Psionics

1

May 28, 2406

Solar System

Earth

Jason sat cross-legged inside a white spherical pod, patiently waiting while the Star Force medical staff scanned him using their most advanced sensors. He neither heard nor saw anything other than the calm interior of the pod, but the equipment was bombarding him with numerous types of energy, probing straight through his clothes and flesh and detailing his body in intricate design as the machine worked to compile a composite digital clone for the medtechs to research.

While the pod was calm and tranquil, with his body reflecting the same, the trailblazer’s mind was not. It was a low level storm, constantly raging that he had to maintain control over constantly. The pressure exerted on him, and by him in return, kept his mind in a semi-numb state that left him partially vulnerable to his surrounding environment, given that his situational awareness wasn’t at its normally high level.

That said, his ‘spherical vision’ helped to compensate for the disadvantage, allowing him to see in all directions around him even with his eyes closed. At the moment they were, but he hadn’t turned on the ability, which he’d subsequently learned how to control and the more times he used it the easier it became to switch it on and off. Despite the pain, he’d been diligently working to improve the ability, learning to focus it where he wanted for greater range and detail, almost as if it were a radar beam.

“That’s good, Jason,” a medtech’s voice echoed through the small pod from a hidden speaker. “Begin phase 2 please.”

Without answering Jason sucked in a deep breath and slowly released it. As he did he flipped on his spherical vision and the interior curve of the chamber manifested itself beyond his closed eyelids. It stretched all around him, down to the flat floor beneath, while ignoring his clothes by means of a minimum distance function of his mind. If an object had reached out to poke him in the arm, it would have disappeared in mind’s eye a couple of inches away from contact while he was in this ‘viewing’ mode.

No such objects were present though. He was alone in the chamber with only himself and his clothes. Even all sounds from the exterior were being blocked, so as not to affect the subject undergoing the scans. Jason ‘looked’ at the inside of the pod, seeing nothing but the tactile-like sensation of its inner surface for several minutes, then the medtech’s voice came on again.

“Begin phase 3 please.”

With a bit of increased pain, Jason forced his spherical vision to switch from ‘viewing’ mode to ‘proximity’ mode. The walls of the pod disappeared and the perimeter of his body seemed to glow, with his clothes being registered in his mind as foreign objects, especially his shoes that appeared like heavy boulders around his feet. He could feel his eyelashes, the small hairs on his body, and the thicker ones on his head bristling like a blonde porcupine, though he could see no color. Everything felt black and white and grainy, though in proximity mode the grains decreased in size, offering enhanced accuracy.

Jason had been on Earth for nearly a week, and one of the first tests the medtechs had run after thoroughly debriefing him was to test his level of sensory sensitivity. While in proximity mode they’d touched various parts of his body with tiny objects, similar in size and pressure to ants and flies. With a signal button he was supposed to register exactly when contact was made, and for control purposes they’d run the test with his spherical vision turned off, though they had to take his word for it at first.

The control tests had been in three stages. The first stage was neutral, just having him come in and be politely prodded with his eyes closed. Second stage was for him to go through a sensory cleansing meditation and dial his senses up as much as he could. It was something Jason was familiar with, much akin to noises sounding louder when they broke into a quiet setting, while noises sounded fainter after, say, coming out of a very loud concert. The body adjusted its ‘normal’ based on what was going on around it, so as to keep as accurate as possible without overloading.

Stage three had been going the opposite way. He’d gone through a short but intense workout in the pyramid with some of the other Archons then come straight to the testing area, where they repeated the same level of touch tests. As expected, there was a variance…and from the data gathered they’d constructed a baseline for his tactile sensitivity, which differed depending on which part of his body they touched, with the areas that saw the most contact, such as the pads of his feet, being the most unresponsive, given the amount of stimuli they processed on a daily basis…not to mention the thin callouses he’d developed from so much kicking and running.

With that biological map in place they’d repeated the tests with him using his spherical sense in proximity mode…and found an insanely sharp increase to his tactile sense. Even the post-workout mode was sharper than the meditative calm had been. How he’d been enhancing his tactile sense had been a mystery for the other Archons who’d arrived at the training summit before him, but eventually one of the medtechs had stumbled onto an erroneous data packet that led one of the engineers on station to deduce the presence of an energy field.

With that avenue of thought now before them, Star Force had hastily brought in energy sensors and confirmed small amounts from the four Archons showing tidbits of the spherical vision…enough to convince them to design and build a much more complicated and powerful sensor, which Jason was now sitting in.

The trailblazer was unlike any of the others, given that his abilities were so much more advanced, so this test would hopefully give the medtechs plenty of data to chew on while the Archons went about the discovery process in their own training-inspired way.

“Excellent. Phase 4 please.”

Jason shut down his proximity mode and instead pushed out his spherical vision around him, going beyond the boundaries of the pod and ‘seeing’ through the walls a few feet…which was all the further his range would go at the moment. As prompted, he compressed his spherical vision down to a narrow cone and pressed it out forward, allowing him to see two of the medtechs outside near a terminal.

He moved his ‘spotlight’ around, all the while sitting motionless inside the pod. Jason counted 9 people in the room in total, with another four in the one below and at least 8 in the room above, though it was so busy with feet walking in and out that he couldn’t be sure how many there actually were. His vision wouldn’t extend throughout the room, nor even far enough to touch the ceiling, but he could see several sets of legs up to the knees, but he couldn’t focus close enough to see through their clothes as he could with the medtechs nearby.

It was strange, given that he could adjust what he was seeing. One moment the walls of the pod were opaque, then with a mental twist he could see the components inside, layer by layer if he wanted, so long as the material didn’t get too dense. Like Superman, the heavier elements blocked his vision, or rather some of them did and didn’t. Which ones were a continuing subject of interest for the medtechs and engineers who were continuing to try and examine the energy fields he was producing in order to ‘see’ in this fashion.

Those energy fields were part of what they were measuring now in the pod, along with his body’s reactions, trying to determine how and where he was producing them. This wasn’t the first time they’d put him in the pod, and each time they did they gathered enough data to have the engineers reconfigure the device in a new way, as if they were tuning it to settings they were just now discovering, making this whole exercise a massive beta test.

“Thank you. Rest a moment.”

Jason did as prompted and released the vision, causing another blip of pain in the transition, though the power drain in his head diminished. It didn’t pull much, but there was definitely an energy expenditure of some sort pulling from an inner reserve that seemed to refill gradually. In the past his head had been so chewed up that he’d had a hard time analyzing it, and though the pain wasn’t gone he’d been able to define several things about his abilities, first of which was that his ‘reserves’ were actually three different pools of energy, one of which fed the spherical vision.

“Begin phase 5.”

Jason opened his eyes and looked down at the small marble he held cradled in a fold of the material of his pants where his legs crossed. He’d placed it there half an hour ago rather than hold it in his hand or place it on the floor. It’d been invisible during all but his proximity mode, but now that he looked at it both his proximity mode and viewing mode activated, piggybacking onto his vision in an odd way that he hadn’t quite been able to pin down yet.

The senses pulled from what he thought of as the secondary pool of energy, while he painfully released the floodgates on the primary and fed power down a line of connection and into the marble, gripping it in a different type of energy field and lifting it up into the air in front of him, where he held it aloft as the sensors scanned both him and the fields he was producing.

Meanwhile the tertiary pool of energy lingered in his mind. At first he hadn’t been sure it was even there, for he never could seem to make it do anything, but given enough experience poking around his own head he’d confirmed that there was in fact another reserve there, smaller in size, but that was probably because he hadn’t used it for anything, and if/when he did it would probably grow larger like the others had with training.

Holding the marble aloft took a good deal of concentration, but his primary pool of energy had grown to the point where the ‘physical’ aspect of lifting the lightweight object wasn’t an issue. At present he’d have trouble budging his shoe, even without his foot in it, but a marble was definitely within his ability to manipulate and given the size of this one, which he carried with him most of the time for practice sake, he could maintain the mid-air suspension for a little over 5 minutes.

His record with the white orb was 5:39, but this test wouldn’t last more than a minute, for the medtechs didn’t want his energy depleted.

True to their word, the voice came back again 32 seconds later.

“Begin phase 6.”

Jason closed his eyes and concentrated, feeling his ‘grip’ on the marble slip as his vision went away. Relying now only on his spherical sight for coordination, he kept the marble aloft then pulled it to the left and set it into a slow orbit around his body…which was very difficult to maneuver. Fortunately it was something that Jason practiced regularly, otherwise he’d only have been able to manage straight lines.

“Thank you. Rest now,” the medtech said after five full rotations.

Jason guided the marble back down to the niche where his legs crossed and set it into the fold of cloth where it had originally been, then bit his teeth against the pain as he released the object. His head constantly hurt, but it always hurt more when he was changing something.

The side of the pod cracked open and the two halves of the dome split, peeling apart and turning the floor he was sitting on into a round table with the various medtechs standing around. Some of which had thoroughly startled expressions.

“What?” Jason asked, sliding off the table and pocketing the marble.

“Have a look,” the lead medtech said, motioning him towards a console.

He walked over and glanced at a detailed image of his sitting form, only without visuals. Instead it was a mass of data signatures, including auras surrounding his body. “Energy fields?”

The medtech nodded. “And we finally have data on them. Yours are far more advanced than the others, though that’s probably due to the crudity of our equipment. You’re putting out larger fields, hence there’s more for us to glean an understanding from.”

“Hey,” one of the engineers said, mock offended. “Ingrate.”

The lead medtech smiled ironically, but let the comment pass. “This is phase 2. Note how the field fills the entire chamber, and probably beyond. Now compare with stage 6,” he said as another medtech adjusted the scans for them.

Jason squinted, trying to make out what he was seeing. There was a compressed line running from his head to the marble as it spun around, but the intersection between the line and the widespread energy field was…funky.

“What am I seeing?”

“I don’t know,” the medtech answered honestly. “But it’s significant.”

“Well I do,” the engineer said, pointing a finger at the display. “At least I have a theory. The thin line is your lifting mechanism. Think of it like a tractor beam. Where the beam connects with the object there are secondary lines flowing back to source. Input and output.”

“Flowing back through the other energy field?” Jason asked.

“You’ve said that’s how you ‘see’ things. One field causes a change, the other senses the change. Look here,” the engineer continued, pointing at Jason’s feet in the image. “There are very faint lines of activity. My guess is because the field has something to ‘report’ back, whereas the rest of the area is open air up to the wall. Less stimuli there, so the field is less active? Just thinking out loud.”

“I get what you’re saying,” Jason said, studying the display. “But tractor beam doesn’t fit. I can move an object on the other side of a blocking one. It’s like the field can penetrate matter, then condense at any point it wants to form a physical hold.”

“Perhaps the line is your power conduit,” the medtech suggested, running a finger on the console from head to marble. “As you send energy down it fluctuates and gives the sensors something to ping off of.”

“Perhaps, but the field is larger than is showing. It feels like a shadow I can throw over an object like a blanket, and once on top I can use precision control, but the blanket throwing is almost random. I can nudge it one way or another, but it’s pretty much all around me and that’s not showing here,” he said, tapping the screen.

“Probably the sensitivity of the sensors,” the engineer grumbled. “We didn’t have much time to build them, so they’re still a bit on the crude side.”

“Do you have enough data to work with for now…both of you?”

“Yes,” the medtech said, while the engineer simply nodded.

“See what you can make of it,” Jason said, placing a hand on the engineer’s shoulder as he walked by and out of the room. He continued down a few hallways before finding a short stairwell and heading down to ground floor…where he walked out of the building and onto the enormous command deck within the V’kit’no’sat pyramid.

He grabbed one of two dozen tech-grade mongooses parked outside the Star Force-constructed building and tore off down the ‘road’ between the other out of place structures dotting what had once been dinosaur central. Their large lounging pads were now surrounded by a sea of buildings, none of which really even began to put a dent in the massive amount of floor space available.

Jason followed the chaotic traffic patterns via painted lines on the deck that swerved in and out around buildings and pads, changing routes twice before he came to a newly constructed building, larger than all the others but still painfully short compared to the height of the chamber. The Archon locked up the brakes and skidded the low-powered mongoose to a halt in its parking place, turning off the whisper-quiet engine and heading inside the most recent addition to the training sanctum.

What had originally been four buildings was now five, with this one larger than the other four combined, given that Davis anticipated many more Archons coming to the pyramid over time as they developed these peculiar mental abilities. The original sanctum had been built small, given that they only needed it for the handful of Archons on site, which was usually one or two doing some basic research through the database or helping the techs by working the hidden interfaces.

On occasion there’d be a group of Archons that would come down to use the holographic training programs, but in general there were few on site at any given time and the facilities could really only handle about 20. Thus Davis had ordered an upgrade.

The building Jason entered was a tall spire with a wide base three stories thick. The highest peak reached only halfway up to the ceiling, but looked down on all the other buildings with ease. The trailblazer headed over to one of the multi-purpose rooms they’d designated as Cerebro 1 and tagged the door switch on the wall. When the halves parted he walked into a control booth, on the other side of which was a pitch black room, visible only through technological means on a wall-spanning artificial window.

Jason sat down in one of the seats, watching the individual inside walk slowly through a maze of small objects.

“Have fun?” Aaron-010 asked, his eyes not turning away from the screen as he was telepathically guiding the other Archon through the darkened obstacles.

2

“They confirmed the presence of energy fields,” Jason answered.

“Well, at least now we know it’s not magic,” Aaron quipped, still focusing ahead…then cringing as Zack-887 walked face first into a soft pylon.

“Nice one,” the Saber said, feeling the dark object with his right hand while he rubbed his smooshed nose with his left.

Jason glanced at Aaron, seeing his forehead knit up as he concentrated. The conversation capability of the control room was one-way only, allowing Zack to talk to Aaron, but not the reverse…forcing the trailblazer to use his infantile telepathy.

Zack received another mental message, then stepped left and smacked into a knee-high object that tripped him up and had him half fall on top of it, catching himself on his knee.

“Let’s go back to binary, please,” Zack said as he stood up and oriented himself straight towards the object, then pointed to his right for a moment, receiving a ‘no’ command from Aaron, so he pointed a thumb back over his shoulder behind him, whereupon he received a ‘yes.’ Neither command was a word, for Aaron didn’t have the skill for that yet. Each thought was something unique, almost like a sound, with the ‘high pitched’ version being used as a ‘yes’ while the ‘low pitched’ version was being used as a ‘no.’

Zack spun around, doing his best to manage a 180 to keep with a grid pattern. He took a step forward and stopped, pointing forward. Another ‘yes’ command formed in his mind like a lingering ping and he took another step.

Jason heard the mental commands as well, as could anyone within a limited radius around Aaron. He’d learned how to transmit openly, rather than point to point. Some of the other Archons that had come in were able to spot other minds, and in this same room they practiced identifying where they were on a grid, much like a chess board. When one person would move from point to point the Archon would sense where their mind was and adjust the board, all the while not being able to see or hear them.

From that ability it was quickly assumed that if an Archon could do both then they might be able to send private messages to one individual rather than blasting it out for all to hear, but so far no one had progressed far enough to try, given that they either had the ‘tracking’ ability or the ‘transmitting’ ability, with Aaron being the most advanced in the transmitting department.

They’d experimented with range outside of the cerebro building, and at his best Aaron had managed 345 meters, though he’d had to practically shout with his mind, which had been taxing, similar, Jason expected, to lifting an object smaller than a marble. He guessed as each of them advanced their power levels would increase, but right now that’s not what Aaron was working on.

“Slow going?”

“My ‘vocabulary’ sucks,” Aaron said as Jason sensed him give Zack another ‘yes’ command when he pointed to his left. “I can handle binary because it’s measured from one extreme to another, but can you notice the variation?”

“Your yesses aren’t all the same.”

“And that’s the problem,” the trailblazer said, sending another ‘yes’ as Zack pivoted and took a step forward, even before he’d pointed ahead.  “We’ve been trying four points…left, right, forward, and back…but I keep slurring the thoughts and he has to guess. It’s like I’m a baby just learning how to speak and all I can do right now is make random sounds.”

“Any sensing ability peeking through?”

“No, and I’d hoped that I might be able to pick up a bit of reflection from my own transmissions but I haven’t got nil.”

“When you’ve got time they’re going to want to stick you in the machine.”

“I’ll head down in an hour or so. I want to get him to the end of the maze first. The more practice I get the better.”

Jason clapped him on the shoulder then headed out the door, leaving him to work without having to talk. As he left he heard another ‘no’ from him, followed by a ‘yes’ in the hallway that was fainter. He caught one more ‘no’ before finally walking out of Aaron’s transmitting range, then as he moved over to another part of the sanctum his head started to hurt worse.

His vision blinked out for a moment, then he steadied himself against the wall as he forced his mind to function…then the strain released and he was back to his normal pain-racked self.

Jason shook his head clear then entered a door a few steps down, finding a pair of Archons in the adjacent room. This one was a normal sparring chamber, circular in design, with Kian-093 sitting in the center while Ellie-579 worked her way around the perimeter doing a series of gymnastics exercises ranging from flips to balance bends, all of which required a significant amount of mental control and coordination.

“Your range is getting better,” Jason commented, with Ellie ceasing her circuit at the sound of his voice. She pulled up, her chin-length blue hair flopping down over her ears as she completed an inversion.

“You felt that?” Kian asked.

“Just now,” Jason confirmed. “Unless someone else was nearby.”

“No, that was me,” the trailblazer said with a bemused look on his face. “I just didn’t think my range had progressed that far. I’m surprised you could tell the difference with how screwed up your head is already.”

“How’s Barbie doing?” Jason asked, referring to Ellie who frowned at the reference.

Kian’s face clenched up and Jason felt another upgrade to his headache that made his balance wobbly, but he managed to stay on his feet. Ellie, however, looked like she was suddenly standing on ice and slipped, falling back onto her butt just before Kian released his disruption field.

“Still getting caught off guard, I’m afraid,” he said, standing up. “I’m surprised you didn’t go down too.”

“Like you said, already got a lot of stuff rattling around in here, so I have to stay on guard.”

“That was cheap,” Ellie complained, getting back up to her feet.

Kian snickered, but offered no further explanation.

“You any better at resisting?” Jason asked her.

“Yes,” the Sangheili said, “but it’s not so much about resisting as it is pushing back. It feels like firing a squirt gun only to have the wind scatter the squirt into droplets. Up the pressure and flow and you can still maintain decent firepower. I haven’t found a way to fight back against what he’s doing, just manage it better. Is your headache really blocking it?”

“My mental pressure flow is sky high already,” Jason told her, “but I almost fell over too. Any twinges from you?”

“Not yet. Still just spherical sight.”

“I want to know the moment it happens. There are some drills I want you to work through so you can hopefully avoid the fragmentation I’ve got.”

“Cheery thought…but as far as keeping you notified of any changes, I’ll add now that I’m also starting to show some tracking ability. Minute levels, only about 3 meters in range, but that puts me on the doubles list now.”

“You and three others?”

“Five total,” Kian corrected. “Tyr came in this morning. He’s got tracking and transmission at minimal levels.”

“Six of us now,” Jason commented, referring to the number of trailblazers. “I get the feeling that eventually we’re all going to end up here.”

“You had your test yet?”

“Just. The techs have got some data to work with now, but they’re going to want to run everyone through the machine.”

“Learn anything?”

“Energy fields and lots of new questions.”

Kian rolled his eyes. “Well, we knew they were energy fields. Anything useful?”

“Not particularly. You figured anything out recently?”

“Starting to,” Kian said. “I’d give you a demonstration but your head hurts enough, I’d imagine. Sorry about the accidental one, by the way. The disruption field can be modified to affect the target in different ways. I haven’t mastered control over it yet, so it’s pretty much accidental when it happens.”

“What ways?”

“Well…ask her. I haven’t actually been on the receiving end yet.”

“The usual is staticy interference, like your nervous system has been disrupted with bit errors. But twice now he’s done something different with it and the static wasn’t there, but it required a lot more mental effort to move.”

Jason glanced at Kian. “Slow?”

The other trailblazer’s jaw dropped. “I totally missed that connection.”

“It didn’t slow me down,” Ellie differed. “My movements were the same speed, it was the mental processing that was…well, ok, that was slowed. Call it slow reflexes, but movement was unaffected.”

“Not like that,” Kian said, shaking his head.

“Have you ever played Final Fantasy?” Jason asked.

Ellie shook her head. “No.”

“That’s why you don’t get it. ‘Slow’ is an effect that you put on an opponent allowing them to get, say, three punches in a given span of time as opposed to four.”

“I’ll have to check that game out…because that’s pretty much what it felt like. Of course I didn’t have long to work through it. He only managed a few seconds each time.”

“Start with Final Fantasy 7,” Kian suggested.

Ellie frowned. “Why not at the beginning?”

“Just trust us on this one,” Jason agreed. “Any other variations?”

“He did something once that felt like a sharp pain inside my head. I don’t know if I shook it loose or he just couldn’t maintain it, but as soon as it started it stopped.”

“Do you have any variations on your end?” he asked Kian.

“I’d say a weak yes on that. Every time I produce the field it feels a little different. Kind of like trying to hold onto something slippery. You never know which way your hand will go when you squeeze.”

“That makes no sense to me,” Ellie said, looking at Jason for confirmation.

“Not much here either, but I understand the lack of control. I assume no one else has joined the disruption group for you to share notes with?”

Kian spread his arms wide. “Just me and me right now.”

Jason sighed and did a fair impression of McKayla Maroney’s ‘not impressed’ face. “You know where Tyr’s at?”

“Cerebro 1, I imagine.”

Jason shook his head. “Aaron’s there.”

“I think he headed up to the holograms,” Ellie offered.

“That’s not mutant training,” Kian scoffed.

The Sangheili shrugged. “Maybe he’s low on power. I heard he tested with almost nonexistent readings.”

“Actually, there’s something I want to check out there anyway,” Jason said.

“Try and see if you can force throw a hologram?” Kian asked, half serious.

Jason frowned hard. “Not unless it’s a holographic marble. I want to see how it looks with spherical sight.”

Kian’s eyes widened just a touch. “Good call.”

