had the thing working in all his simulations, he just hadnt put the two peices together. He put them together,and put it in the test chamber. The rig inside would be able to fire the weapon at his command. He left the chamber, starting a 1 minute countdown to firing. Once back in his work room he unburied a control station for the chamber. He pushed a large purple button and grav sheilds came to life inside the room, just in case. The timer ticked down to “00:01″ then..

FLASH!!

A bright blue flash filled the fireing chamber, spilling into his work room through the observation window, then vanished. The grav sheilds showed no power drain, he shut them down and ran tests for radiation. They came back negative. Without another moments hesitation he opened the door. There was a small amount of heat left in the targets area. And the target was a pile of ash smoldering on the floor. He reached the weapon and ran a quick diagnostic, it had worked flawlessly. And the weapon had barely even heated for the shot, the magnetic field in the barrel had kept the plasma away from the metal.

They had an extremely powerful straight path plasma gun now. Ben had to test the guided part now, he began designing in his head, quickly following it in real life with a carefully aligned set of electromagnets in the barrel that didnt interfere with the feild inside the barrel, which was impossible he realized. So he switched tactics, leaving the barrel the way it was and putting three magnetic feild projectors at the end of the barrel that would “catch” the sphere of plasma and allow the computer to steer it to the target.