“Carry on,” Jason prompted as he walked out. “And you might want to find a bigger room so you don’t keep tripping up people in the hallway.”

Kian smiled deviously. “Now where would the fun be in that?”

Jason glanced back and mock slapped him through the air…with his cheek denting slightly as he added a telekinetic nudge to the gesture.

As he turned into the hall he got a dizzying burst of static in return, making him stumble just a bit but he brushed it off and moved on, heading back to the mongooses parked outside. He grabbed one, noting the one he’d ridden in on was already gone, and drove across the command deck until he got to the dino-ramp that was made up of differently shaped stairs. In the past they’d had to hoof it up and down, but Star Force had built its own ramp over top along both sides and Jason drove his upwards on the right, riding the accelerator heavily to overcome the steep grade.

He drove up several levels before getting off at the entrance to the Zen’zat levels. From there the hallways were too small to accommodate mongoose traffic without running over people, though the hallways were sufficiently wide to accommodate a single vehicle if necessary. They weren’t the smallest hallways in the pyramid, for Ari’tat were half as tall and their habitat section was constructed accordingly, but they did function as the cap to the ginormous structure, preventing most of the other V’kit’no’sat races from physically entering the tiny bipeds’ domain.

Rit’ko’sor still could, which was why the Zen’zat hadn’t been able to hide out during the rebellion and maintain control over the pyramid, but Jason never understood how they’d managed to get the Ari’tat out, for it would have required them to crawl in. Then again, maybe they simply had…or used some sort of weapon to ferret them out.

Jason worked his way through the Zen’zat levels until he came to the sealed section…which had been purposefully left open to allow non-Archons through. He could clearly see the hidden markings around the door that the others couldn’t, and wondered if they would also open up to Rit’ko’sor or just Zen’zat.

Yet one more question in a long list that was attached to the pyramid. They’d had it in their possession for nearly 400 years and there was still more mystery to it than answers.

Jason headed through the open doors and worked his way to the holographic training chamber and did indeed find Tyr inside sparring with a much taller opponent. He wore a black body suit with emerald trimmings that stood out in stark contrast with Tyr’s white with green stripe Archon uniform. The two were exchanging blows, with the Zen’zat hologram using a rotational fighting style that they seemed to favor. Whether moving forward a step or back, the man’s large torso would twist around in a full circle, swinging arms or legs with it to keep Tyr at bay or to inflict damage.

Jason stayed out of holographic range, standing a step outside the doorway as he extended his spherical sight out in a wide cone towards the pair…whereupon he discovered that he could sense the hologram, as well as feel the pair of bumps on its chest.

That surprised him, because he didn’t remember there ever being any holographic female opponents, but more than that the hologram didn’t feel like Tyr did. It felt sparkly and hollow…with a very rigid frame, like it was made of moving glass just waiting to be broken. Like an energy shield, it diminished on contact, and Jason could just barely make out a weak point where his fellow trailblazer punched it, then the thinness dissipated as more power was pumped into it from the emitters in the room, restoring the thin shell to full thickness.

A series of kicks on Tyr’s part ended with his foot punching through the hologram, whereupon it disappeared with the Archon’s victory…but to Jason’s sight the hologram disappeared prior to the impact, suggesting that it had shut itself down rather than be breached, making him wonder how tough the hologram would be to penetrate at full power.

“Long time, brother,” Tyr offered when he finally noticed Jason. “Bit of a constant headache I hear?”

“You shouldn’t have to ask, Professor.”

Tyr waved a finger at him. “I barely count. I didn’t even notice till after the recall order went out, then I started paying attention. I started mentally yelling at people I passed in the hallway and freaked myself out when somebody actually heard me.”

“You try force-lifting anything?” Jason asked, walking inside.

“No joy there. I hear you’re the only one to break through to Jedi mode?”

“Hmmn, I like the sound of that.”

“Can you lift a stun sword yet?”

Jason reached down into his pocket and pulled out the marble, then levitated it in the air between the two.

“This is about all I’m rated for now. I can manage a bit more mass, but I don’t have the longevity.”

Tyr stared at the floating white orb in wonder, then ran his left hand around it, feeling for connections and finding none.

“Now that is impressive.”

Jason returned the marble to his hand, then his pocket. “Hurts like hell though. And yeah, I’m the only one to break through, but there are several with the precursor so I don’t think I’ll be alone for long.”

“The Jedi sight I read about?”

“Seriously, why didn’t I think to call it that?” Jason said, a bit disappointed with himself. “Yeah, I was just using it to scope out the hologram you were kicking the crap out of. It’s what you use to guide the telekinesis, so if it pops up the other is bound to follow.”

“And which is damaging you?”

“At this point, I so much as blink and it hurts. I don’t know if I’m actively being damaged anymore or just tearing open old injuries. My head is fragged, not as bad as it was before, but enough that I can’t sleep. You can imagine what that’s done to my training.”

“How’d it start?”

“The sight started popping up randomly, and it did fry me pretty good, but there was a building pressure inside that did the worst of it, and that only released when the telekinesis broke through. I’m hoping we can get some answers before the others get to that point.”

“Physical activity help?”

“Other than a distraction, no. This ability operates on its own little island with its own rules. Don’t know if it shares a cabana with yours or not, but it’s completely separate from the physical skills.”

“I brought 18 Angry Chipmunks with me, four of which have your Jedi sight. One of those is starting to get headaches.”

“Who?” Jason said, now well used to Tyr’s Clan name. In the beginning he, Morgan, and others had chosen more humorous names than the rest of the trailblazers, but at this point the words had gained new definitions and Clan Angry Chipmunk no longer registered as funny, but rather a group of Archons strong in aerial and commando with a large chunk of Titan under their control.

“Riona-111.”

“Where is she?” Jason asked forcefully. “Time matters.”

“I don’t know,” Tyr said, walking towards the door with Jason dropping into step. “But if you think it’s urgent?”

“The headache will build continuously until it pops…I broke through to telekinesis. If I hadn’t…”

“You could have died?”

“I came close,” he whispered.

“That wasn’t in the update,” Tyr complained, changing from a walk over into a jog as they exited the restricted section back out into the communal hallways.

“I just got here too. I didn’t have a hand in writing it.”

“I meant your logs.”

“You haven’t read the recent ones then.”

“Damn those comm delays,” Tyr swore, meaning it more than ever.

“I know. I’m going to put Clan Sangheili techs to work on it round the clock now. We’re getting way too spread out for couriers.”

“Angry Chipmunk will do the same. What’s taking Davis’s people so long? We should have at least a primitive version up and running by now.”

“As long as we’re here, why don’t we ask him?”

“That…is a very good idea,” he said as they ran down a narrow set of oddly shaped stairs. “After you get Riona squared away.”

3

May 31, 2406

Solar System

Earth

David stepped over a 3-inch high ‘wall,’ barely able to make it out. It and the floor looked almost the same in his growing spherical sight, but there was just enough of a line in the scratch black/white mental image to get his attention, allowing him to avoid tripping over the tiny obstacle.

The next one was not so small. It was a wall with several oddly shaped holes in it, through which David had to crawl. The tricky part was his mind seemed to be filling in the gaps where his senses lacked, and unless he got a good ‘feel’ for the holes his mind painted a solid wall in front of him. He knew others had been getting blocked by that trick, and was glad he’d developed to the point where he could at least spot a disturbance in the solid barrier…from there his hands did the rest, feeling out the perimeter of the hole in the pitch black training room.

Cerebro 2, as they called it, had been developed specifically for those Archons with the spherical sight manifesting to hone their skills. The obstacle course David was walking through was a level 4, throwing different challenges at him as opposed to the level 1 he’d begun with that was simply a walking maze with predictable, straight hallways and right angled turns. That had been hard enough when he began using the new course 3 months ago, but the more challenges thrown at him, the better his mental radar got at both interpreting the data he was receiving as well as enhancing his range and accuracy.

When David crawled out of the hole he ‘saw’ several disqualification pits in the floor, no more than a foot or so deep, but if he stepped in them he’d have to abort this run and start over again…with the arrangement of the room resetting so his memory wouldn’t help him. There were several narrow walkways through the pits, slightly wider than his body, and he slowly walked down one until he got on the other side and almost bumped his face into a protrusion, stopping himself just in time.

As he ‘looked’ ahead, though his spherical sight was in fact looking everywhere at once, his mind began to gather more data on what was in front of him and several tubes appeared sticking out at him end on. Careful not to backtrack into the pits, David walked sideways, seeing more tubes appear as the others dissipated. He frowned, still disappointed that his range wasn’t better. He could make out walls a good 10 meters away, but smaller objects seemed to escape his detection unless they were right in front of him.

David reversed direction and sidestepped to the right, eventually finding a patch where the tubes weren’t and squeezing through the gap in the wall that had little bendable fibers covering the opening so it wouldn’t be seen. Had he not been able to detect the tubes and see where they weren’t, there was no way he could have found the right spot, save for feeling up and down the length with his hands…which he had done before, and was legal in this challenge, but he was also on the clock and that took a whole lot of time unless you got lucky right off the bat.

When he pushed through he came out into a small empty space with a solid wall on the far side and to his left, forcing him to turn to the right and walk a few meters…then he tripped and fell forward onto an up-ramp, catching himself with his hands.

“Damn it,” he whispered. “Why can I never see you?”

David ran his hands over the surface of the ramp and magically it appeared before him, like his spherical sight needed the physical stimulus to reset itself. He was beginning to think a lot of what he ‘saw’ was his mind guessing, just like now it had been guessing that the rest of the hallway was flat like the start. He knew that could be dangerous, but without better senses it was all he had to work with.

David just wished his subconscious would guess right more often.

The Archon climbed up the ramp and turned left at another flat wall/corner, then walked across a bridge with rails, thankfully, but there were 1-inch high strips on the floor at random points, tripping him up when he failed to spot them. 3-inches high he could handle, but 1-inch was virtually invisible…then again, him being able to navigate the room at all with no lights was impressive enough.

After stumbling his way across he came to a nexus with three circles low to the floor which he knew from previous experience were slides. Now came the tricky part…knowing which slide to take. It was written somewhere in physical, block letters, which David couldn’t yet read. Well, he could barely make out some big ones during individual practice, but give him a sentence in front of him with 2-inch long letters and all he could see was a long block with a few pits in it…the best guess his mind could make based off his limited sense.

But David could see where the circles were so he walked towards the rightmost one and felt around the perimeter, quickly finding the letters tattooed on the wall. Using his fingertips he felt over the first letter of what was always a different word, meaning he couldn’t just feel the first one and guess the rest.

N…O…P…E

David sighed and moved over to the center one, feeling around the edges until he found the word underneath the bottom of the circle.

U…H…U…H

David’s sigh turned into a growl as he moved over to take the third slide, then for some reason he felt around for the words anyway, wondering why he was wasting the time when it had to be the one.

W…R…O…N…G

“What?” he asked into the dark, feeling over the letters again. He hadn’t read them wrong.

David stood up and soaked in the radar-like sense of the entire room, sensing the three circles in front of him and low to the ground, as well as the doorway behind him.

He froze in place, ‘staring’ at everything around him and trying to get his sense to reset. Maybe it was ‘guessing’ away another exit.

After maybe 10 or 15 seconds a little bit of disruption above him caught David’s attention, then a fourth circle appeared. He reached up and felt around the low ceiling, finding another set of letters that to his mind’s eye looked like a very shallow rectangle.

Y…E…P

David reached up into the circle and felt around, finding a ladder rung. He jumped up, bypassing several, then hand climbed up enough to get his feet on the bottom rung, pulling himself up inside before climbing a few meters to the peak where the entrance to the slide began. Not wanting to waste any more time he went in head first and began to slide down, twisting and turning through several corkscrews that showed little in his vision other than some weird flashes of signal and very little of the tunnel ahead of him.

He was eventually dumped out on the ground with a waist-high object situated several meters in front that he recognized as the finish pedestal. David got to his feet and walked forward, then fell face first to the ground as another low wall tripped him up.

Not wasting the time to curse his stupidity he got to his feet and tagged the finish button on top, stopping the clock and turning the chamber’s lights on slowly so his eyes could adjust without a bright flash.

David released the spherical sight, feeling thoroughly drained. He no longer had to worry about it going out on him mid-course as it had done that first month, but it was still taxing him heavily. Additional ambrosia doses didn’t seem to help much, though he and the others had been trying them frequently with some minor successes. From David’s perspective his internal battery simply had to recharge over time, and at the moment it felt like he was running pretty low.

The holographic time popped up over the finish pedestal a few seconds later, indicating that David had shaved off 4 seconds from his previous record. Progress was progress, but with the course altering every go around the time should have been coming off in large chunks, whereas 4 seconds could have just been luck with this particular setup.

Still, the more runs he made the more training experience his mind had to adapt to, so David walked out of the nearby door mostly content and hit the reset button. He watched for a moment while the various barricades and such pulled back into the walls, eventually leaving a large, empty room behind, coated in white panels with golden lines crisscrossing them in a grid, giving it a very holodeck-like feel.

David wanted to have another go at it, but he knew his mental power reserves were too low so he decided to take a break. He’d already gone through three rounds, and knew it’d be at least another 2 hours before he was full of energy again. Jason had suggested keeping that energy reserve draining as often as possible to encourage better discharge capabilities and prevent blockage that could cause an overload similar to what he had initially suffered from.

David was grateful that hadn’t happened to him, but Riona had already started having trouble with pressure headaches. Jason had her going through a variety of drills to try and alleviate the pressure while restructuring the pathways that the techs still couldn’t isolate. Right now Jason knew more than they did, and if he said there were ‘pathways’ then David trusted him on that, even if he couldn’t completely confirm what the trailblazer was saying. To be honest, David only had a rudimentary understanding of what was happening inside his own head, and that freaked him out to no end.

“You done?” Mathis-831 asked from behind him, seeing the empty room through the viewing pane.

“Yeah, I’m…” David said, turning around from the control board. “What the hell is that?”

Mathis held up his bow for David to see more clearly. “Something I’ve been working on.”

David frowned. “Seriously?”

“Clan Croft is encouraged to think outside of the box,” the Archon said, stepping past David and activating a preset training exercise.

“Alright, I’m outside of the box. How is a bow and arrow useful?”

“Don’t think of them as arrows,” Mathis said, pulling one of the long shafts out of the very advanced quiver/vest he wore. “More like tiny missiles or remote mines, for you Goldeneye fans.”

“Does that…” David said, pointing to the shaft with a very heavy end piece.

“Anti-grav it does have,” Mathis confirmed as multiple targets began floating around the room as the lights dimmed, leaving only a narrow, lit pathway leading out to a circle of light far off in the center of the room.

“Oh I’ve got to see this,” David said, pulling up a chair in front of the wall-sized window.

“Turn on the night vision,” he suggested as he walked into the chamber, closing the door behind him.

“Blind target shooting…typical,” David said, switching the window over to a mode that saw the dark areas of the room lit up in green highlights. He watched Mathis jog out to the center of the circle of light, then on cue all the illumination went out, leaving only the glowing green shapes behind.

Mathis’s outline sprouted his bow and David could barely see him pull an arrow/missile out and sling it in. His position was well away from the window and even with the nightvision it was difficult to make out objects that small. The larger targets he could see clearly. There were dozens of floating cubes drifting in a circle around the Archon, then three of them broke formation and moved in towards him. David saw a distance counter activate on the console in front of him…which indicated that the purpose of this challenge was to keep the targets from getting all the way into the center.

Suddenly a streak of green shot out from Mathis and imbedded itself in one of the cubes, sticking out like an ugly hair. Nothing exploded, though in retrospect David chided himself for expecting as much. Mathis was here for accuracy, not destruction, and David found himself impressed at the range he had shot the target…not because of the archery skill involved, but because it was farther away than David could currently stretch his spherical sight. Given that the lights were out, Mathis was targeting purely with the mental ability.

The Clan Croft marksman spun around and fired at another one behind him, then spun again to hit the third as more targets began to drift in from the ring towards the center while the hit ones dropped to the floor and pulled back, letting Mathis know he’d already tagged them. David counted 24 targets in total and guessed that was about the amount of arrows he’d had in his quiver, meaning this was going to be a very short exercise.

David kept count of his hits mentally before he noticed another counter on the console. With fluid rhythm Mathis found and tagged each of the cubes as they came in, then the counter passed 24 hits on its way up to 30, making David wonder exactly how many arrows he’d stuffed in that quiver. The targets, he saw, were cycling back to the outer circle to be reused, but Mathis kept firing arrow after arrow, causing David to have a mental fit…where was he getting them all from?

Using the control board in front of him, David pulled up the info on the current challenge. He scrolled down through the basics and into the physical dynamics of the setup, finding his answer…somehow the room was pulling the arrows off the cubes and moving them back to a recycling post at the center of the room.

David took a closer look at Mathis’s green form, not noticing anything for a long time as the man spun about, targeting cubes behind him almost as if he could see them there…which he could, thanks to the spherical sight. After getting used to watching the nightvision David finally saw the difference…instead of pulling new arrows out of the quiver, he was reaching down towards the floor slightly, not enough to drop to a knee, but low enough to pull out a new arrow from what the schematics indicated was an open-air quiver, meaning no sidewalls, from which the recycled arrows would sprout from.

Ingenious system, and typical Star Force. This way Mathis could train for hours without ever running out of ammunition, though he expected the arrow tips had been altered to accommodate the cube impacts. The one Mathis had shown him hadn’t been pointy, but rather blunt and thick like the end of a firecracker. David wasn’t sure if that was standard or not, because in order to have a decently sized explosive he’d need to have a significant amount of volume on the arrow…not to mention room for the anti-grav tech inside.

As he watched more and more arrows being fired off David visually confirmed that they were flying straight-line trajectories…meaning no arc from gravity. That would also give Mathis insane range, though David knew the capacitor on the anti-grav had to be extremely limited. Probably no more than a few seconds worth…which this challenge had to be recharging with each cycle.

David shook his head in silent appreciation. He didn’t know how useful the weapon would be on the battlefield, but its design was certainly impressive, as was Mathis’s ability to shoot in the dark and track objects at such a range. He wondered if he could do the same with a pistol at short range and scrolled down through the chamber’s options…finding such a program already created.

He’d have to give that one a go later, but for now he needed to move on. With an unlimited supply of arrows, Mathis could be at this for a very long time.

David tossed his fellow Archon an unseen two-fingered salute and left the chamber, heading over to the more traditional parts of the sanctum to get some agility course work in while his mutant powers recharged, then he’d be back here or in one of the other Cerebro rooms to keep adding up mental training experience points and hoping that through it all he and the others would learn enough to hone their abilities to the point where they wouldn’t only be useful in combat, but wouldn’t be a danger to themselves.

Even though he’d dodged the bullet so far, David wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t going to start seeing the same headaches as Jason and Riona started to manifest. And the idea of not knowing how to fight the unknown unnerved him considerably, as well as causing him to give the trailblazer more credit than he’d done in the past, for he’d had to work through it alone, and at least David and the others had him around to nudge them down the right path…even if Jason didn’t fully know what was going on either.

4

July 13, 2406

Solar System

Earth

David came back to his quarters within the sanctum after a long run around the pyramid and slid into the shower tube straight off, getting the drenching sweat off him. For some reason the V’kit’no’sat had preferred a bit more humidity in the air than Humans liked, and thus far the techs hadn’t discovered the primary environmental controls. The ones for the Zen’zat levels had been available straight off, with those in the other dino-chambers discovered and accessed gradually over time, but the ones for the communal areas had always been thought to be located within the restricted core access…but now that they had it, they hadn’t been able to find the damn settings to readjust.

As a result, any workout done within the air of the pyramid and not in one of the Star Force structures left one drenched in sweat, which David actually preferred, given that it added another element of difficulty to the runs aside from climbing/descending the gigantic stairs/ramps that connected one level to another. He’d gotten in a good 2 hour run and had been blissfully soaked in sweaty clothes, but now that he was done he wanted/needed to get cleaned up before he continued on with additional workouts.

After he dried off and pulled on a new training uniform he slipped into the computer console’s seat for a quick check of his account, looking for any new messages or alerts…and finding two. One was from Jason, passing on yet another bit of advice for dealing with the spherical sight development. David had gotten to the point where the strain was causing him headaches, but with a few training tweaks those had gone away and Jason was continuing to update him and the others showing the same ability with whatever information he could…which David was grateful for.

The second message was from Davis, which gave David pause. He’d been waiting a long time for an update on The Word’s activities, and he wondered if this was the first sign of their promised unconventional war beginning to develop. So far they’d been all but silent. A month ago Davis had passed on some intel that David had assigned Jet-612 to run down…or more accurately, the Russian convoy on Mars that had been hauling illicit cargo.

Jet had intercepted, boarded, and inspected the overland train’s haul before it reached terminus, whereupon he alerted Russian security and assisted them with confiscating the handful of plasma rifles stuffed in alongside spare parts canisters holding items of similar construction and making it almost impossible to spot the rifles on inspection scans.

The confiscated rifles were the same make as the weapons produced in Colorado, meaning these had either come from that facility and were only now cycling out through distribution channels, or that The Word had another operational facility churning out the crude knockoffs. Regardless, their presence on Mars indicated that The Word definitely was operating elsewhere in the Solar System, just as Agent had attested.

When David opened up the Director’s message he saw it came in parts, the first of which was an update on the Russian confiscation, which had apparently disappeared from records…along with all of the weapons. Davis was working with higher up Russian officials to track down where the weapons had disappeared to and how the data files could have been altered, but a side note from him suggested that the Russian security forces on station must have been affiliated with The Word, for no official transfer of the weapons outside of their custody had been ordered.

David pounded his fist on a flat spot of the table/console in frustration. Their one and only victory had been undone thanks to corruption on the part of the Russians. In fact, Jet may have inadvertently helped deliver the weapons to them, if security had been their ultimate destination.

No, he couldn’t assume that. The easiest way to smuggle cargo was to have it never see the light of day. The security seizure may have been a backup plan though.

Either way, the weapons got where they were going and were now off of Star Force’s grid. How many operatives did The Word have anyway? That was the last time Green Team was going to rely on outside help. From here on out they were only going to use in-house resources.

The note from Davis indicated that the trail hadn’t gone completely cold, and at the least he felt that between Star Force and the Russian Internal Affairs they’d snag at least a few of the conspirators, but the weapons were long gone, and given the time delay since discovering the ‘oversight’ they could have been moved anywhere within the system, so they couldn’t even narrow down their search to a specific region of Mars.

David finished the note, feeling angry and embarrassed at the same time. Whoever these people were, they were good at what they did…but get them out in the open and he’d see how good they are with the weapons they’re making.

He moved down to the second item in Davis’s message packet, seeing that it was the summation of the background searches into the individuals they’d been tracking from the Colorado mission, some from photo identification, others from genetic samples taken both from when they were on the run and from the base. As good as The Word had cleaned it up, they hadn’t actually ‘cleaned’ it up, and Star Force now had dozens of unphotographed individuals with genetic IDs to search for.

Finally some of those searches had come up with new leads. Family relations, previous employers, school records, traffic patterns, both from in atmosphere flight on Earth and transit through the system, a lot of which had been on Star Force flights. With the data before him now, David had some threads to follow, one of which he was sure would lead to a nexus point or something of value for Green Team to hit, and right now he badly wanted to return the favor for the Mars snafu.

There was a lot of data there to work through, so David set it aside and moved down to the third item in the packet, finding yet another analysis report…Davis must have been holding them back so he could send them all at once. It was on several of the items recovered from the Colorado base, backtracking them to their points of origin. Some had been purchased by companies that were now on Star Force’s watch list, while others had gone ‘missing’ or were listed as ‘damaged’…but there were a few others that had no official connection at all.

David pulled up one piece of the report that detailed a 3d fabrication machine that was used to create the pistol barrels prior to the magnetization process. It had no serial number whatsoever, but the design was able to be traced back to Setting Sun Industries. A quiet search through their computer records by Star Force hackers discovered an accounting program with a curious bit of code that would occasionally register numerical errors in the production assembly line…meaning that some pieces of equipment would be physically produced but never cataloged.

In that way, David assumed, The Word could produce equipment for their explicit use without having to buy or steal it, leaving no records trail at all to follow…suggesting a higher level of The Word activity in that particular corporation, for a little sleight of hand with computer systems wouldn’t allow for physical shipping of the product when it didn’t have an ID tag for processing purposes. They had to have agents in position to intercept the ghost units coming off the line and spirit them away into The Word’s illicit transportation network.

Davis’s notes attached to that set of data informed David that they’d set up long term surveillance on those sites, hoping to spot and track future ghost shipments and suggesting that they be left alone rather than shut down by grabbing The Word operatives there if/when Green Team identified them.

In that David agreed.

The third piece of the data packet was the results of a comprehensive search through Star Force’s computer systems within Sol, looking for unrecognized security breaches. It was a short report, for none successful had been found, but they had discovered a bit of nibbling at various locations that warranted further investigation, which Davis inferred was ongoing. Whether or not The Word was responsible for the nibbles couldn’t be said, but David was glad that whoever it was hadn’t managed to get in. The security of Star Force’s comm systems was one of their greatest assets, and if it could be cracked they’d have to rework just about everything, because it could potentially jeopardize control of their remote craft.

Namely their warships. And if an outside force gained control of even one of them temporarily, it could result in disastrous circumstances.

So far the systems were clean though, which was a bit of good news. The fourth piece of the packet was not, however. The Director had been pulling anomaly searches throughout Star Force territory, hoping to discover some bit of The Word’s web without following a link back from Colorado to do it. His notes indicated several accidental discoveries unrelated to The Word, which Davis had Red Team dealing with, but there was one individual by the name of Seamus Kilmeade that had drawn a yellow flag.

The man worked in an affiliated Star Force facility, meaning technically he was on Star Force’s payroll, but more of an independent contractor than one of the lifelong staff. On the civilian side, Star Force was split into tiers, the uppermost of which held the more important workers, administrators, and techs. These people, like the Director, had dedicated their lives to the Corporation and lived as part of it. There was no commute to work, for they lived in Star Force facilities and moved about as needed. Most were unmarried, or ended up as such as the years passed due to the fact that they outlived their spouses.

The upper tier members were virtually all more than 100 years old, having attained self-sufficiency even if physical activity wasn’t part of their area of specialty. They had learned the essentials of maintaining their bodies and minds, as well as the advantages it gave, making them far more valuable than any of the ‘younglings’ looking for employment in the Corporation, no matter what their background.

The upper tier, designated a level 7, received no pay…but had free access throughout Star Force’s transportation grid and access to any purchases within the Corporation free of charge, ensuring they had what they needed but making no effort to establish a lifestyle independent from their ‘jobs.’ Like the Archons, they lived and breathed their work, and were exceedingly good at it. It was the techs in the upper tier that were given access to the V’kit’no’sat pyramid data and were pushing the limits of Star Force technical knowledge, doing what the trailblazers had done with the military only on the scientific front.

Level 6 members of Star Force were lifelong employees as well, also taking no pay and mastering at least the basics of self-sufficiency in order to prolong their lifespans enough to become sufficiently skilled in their work and to be of use handling assignments that the level 7s were either too busy to handle or assignments that had been handled before and needed to be replicated. The 6s were essentially master apprentices, far more experienced than most employees of the Corporation, but not entrusted with ‘trailblazer’ duties. They handled the difficult familiar, taking their cues from the 7s whenever something new came into play.

Level 5s were long term employees that did receive pay, and about half of whom retired outside of the Corporation. The other half was split between those who had achieved self-sufficiency and preferred to stay active in their positions rather than turn tourist, and those that were working their way up the ladder towards level 6. Most level 5s lived within Star Force facilities, though a few maintained personal residences in their limited spare time. Most of those who did were assigned to colonies where the public sector habitats were within travel distance from the Corporate facilities.

Level 4s were high skilled employees valued for their abilities but who only saw their employment as a job, one that would consume most of their time but one that paid well and came along with a lot of perks. They were split between family types and career hounds. Physical training was required for them, along with all the upper tiers, but ambrosia was reserved for those who achieved certain benchmarks. Most level 4s did not achieve that level, and thus were not entrusted with the super-juice due to their unwillingness to train more than necessary to maintain the fitness levels required of employment.

More often than not, experienced level 4s would ‘retire’ when they failed to pass their quarterly physicals which required a quota of completed workouts during the previous 3 month period. In this way the turnover for level 4s was slow but steady, with most cycling out over a period of 40-50 years rather than working their way up to level 5. It was a fact of reality that Star Force had come to accept, that the individual had to want to attain self-sufficiency in order to get there, and that while prerequisite training would extend the workforce’s lifespan they couldn’t maintain the number of workers necessary by requiring higher standards.

Thus, Star Force would teach its employees what they needed to know, and require a moderate level of training that would give them the opportunity to work towards self-sufficiency, but at the end of the day they were in control of their own destiny, and many simply were too lazy to do what was required, even knowing and seeing the benefits in others.

Level 3s were required to do a bit less, and made up the bulk of Star Force’s members. These were the experienced workers that had made a permanent job out of Star Force, though many of them bounced from one section to another as demands met or as they chose. They lived in private housing by choice and kept a social and personal life separate from the corporation, with the average employment lasting between 15-20 years.

Level 2s were a mix of inexperienced workers learning the ropes and of experienced affiliates. The affiliates received pay, but were not part of the Star Force permanent workforce, operating instead as contractors on a set timetable that could range from a day to 10 years. Only minimal physical standards were required of level 2s, of which was measured by being able to run a sub 8:00 mile twice a month. For the affiliates they maintained this requirement for employment sake, while those who were part of the Corporation and looking to work their way up usually exceeded this requirement by a significant amount as they trained towards the level 3 requirements…which would come with increased pay and perks, which was the only reason why many of the level 2 employees put up with the training in the first place.

Seamus Kilmeade was a level 1 employee, having the same sub 8:00 requirement and little else physically, but with a plethora of Star Force codes of conduct to follow. He was an independent hire, and not part of any other company, working as an instructor in one of the training centers prepping would be colonists migrating from Earth. His area of specialty was linguistics, David saw from the attached file, with him speaking 5 separate languages fluently, allowing him to help teach English to groups of colonists coming from varied nations.

One pet peeve of Davis’s was the multi-cultural euphoria that the planet had seen in past centuries, celebrating Earth’s diversity and preserving the cultural and linguistic differences that kept the people living next door to each other from being able to communicate. He’d put a quick end to that with the colonization program, declaring English to be the one and only language Star Force used and requiring all colonists to be able to test out in the language at a sufficient level to be able to operate within an all English-speaking colony without translators…from which point they’d pick up the fluency in the language from daily interactions.

Davis’s seemingly arrogant assertion, as viewed by the public, had been hilariously reinforced when the Hycre had introduced Star Force to the Alliance, noting that different races throughout the local region of the galaxy had seen the wisdom of creating a trade language through which to communicate with each other…which made Humans not being able to communicate with other Humans hilariously pathetic.

Seamus, it seemed, was good at his work, having received an 85% efficiency rating as an instructor, meaning that 85% of his students passed their requirements within a given amount of time that was deemed reasonable. It seemed he was usually assigned groups that had no prior experience with the language at all, which was rare. It also gave him an audience that probably couldn’t understand what he was saying most of the time…which was probably what The Word was interested in.

Davis’s anomaly search had indicated traffic patterns atypical with someone in his position, seeing him travel outside the city/building that he worked within. That wasn’t completely unheard of, but the Star Force transit data didn’t match up with any locations of known relatives, which is what had thrown the yellow flag.

A closer inspection of the data suggested an irregular pattern of predictable routes, none of which could be associated with any known behavior, such as sporting events, festivals, and such. All of the trips on record had been 1-day affairs, some of which had seem him leave and return almost immediately, which had suggested to Davis that the man was making or receiving drops.

David concurred, and was glad to see the Director’s final note on the data.

I HAVE ISSUED NO ORDERS CONCERNING THE TARGET, THEREFORE HE SHOULD BE UNCONTAMINATED. PROCEED AS YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE.

While he knew this might not be related to The Word, David had a gut feeling that it was and apparently the Director did too, otherwise he wouldn’t have sent it to Green Team. With the location being in Antarctica and essentially right next door, David couldn’t see the logic in calling in one of the other team members and knew that he had to deal with this one personally. He wanted to start with a surveillance order and then sit on it for a few weeks, but he had a sneaking suspicion that the target might go to ground if he did…and then there was the slim possibility that the local security might have been compromised as well.

He doubted that, but felt it better if he had a quiet look around before bringing them in on the operation, if at all.

David got up from the console and was headed to grab the duffle he had in his closet to start packing when his earpiece chimed. It was sitting on the corner of a nearby table where he’d left it after coming back from his run. He walked over and picked it up, flicking off a droplet of sweat that had survived on the surface.

“Go.”

“David, Morgan just showed up,” Angel-676 said excitedly, “and she’s playing King of the Hill against six trailblazers and kicking their asses with some freaky new powers. Get over here before you miss the show.”

David raised an eyebrow. The highest ranking Archon was here, had gone mutant with some type of new power, and she was taking on 6 other trailblazers…and winning?

“On my way,” he said, hurrying out of his quarters.

The packing could wait an hour or two.

5

Kerrie-057 slide/kicked across the floor into Morgan’s bare right leg, knocking it askew and dropping the ranger down on top of her. She jabbed her in the ribs just below her sports bra before getting knocked in the side of the head as Morgan spun back up onto her feet. Then Kerrie saw Jason jump into her vision laterally and tackle Morgan around the shoulders.

Morgan went down with the Sangheili on top of her…then Jason flew off as she knocked him free with a combination elbow jab and concussive wave. He went flying out of the ring on his own momentum, landing in the softer padding around the King of the Hill circle that they were trying to knock Morgan out of.

High above the wide circle a holographic clock counted up from 4:21, indicating how long Morgan had held her ground against the other six trailblazers. Today the ring was flat, rather than being elevated to form an actual hill, but the basics were the same…stay in and keep knocking the others out. And when the others were 6 trailblazers the odds of anyone staying in, even Morgan, was slim.

As soon as Jason was tossed Tyr came in and tried to knock Morgan further to that side of the ring, ramming his shoulder into her torso but she rotated around and deflected most of the blow. Tyr countered by latching onto her arm in the process and dragged her another two feet towards the edge while Aaron came in to knock both of them out. Morgan countered by dropping down to the ground, tipping Tyr over at the waist in the process and sending Aaron over top of her as she grabbed his wrist and used her back as a pivot point.

The other trailblazer doubled over and inverted momentarily, his legs coming up above his head as he twisted around Morgan who had dug her heels into the floor…then with a concussion wave tap she sent Aaron flying out of the ring upside down, leaving her with only Tyr to deal with for the next two seconds.

He kicked into her midsection as she came up, but the blow never landed. Suddenly he found himself propelled backwards by an invisible force…then he landed on his backside on the soft mat outside the ring and somersaulted backwards into the line of Archons ringing the area as they watched the contest.

“Looks like she’s kicking your ass, boss,” one of the other Angry Chipmunks commented.

“She usually does,” Tyr acknowledged as he got to his feet and ran back into the circle as Kian and Ryan came at Morgan from opposite sides when she moved back towards the center of the circle. The pair circled around her, not making a move until the others got to their feet and headed back in.

Morgan knew what they were doing and smiled as she set herself, glancing back across her shoulders occasionally to get all of them in her peripheral vision.

Jason came first, from behind her, and she back-kicked towards him, but he easily swatted her foot aside with a pair of hands then kneed her in the torso as he got to pointblank range…except she’d already seen it coming and had twisted to her left, bringing his knee out of range. Halfway into the maneuver Aaron came in from the other side, with Kian and Ryan a split second later. As Morgan dealt with Jason and Aaron, keeping them at least arms reach away from her with a fury of punches and kicks, the other two came in from the sides like a pair of gongs and smashed into her with precise timing that didn’t allow her to divert one or another.

She should have gone evasive, which the other two trailblazers were waiting for a few steps back, but instead she held her ground and balled up…then released a spherical concussive wave, a la Starkiller, and knocked the four of them back away from her, with the other two bobbling on their feet as the remnants of the wave hit them.

Morgan stood up tall and laughed once, but kept her eyes moving around, knowing that even though she’d surprised them they wouldn’t let up.

Kerrie moved first, coming in and slide/kicking towards Morgan’s feet, which caused her to hop away a step towards Jason, then off to her left as he kicked towards her feet. She dodged both then nearly fell over as a wave of static ran through her body…then the next thing she knew Kian’s foot was in her midsection, doubling her over as he kicked her back towards the edge of the ring.

Morgan caught her balance just in time for Aaron to blindside her with a spin kick across her chest that knocked her backwards a meter to where she fell across the out of bounds line…stopping the clock at 4:58.

“What the hell was that?” Morgan asked as she stood up.

“You’ve got your new power, I’ve got mine,” Kian commented with a smile. “I call it a disruption field.”

“It jams your senses briefly,” Jason explained. “Now mind telling us what you were doing?”

“Do it again,” Morgan prompted.

Kian blinked, then Morgan’s head got all weird again, this time for more than a second. She tried to shake it off, only partially succeeding, then the sensation vanished.

“Enough,” Aaron said, rubbing his head. “He can’t pick and choose. It hits everyone.”

“Except me,” Kian pointed out. “Think of it like white noise.”

“Useful,” Morgan commented. “I hope there’s a way to defend against that?”

“We’re working on it,” Jason agreed. “Now what did you do?”

“And what’s it got to do with you not wearing a uniform?” Kerrie asked.

“Tougher to hold onto when you’re slick with sweat,” Morgan pointed out sarcastically.

“No shoes is a bit of a disadvantage,” Tyr countered.

“Except when I can project from my feet.”

“So that’s what you did,” Aaron said in realization. “I didn’t think you could kick that hard.”

“If I wear clothes I’ll just tear them off,” Morgan said. “The energy originates from my skin, so even shoes get in the way.”

Jason slipped a finger underneath the shoulder strap on her bra where there was a tear. “And these?”

“Figured you seeing me naked would have been too much of a disadvantage for you guys,” she joked. “I’ve learned to fight with my arms and legs and to avoid the torso and pelvis as much as possible, but that’s not always an option. Luckily I didn’t blow them completely off,” she said, finding another rip in the waistband of her skintight short shorts.

“How close to dead are you?” Kian asked as the other Archons began to migrate in closer to listen to the conversation, some 50 of them in total.

“I have a few more blasts left in me, but I’m nearly out. This power feeds off ambrosia, so with some snacks I can work into some long training days, but my reserves aren’t nearly as robust as I’d like. They’re growing with time and training, but I’m having to hold back my intensity otherwise I’ll drain myself out within 30 seconds or less.”

“I assume,” Kerrie asked, “that when you knocked all of us back at once that you were close to full power?”

“Sort of…with a bit more prep time I can go bigger. Been working on a Kamehameha, but it takes so much out of me I can’t practice it a lot.”

“Still invisible, right?” Jason asked.

“Oh we’ve got to see that,” Aaron prompted as Morgan nodded to answer Jason.

The senior ranger smirked. “Alright, I think I’ve got just enough left, but I’ll need a target…and since it’s your idea, Aaron,” she said, motioning towards the center of the ring.

“Bring it, girl,” he said, setting himself so that he leaned forward a bit to counteract the blow that would be incoming.

“The rest of you need to clear out,” Morgan warned. “I’m not all that accurate yet.”

“Sam is going to love this,” Kian whispered to Jason as they stepped back behind Morgan and the other Archons parted behind Aaron, leaving a large open wedge of space leading back to the far wall.

Jason stared at Morgan as she took up Goku’s patented stance, pulling back her arms on her right side, palms connected at the wrists.

“Ka…meeee,” she said aloud, summoning up a cascade of tingles throughout her torso like a fireworks display.

“Haaa…meeee,” Morgan added, shifting them through her body and into her arms, then forcing the energy to pool in her hands and wrists, with a lot backing up all the way to her elbows because she couldn’t fit it all in. When the pressure got as much as she could handle she reached her hands forward, still touching at the wrists, and launched the energy from her palms, cradling the blast between her energy-laced fingers and directing it forward like a fire hose with plenty spilling out between the gaps.

“Haaaa!” she yelled as she released the torrent directly toward Aaron who was standing about 5 meters away.

He thought he was ready for it, but the blow came so fast and heavy that he was taken completely off guard, and the angle of his chest leaning forward actually helped to propel him upwards into the air a foot or so as he was slammed backwards all the way into the wall some twenty meters back where he bounced off it gratifyingly and fell to the floor.

“Whoops,” Morgan said apologetically as he smacked the unpadded wall and was slow to get to his feet.

“Wow,” Jason commented, walking up beside her. “You definitely got the big guns.”

“You should be able to do that too eventually, right?” she asked, glancing across her bare shoulder at him.

“Ha…maybe in a few hundred years. My telekinesis is good for lifting tiny objects and playing with water droplets in the shower right now. I have no idea how you’re generating that much power.”

“Medics think it has to do with a number of growths spread throughout my body. Power cells, emitters, maybe both. They haven’t been able to make much out of it yet.”

“Have you had the specialists take a look?”

“I did on Corneria, but there wasn’t much more they could offer. The energy fries their equipment, so they can’t measure anything active. Oh yeah, did I mention I can also walk through force fields?”

“Get out,” Kian said, giving her a ‘there’s no way’ look.

“Did it on accident at first,” she said, nodding so that he’d know she was serious. “Saved my life actually.”

“Oh?” Jason asked as Aaron came walking back over rubbing the back of his head.

“I’ll tell you later,” she promised, and Jason got the feeling it was a bit of a sensitive subject she didn’t want all the others to hear about.

“That’s the last time I play target dummy,” Aaron said. “I didn’t think you could knock me that far.”

“Neither did I. Sorry about that.”

“No you’re not,” he said with a wry grin.

“I am a little,” she countered. “Now, I’m out of juice. So unless you want to do some conventional training I need to suck some ambrosia. Wanna take a run then hit the cafeteria or cafeteria first? I want a chance to pick your brains one way or another.”

Aaron glanced at Jason, and Morgan followed his eye line. “What?”

“I’m up for a run,” Jason said, glancing down at Morgan’s bare feet. “As soon as you grab some shoes.”

“What’s wrong with you, besides the obvious?”

“Later,” he said, glancing out at all the other Archons around. “Show’s over people. Needless to say, if any of you start developing this ability we’d very much like to know…because right now you seem to be it,” he said, looking back at Morgan.

“Another lone ranger,” Kian said, pun intended.

“You’re the only one?”

“So far. I don’t even know what the disruption feels like, let alone how to train against it.”

“Same here,” Morgan said as she looked around for her shoes, knowing that she’d need to learn how to defend, and potentially block against someone else’s concussive energy.

“I’m sort of in the same boat,” Jason added, “and I’m kind of hoping it stays that way until the medics can figure out an easier transition. A few of the others are starting to get the headaches.”

“Looking for these?” David asked, holding up a pair of shoes with crumpled socks tucked inside them.

“Thanks,” she said, taking them from him and unceremoniously plopping down on the floor to put them on while everyone else remained standing around her.

“By the way,” David added, looking at Jason. “I’ll be heading out for a few days. Local mission for Davis.”

“What’s up?”

“Potential Word operative in the colonial training facilities. Hopefully if it pans out it’ll give us some other leads.”

“Who’s us?” Kian asked.

“Green Team.”

“I heard one of them blew themselves up?” Aaron asked.

“Who blew what up?” Morgan asked from below as she wiggled on her second sock.

“Long story,” David said. “Check the files, it’s all in there. He did blow himself up, on the other side of a shield from Nathan and took out the entire cell. Aside from some bone shrapnel Nathan just got his bell rung, but if the shield hadn’t been so robust he’d have been killed.”

“Good hunting,” Aaron offered.

David nodded his thanks then pulled back out of the quickly thinning group and left, heading back to his quarters to pack before hitting the Antarctic transit system that crisscrossed the snow-covered continent with high speed rail lines.

“Somebody talk to me,” Morgan said, lacing up her shoes.

“The Word is a new bad guy,” Kerrie offered. “Sort of a SPECTRE wannabe. Green Team busted up one of their bases in Colorado, after which they pretty much declared war. I haven’t heard that they’ve done anything since then though?”

“Neither have I,” Jason said, offering a hand to pull Morgan to her feet. “Is your power separate from the rest of your energy?”

“Almost completely separate. I can be dead in one and energetic in the other, but it does take a lot of physical focus to pull off, so if I’m really fatigued I won’t get as much out of the ability.”

“Four laps then?” Jason asked, referring to a circuit around the pyramid’s interior that was quite long.

“At least,” Morgan scoffed. “I may have spent the past 4 years on a warship, but I guarantee you it hasn’t slowed me down.”

“That I don’t doubt, but we’ve extended the main lap a bit to include the lower sections.”

“Goes through the fish tank now,” Tyr added.

Morgan smiled. “I can take whatever you dish out.”

Jason stared straight into her eyes, holding the gaze for a moment before smiling. “Ok, let’s go,” he said, jogging off out of the chamber that now only held the 7 trailblazers.

The others went with him, but Morgan only got a few steps before realizing one of her shoelaces was untied.

“What the…?” she asked, dropping to a knee to retie it while the others hurried out. Ryan was grinning from ear to ear, having seen what Jason had done.

“Let’s go slow poke!” Jason said before ducking out of the door with the others and taking off sprinting, trying to get as far ahead of Morgan as they could while she retied the shoe that Jason had telekinetically unlaced.

6

July 15, 2406

Solar System

Earth

David sat in the security station of Colonial Transition City/Building #35 studying surveillance data from the hallway cameras that were placed everywhere public and built into the walls and ceiling as to avoid notice. Such was standard for civilian habitats, with a lesser amount of surveillance on other Star Force infrastructure, but having cameras in place to monitor internal activity was a necessity for dealing with large numbers of people living and moving about in such small areas.

Some people found it intrusive, but David did not. It gave potential victims an ‘eye in the sky’ and a lifeline for help that a dark alley didn’t allow for, not to mention allowing security to track threats in realtime as they moved about. Back in the day the first colonists had complained about the intrusive nature of the surveillance…which was not placed in personal quarters…and suggested that it was too much power for any government to have, and that abuses of power were sure to follow.

David had scoffed at the idea then, and by now most of those silly notions had been laid to rest with regards to Star Force. Power was not the enemy. Power did not corrupt. Power wasn’t to be feared. Power gave the good guys the ability to stop the bad guys…as well as allow David to backtrack Seamus Kilmeade’s movements throughout the city/building for up to a year before the records were purged to allow for new data space.

The surveillance records at the terminals were another story. Those camera feeds were permanently saved, allowing David to monitor Seamus’s movements over the past 6 years since his employment began. Where he went when he left the train system was sketchy, but a number of purchases popped up at various venues that allowed him to confirm the approximate locations he’d been, as well as establishing a pattern that David was currently using to search through thousands of recent surveillance footage from individual cameras at one of the coastal cities.

Seamus went here often…or, rather, regularly, coming out randomly within a two month period that belied any repetitive schedule, but like clockwork he’d reappear within the given timeframe and hit one of the busiest sections of the tourist sector, where millions of people, mostly non-natives, would be congregating for holidays and vacations, allowing him to mix with the masses and lose himself in the Antarctic travelers.

Except that with the ‘intrusive’ surveillance there was a record of his movement…hard as it was to track. David had to go through frame after frame, losing sight of the man behind obstacles and other people, then reacquiring view of him again briefly before repeating the process. He had building security helping him go through the local feeds, but the ones he was pulling down from other Antarctic locations he was accessing by himself, having identified 3 probable drop locations and working on a fourth as he tracked Seamus’s movements to another sector of the coastal city.

The man didn’t carry any luggage or packages to be exchanged, he simply traveled about and ducked inside various venues where the security feeds didn’t go. He’d come back out at a reasonable time and return to the civilian flow, working his way back to the transit terminal and promptly back to the colonial building where he worked.

David was convinced he was up to something. Had he been going to the same location, then there could possibly have been an explanation…a friend or relative, or perhaps even some activity he was fond of, but by switching venues in a circuit at random, it pretty much ruled out any habitual activity.

All of that had already been confirmed by Davis’s investigation, but David was trying to pick out a bit more from the raw feeds. The man had to be doing more than just relaying messages, and David was paying close attention to the man’s bodyline whenever he had a clean camera view…which he could then zoom in for closer examination.

He was looking for a clean shot of Seamus’s chest on the current footage, flipping between different cameras as he walked down a crowded internal boulevard that sported a slew of shops, one of which the man had spent all of 5 minutes in, coming out with no visible package.

David stopped one of the feeds, backtracking a few frames and then enlarging what he had onto a side monitor. From there he zoomed in, confirming a slight bulge using an analysis program on the man’s clothing.

Left chest internal pocket…same as before.

Which again confirmed him as a recipient of another drop rather than the courier. That made sense, given that the people he was theoretically contacting were on a one-way trip towards a new colony. The question was…what was he passing along?

So far none of the local cameras had caught any potential contacts, and the classrooms were on the surveillance grid. Davis’s people hadn’t found anything suspicious in them, and he imagined they’d listened through session after session trying to glean any tidbits of information that could have been verbally passed on in a number of different languages.

David knew there was something here, he just wasn’t thinking outside the box. The Word was devious and operated in the cracks where traditional methodology didn’t reach…meaning what in this case?

“Where is he now?” David asked.

“In the classroom,” one of the gold/white uniformed security officers informed him, glancing over at a live feed for confirmation. “He should be there for another 5 hours if his schedule holds.”

“Grab me a magic wand. I’m going for a walk.”

Jason walked around the perimeter of the darkened sparring ring, moving to Morgan’s left side as she stood near the center, unable to see her opponent but not needing much more than a sound to direct her concussion waves in the approximate direction. She’d knocked him down twice so far, but he was up on her 6-2, having snuck in to close range and taken her down to the mat from a variety of angles. Each time he did she adapted, and he to her as they both learned new combat strengths and weaknesses.

“Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” Morgan taunted as she slowly twisted around, not talking much so she could listen for Jason’s movements.

He knew better than to respond, for an invisible wave could come back his way a second after he spoke. That was how Morgan had got her first takedown.

Jason reached his right leg out, hovering his foot above the ground for a moment as he ‘looked’ at Morgan. Her arms were partially up, ready to throw some energy wherever she needed, but he’d learned it took her a moment to charge up so if he acted fast he had a chance to rush her.

That wasn’t the plan though.

Holding his leg out to the side he bent down on his left knee a bit, leaning that way as he lifted his foot up a few more inches before smacking it down on the mat, then pushing off towards his left as he dived out of the way.

As expected Morgan threw a concussion wave toward the sound. The two meter-wide blast missed Jason as he ducked to the side, dragging his left foot across the mat into a pivot and running straight in towards her.

To Morgan’s credit, she got her arm turned towards him, though all she had to work with was the sound of his half dozen steps. As she summoned another burst of energy Jason slid feet first underneath her arm and slipped directly underneath her spread legs, wrapping his arms around her knees and tipping her over face first into the mat.

His head got pinned underneath her body in the process, but that didn’t matter. He shoved her legs off to the side and stood up, flicking back on his spherical sight that had turned off when he got smooshed underneath her shorts.

“Seven,” he noted, standing back up and seeing her do the same from behind him. Jason was really starting to like being able to see every direction at once, even if it did pull some extra mental energy to sustain it longer than a few seconds…but that again was the point of these bouts. To push both of them into uncomfortable areas and give their bodies a chance to adapt.

“Center?” she asked, not being able to see where the ring was.

Jason walked over and pushed her by the shoulders into position and backed up, sidestepping as quietly as he could so she hopefully couldn’t track him.

Morgan drew in a slow breath and stood up to her full height, lowering her arms to the sides and splaying her fingers out wide, drawing a frown from Jason. He held still and waited, trying to figure out what she was doing because she wasn’t in position to throw off energy like she normally did…then he got the feeling she was going to go big and try a spherical attack, despite how much it would drain her of energy.

He knelt down slowly, positioning his right foot behind him to brace for the blast but Morgan didn’t move. She just held still as a statue.

Jason really wanted to say something, but knew he couldn’t so he just waited.

Eventually a smile crept onto Morgan’s face, a little at first, as if she was unsure about something, then it blossomed into full mocking mode as she twisted her body and pointed her left hand down towards him.

A directed blast hit him, and it was all he could do to keep from getting knocked over, but he held his exaggerated track start pose, only to see Morgan coming towards him and sweep kicking his forward leg out.

With that physical contact made and registered in her mind, Morgan quickly got her hands on Jason’s body and they wrestled around with him losing his spherical sight in the process. That little hiccup gave her the advantage and he quickly found himself smacked back down onto the mat with Morgan sitting on top of him.

He flicked his spherical sight back on and saw the grainy image of her ghostly face smiling at him.

“I…see…you,” she said in a poor imitation of Sauron.

“You have glowrods in those eyes now?”

“Well, I saw you. It’s completely black now,” she said, not letting him up.

“You developing a newfound crush on me?” Jason teased.

“No…just trying to do it again.”

“Do what? Is there something with your eyes?”

“Where’s your head at?” Morgan asked, feeling up his chest until she got her hands on the side of his face. She leaned forward and kissed him on the head, but missed and hit him in the right eye. “That’s two, sweetheart.”

“That’s three, actually,” he said, frowning. She didn’t usually act like this.

“Nope…two,” she insisted, tapping on his chest twice. “And I’m pretty sure I have you to thank for it.”

“Wait…” he said, reassessing what she meant by ‘I see you,’ and the fact that she’d known right where he was on that last concussion wave.

“It didn’t last long, but I saw you. I’ve been getting little blips the past two days, and always when I’m sparring with you. I think you’re turning me on, boy.”

“Spherical sight?” Jason asked, just to be sure.

“If it looks like a grainy black and white radar image?”

“What did I look like?” Jason said, keenly interested.

“Couldn’t see your face or arms or legs. Just a whitish blob low to the floor…and I could see the floor.”

“How far?”

“About a foot past you. Everything further out kind of just didn’t exist.”

“Did it turn on by itself?”

“No…I kind of coaxed it out. Sort of a Jedi trance thing. How do you do it?”

“It had a mind of its own in the beginning, then I just found the switch. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like finding a third arm I never knew I had. How do you explain how to mentally move your arm?”

“Point.”

“So…are you going to get off me or are we going to make out?”

“If you insist,” Morgan said, leaning forward and finding his nose, then moving down to kiss him on the lips for a split second before she couldn’t help but snicker.

Jason playfully punched her in the gut and flipped her off him, then got to his feet. “You’re in a good mood.”

“New powers do that for me,” she said, not knowing where exactly to look, given that the room was still pitch black.

Jason didn’t have that problem. “What did you mean about me helping?”

“I think your energy field is prodding mine,” she said, her playfulness gone. “Now that it’s happened once, fully, I should be able to exploit it…but I would ask that we keep training in the dark so I can soak up your effect as much as possible. I’m guessing the others aren’t as strong.”

“I don’t know about field strength, but mine is more sensitive and has longer range…however that works.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Sure. I want to keep an eye on you anyway.”

“It’s a lot worse than you’re letting on, isn’t it?”

“Ahh…” Jason sighed, not liking the question.

“Come on.”

He walked over next to her and sat down on the mat where she was sprawled out and touched her shoulder so she knew he was there. “It was. I’m past the worst of it now.”

“Scary?”

“Like you’re going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he admitted. “I hate feeling helpless.”

“Have you had time to read my log?”

“No, but I did hear about the gravity trap.”

“I should be dead,” Morgan said, with Jason hearing something in her voice that he didn’t like. “I was dead. The gravity was crushing me, there was a shield in my way, and I only had a tiny pistol, not enough to get through the shield, not to mention that I couldn’t lift it. I’d walked into a trap and they had me dead to rights. The others died, and I should be dead too. I’m glad I’m not, but it doesn’t feel right. It feels like…total luck. I screwed up. I didn’t deserve to live.”

“Hey…that doesn’t sound like you at all.”

“I don’t know what happened, Jason. And it still freaks me out sometimes.”

“How did you get out?”

“I was stuck on the floor, tipping the pistol and firing into the shield. I levered my shoulder up so I could lean against it, hoping to add some more disruption and after a few tries I fell through. In retrospect I figured out it was the concussive energy manifesting. It disrupted the shield enough for me and the pistol to come through. After that I was almost dead anyway, but I crawled down a hallway and into a room with machinery and just fired off a few shots at random. I couldn’t see well and I still don’t know how I hit what I needed to.”

“The gravity shut down and I woke up floating in the room. After that I managed to get through the ship to the hangar bays where the Calavari recovered me.”

“Well the lucky shot I can understand,” Jason said, trying to work it through for her, “but the shield was all you. However the ability manifested, it was your body that produced it and got you through.”

“I know, I know…my brain does, anyway, but I still remember what it felt like on the other side. I was dead and I knew it. I never should have put myself in that situation. I deserved to die and I didn’t.”

Jason saw a ‘shiny’ tear roll down her black and white face so he scooted close to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled his face in close opposite from hers and tipped their foreheads together.

“If the others had survived, barely, would it still bother you? If you’d knocked out the gravity in time, and they lived, busted up royally but lived, would you still be kicking yourself?”

“That’s not the problem, Jason. I mean, it was, but I got over it. I didn’t like losing them or the Calavari, but I know sometimes things just go wrong and you have to move on. We learned that from the Black Knight lots of times. I know how to lose.”

“So what is it?”

“It’s like…the enemy got inside my defenses and is still there. I’m still scared.”

Jason didn’t say anything for a few seconds, nor did Morgan. She just sat, letting Jason hold her in the silence. He shut off his spherical sight so he was in the same boat as her, then finally whispered in her ear.

“Me too, sis. That’s why I want to make sure you and the others don’t have to go through what I did. I was dead too. And I don’t have an explanation for why I pulled out of it. I’m not out of the woods yet, so maybe me still being in combat mode gives me some perspective. You can’t go back to the gravity trap, so you’ve only got a few memories to work through, and those alter with time. My enemy is still in my head, hammering away. It’s not the same beast it was, but the fear is lying there under the surface. I’ve got it under control for now, but since I really don’t know what I’m doing, there’s always the worry that it’ll get worse again and I won’t be able to stop it a second time.”

Morgan reached up and ran her fingers through his hair, a silent way of saying thanks while she was too choked up to talk.

“Then,” Jason added, changing the tone, “I remember that Paul would gladly trade places with me. He hates that I’ve got Jedi powers and he doesn’t.”

“Ha,” Morgan laughed. “He would.”

They didn’t say anything else for a few seconds, then Morgan wiggled her way free and stood up, pulling Jason up with her. “I think Davis was right to recall us. Our best bet is always working together.”

“Something we rarely get to do nowadays.”

“War aside, I think we need to make a change there.”

“I think you’re right,” Jason agreed.

“Now,” Morgan said, swiping away the moisture around her eyes. “You wanna have another go or find some second gens to knock around?”

“They are getting a bit cocky with their new powers, low level as they are.”

“I was thinking the same. Now,” she said, grabbing hold of Jason’s hand, partly gesture, partly necessity in the pitch black, “show me where the door is.”

7

David passed the small, pencil-like ‘magic wand’ over the alpha numeric keypad/swipecard box in the residential area of City/Building #35 and remotely unlocked Seamus Kilmeade’s quarters. The door slid aside to reveal a modest, yet compact living area with three doorways leading to other rooms. It was neat, but not too neat, with a few scattered items laying around without any actual trash or grime.

David stepped inside and shut the door behind him, then began a visual sweep of the living area. One wall had a large video screen, with another having a morphable mural that changed from dull orange to blue as he watched, emitting a low glow along with depicting a fantasy landscape. It wasn’t holographic, but rather another type of video screen…one intended to give the occupant a sense of having a ‘window’ while inside the giant cube of the building, as well as to visually make up for the tight confines.

David had never been the claustrophobic type, unless he was being restrained in some way. A small room was just a small room, but these types of murals apparently helped many individuals with both the transition to an interior, urban lifestyle, as well as prepping them for life on airless planetoids or space stations where there literally was no ‘outside’ to go strolling through. Star Force facilities usually had interior parks of some sort, along with spacious warrens for people to mingle through and this city/building was no exception, but given the newb status of most of the occupants, the murals had become standard issue in all the building’s quarters.

This set had a single chair in the center of the room facing the video screen. It was plush, but where most units had a couch or two this one did not, belying that the man who inhabited it did not feel the need to welcome guests. On the wall opposite the video screen and next to the three doorways there was a small table with a high stool, on top of which was a comm terminal and an assortment of items. David walked over and visually ran through the lot, seeing nothing uncommon.

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he suspected that whatever the operative was doing here had to be happening where he knew there was no surveillance. There were small items coming into his quarters…that much they’d been able to confirm from hallway monitors. He’d never been seen leaving with anything in his chest pocket, but the trouble was there were many places on the body to hide such things that wouldn’t be visible.

David was pretty sure this operative wasn’t that cagey. If he was pocketing the package in his chest pocket upon arrival he doubted he would smuggle it any other way coming from his quarters…meaning that whatever it contained was probably still here.

He had to be passing something on to the colonists moving out, David was sure of it, but nothing had shown up on visual records. That left these quarters as the end of the thread, meaning there had to be something here.

The fourth wall, bordering the hallway outside, was blank, standing in stark contrast to the mural on the opposite side. At the end of both were two doorways, with the third on the mural side nearby the table. David walked the perimeter of the room three times, checking in every nook and cranny he could find, but there wasn’t much to search through. The room had almost no furniture and looked like it hadn’t been lived in more than a week, though that wasn’t the case.

Next he checked the restroom, which was on the hallway side of the table. It was also spartan, with the cabinets full of little items but nothing overly important. Toothpaste, shaving kit, makeup, anti-acne ointment.

David frowned, taking a second look at the makeup. He opened the lid on the small circle and saw several shades to choose from, all skin tone, one of which was half gone.

Interesting, David thought. A guy with makeup, but no social life? You’re hiding something. Tattoo maybe? Or a wound?

He set the makeup back down exactly where it had been and moved on, finding no other items of interest. Next he searched the structure of the room, trying to see if there were any secret hideaways. Lastly he checked the shower tube, noticing nothing significant other than the fact that it was a walk-in model rather than a vertical entrance.

David left the door to it open, as it had been, and checked the next room whose entrance was on the same wall on the opposite side of the table. There he found the probable cause of the makeup cover up…a bit of blood on the carpet, directly underneath the broken edge of a portable workout kit of shoddy construction.

Best guess was he slit his shoulder on the edge while doing dips. One of the modular pullouts had a nub tapped over heavily, padding it against another cut rather than buying a new unit. The guy was cheap, as well as clumsy…and the fact that he didn’t want to go to the communal workout areas further hinted that this guy spent most of his time in his quarters, but doing what?

At least he worked out…or tried to. David couldn’t say as much for most people, and doing this kind of upper body work wasn’t going to help him on his running quals, so it must have been self-interest or vanity…which was also odd for an operative that seemed to want no social life other than from his official interactions with his students.

The workout room was otherwise empty aside from a series of shelves built into the wall. They had an earbud mount on them, which Seamus obviously used for workout music, but then again earbud technology could be used for a lot of other things as well. David walked over and gave it a closer look, but everything seemed standard and there wasn’t anything else on the shelves so moved on and tried the fourth room.

It was small, with a bed built into a wall niche and storage compartments above, with a closet on the right and more storage on the left. David pulled open each drawer and cabinet, looking through without rifling. He took his magic wand out and pressed a button on the side, then proceeded to sweep a blue laser guideline through the man’s clothes and other possessions, looking for hidden electronics and other items that would give a response ping from the sensor.

He moved through three large drawers of clothes finding nothing till he opened the fourth to three stacks of folded shirts smooshed together in a compartment only wide enough to hold two and a half. David spotted the upturned corner of one of the stacks immediately, but got no ping from the wand as he ran it over the drawer.

He put the device back in his pants pocket and gently lifted up the shirts in the corner in a manner that he could pivot them back down in approximately the same position, then he reached a hand down into the nook and discovered an object beneath. David pulled out the small, flat box and laid the shirts back down, realizing that it was the same approximate shape as the bulge in the man’s chest pocket from the surveillance footage.

David popped open the hinged top, revealing four slots. Three were empty, but the last one contained a tiny vile of dark liquid that looked like blood. In the top of the case there were another four slots, but these were shaped differently and likewise contained only one item…an injector assembly small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

David pulled it out and undid the strap, which he quickly discovered slipped onto his index and middle finger as a pair. A small mechanical box was attached to the strap with a recessed needle tip, along with a receptacle that matched the end of the liquid tube.

It’s an injector…so why would he have blood?

David’s eyes widened and stared at the vile, glancing back and forth between it and the injector.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered, realizing that the blood wasn’t the point. It was merely the transport vector. Inject one of the outgoing colonists and they’d carry whatever was in the vial with them through Star Force’s transportation network where it could be recovered at the other end by another operative. Question was…what was in the blood?

David’s mind flashed back to the drops on the floor in the other room…then dismissed it as coincidence. The machine had been broken and taped over, and he knew Seamus hadn’t had any visitors in his quarters…ever. So unless he was injecting himself and was really clumsy with it, the blood didn’t come from the vials.

The other three were missing, and with three more slots for more injectors he assumed they were meant to be disposable…so probably a trash can. Best bet would be the restrooms, meet up with the target inside, inject him, dispose of the device, and be back out without delay. David had monitored his restroom visits between classes, trying to see if he was meeting up with someone inside but he hadn’t established a pattern. If this was a one-off drop, and the individual he was injecting would leave the planet shortly thereafter, then there would be no pattern to pick up…and since everyone had to use the restroom regularly there was no suspicious activity to flag.

This was all speculation, he knew, but his instincts told him he’d found the smoking gun…plus, he had no legitimate idea for why someone would be injecting themselves with such a small amount of blood. He flirted with the idea of trying to tag and follow whoever he injected next, but with only one vial left he quickly dismissed that idea. This one was going to the medtechs for analysis.

David took the injector off his fingers and placed it back in its slot, then closed and pocketed the case before leaving the tiny bedroom. He opened and then relocked the door to the hallway, then used the comm unit included in the wand to contact security.

“I want these quarters locked down until I can get a sweeper team here. Post a guard 24/7. No one in or out.”

“What about Kilmeade?” the security officer asked.

“I’ll handle him. Is he still in class?”

“They just went on break. He should be back in the classroom within the next 10 minutes. I don’t think he’ll come all the way back to his quarters. He’s in the restroom at the moment.”

“Get a cell ready and have a medical team standing by with scanning equipment. I want him sedated until we can arrange for transport.”

“Scanning for what?”

“Mechanical implants.”

There was a slight pause before an acknowledgement came back. “I’ll pass the word along. Do you want backup?”

“No, just get the quarters locked down and the cell ready. No alerts or anything else to tip him off.”

“Copy that. We’ll be waiting.”

David clicked off the wand and placed it back in his side pocket, then walked through the sparse hallways of the residential block and into one of the larger traffic flows heading through the gigantic building. He headed towards the instruction chambers that served the tens of thousands of would be colonists, all of which were located in the southern lower quadrant of the structure. On his way there he took a short detour to one of the security checkpoints handling incoming traffic from the trains and walked up towards a pair of security guards overseeing the calm transition of passengers as they passed through a scanning machine.

Both men stood a bit straighter when they saw him and his Archon uniform approach.

“Sir?” one of them asked.

David pointed a finger at him, then down at his belt. “I need to borrow that.”

“My weapon?” the guard asked, a bit confused.

“Yes. Belt too. I’m in a hurry.”

The man undid the buckle and handed him the stinger pistol still in the holster.

“Do you need assistance?” the other guard asked.

“Nope. This will do. Thanks,” David said, turning and walking away quickly as he adjusted the belt to match his waist size.

“That…was strange,” the guard said after he was gone.

“You think something is up?”

“Has to be…otherwise why would he need a weapon?”

“Think I should head back and grab another?”

“Not until we get a replacement. If something is going down we don’t want to leave this station undermanned.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re still got your stinger.”

“Recuerde, el adjetivo viene antes del sustantivo. Por tanto el botón rojo se dice ‘red button,” Kilmeade said in Spanish to a class of some 50 students in a tiny amphitheater as David walked in the side door, drawing the attention of some of the students but Seamus didn’t notice him until he started to mount the short staircase that led to the speaking podium, probably having assumed he was another student coming into class late.

When he did see him he stuttered, then held David’s gaze admirably with only a bit of quiver that quickly disappeared.

“Yes?” he asked casually, noticing as the students did his white Archon uniform.

“Instructor Kilmeade, can I have the word?” he said, deliberately mispronouncing the phrase.

A flash of recognition crossed the man’s eyes and David knew he’d guessed correctly. Before the man could respond the Archon took a half step to the left and brought his right arm up in a side-fisted cross and popped the operative in the side of the head, sending him spinning to the floor.

A collective sound of exasperation came from the students, but before any of them could so much as mouth a word David drew the pistol with his left hand and shot Kilmeade in the chest three times, insuring that he was quite unconscious.

The Archon reholstered his pistol and casually looked out over the wide-eyed students.

“Class dismissed,” he said with a smirk, thumbing towards the door.

The lot took the hint and hurried out nervously, sensing that they weren’t in danger but too agitated to stay around and ask about what had just happened. There were any number of rumors floating around about the Archons, but the one constant amongst them all was that they weren’t to be trifled with.

Once they were gone David laid Kilmeade out on his back and searched his body, finding nothing of interest in his pockets and no marks on his neck other than a bit of paint splatter. Out of curiosity he unzipped the Star Force-made civilian shirt across the shoulder and down the left side until it came undone, then he flipped the man over on his face and pulled the back off. As he’d guessed the man had a fairly recent cut across his left deltoid that had sealed over, but it wasn’t patched. He probably hadn’t wanted to see a medic because questions might have been asked, so he’d just stopped the bleeding himself and was letting it heal unaugmented.

David pulled the back of the shirt in place and zipped it up again, then flipped him over right side up and examined his face. It took a few moments, but he eventually ran a finger across his left jaw and came up with a bit of makeup on his finger. He proceeded to rub it off the man’s face enough to see another thin gash, made all the more evident by the tiny droplets of blood oozing out now that he’d broken the scab.

That took care of that little mystery, given that the cut was on the same side of his body.

David picked the man up by the waist as if he were nothing more than a toy and tossed him over his shoulder, despite the fact that the man was two inches taller and weighed a good 15 pounds more than he did. It looked a bit comical, and he cringed a bit as he realized he was smearing paint all over his white uniform, but David nonchalantly carried the unconscious man across the platform, down the stairs, and out the door into the hallway, drawing stares from passerbys and a few of the students that had been brave enough to stick around and see what happened next.

“Relax guys,” David said casually as he passed them by. “No homework for today.”

8

July 16, 2406

Solar System

Earth

“Scans are clean, Archon,” a female medtech said, having been brought in with a specialized team on an overnight flight from Atlantis. “No Dargomir is present in the subject’s body, so far as we can tell. It’s possible there are isolated pockets, but to date all the data I’ve received indicates thorough distribution throughout the body, and we’re detected none here.”

“Good,” David said, arms crossed over his chest as he looked into the cell where the unconscious operative lay with a pair of medtechs hovering over him. “Anything else I should know?”

“He has a mild concussion, along with previous lacerations on his shoulder and face that haven’t completely healed. No signs of surgical augmentation of any fashion.”

David nodded. “Wake him and leave. I’ll take it from here.”

The woman nodded and gestured to the other medtech, who injected Kilmeade with a destunning serum before walking out of the cell. As he worked his way back to consciousness David activated the energy shield and stood waiting for him to wake up as the medtechs left the room.

“What…happened?” Kilmeade asked as he sat up, holding his hand against the throbbing in his head…then he noticed the Archon standing behind the glowing barrier. “Why did you hit me and why am I here?”

“You’ve been found out,” David said simply. “We confiscated your last blood injection, along with your data files. I believe your next appointment was a Tankana Walkowski?”

The man’s eyes went wide, but he kept his mouth shut.

“When we hired you, it was for instructional purposes only. I’m pretty sure somewhere in the contract we mentioned you weren’t allowed to work for the opposition.”

“I’m not employed by anyone else. What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t say ‘employed,’ I said ‘working for,’” David clarifying using quote fingers. “Just so you know, Star Force and The Word have already been formally introduced. Been playing a bit of a chess game and, guess what, you’re one of the pawns we just took.”

“And what are you, a knight?”

“An Archon.”

“I know what you are, I meant metaphorically,” Kilmeade said with an instructor’s tone.

“There’s no equivalent piece on the board for us. Chess is a limited game. Star Force likes to fashion its own pieces.”

“So what is it that I’m actually being accused of doing? What law have I broken?”

“Uh…working for the wrong side.”

“You can’t put me in jail for that,” Kilmeade argued, finally standing up and walking towards the blue force field.

“Dude, we caught you. There’s no trial by jury with Star Force or lawyers you can use to worm your way out of this. You got caught. End of story.”

Kilmeade rubbed his head again. “So what, you’re going to lock me up and throw away the key?”

“Haven’t decided yet. But Star Force does operate its own prisons. They don’t get very full because we really don’t care what you do so long as you don’t cause trouble. That said, we do have a regular flow of smugglers cycling through. So maybe you’ll have some company after all.”

“Oh, wait,” David said before the man could respond. “That’s right. Star Force prisons function on isolation protocols. You won’t see anyone once you go in. No inmates, no guards…not a single living person. You’ll have plenty of things to do to keep you busy, or you can just sit and rot if you like, but you’ll be completely cut off from society until you get out, so if you feel like talking this will probably be one of your last chances.”

Kilmeade shook his head firmly. “You can’t just throw civilians away like that. You have to have some judicial procedures in place.”

David smiled. “Nope.”

“Come now,” Kilmeade said, disbelievingly as he sat back down on the single bench inside the cell. “Star Force has all manner of rules. You want me to believe they don’t also have a justice code?”

“We’re not interested in playing games, only ferreting out the truth. Once we have it, we decide what to do with you. You should be grateful, actually, since we don’t execute prisoners.”

“You still haven’t stated what rule I’ve broken.”

David frowned. “Let me make it more plain then. You’re one of the bad guys.”

“Depending on your point of view.”

“I’m willing to hear yours.”

“Are you the one that decides what happens to me?”

“Pretty much.”

“So Archons can do anything and everything they want?”

“We’re in charge,” David answered simply, not sure which way this guy was leaning.

“Of the military. I thought the civilian side of Star Force was out of your jurisdiction?”

“You heard wrong.”

“Did I? I’m starting to get the idea that you’re just trying to squeeze information out of me before the actual authorities arrive.”

“Ha!” David said, walking around in a small circle with a bemused look on his face. “For an intelligence organization that has supposedly infiltrated our ranks, The Word is really clueless on a lot of simple stuff. The Director and the Archons run Star Force. There’s no jurisdiction involved, no politics, no internal wrangling. We all get along and share responsibilities. Ferreting you out was one of mine, so I get to decide what happens to you.”

“There’s always politics,” Kilmeade said dismissively.

“The young ones always say that.”

The man frowned. “Just how old are you?”

David sighed and pointed to the silver stripe running down the side of his white sleeve. “You see this. Good luck earning one of these before you hit 100.”

“You want me to believe you’re more than a century old? Best guess is you’re 20, maybe 25.”

David looked at him oddly. “Are you even part of The Word or just a stooge? Do you really know that little...wait, check that, most of the populace knows how old Archons are, and a lot of them know what our uniform colors mean. How can you be so dense, especially when you’re getting paid by us?”

“I’m a linguist. I help people learn to communicate with each other. I have few interests aside from that, so my knowledge of the rest of society may be deemed as lacking. I don’t see that as a fault, merely specialization.”

David pointed a finger at him, but refrained from touching the energy field in between. “That’s the most reasonable thing you’ve said thus far. So, your pathetic workouts. A hobby?”

Kilmeade glared. “What do you mean, pathetic?”

“Dude,” David said emphatically, thumbing at his own chest. “Archon.”

“Meaning what?”

“Did I really smack you that hard, or are you just playing dumb?”

“What’s wrong with my workouts?”

“Why didn’t you use the proper equipment that we supplied you with, rather than buying that cheap ass stuff in your quarters?”

“So you searched through my stuff too?”

David hesitated for a moment, unsure whether or not all of this was really a bluff. This guy was acting like he wasn’t that sharp, and David was starting to believe part of it.

“Where did you think we found the blood vial?”

“Star Force says it respects people’s privacy within their quarters. So now you just search them at random?”

“You’re working for our enemy. You have no grounds to complain, Seamus.”

“What’s it matter what the equipment costs, so long as it gets the job done?”

“Your cuts, for one. It broke while you were doing dips, didn’t it?”

Kilmeade frowned. “You have a camera in there, don’t you?”

“Didn’t need one. The placement of your cuts and the piece of the machine that you tapped over don’t leave very many options. Also, I noticed your arms are larger than average. Not hard to deduce what happened.”

“I prefer to train alone, and I couldn’t afford the larger models. Until it snapped I didn’t have any complaints.”

“Where do you run?”

“I don’t. All my workouts are lifts.”

“That…is why your workouts are pathetic. You’ve got to have the cardio to boost you towards self-sufficiency…you do know what that is, right?”

“Yes I know. I read the Star Force fitness manual. What’s cardio have to do with it? I thought any workouts would increase your healing ability.”

David was confused as to how inept this operative was but he was definitely sensing an opening, so he decided to pursue it.

“Efficiency is the key. For that you need lots of reps. When you run you get thousands of cycles on your body, even in a short workout. When you lift you only get a handful. They’re more powerful, which induces more muscular strength and new muscle fibers being added if you overdo it, but it won’t boost efficiency. Efficiency will reduce your attrition, as well as making your body capable of doing progressively greater workouts…which will then further increase your healing ability, allowing you to attain self-sufficiency.”

“That wasn’t in the manual.”

“Yeah it is,” David said, crossing his arms over his chest again. “But don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to read in prison. Plus you’ll have all the workout gear you need. You can actually diminish your stay by completing workouts, so you’ll get in better shape during your solitude if you choose to. Was that part of your plan?”

“What do you mean, part of my plan?”

“Knowing that you’d be able to train at a higher level than ever before, all by yourself, once we caught you? Was that a perk The Word mentioned when they assigned you to this mission?”

“My training is a private hobby.”

“So what, they told you to expect a traditional prison if you got caught?”

“The subject never came up.”

Bingo…first crack.

“You had to know this wouldn’t last forever.”

“Lots of people work for Star Force. I’m just one of the many. You weren’t supposed to notice.”

“We did.”

“Obviously. Mind telling me how?”

“One of your students,” David lied.

Kilmeade lowered his head. “How’d you catch them?”

“Just kidding,” the Archon said, adding another data point to his mental list. “Most people don’t go on vacation for a few hours. You should have stuck around for a while, gave yourself some more obvious cover story for why you were coming and going.”

“They told me to keep everything to a minimum to avoid drawing suspicion…and you’re saying that’s what led you to me?”

“That, and the fact that one of their other operatives mouthed off that they’d infiltrated us so we started looking harder…and found you,” he finished with a sarcastic smile.

“So much for ‘mind your own business and you won’t get picked up,’” Kilmeade scoffed.

“Is that why you were training in your quarters?”

“Yes.”

“As I said, you’ll have better training facilities to work with from now on.”

“I still don’t get that. Why give your prisoners stuff?”

“More like borrow, but I get your question. You’re not the first to ask, by the way. The basic point is, if we wanted you dead we’d just kill you, so why lock you away in a cage where you’ll rot to death or get killed by other inmates? Kinda counterproductive. This way, we isolate you, don’t harm a hair on your head, and drive you insane with the isolation. Now, for me and others in Star Force the isolation wouldn’t be a problem, but for weak-minded people with a pack mentality it is. You can call it revenge…or an impetus for change.”

“Rehabilitation?”

David shook his head in the negative. “Change comes from within. It can’t be forced. It can be heavily encouraged, but not forced. So, you can sit on your butt and stagnate if you want, or choose from a list of activities that we feel will be beneficial for you…and if you haven’t noticed, we really like training.”

“So how long are you going to give me?”

David uncrossed his arms and planted his hands on his hips. “Depends how much you actually did. I’ve got people digging through things, are they going to turn up more than just the blood injections?”

Kilmeade sighed. “No, that was my sole purpose here. They tell me who and when, then the student finds me right before graduation, I inject them, they move on, and I wait for the next person on the list.”

“Where are you injecting them?”

Kilmeade pointed to his inner right elbow. “Easiest veins to hit and doesn’t leave a visible mark if you’re wearing long sleeves like the neck would.”

“I meant the location in the city.”

“They told me the hallways were monitored, so I had to use the restrooms…the target would show up, say a code phrase to confirm identification, then I’d find a little privacy or diversion and inject them. Sometimes all it took was one of us having our back to whoever else was in there. Nothing complicated.”

“What did you do with the injector?”

“There’s a button to press after use that causes it to disintegrate. Never stuck around to watch how. I just hit it and tossed it in the trash, like I was told.”

“Were any of the contacts in your classes?”

“Two were prior to my being given instructions, but at that point they’d already moved on to other instructors. I handle the basic linguistic translation, so the ones I’ve got aren’t near to leaving. Something about the liquid was time-sensitive, which was why they had to be injected right before they left.”

“You call it liquid, why?”

“That’s all I know. It looked like blood to me, but they never said and I never asked.”

“What were you getting out of this?”

“A job that pays 5 times what this one does, after I complete my stay here.”

“That’s it?”

“That and a philosophical justification. Why, were you expecting more?”

“So you’re more of a contract case rather than a member of The Word?”

“Both small and large, we are all The Word. There’s no mission too small, for all support one another in building the structure that will take Humanity back to our rightful place.”

“Team mantra?”

“Something like that. Then again, they also told me I wouldn’t get caught, so who knows.”

“What made you think they’d come through with the job afterwards and not just cut you loose?”

“They said the job would be a step up in the organization, so it wasn’t so much a payoff as a promotion. They’re not just going to let someone in that hasn’t proven themselves.”

“So this was an initiation?”

“You could say so.”

“How much information were you given about the organization?”

“About an hour long speech. After that the only contact I’ve had was at the drop points and the contact lists. How’d you unscramble those anyway?”

“It wasn’t that hard when the instructions were still in your files.”

A weird expression crossed Kilmeade’s face. “I never had an instruction file.”

“It was deleted, but not all the way.”

The man facepalmed. “I wrote a note to remind myself the first time, then got rid of it. You’re saying it was still on there?”

“Computers have a way of backing up lots of things.”

“So you know who that last vial was going to?”

“Yes.”

“Are you picking him up?”

“Is there a reason we shouldn’t?”

“Have you picked him up yet?” he insisted.

“Not yet.”

“Can I get a lighter sentence if I help you?”

David frowned. “Meaning what?”

“I don’t know where they go, but if you know who it is you can follow them down the line…if I inject him as expected.”

“That’s assuming word of me punching you in the face and carrying you across the building over my back hasn’t gotten around to him.”

“Oh…hadn’t thought about that. You carried me through the halls?”

“I’m a lot stronger than I look.”

“It might still be worth a try?” he pressed.

“So what happened to your philosophical loyalty?”

“It died.”

“What was their selling point, by the way?”

Seamus sighed, figuring there was no harm in explaining fully, now that he realized he wasn’t getting out of this. “Meat. There are very few places you can get it nowadays, thanks to you. My father took me hunting as a child and I grew fond of the taste of the wildlife cooked over a campfire. So their pitch to return things to the way they used to be while improving on the mistakes of the past had something tangible for me to hold on to…that and the assignment seemed a pathetically easy inroad to the organization.”

“How’d you even learn of the organization?”

“They found me…I don’t know how. Guess they did their homework, because the hunting was brought up as one of the first complaints against you guys, along with a list of others, most of which I didn’t care about. I actually like how you’re defending the planet and all…assuming that isn’t a gigantic hoax?”

“It’s not. So why help take us down if you want us defending the planet?”

Kilmeade frowned. “The Word isn’t trying to take you down. Fighting a civil war would do more harm than good. They’re changing things from the inside, which is why they have to stay hidden. They didn’t say, but I got the feeling the injections were some sort of message being carried. They assured me there wasn’t anything dangerous, like a disease or something, just an injection that had to be given within a certain timeframe. I thought it might also be some type of medication or drug, but nanites holding a message or something made more sense. Do you know what it is?”

“It’s undergoing analysis now, but I can tell you that it is blood. Were the contacts always delivered singly?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t make drops that often, so they’d give me a set of liquids that I’d wait on. Each one was different. They insisted that I didn’t get them mixed up.”

“Can you give us the names of your other contacts?”

“I deleted the messages…can’t you pull them back out of cyberspace too?”

“No. The instructions were a document on your tablet. The messages weren’t. How’d you know where to look for them?”

“If I tell you that, you can backdate them, I assume? They’re in public documents. Surely those haven’t been deleted?”

“No they’re not.”

Kilmeade smiled. “I can give you the most recent few from memory, then maybe a few more. They updated the key each time I picked up the vials.”

“Who was your most recent contact, and when?”

“Harold Smithison. About two weeks ago. The 3rd I think. I don’t usually remember past one. I’d write it down, but they told me not to, so I make myself remember until it happens. The previous code cypher was ran…random kitty. That was good for 5 people.”

“I think I’ll arrange for your prison stay to be…oh…let’s say about 2 years. If you complete the training programs that’ll decrease considerably…or lengthen based on bad behavior. It’s all up to you. If this information, or anything else you can provide us, turns out to be valuable in some way, I’ll see that your pay continues…that way you’ll have a tidy little sum built up by the time you get out.”

Kilmeade half smiled, not liking the idea of going to prison but favoring the terms the Archon was offering. “I can live with that.”

9

August 21, 2406

Solar System

Earth

David ducked just in time for a tiny ‘thud’ to zip by his ear, missing his shoulder. The mundane ball hit the far wall, compressing on impact so as to give little rebound. It fell to the ground and rolled towards the exterior of the dark training room where there was a collection tray set into the floor. Gravity pulled it down and in, then it rolled to an intake port and disappeared from the Archon’s spherical sight, though he wasn’t paying attention to it any longer as more thuds were firing out at him from multiple launchers in the walls.

The tiny ball slipped into a mechanized elevator that pulled it up high into the wall and placed it in a dispersion machine, waiting its turn to be sectioned off and returned to one of the launchers in the room when the hopper ran low. That occurred about 40 seconds later and it, along with several dozen other thuds, were scooted through an internal track around the inside of the curved wall and dumped into the weapon’s ammunition store. From there it waited again, before being pulled into another transition chamber, then shifted down into the firing tube.

The barrel tilted slightly within the wall, adjusting to David’s position, tracking his torso, then a bit of compressed air propelled the thud back out again towards its target, but the Archon deftly twisted to the side and let it slide underneath his armpit...then it impacted the far wall and began to repeat the same cycle.

Over and over the little thuds would cycle, giving David an unlimited amount of training time if he chose. This was a staple of Archon agility drills, the trick of it this time was that the room was dark and there was a white noise generator, sounding like an oscillating hiss, that was covering the telltale ‘whiff’ of the thuds coming out of their tubes which normally alerted an Archon from which direction they were coming, giving them a split second or so to react.

With that advantage gone, as well as his sight, the only way David could track the thuds was with his spherical sight…which ironically worked far better than usual for this drill, because he didn’t have to be constantly alert for getting hit in the back when he could ‘see’ everything in the room as if it was in front of him…meaning that, as far as his sensing ability was concerned, he no longer had a back.

The trouble was, both for him and others, that the smaller the object was the less it stood out in his spherical sight…or any other sight for that matter. If David’s ability wasn’t refined enough he wouldn’t be able to sense the thuds coming out of their tubes until they were only a meter or so away, or maybe not even that, meaning that those Archons with a low level spherical sight ability just beginning to manifest couldn’t use this drill until they progressed a bit further, making it something of an alpha dog scenario that currently only he and Jason were developed enough to use.

Not that he was anywhere within Jason’s league. David had worked up to a level 4 setting, compared with the level 37 he managed when the lights were turned on. Jason had already progressed to level 34 with the lights off, blowing David thoroughly out of the water…but it was still a feather in his cap just to be able to use this challenge, and he definitely wanted to stay ahead of the rest of the Archons just now beginning to experiment with level 1 runs.

David had this current scenario set at a simple 10 minutes…no scoring threshold to meet, just gaining experience picking up the fast moving objects on approach and getting his body out of their way in time. When he finished he’d accumulated 57 hits, which averaged out to be one about every 10 seconds. That wasn’t good, but it wasn’t horrible either, considering how many were being spat out of the walls.

As David exited the chamber he pulled off his safety sunglasses and put them in a rack along with several others of varying size, knowing from experience that he didn’t want to take one of the thuds in an eye socket again. His spherical sight stayed on until he got into the hallway, then it slipped out of focus and disappeared. It had been staying on longer than David liked, but he also appreciated the fact that he didn’t have to focus to keep it active, which allowed his mind to move to other tasks…like evasion, with the sight as an afterthought. It was simply there, like his eyes were, and had become quite natural after so many attempts.

His endurance had skyrocketed as well, with him almost having to concentrate to turn the sense off. Usually he could just relax and it’d knock itself offline, but the more and more he got used to seeing through it his subconscious mind didn’t want to let it go and he had to make more of a mental choice to shut it down.

Right now that wasn’t an issue because he was feeling a bit of fatigue from using it and it slipped off on its own. He had a bit of a headache from the effort, having had to metaphorically ‘squint’ a lot during the drill to catch the thuds coming out of their barrels. If he didn’t he had only a 50/50 chance of picking them up enroute with enough time to evade, so he’d been having to press his spherical sight as much as he could to give him another few hundredths of a second to work with.

To be honest, he wasn’t sure if he was actually doing anything when he ‘squinted’ or just giving his head a brain cramp, but he was trying none the less. Other than Jason’s instruction…which was quite helpful at times…David had to poke and prod around inside his head to figure out how things worked, which a lot of times meant trying the stupid and pointless and seeing if anything happened…and on occasion something would.

As David’s spherical sight released and the hallway returned to his normal vision he felt a release of pressure in his head, now that he wasn’t expending the mental energy to produce the field that allowed him to ‘tactilely’ touch the objects around him to generate the image in his head. Jason had figured it out first, then was later backed up by the medtechs when they confirmed that the energy field being produced was not straight line beams like conventional sensors were. Instead it operated as a cloud that filled in the area around the person, allowing them to ‘see’ the backside of objects as well.

Not that it mattered, but David could ‘see’ the entire way around each of the thuds if he’d had time to concentrate, the same way that Jason could ‘see’ around the perimeter of his favorite marble. Neither of them could see inside objects well, unless they were porous. The energy field could push through lower massed walls, but it was more concentrated with direct access. This the medtechs had also confirmed with multiple studies on Jason and backed up with tests on David and a few others.

David’s test had been two balls. Both had an inner core that was hollow, one was sealed and the other had a tiny pinprick of a hole. He could see the hollow center on both, but the one with the hole was more distinct, confirming that even though the energy field he was producing could penetrate the material, it also was being restrained by it in some fashion, the exact specifics of which the medtechs hadn’t deduced.

They had, however, come through in several other areas, namely identifying the regions of the brain that were producing the superpowers. Both David and Jason had a growth in their occipital lobes, or rather a reconfiguring of existing tissue into a denser configuration. What had caused the upgrade wasn’t known, but Archons and other Star Force personnel were now being checked for similar growths which would indicate that they were developing the spherical sight ability.

How it worked was still a mystery, but the growths were emitting the energy field, and in the case of Jason’s, the structure was four times larger than David’s, as well as many times denser, almost as if the brain tissue was developing much as muscle would. This wasn’t surprising to the Archons, but it did freak out the medtechs, given that they’d always viewed the brain like a computer core rather than a source of physical output.

In Jason’s case he also had a second ‘anomaly’ within his brain, located in the back portion of the parietal lobe, that was responsible for the telekinetic energy fields he was capable of producing. They’d also been able to identify new tissue interlinking the two, and the more he developed his abilities through training, the more complicated and intricate the tissue became, almost as if the brain was running new wires between the two to increase processing speed.

The medtechs had also been able to detect and measure disruptions/anomalies in other portions of his brain, all of which seemed to stem from the new tissue growth, as if it was progressing too fast. That was their assessment, but David put that down to no more than a guess. He’d seen the scans, and could tell that the new areas were the source of the changes, but as to how they were causing them wasn’t clear. The medtechs didn’t understand that training could progress slowly or lightning fast…it was unpredictable, but repetitive, and given the leaps and bounds Jason was making with his training now, and the gradual improvement he was making inside his head, speed didn’t seem to be the deciding factor in what was going on.

So it wasn’t with any great surprise that on his way through the halls, just as his spherical sight was fading, that something else in his head began to clench up…just slightly, as if his mind didn’t want to completely relax. David noted the change then dismissed it, having had all kinds of little tweaks happening over the past months. He hit the track next for his second run of the day, a short 5k, then he swung back by his quarters for a quick shower and nap…the latter of which usually helped to loosen the tension in his mind, a trick that Jason had passed along and David had found to be effective.

He was out for 20 minutes in a foggy trance where his mind seemed to be far more active than it should be, chewing over what he didn’t know, but the clenching seemed to ease a bit until he stood up.

David pressed a hand to his forehead and massaged the knot a bit, which helped in some way he couldn’t explain. He kept it up for several seconds on his way over to the comm terminal to check his incoming messages, expecting an update from Seraph-822 either today or tomorrow. He was following one of the leads that Kilmeade had provided them, or rather that the student who Kilmeade had identified had provided them.

After David had finished his interrogation of the operative and sent him on his merry way to a prison facility on Luna, he’d returned to the pyramid while sending other members of Green Team around the star system to track down the students that had been carrying the blood samples inside their bodies. Those had turned out to be very clever data transfers, and completely biological, leaving no nanites or other machines present to be detected even if someone was looking for them.

Instead, the blood contained genetically altered cells, matched to the target’s blood type to avoid rejection. These cells were nonfunctional as oxygen carriers, but where that capability was missing there were dense regions of material containing genetic patterns that could be readable by certain types of analysis equipment…nothing standard or handy, but advanced models that could give you a complicated genetic string, from which a computer program could synthesize data.

And not just a little data. These cells were capable of carrying entire programs, charts, books…they were essentially a biological equivalent of a data chip, one with low memory capability, given the size, but more than enough to send brief packets of intel out to operatives without leaving an electronic trail behind for Star Force or any others to track down.

Each cell in the blood sample they’d recovered was identical, with the idea being that at least a few should survive in the body long enough to reach their target. The extraction process was unknown until Green Team recovered one of the handlers that the student/colonist had met up with, and though the individual was not forthcoming with information they had recovered his equipment.

A small probe would be inserted into the carrier’s vein, whereupon it would sit and wait for one of the special blood cells to pass by. When they did a component of their design was attracted to the probe and would attach. In this way the operative would ‘sift’ through the carrier’s blood until they got their message packet, then they’d remove the probe and send the colonist on their way to begin their new life…either as the endpoint of their service to The Word or on to another assignment within the colony itself.

The students/colonists that Green Team had been able to track down were much more forthcoming with information than the operative had been, given that their association with The Word was only in the beginning stages. Unfortunately they didn’t have a lot of information to offer, but some of it was valuable, in so far as identifying some of The Word’s recruitment procedures.

Between their data, the information extracted from the blood sample, and the equipment recovered from the operative Green Team had several new leads to follow up and David had sent four members off to hunt down individuals or data trails. Seraph was currently investigating a facility on Titan where they thought The Word had set up a warehouse of sorts, but so far there was no message from him.

That didn’t worry David, because he was just in the beginning edge of the expected timeframe. However, there was another message from Davis that did concern him, detailing a bit of sabotage at a chemical plant in Mars orbit. One of the storage tanks had been detonated…nothing combustible, but it had spewed out a cloud of icy debris that caused several orbital traffic patterns to be closed down temporarily. There was already a news story out about how Star Force’s safety procedures hadn’t been sufficient on the station in question and blah, blah, blah. Point was, it looked like Star Force was being sloppy, and Davis had already tagged it as an example of The Word’s unconventional war…

Damage their reputation and turn public sentiment against them. Even if that wasn’t going to stop Star Force in any way, shape, or form, it would could cause them headaches and, more importantly Davis pointed out, create a growing opposition that in time could escalate to dangerous levels. The Word might not even have to fire a shot if they could convince others to in their stead.

That was far down the line, as the Director pointed out, but it was a concern none the less, not to mention the damage done to the station. He indicated that no one had been harmed in the sabotage, but the perpetrator had yet to be discovered.

Attached to the message was the preliminary investigation notes and David pulled those up for a quick read through before heading over to the Cerebro section of the sanctum for some more navigation drills. He got through the first few pages, indicating that the explosive had been concussive in nature and that the pieces of which had been imbedded in the ice fragments and recovered during the cleanup operation.

It had been a small device, but not something you could carry around in your pocket, meaning…

Suddenly David’s head clenched up again, but this time far worse…so much so that he stumbled out of his chair and went to his knees on the floor. It reminded him of a muscle cramp, and he knew the only thing he could do was go inactive, because any movement or resistance would just make it worse.

He held position in the floor, trying not to think of anything and just enduring the pain before it began to slowly subside. David blinked away tears as he held his nerve, but like Jason had told him about his own trials, the pain didn’t go away completely. There was a small knot in his head that, once the wash of pain was gone, was still fighting him. David wanted to forcefully break it up after his nerve returned, but he held off, knowing that had made Jason’s even worse.

Instead he stood up, experimenting with the movement and finding it didn’t affect his head much, then he walked out of his quarters and headed off through the sanctum. For the first time since hearing about Jason’s story David was truly scared. Not just because of the intensity of the pain, but because of the idea that it wasn’t going to stop, rather it was going escalate to potentially fatal levels.

“Something wrong?” Aaron asked, passing him by in the hall and seeing the tears in his eyes.

“Very,” he said with a slightly trembling voice. “Do you know where Jason is?”

10

September 4, 2406

Solar System

Earth

Kian stood on the finishing platform in the dark, using a pair of nightvision sunglasses so he could watch Jason as he approached, leaping from one pillar to another across the disqualification padding a meter below. The other Archon was having to navigate the uneven pillars, using only his spherical sight for navigation, all the while Kian was attempting to knock him off.

Well, not literally, but he was trying to disorient him enough that he’d fall off on his own. Randomly he was throwing out disruption field pulses, trying to catch Jason off guard and cause him to slip up, but his fellow trailblazer was getting accustomed to Kian’s ability and had learned to guard against it so long as he used slow, deliberate motions. That had prompted Kian to not broadcast it constantly, but rather to switch it up unexpectedly and catch Jason in the transition.

He was about halfway across the course now, balancing on the tops that ranged from 15 inches wide all the way down to a mere 2. Which route he took across was his choice, but if he kept to the wider ones they also added an elevation component, forcing him to jump, not just across, but higher and lower as he progressed, making the landings even more tricky…or rather they would have been for regular Star Force personnel. For the Archons this was child’s play.

Doing it in the dark was part of the challenge for Jason, though by now his sensing capabilities had reached the point where flat objects were no longer a problem. His sense of balance had adjusted and he was able to recognize the platforms in an instant, whereas other more irregular objects took a moment to process in his mind. The more familiar the shapes were, the quicker he could react, with the geometric pillars easily recognizable.

He could also see Kian on the far end, blurry as he was. Jason’s range was continually increasing, but he didn’t like to extend it out too far for it took more and more energy to do so. Like light emanating from a star, the farther away you got the dimmer it became, and in order to see far out he had to up the intensity of the energy field considerably…unless he wanted to focus on a particular section in ‘spotlight’ mode, but that would cut out everything else around him and leave him vulnerable, and right now he needed his spherical sight active to help maintain his balance.

Jason jumped across a double gap, bypassing a 3 inch wide pedestal and getting hit mid jump with another disruption burst. His spherical sight didn’t go out, but his connection to his senses dimmed enough that when he landed he felt half numb, however he did retain enough connection to his limbs to flex his legs underneath him to absorb the landing and stay more or less upright.

He focused hard to get his balance, as if he was having to plow his neural impulses through snow-covered roads to get to his muscles, but he maintained one foot on the pedestal and wiggled around for balance, then placed his left down with only his toes touching the pillar, offering now a two legged stance.

The disruption field ended, with it feeling like his body suddenly lost 500 pounds of weight. His senses cleared up and he felt lithe again, but he knew he had to be patient otherwise Kian would catch him off guard and he’d smack his face into one of the pillars on his way down like the last time.

“Come on, Jason. Pick up the pace,” Kian said, throwing a half second burst in just to mess with him. “You’d be a sitting duck if I had a weapon.”

Unfortunately, Jason knew he was right. He was moving too slow, but it was the only way he could assure himself of getting across…and there was no time restriction on this drill, though he should probably add one later. Right now, though, he just needed to get across while holding his nerve. The disruption field Kian was producing never got easier to take and it shook him to the bone each time. He was making progress in resisting it, but by resetting his equilibrium faster, not by blocking it.

Jason hopped to a nearby 2 inch pillar set half a meter higher and skipped across to a 4 inch of equal level…with Kian not interfering. That almost tipped him over the side, having set his mind against something that never manifested. He teetered on landing…then got blindsided by a short burst, followed by a pause, then another burst.

Kian repeated it for a third time and smiled as he saw Jason topple over the side, unable to keep up with the changes. He waited for the disqualification signal to sound and the lights to come back on but the chamber remained silent…then he saw the trailblazer hanging onto the pillar with one hand and his feet mere inches from the padding below.

“That’s kind of cheating,” he called out as Jason pulled himself back up, despite another disruption field descending upon him and staying in place.

“Shut…up,” Jason said, having to force the words out as much as the nerve impulses. Most of his body was a ghost to his mind, with only thin tendrils of controllable mass, but he pulled upwards strongly, almost telling his muscles blindly what to do rather than feeling the feedback and adjusting. Soon his chin came up past the tip of the tiny pedestal and Jason reset his hands on top of one another as he snaked his head up over top of them, followed by his chest in an impressive feat of strength and balance.

It wasn’t to last. Kian kept the disruption field up long enough that the sensory fatigue got to Jason and his control slackened just a touch, but it was enough for his hands to slip and for him to come crashing down on top of the pillar. It knocked the wind out of him, for he couldn’t predict it coming with his senses on the fritz, then he toppled off the side and hit the mats.

The lights came back on, but the static in his head didn’t end.

“Enough already,” he complained, flipping over into a seated position.

He heard Kian laugh, then his head suddenly cleared.

“Can you adjust the intensity?” he asked, getting to his feet.

Kian’s merriment died out. “Sorry, but no. I’ve been trying, but right now all I’ve got is one setting. And I think it’s getting louder as I grow stronger.”

“So if I’m holding even I’m actually making progress?”

“More than that, you’re getting harder to knock off.”

“I wish there was one more of you,” Jason said, climbing up one of the shorter pillars and getting back on top, then hopping across the others easily to get to the finish platform. “I bet there’s a way to block the effect. There’s got to be.”

“I’m still surprised I’m not affected,” Kian said with a shrug. “Useful trick though.”

“Too bad we don’t know what it’s called. There’s bound to be something in the database about it.”

“Still looking, still failing,” Kian agreed.

Jason sighed. “Again?”

“I’ll give you three more. Any more than that and I’m going to get a headache.”

“You feeling any other power twinges?”

“Nope. You?”

“I’ve got my hands full with this one, thanks,” Jason said, hopping back onto the pillars and crossing back to the start end directly rather than going round through the exterior hallways. When he got back to the other side he triggered the start pedestal and the lights went out.

Kian hit him with a blast immediately, not even waiting for him to get to the edge of the platform. He saw Jason stumble a bit, then he hopped onto one of the smallest pillars, after which he leapt up to an even taller narrow one, seeming to take the most direct route across gap. He let him go through four before hitting him with a disruption blast just before he jumped again.

That caused Jason to only get partial power on the jump and he came up short, having to stretch out his foot to get it on the target and then leaning forward to try and regain his balance. Limber as all Archons were, he reached down and grabbed the edge of the pillar with his right hand and hung there with his butt off the side and his leg mostly extended…then he leveraged his way back up to neutral and weathered another disruption blast before standing up again.

Suddenly there was a burst of light from behind Kian. He didn’t notice it immediately, given that he had his vision augmented by the sunglasses, but Jason stopped moving immediately and Kian backtracked the whitewash around the edges of his vision to the door leading out of the finish area behind him just before the main lights came on.

“Hello,” Kian said as he turned around, a bit annoyed. People knew that when this chamber was active it was supposed to be dark.

Kara came around the corner and nodded distractedly at Kian, looking out across the pillars to where the other person in the room was standing. “Jason! Get over here!”

“What’s up?” Kian asked, taking a step closer to her as she seemed serious about something. “And when did you get here?”

“Just now,” she said, keeping her eyes on Jason. “Sorry about interrupting, but I didn’t want to wait. How’s he doing?”

“Am I missing something?”

“His head. How’s he doing?”

“Well enough. David’s got it worse.”

“David?”

“441.”

“Does he have telekinetic abilities yet?”

“I don’t think so…what’s going on?”

“I’m here to help,” she said firmly as she watched Jason display his superior agility as he jumped from one pillar to another with barely half a second spent on top of each, bouncing left and right as he chose an erratic pattern, grabbing the medium to large pillars to maximize speed.

“How?” Kian asked, his eyes dropping down to the jewel on her left wrist.

She followed his eye line, then raised her forearm up so he could get a better look. “How much did Mark tell you?”

“Some form of retractable armor.”

“And?”

“You couldn’t take it off, even with an army of medtechs.”

Kara smiled. “It does a lot more than that, and I’ve had 4 years to work with it.”

Kian noticed the uniform she was wearing, including the green stripe bracketing the sides. He pointed to it. “When did you make ranger?”

She shook her head side to side. “Not just ranger. Level 43 ranger.”

Kian’s face scrunched up in disbelief, and Jason had a similar look as he hopped off the last pillar and jogged over to them.

“Say again?” he asked.

“I’m a level 43 ranger,” Kara said evenly, then held up her forearm jewel. “It’s a cheat, I know, but I’m stuck with it.”

“Cheat how?” Kian asked.

“It boosted my strength, agility, speed…everything. Took a while to take effect, and the increase was one time, as far as I can tell, but all that can wait,” she said, looking at Jason and motioning him forward with the fingers of her right hand. “Give me your head.”

Jason and Kian exchanged glances. “What for?”

“Your mind is blocked from my Ikrid, so I need physical contact.”

“Ikrid?” Kian asked.

Kara rolled her eyes. “Sorry…telepathy. I think in V’kit’no’sat half the time now…can’t help it.”

“Wait,” Jason said, raising an eyebrow. “You know what it’s called?”

“Yes, and a lot more. This little baby,” she said, pointing to her left wrist, “holds more than armor. Puff didn’t just give me Zen’zat equipment, he made me a full Zen’zat, meaning a huge knowledge upload. I’m not through all of it yet, pieces keep popping out at random, but I can help you with your head, I think, but I need to touch it.”

“Why haven’t you mentioned any of this before?” Jason asked.

“I’ve been on Daka and spent most of my time flying and figuring this thing out in my spare time. Mark knows most of it, didn’t he tell you?”

“Ah, no,” Jason said, a bit perturbed at the oversight. “We’ve been looking through the database for anything related to these superpowers but we didn’t have the keywords to search. You’re saying you do have them.”

“Ugh,” she complained, wishing they’d just trust her. “Rensiek, Fornax, Ikrid, Sesspik, Pefbar, Lachka, Ensek…the seven basic Zen’zat psionic abilities. We’re supposed to have access to them from the get go. Breeding wasn’t figured into the equation so they’ve gotten a bit funky. Genetic deactivation, I’d guess. You guys are shuffling your bodies around enough through training adaptation that you’re probably triggering a Menslavenchednes…sorry, a…resetting of your abilities to your defaults, though apparently not all at once. You can see all around you and lift objects, correct?”

Jason and Kian exchanged glances again, thoroughly blown away. “Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“Not me, as far as I know.”

“I can do this,” Kian said, throwing off a disruption burst.

Kara squinted, but her body didn’t move while Jason slumped a bit, even though he knew what was coming.

“Fornax. Always wondered what that felt like.”

“Me too,” Kian echoed, studying her closely as if he wasn’t sure she was being genuine.

Kara caught the gist of his look and closed her eyes for a moment.

Suddenly Jason slumped again, while Kian nearly fell over. He caught himself after Kara’s disruption blast passed and stared at her with wide eyes.

“You have them all?” Jason asked, picking up on what she’d said earlier.

“All the basics. I haven’t broken through to the higher abilities. Will you please let me help you?”

“How?”

Kara held up her hand and stared at him.

“You don’t think you can give me at least a little explanation of what you’re going to do when you start poking around inside my head…which I thought wouldn’t work on Zen’zat anyway?”

“You guys can be so stubborn,” Kara said, still holding up her hand. “Trust me. Time matters.”

“Alright,” Jason said, stepping closer. “But if you mess anything up Kian’s going to kick your ass.”

“He wishes,” Kara scoffed. Then Jason remembered what level ranger she claimed to be, which put her ahead of all of them save for Morgan and Steve.

“Just hold still,” she said, touching her fingers to his forehead as she concentrated. She held them there for only a second, then started running them through his hair around to the back of his head. There she lingered, bringing up her second hand around the opposite side of his head in a loose embrace with her face a few inches away from his. She had her eyes closed, but his were open and staring at her. He felt nothing and wondered what exactly she was doing.

“Damn, you’re chewed up alright,” she said without letting go. “Did you use a Kich’a’kat?”

“Tried,” Jason said, recognizing the V’kit’no’sat name for the device Star Force referred to as a ‘regenerator.’ “If it helped, it wasn’t enough to notice.”

“I can see the repairs it tried to make. It probably bought you a little time, but it can’t heal what isn’t there to begin with. Your pain is coming from new tissue growing incorrectly. If you had the tissue and then it was damaged it could repair it to previous condition, but given this is new to your body it has no pattern to work off of, so it tried to repair the incorrect pieces to their previous incorrect status. Understand?”

“Actually, that makes a lot of sense.”

“I’m still lost,” Kian offered.

“Fortunately, I can fix this,” she said, still probing the damage. “But it’ll require you and I take a long nap together.”

“Careful, Jason. I think this second gen is hitting on you.”

“I’ll take the chance,” Jason said bluntly. “How are you doing what you’re doing?”

“Remote Ikrid download is blocked, so someone can’t pry into your memories or thoughts and extract information, nor can they take control of your body. Physical Ikrid operates differently in that it allows you to directly access the nervous system. Zen’zat have some blocks there as well, but most of those are conscious ones. They wanted us to be able to interact with each other, but not with other races. Rit’ko’sor, for example, can’t access our minds through touch any more than they can through remote Ikrid.”

“What I’m doing now is basically hacking your localized nervous system and getting some basic status feedback from it. Damage assessment. My Ikrid ability isn’t high enough to get more than a few inches from source of contact, but if it was I could hack your head by simply touching your finger.”

“No more pinky swearing, I guess,” Kian joked.

“By the way,” Kara added, “your Ikrid ability is manifesting too. It’s dormant because the tissue isn’t developed enough, but I can feel it beginning.”

“How close am I?”

“I don’t know enough to give you a good estimate, but it’s coming,” she said, finally releasing his head and taking a step back.

“My turn?” Kian asked.

“Oh, now you trust me?”

The trailblazer gestured at Jason. “He didn’t die, so…”

“You having headaches too?” she asked, stepping up to him and touching his head.

“No, but I’ve only got the one power. Can you tell me if I’m getting any more?”

“You’ll get them all, eventually. At least you should. Depends how you’re shaking them loose…you’ve got a very small Pefbar growth,” she said, moving her hands around his head to various locations, “but I don’t feel anything else at the moment.”

“Pefbar?”

“Your third eye,” she answered metaphorically before pulling away.

“Spherical sight?” Jason asked, just to be sure.

“That’s one way of describing it,” Kara said, turning her attention back to Jason. “You want to find a bed or do this here?”

“What’s ‘this’ exactly?”

Kara held up her clear jewel. “This is also a Kich’a’kat. It has tendrils throughout my body…or can extend them out, haven’t quite figured that one out yet. Anyway, I can connect to another person. Basically my body becomes a Kich’a’kat and you have to wear me for a while for it to make repairs.”

“I thought you said a regenerator couldn’t fix the problem?” Kian asked.

“Well, it can, but not on default settings,” Kara said, catching herself again. To her all of this was common knowledge. “If they’re not set to rebuild you to previous settings and go on straight genetic replication, they’ll build entirely fresh tissue...unaugmented tissue. It’ll wipe away years of training in a matter of minutes.”

“As much as I hate the headaches, I think I’ll pass, thanks,” Jason said, taking an unconscious step back from her.

Kara noticed and laughed. “Relax. It only targets damaged areas, and I can use it to build brand new tissue around what you’ve already got. I may have to nick off a few pieces here and there, but for the most part you’ll retain what skill you have already.”

“And that will stop the damage?”

“You’ll be fully formed, then you can upgrade from there naturally.”

“If this works, can you do it for the others?”

“Yes.”

Jason laid down on the floor. “Do it…then get to David. He’s in worse shape than me.”

“Ok,” she said, straddling him. “This may feel a little weird. The tendrils are going to have to penetrate into your brain, same way they do when repairing muscle, and like a Kich’a’kat it’s important that you don’t break contact until the process is finished. Don’t want to jerk around pieces of your brain. It doesn’t take damage as well as muscle does.”

“Don’t move, got it,” Jason said, glancing over at Kian. “See to it that we’re not disturbed,” he joked.

“Jason and Kara…sprawled on the floor…” Kian said mirthfully until she turned around and pointed her index finger at him like she was holding a gun. She pulled her thumb down and the trailblazer felt a telekinetic thump against his chest that knocked him back a step.

“Don’t,” she said seriously. “I need to concentrate. This won’t be automatic like usual.”

“Got it,” Kian said, matching her serious tone.

“You’ve never done this before, have you?” Jason asked.

“Actually I have, just not on someone’s head. Ready?”

“Anything I have to do other than stay still?”

“No.”

Jason leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Do it.”

Kara leaned forward and rested against his chest, then nestled her head up against his, pressing her left arm against the other side and putting a light vice grip on his head to increase physical contact and hold it steady.

She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, concentrating on the mental interface with the device that she’d been refining over the past few years.

The clear jewel lit up, as it always did when used as a regenerator, and Kara could feel little tendrils coming out of her head like new hairs being grown. When they touched Jason’s head they immediately numbed the tissue and bored their way inside in the magically technological way that left no penetration damage.

She could feel the strands on her side, for they had only been partially numbed so as to let her be able to monitor the link and not accidently pull away, forgetting that she was still attached. In mind’s eye she could see the thousands of tiny lines worm their way into the rear portions of Jason’s brain and engulf the damaged and unstable tissue in both locations, as well as the connecting filaments.

Once connected she had a zoomed in mental map of the area and she began tagging what to keep and what to lose…on top of which she ordered the Kich’a’kat to grow the remainder of fully functional units based off his repressed genetic code, which hadn’t originally grown them from birth.

Kara knew better than to speak while in such close proximity, for fear of it jiggling the connections, but a tiny smile, barely visible appeared on her lips as she connected to his nervous system simultaneously and sent him a crude, but audible telepathic message.

You can relax, Jason. I’ve got this.

Recalibration

1

September 4, 2406

Solar System

Earth

The Kich’a’kat leads withdrew from Jason’s head back into Kara’s body and she sat up looking down at the trailblazer. “How’s that feel?”

Jason blinked twice, seeming to come back to his senses after having disappeared inside his mind’s eye and doing a check on his abilities, finding the pain and fragmentation gone…along with a touch of his power reserves, but that didn’t matter.

“Hey,” Kara asked, frowning a bit. “You still with me…or did I unplug something I shouldn’t have,” she joked.

Jason reached up and grabbed her head, pulled her back down, and kissed her once, hard.

“Thank…You…” he said emphatically.

Kara smiled broadly. “You owe me one.”

“That I do,” Jason agreed as she slid off him and they both got to their feet.

“I assume whatever you did worked?” Kian asked.

“She’s definitely got the magic touch,” Jason said, flicking his spherical sight on and off several times, trying to get the pain to return and happy when he couldn’t. “David’s next. Can you find him?”

Kian frowned. “You got somewhere else to be?”

“Yeah, I do,” he said, turning to Kara. “Pefbar?”

She nodded, then added, “and Lachka.”

“Get to David and the others. I’ve got some homework to do.”

Kara turned to Kian. “Let’s go.”

The other trailblazer nodded and followed her out of the training chamber, throwing Jason a questioning glance on the way out.

Jason gave him a subtle nod, indicating that he was truly ok, then he found himself alone on the platform and took a moment to reshuffle his thoughts…including bleeding out a few tears from the sheer relief of having the fragmentation in his mind cured in a matter of minutes. It seemed cheap, in a way, because every inch he’d scraped for over the past months had suddenly become irrelevant.

Jason took a knee and sat on his heel, breathing in heavily and relishing the calmness of his mind.

“Now,” he whispered, “it’s time to start playing catch up.”

Half a dozen things leapt to mind, training wise, that he wanted to tackle today now that the pain was no longer inhibiting his workouts, but getting some answers was going to take precedence. With that thought in mind he stood up and walked out of the training chamber with an intensity that had been sorely lacking…and only now did Jason realize just how debilitated he’d been.

He left the sanctum and passed up the group of mongooses parked outside, preferring to run instead…and finding a measure of his speed had returned, now that he didn’t have the mental drag on his movements. Jason ran across the command deck to the nearest of the pads and scaled the attached stairs, coming up on top and shooing away the techs working there.

“Move aside fellas,” he said, jogging up to the Zen’zat control consoles. “I need to do some research.”

“Anything we can help with?” one of the three offered as they made room for him, either moving aside or to other stations, giving him the primary.

“Actually yes. I need you to assemble of list of terms that we have no V’kit’no’sat translation for, specifically items that we’ve tried to locate in the database and failed to do for lack of necessary vocabulary.”

“How long a list are you wanting?”

“Everything you can think of,” Jason said, accessing the console and bringing up a holographic interface display. “We’ve got someone who can translate now. Start with engineering terminology.”

The techs eyes went wide, but they held their questions, sensing that the Archon was busy.

“Right away,” one of them said as all three left the platform in a hurry to find their peers and start compiling the list.

Jason didn’t give them a second thought, digging into the database with tunnel vision. He input the first word, Pefbar, and got an immediate hit…several actually, for the ability was present in many of the V’kit’no’sat races. Resisting the urge to start exploring their capabilities he focused on the Zen’zat entry, and upon opening it was overwhelmed with data.

Good as his V’kit’no’sat was, he had to concentrate to decipher the alien script, though there were many charts and schematics to work off of as well, all floating in holo before him. One detailed the position in the brain where the relevant tissue was located. Another was a chart of different developmental tiers. There was a wealth of knowledge here, with Jason drooling like a kid in a candy store, but the overall assessment he was gathering without having to dig too deep into any of the individual files, was that the spherical sight ability was something that could be developed in multiple ways.

He’d originally thought that the telekinesis was the second stage incarnation of the ability, but that appeared not to be the case. There was a small subset of data related to the interaction of the Pefbar with the telekinesis, but Jason set that aside for later and dug through the timeline. It seemed as though his current incarnation of the ability was at level 1, with level 2 manifesting itself internally.

Jason frowned, not having ever tried that…nor knowing how. His Pefbar energy always seemed to radiate out from him like the light from a lantern. How was he supposed to direct it inwards?

Then again, it was emanating from his brain, so he should have been able to use it to see inside, say, his arm as the records indicated was possible. In fact it’d be necessary if he had to telekinetically remove a piece of shrapnel from inside his body, so how was he supposed to refocus the energy into his body whereas it seemed to only exist outside of it?

An hour of reading through subtext gave him his answer…the energy was already being transmitted throughout his body, it just wasn’t registering in his mind. In order for him to process the signals coming to him his own body was a null spot, as he’d discovered earlier through his own training. He’d learned to pull that in with proximity mode all the way to his skin’s surface, but never inside his body.

The data indicated that level 1 abilities were standard, but that subsequent level upgrades had to be attained by the individual rather than by genetic manipulation…which suggested that such genetic manipulation might be able to deliver the ability directly. According to the generic timeline a Zen’zat would train and develop the Pefbar ability on a particular level until the next level randomly broke through. There was no significant precursor or threshold to be met, according to the data, which left the process a bit murky from a scientific point of view.

Jason found that odd, given the rest of the detail in the records, but he could accept that the next level wouldn’t manifest until an individual had attained a significant amount of skill in the current one. It seemed appropriate, actually, given that they had to earn their way forward.

During his search Jason came across a statistical assessment of Zen’zat in general, indicating that 98% progressed to the 2nd level…reminding him that, once again, he and the other Archons were still newbs compared to the real Zen’zat out there somewhere in the galaxy. Frustrating as that was the numbers intrigued him, for while 87% progressed to level 3, only 54% progressed to level 4…and upwards from there the numbers dropped drastically. That meant either the development of the abilities got progressively more difficult or the turnover rate of the Zen’zat was drastic.

Everything he’d learned thus far about the Zen’zat indicated that while they were deemed somewhat expendable in combat, they were valued enough not to be wasted, if for no other purpose than the other races didn’t want to be constantly having to train replacements. Most Zen’zat lived over 1000 years, shy of large scale conflicts, of which there were a number throughout V’kit’no’sat history, but 400 years old was considered young by their standards, meaning that most of them would live well past that and conceivably have a wealth of time to train their abilities up to the higher levels.

But how good were they, really? That had been a lingering question in all of the trailblazers’ minds for some time. How well did they stack up, head to head, given their age? Were they ahead of the curve and only behind because of the Zen’zat’s longevity, or were they on par, or inferior, with the V’kit’no’sat training standards being even higher than the Archons’?

They’d been able to study some training data left in the machines in the pyramid, getting the raw scores from a number of the Zen’zat who conceivably could have been their ancestors, as well as pulling some numbers from the database of their training in general, but this was the first instance that he knew of where he had a ‘tech tree’ of comparison scores to view. Maybe that was because he’d never been able to identify an individual skill to study, or maybe their understanding of the database was just too pathetic for them to realize how much they were missing.

Regardless, Jason now had a glowing display of Zen’zat aptitude scores, pulled from what he didn’t know. It could have been a detachment, planetary statistics, or all Zen’zat throughout history. The label had three terms he couldn’t identify, but the scores he could read and they were showing him that there was definitely a bulge of lower level individuals that steepled into a very elite group.

The scores for the masses were attached to individual tests. Jason tagged one of the solid holograms and a schematic of a familiar room appeared, along with a wider breakdown of the test scores for what appeared to be a response drill…if Jason was reading it right, and he wasn’t completely sure he was. He brought up the test description and read through a mass of text, realizing that he could stand here for the next 24 hours and not even get through a sliver of the material on Pefbar. That excited him to no end, so he squelched his curiosity and focused on the single test before him, reading up as much as he could.

Content that he knew what he was doing, Jason eventually shut down the interface and made the long run back to the ramps on the edge of the command deck and up into the Zen’zat zone of the pyramid. He worked his way into the restricted section and into one of the chambers that the Archon’s had previously assumed to be a sparring chamber…one of many.

It had a circular mat with a narrow ring of hard floor around the outer edge, but now it seemed that this and probably the others like it were more than met the eye.

“Cha’ves’lak,” Jason said aloud as he stood in the center, as the database instructions had indicated was the startup procedure.

The open-air arch of a doorway disappeared as recessed door segments slid shut, sealing him in. From there a holographic array of colored discs appeared around Jason. Through them he chose the particular psionic test he’d been reading up on and selected the lowest ability level.

The menu vanished, as did all illumination in the chamber. Jason flicked on his spherical sight, or ‘Pefbar’ as he had to keep reminding himself, and saw an object about a meter wide appear to his right in the shape of a geometric sphere with more than 100 tiny sides…which he was pleasantly surprised that he could make out. In the past it would have appeared as a giant blur, and the detail was a welcome perk of all the headaches he’d gone through to develop his ability to this point.

Then again…it was a bit too precise, and he couldn’t help but think that some of the new tissue Kara had said was needed to be grown had added an element to his ability that hadn’t been there before, meaning he was probably functionally stronger than he had been a few hours ago, even if he’d lost a bit of power generation in the process.

Jason walked over to the object and punched it lightly, feeling his hand sink into the hologram with resistance, like he was pushing into liquid. After a brief delay it ‘cracked’ and vanished, along with a satisfying tone indicating that the target had successfully been dispatched.

When it went away another one appeared elsewhere in the room, immediately coming up on Jason’s ‘vision.’ He walked over and tagged it as well, then proceeded through 13 more before the basic test ended. His statistics appeared, along with the control interface and a prompt asking for a username to attach the scores to.

Jason smiled, inputting his number 025, which he’d used before for the holographic sparring program. The purely holographic interface was slower to use than the console mounts in some of the other chambers, but it functioned well enough, making him wonder why all of the chambers weren’t controlled strictly from holograms.

A matrix appeared with two small areas highlighted. Jason touched one and his previous sparring scores appeared, filling in a small area of that overall program and indicating that that he’d only brushed the surface of its capability. It took him a moment to find the ‘back’ button, then the matrix returned to overview mode and he tagged the second piece, bringing up an almost blank submatrix with the test he’d taken highlighting one area.

Tagging that, he had to go through another submatrix to get to the hexagonal cylinder tube that showed the bottom segment highlighted. This, he knew, was the test level, marking his completion of level 1. He touched it with his finger and the attempt he made showed up, tagged as a single score icon. Had he not found and dispatched all of the targets within a generous timeframe it would have indicated how many targets he’d successfully achieved, but since he’d gotten them all it merely marked the attempt as completed.

Jason touched the 2nd level sliver of the cylinder and brought up a blank score sheet. From there he used a linking button to reactivate the chamber without having to go back to the main menu.

The visible holograms disappeared again, while the invisible ones popped up, this time two at a time. They neither glowed nor reflected light…not that there was any in the chamber, but if there had been they’d have been completely clear and perceptible only by touch. The Pefbar ability manifested in a similar manner, ‘touching’ all objects and as such it registered the holograms…at least that’s what Jason could make of the description in the database, of which a lot of the vocabulary was still a mystery to him.

He wondered where the massive dragon had gone, and what it would take to get him to pass out a few more of those forearm trinkets.

The two holograms were of equal size, but different shape. One was the geometric sphere like before, while the other was a cube. Jason walked over and touched the sphere, jamming his knuckled fingers into the resistant surface and shattering the object. The cube disappeared at the same time, then two more targets appeared elsewhere in the chamber, with him having to choose the sphere each time.

In the past, he knew, his Pefbar wouldn’t have been detailed enough to determine the shape, but rather would have registered as a blurry spot on his vision. As Jason danced around the chamber easily tagging the spheres, he was relieved that he could pass the lowest level of the Pefbar tests. That meant he was ahead of the rookie Zen’zat, at least. How long it took them to move through these levels after their genetic conversion from Ter’nat he didn’t know, but he was glad to be statistically in the game now, and was eager to see just how far up the cylindrical icon he could move his scores.

Four hours later he hit his limit, on level 17, when multiple moving objects were put into play…and by multiple he meant upwards of two dozen. They were small and different shapes, each of which indicated a sequence, like being numbered. Jason had to tag them in order, but he couldn’t maintain ‘visual’ identification of them all simultaneously…it was too much for his mind to process and he kept losing track of some of them. They literally vanished from his view as his mind constrained what processing power it had to focus on certain areas, using his ‘spotlight’ ability simultaneously with his spherical sight, something that he’d not done before.

The other tests had gradually progressed him towards this point, and he felt like he was getting quite the psionic workout, even though these tests were meant to measure one’s skill rather than train…there were other scenarios for training sake, he’d discovered, but using the tests designed specifically for this ability and refined over millions of years was doing more for Jason than their own crude training chambers ever had.

That was a result of simple ignorance, and he knew their own facilities would advance quickly as they mimicked and upgraded the V’kit’no’sat methods…though without the ability to produce solid holograms this was going to be the only location capable of this level of training, meaning that the pyramid was going to be Archon central for years to come.

Jason failed the level 17 test, not moving fast enough between targets and feeling like an elementary student trying to order block letters in a sequence and studying the ‘U,’ holding it upside down and wondering if it was an ‘N.’

He sighed, resigning himself to stop for the day but satisfied with his progress. The past few months hadn’t been a wash after all, for they’d advanced him beyond the basic level of Zen’zat Pefbar skills…though only barely. The progress cylinder, as he’d found out, was only marking the lowest subset of 10 tests. Once he’d completed that it had minimized into its own block on yet another cylinder. Jason had searched through the displays and discovered approximately 1200 testing levels available, which absolutely blew his mind…both with imagination and appetite.

New training programs, with this level of complexity and depth, were like opening a Christmas present and finding a Time Lord’s cookie jar…which was bigger on the inside.

“Cha’ves’lak,” Jason said, powering down the testing program. The lights came back on and the doorway reappeared, revealing a pair of second gen Archons looking inside.

“Easy kiddos,” he said, walking out and rubbing his head reflexively, then realized he didn’t have a headache and laughed at himself. “I’ll show you the ropes later.”

“What is it?” Sloane-1043 asked.

“New training toys,” Jason hinted, then walked off, knowing that they couldn’t get anywhere without the activation phrase. Those two didn’t have Pefbar anyway, but even if they did they’d need to get worked on by Kara before they could make any real progress.

On that note, he needed to find her and ask her a bazillion questions…now that she’d had enough time to fix David’s head, along with who knew how many others.

2

Kara pointed to the tiny cookie on David’s tray with her finger, then sent it smoothly flying down the length of the table as if on an invisible tractor beam emanating from her fingernail. Two meters down and it landed in Riona’s mouth. The Archon bit into it smiling, then Kara slowly launched another from the tray down towards Aeryn-412’s waiting tongue.

A few inches from her mouth and the cookie made a sharp detour, bouncing off her forehead and away from the table…straight into Jason’s hand. He held it between two fingers and nipped off a bit of it.

“Looks like this is the ex-headache Clan,” he said, sitting down at the cafeteria table opposite from Kara, but two seats down where there was an opening. “Thanks again, by the way.”

“Questions?” she guessed.

“Plenty,” Jason confirmed.

“You should have gotten here earlier,” David suggested. “We’ve been getting schooled on several matters.”

“You mind?” Jason asked her.

She telekinetically stole a cookie from another Archon’s tray and delivered it straight into her own mouth as she set her elbows on the table. “Shooott,” she said, chewing.

“I just found a Pefbar training chamber that we didn’t know we had and spent several hours measuring my skill. I hit level 17…out of some 1200. How far behind the Zen’zat are we really?”

Kara swallowed and stared down at the tabletop for a moment, seeming to search her thoughts. “My information is dated. Some comes from near to when the Rit’ko’sor rebellion began, but the rest comes from the period previous to the Zak’de’ron purge, which was approximately 850 millennia ago.”

“Ouch,” Lanny-257 commented.

“That’s the first number I’ve heard on that,” Jason added.

“I had to do the math,” Kara admitted. “I’ve got the dates up here,” she said, tapping a finger against the side of her brunette head. “Some of them, anyway. More information keeps popping up as I come across it, so I’m not sure how much memory I actually have. I do know that the V’kit’no’sat advance slowly when they’re not being challenged, technologically I mean.”

Kara held up her wrist so all 9 Archons at the table could see the jewel, with a few techs from the other tables starting to come over and listen as well.

“This should still be superior to what the Zen’zat have. At least that’s what my memories tell me. Zak’de’ron technology was superior, and they only shared part of it with the V’kit’no’sat. We’re…their Zen’zat didn’t mix with the others, and were drawn from their own Ter’nat populations. All the races draw from the communal Ter’nat race, then usually keep some of the Zen’zat they produce for themselves once they reach higher levels, but technically they’re supposed to serve all the races and can be rotated between duties.”

“The Zak’de’ron didn’t submit to that and kept their own Zen’zat, not to mention giving them greater abilities than the others. We all have one of these,” she said, tapping on the clear jewel imbedded into her left wrist, “it’s our armor, regenerator, comm system, and just about everything else you can think of. It uses compression based technology on a scale far beyond what the V’kit’no’sat possessed, and the knowledge in my head says that there’s no way they’ve caught up yet.”

“The knowledge is separate?” David asked.

Kara frowned. “I’m pretty sure it comes from this, but it’s not standard. I think the dragon added it specifically for me so I’d know what the hell I was doing. Then again, some of it could have been standard.”

“Maybe I should ask how strong are you, then?” Jason pressed.

“I’m a weakling, unfortunately,” she admitted. “You need to understand, the Zen’zat attain self-sufficiency, as do most of the races, so you’ve got individuals living hundreds of thousands of years, with a small few reaching over the million mark. Most of those, oddly, are Zen’zat. And you can imagine how powerful one could get with a million years’ worth of training.”

“Damn,” Riona whispered. “I can’t even imagine what that skillset would look like.”

“I don’t have to imagine, I can remember,” Kara said uneasily. “The greatest Zen’zat in history was Ironnsey. He wasn’t Zak’de’ron, but a regular Zen’zat who primarily served the Oso’lon. He was pretty much a Jedi compared to everyone else, Zen’zat and dinosaur combined. I have several memories of him, including an incident where he was ordered to hunt down and destroy a group of six rebel Hjar’at warriors.”

“I should probably say, and don’t hesitate to ask questions because I don’t always remember what you know and don’t know, but the Hjar’at are the more dangerous of the races when it comes to close quarters combat. Their Saroto’kanse’vam were specifically engineered to make them lethal above all others, and while they’re not the dominate race in the V’kit’no’sat socially, they are the most militarily dominate on the ground.”

“What was that word?” Chad-913 asked.

“Sorry, Saroto’kanse’vam are the spikes that run down their back and tail. The Les’i’kron have a smaller version on their tail tip, from what I can tell, and a few other races have minor combat adaptations, but the Hjar’at’s are by far the most impressive. They produce different energy fields that give them ranged attack, proximity defense, even biological shielding in addition to the armor they wear…and don’t think they’re slow. The Saroto’kanse’vam are bladed for a reason, and they can cut a decent sized target into shreds with a spin strike and flip.”

“Ironnsey?” Jason reminded her.

“Right…he was sent to kill the six, and they were highly ranked, meaning their combat skills were above the rest. Had the Hjar’at sent their own troops after them it would have been a blood bath, and nothing short of elite units would have had a reasonable chance of defeating them. So instead they sent Ironnsey, by himself, to take them down inside one of the Hjar’at facilities, which is how I have a mental recording of that battle.”

“Impressive?” David asked.

“Goku-esk,” Kara said with awe, “aside from the fact that he couldn’t fly. None of the regular Zen’zat could…which is stupid. Even we have jump packs, but the Zen’zat only had gravity buffers to stop falls from killing them, and it was the same with the other races. They have the technology, but they never used it…and though I don’t know about now, I doubt their methodology has changed much. The V’kit’no’sat like to stick with tradition for tradition’s sake.”

“Wait a sec,” Jason said, pointing a finger at her. “Can you?”

Kara smiled and nodded.

David’s eyes went wide. “You can fly?”

“My armor has to be deployed, otherwise I just hang from my wrist. The Zak’de’ron are flyers…why would they want servants that couldn’t keep up with them in the air?”

“What kind of power source does that thing have anyway?” Riona asked, with several of the techs around them nodding in thanks for asking that question.

“It absorbs power from the environment and stores it. It’s at about half charge now, which is a lot, and it’s slowly recharging. That’s why it’s a bit cold to the touch. It absorbs light, heat, electricity and just about anything else. I usually just find a power conduit, stick my gloved hand in, and let it drink up. My body is protected somehow, and don’t bother trying to stun me. It’ll last like a tenth of a second before this baby sucks it right out and adds the energy to its reserves.”

Jason levitated a cookie up off of one of the half-empty trays and sent it up high towards the ceiling and held it there with a bit of effort, then motioned for Kara to go get it.

“Oh…fine,” she said, pushing back her chair and standing up. She reached her left hand up like superman and slowly floated up a few meters, then snagged the cookie with her right hand and began eating it on the way down.

“Don’t suppose that thing has twinning capability?” David asked as she sat back down.

“It’s called a Vorch’nas, and no, unfortunately. It’s bonded to me permanently, so even if I get my hand cut off no one else will be able to use it.”

“So much for needing a parachute,” Jason joked.

“We need to press our jump pack technology in this direction,” Kara urged. “It’s one advantage over the other Zen’zat that we’ll need. They can always counter by building their own, but we need to be able to fight in the air and move across rough terrain unaugmented.”

“You said Ironnsey didn’t have that?” Jason pressed.

“No, but he could jump and glide in his armor, and his vertical was insane, as was his speed. The Hjar’at couldn’t touch him up close, and he was cagey enough not to get caught in the open. He killed them all together, one at a time, at pointblank range, and didn’t look like he broke much of a sweat doing it. Him and others of similar skill are the reason there is very little rebellion within the V’kit’no’sat. Cause a big enough ruckus and you’ll get elite troops sent your way. Defeat them and you’ll work your way up through the ranks until you face an opponent beyond you.”

“Sounds rather hopeless,” David commented, half-sarcastically.

“It is,” Kara said, glancing back at Jason. “To answer your original question, we’re not a match for even their low level troops. Well, I am, but I’ve got this,” she said, tapping her Vorch’nas.

“Ranger level 1 ranks where in comparison?”

Kara grimaced, then bit her lip as she thought. “Without augmentation. No armor, no toys whatsoever…would still get owned by all but the greenest of Zen’zat, but only because of their psionic abilities. If and when we can catch up in that department, it’ll be another story.”

“Take those out of the equation,” Jason said. “Where does a level 1 ranger rank?”

“That’s hard to do, because those skills are part and parcel of what the Zen’zat are and how they fight…but I’d say easily still in the bottom 10%.”

“So we’re ahead of some of them?” David asked.

“Did you make ranger when I wasn’t looking?” Kara asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Some of us, then,” David corrected himself.

“With me, we’re about even with a Zen’zat expeditionary force,” she explained, “which is made up of one moderately leveled leader with experienced rookies. That’s the standard deployment for low level incidents that need dealt with. If the team fails a higher level one is dispatched, and so forth. The V’kit’no’sat don’t waste resources if they’re outmatched, they just bring in higher classed units.”

“That’s something then,” Jason said, relieved that they were at least in the game.

“No, Jason, it’s not,” Kara said, almost apologetically. “I know more than I can explain, and we’re hopelessly, hilariously, and pathetically outmatched. I know we’ve got our own war to deal with now, but unless we crank things up significantly we’ll be rolled over by their crap units…and that’s just talking Zen’zat. Our odds are even less impressive when the other races are thrown in.”

“How often are they used?”

“Most of the time. We’re sent in for utility work or special assignments. Almost all of the combat is handled by the race in question. They may be augmented by Zen’zat units, but it’s their show. We’re extra.”

“What do you mean, ‘crank things up?’” Riona asked.

“It’s complicated,” Kara said, shaking her head. “Very, very complicated. Archons are better than Zen’zat, as in how much we train and how smart we are about it…but we’re still ignorant and making up stuff as we go along. They’ve got a refined training system and upper tier individuals who have had thousands of years’ experience to instruct where necessary. They get more done with less, and we’re behind the curve in that department, save for our adepts. They’re squared away, but the acolytes and especially the ranger training is what I’d call ‘loose.’”

All eyes moved to Jason, as the Archons sensed Kara’s rebuke in her analysis, but oddly Jason didn’t seem to take offense.

“Let me see if I heard you correctly,” Jason said slowly. “We’re better than they are because of the way we train, but not because of the way we train?”

“Yes.”

“Fast forward a thousand years…”

“If the trend holds, we’ll have an advantage over most of them, taking technology out of the equation. Their elite units will still own us and, I’ll point out, that most of the Zen’zat slow their training over time. This is either from boredom or lack of motivation, but while they are still advancing their rate of advancement drops considerably aside from a select few, like Ironnsey, who keep pressing on. He and the others are Archon-like in that respect.”

“I almost want to meet the guy,” Jason joked.

Kara shook her head. “Don’t have to worry about that…he’s dead.”

Jason frowned. “How?”

“We killed him during the first year of the war.”

“We being the Zak’de’ron?” David asked.

“Yes. I still think like one of them. That’s how this knowledge is programmed.”

“How’d you take him down?” Jason asked, keenly interested.

“Orbital bombardment,” Kara said dismissively. “We targeted all the high level Zen’zat the enemy possessed at the outset, as well as the more powerful of the other races as well. Doesn’t matter how good you are if you’ve got a naval fleet sitting over your head firing down on you. That was one think the V’kit’no’sat didn’t take into account. They expected us to fight them on an even playing field, army against army, navy against navy, and so forth. But we’re built to fly, and we’re very good at raining down destruction from above.”

Jason glanced at David. “I don’t know if that’s Zak’de’ron or Saber talking?” he quipped.

David nodded. “Does sound rather like Paul.”

“That’s the kicker,” Kara emphasized. “We have no hope if we can’t face them directly in space. We have to develop a navy capable of doing that. If we do then we’re still toast, because they’ll hit us from other angles, but without a competent navy it’s game over before it even starts…and that isn’t dependent on skill as much as it is technology.”

“How much of that do you have in your head?” Jason asked.

“I don’t,” Kara said, almost relieved. “Some Zen’zat are techs, but not this one. The Vorch’nas he gave me is a combat model.”

“Does it have weapons?” Ursala-529 asked.

“They’re a power hog, but yes. Usually Zen’zat will carry independent weapons, like we do, but there are built-in units even in standard Zen’zat armor, which you already know.”

“Feel free to show and tell,” Chad urged.

Kara set her left elbow on the table with her hand up in the air, then on mental command the jewel fractured and sent out a spray of red slivers that formed into a scaly, metallic glove that extended back to her elbow and stopped.

“Oh that’s cool,” David commented.

“Yes it is,” Kara agreed, then with another though a bump appeared on the back of her hand and formed into an elevated weapons battery, tiny in size. She looked over at Jason. “Give me a target.”

The trailblazer telekinetically grabbed another cookie and sent it floating up into the air above their heads. “Try not to blow up the ceiling please,” he asked.

“I can modulate the power output,” Kara said smiling as she aimed her gloved fist up, then hesitated a moment before an emerald green pinprick of light flashed out and intercepted the cookie, burning it into a cloud of smoke and charred debris that drew the attention of everyone else in the cafeteria that hadn’t already been brought into the conversation when she floated her way up to the ceiling.

As it was, the cookie debris rained down on the assembled Archons and more than 100 other Star Force staff who’d gathered around to watch and listen.

“Which weapon was that?” Jason asked.

“Basic Dre’mo’don,” she said, with the other Archons recognizing the term. The energy the weapon produced wasn’t something that Star Force could create yet, but many of the handheld weapons recovered from the pyramid were constructed in this fashion. The energy itself wasn’t a beam, but rather a condensed packet fired at a range of speeds, most of which were within viewing capability and looked like speedy, glowing paintballs when fired. This one had been so tiny that only the glow was visible for a split second.

“Any others?” Chad asked.

“I’ve got a stun and an orb-launcher…and you don’t want me to demonstrate that here.”

“Mobile artillery?” David asked, referencing V’kit’no’sat tech lessons he’d had a long time ago.

“From our point of view, yes, but compared to what they work with…hardly. It’s mainly used to get through dino armor. They can wear so much more tech than us due to their size that their shields and plate thickness are insane. Besides, these are basic weapons. The more potent ones we carry as rifles and such. You’ve seen the basic setup before.”

The crowd of techs parted to let another individual through and Jason turned his head to look at the motion as Morgan squeezed into the group.

“What’s with the party and who’s shooting what?” she asked, looking down on the assembled Archons with her eerie gray eyes.

Kara’s face, which had been smiling, suddenly blanked…then her jaw dropped. “Son of a bitch, Morgan,” she said as she stood up, almost angrily. “How the hell do you do it? You are always one step ahead of everyone else.”

“What?” Jason asked, glancing back and forth between the two women.

“What are you talking about?” Morgan asked, glancing at her armored hand, “and what are you wearing…wait…is that your armor?”

“Her eyes,” Kara said heavily. “Look at her eyes.”

Morgan stared back at her. “What about my eyes?”

“You have no idea, do you?” Kara asked, forcing a laugh. “Of all the…and here I thought I’d finally caught up with you guys.”

“Kara, spit it out,” Jason ordered.

“To put it in simple terms,” Kara said between gritted teeth, frustrated at once again being the inferior. “Zen’zat wise, she’s gone Super Saiyan.”

3

Morgan’s eyes narrowed. “Explain that, please.”

“I can’t, because it shouldn’t have happened,” Kara said, exasperated. “What can you do?”

“Concussive energy,” the trailblazer said, not offering a demonstration.

Kara rolled her eyes. “Straight to the big guns.”

“What’s with her eyes?” Jason asked pointedly.

“It’s the way the V’kit’no’sat tiered our abilities,” she answered, sitting back down. Chad stood up to give Morgan his seat but she put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

“Ok, little history lesson,” Kara continued, leaning back in her chair. “When the V’kit’no’sat found the Ter’nat they had a choice between eradicating them or ignoring them, as they do with all other races they encounter. The Ter’nat were large in number but technologically weak. Cannon fodder stuff, but due to their small size and biped structure it was decided to annex them. In case you hadn’t noticed, most of the V’kit’no’sat don’t have much in the way of hands. They use their Lachka abilities to manipulate small devices.”

Kara saw several frowns, then corrected herself. “Telekinesis. Lachka is their word for it. They wanted a race of servants that could be useful without upgrading them, plus there are also advantages to being biped. A whole lot of disadvantages too, but as large as the V’kit’no’sat are, they deemed it wise to add another element to their power, so they made the Ter’nat part of their empire.”

“They were slaves initially, and tasked to the Era’tran for incorporation and ‘enlightenment,’ but they didn’t live up to reptile standards. Part of the problem was biological, they deemed, the rest was psychological. The Ter’nat were belligerent and lazy…pretty much like Earth has been in recent history, aside from Star Force, and they bred too fast. Now, most of the V’kit’no’sat races lay eggs that have to be fertilized, so sex isn’t really an issue culturally. It’s seen as a huge detractor in the Ter’nat, which is also a reason why Zen’zat are forbidden from reproducing.”

“Define reproducing,” Jason asked.

“They have no contraception available, so if they get laid they’re risking execution,” Kara explained. “So dating is essentially taboo. Not so for the Ter’nat. They’re allowed to breed to their hearts’ content…and if they run out of resources and a few million of them die, so be it. The Era’tran, in their assessment of the Ter’nat, discovered that a small percentage of them were useful, but there was no biological indication as to who the useful ones would be. It was totally at random. Some of the V’kit’no’sat wanted to just eradicate them and be done with it, but the Era’tran strongly supported a different option that eventually won out.”

“The Zen’zat,” Jason guessed.

“The Zen’zat,” Kara agreed. “They would farm the Ter’nat in exclusive colonies. They would not be able to intermix with the other races and would have to pretty much be self-sufficient with regards to resources and technology, though the Era’tran had already given them enough upgrades to bring them up far beyond what we have now, unfortunately. From those colonies the Era’tran drew the useful Ter’nat and put them to work in a manner of fields, primarily as techs and areas where their small size would be of advantage. Eventually they were used for some small combat applications and proved useful in a support role.”

“The Era’tran especially wanted to incorporate them into their own ranks, given the size differences. In order to do that they had to be trained and biologically upgraded…which a lot of the other races didn’t want to allow. There was a lot of internal wrangling, but a satisfactory method was eventually arrived at. The race of Ter’nat wouldn’t be upgraded, only individuals would, but they’d have to earn their abilities. The other races were born with theirs, which they developed through training, but the Ter’nat individuals would have to prove their worth, which was highly doubted outside of the Era’tran.”

“Because of that, Zen’zat are ‘created’ by taking a Ter’nat and making alterations to their genetics. Those alterations are many, including the 7 basic psionic powers at minimal levels. Default Lachka of, say, the Oso’lon is considerably more powerful than ours, even taking into account the size difference. Bigger brain, bigger emitters and more power.”

“Size does matter then?” David asked.

“With psionics, yes, it does. They gave us the ability, then cranked it down really low to the point where we almost have nothing, but wove into our genetics the ability to upgrade over time, more than just with training. When we hit a prerequisite level you’ll see significant upgrades to your current abilities as well as new ones popping up.”

“Not like now,” she clarified. “We’re all supposed to have the basic 7 to begin with, which is why your development is causing problems. There are other abilities beyond those. Some small, some large, but they have to be earned, basically disproving the general V’kit’no’sat sentiment that Ter’nat are worthless. If and when they can do that Zen’zat are viewed with some level of respect from the others, all the way up to peers in some cases. Other rare occasions, like Ironnsey, and they’re actually superior.”

“My eyes,” Morgan reminded her.

Kara held up a finger. “I’m getting there. With the individual advancement plan in place, Zen’zat began being created and their genetics were tweaked over time giving them more and more potential. Eventually the V’kit’no’sat saw the advantage of using them and Ter’nat colonies were given to all the other races to care for and restrict, from which Zen’zat would be created to serve not just the Era’tran, but all the races. They were to be shared and serve as a commonality amongst the V’kit’no’sat, which the Zak’de’ron didn’t hold to.”

“The others did, and the mass of Zen’zat that were ‘harvested’ from the Ter’nat began taking on more and more tasks. Eventually they became present in virtually every V’kit’no’sat colony and ship, but always in the background. They are the quiet servants without a race, and because they have no race they are seen as neutral politically and therefore trustworthy.”

“There’s bickering amongst the races?” Riona asked.

“Not bickering…but while they view themselves as V’kit’no’sat first, they’re not above positioning their own race ahead of the others with regards to resources and territory. Again, the Zen’zat have none, so they’re not involved in the egotistical conflict and are often seen as a calming influence. There’s no actual fighting between the races, V’kit’no’sat society is too structured for that, but it doesn’t keep them from competing against each other in lesser forms of conflict.”

“Anyway, over time it was deemed necessary to further enhance the Zen’zat to compensate for their smaller biology. They still had to earn their advancement, but the potential was much higher. Seeing the Zen’zat as tools rather than a competing race, their potential got jacked up so much that the elite ones became capable of killing the much larger races in hand to hand combat. Rather than view this as a threat, they wanted more Zen’zat of this level and aggressively pushed the training of the ones they had, while maintaining allegiances with those already present.”

“Technically, Zen’zat serve no one race. They serve the V’kit’no’sat as a whole. But bonds are formed and, short of betraying the V’kit’no’sat, certain Zen’zat will help one race seek dominance over the others…then if they’re traded off they’ll help those they now serve. A lot of the trading happens within the Zen’zat ranks, because they control their own assignments for the most part, so establishing a relationship with them is seen as the route to power, given that they can’t technically give them orders.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Jason said, stopping her before she could go on. “You’re losing me. You’ve said Zen’zat are servants, now you’re saying they don’t take orders?”

“A Zen’zat serves where needed,” she explained, taking no visible offense at the lack of understanding. “They are assigned by the Zen’zat leadership upon request of one of the races. If the Brat’mar requests 10,000 Zen’zat for use on a particular planet, the request is reviewed by the Zen’zat leadership and if applicable the personnel are sent. Once on site they take their orders from the race or races that requested them. A lot of their planets are shared, so a contingent of Zen’zat will often serve multiple races at the same time.”

“Who tells the Zen’zat leadership what to do?” Jason asked.

“The V’kit’no’sat operate as a collective, so no one race can order them around so long as they stay in good standing with the dominant races. Many times the Zen’zat leadership will flat out refuse a request from one of the races and get into a bit of a staring match…and win, but only because the other races are silently backing them. Zen’zat are supposed to be neutral, so them putting another race in their place is generally seen as a good thing to maintain societal balance, but if any aspirations of their own manifest the Zen’zat would be quickly put into a world of hurt by the other races.”

“That never happens, because the Zen’zat are fanatically loyal to the V’kit’no’sat. They feel like they’ve been given peerdom where their race doesn’t belong, and because of that they’re committed to the cause. That commitment is seen with a measure of admiration by the other races, given that they all have secondary agendas.”

“Jedi-ish,” Jason commented. “No attachments, greater trust.”

“I said fanatical for a reason,” Kara pressed. “They’re not moral. Honorable, maybe, in a skewed way, but don’t call them Jedi. They are committed to V’kit’no’sat dominance, and they will do whatever it takes to maintain it.”

“What about you?” David asked.

Kara smiled. “Zak’de’ron Zen’zat were kept separate, on purpose. The dragons didn’t like blind obedience. They wanted submission, not ignorance, so they taught us to be superior, and in doing so we would realize just how far beyond us they were. It’s a philosophical sticking point with the V’kit’no’sat that contributed to the purge. To put it simply, the V’kit’no’sat mantra is ‘Because we say so,’ while the Zak’de’ron version would be, ‘Because we are.’”

“And you know this how?” Morgan asked.

Kara held up her forearm jewel. “Memory downloads included.”

“You still haven’t gotten to my eyes.”

“Still getting there…trust me, the story is worth it. Now, the Zen’zat were given potential to become very, very strong, but most did not. They rose to an appreciable level but only select individuals like Ironnsey really dug down into their genetic potential and put it to use. In order to cater to this possibility, the Zen’zat were again upgraded with greater potential so they could progress to a point where they could be used as enforcers against the other races,” she said, looking at Morgan. “So one of us could kill an Era’tran or Brat’mar…or even a Hjar’at. When a Zen’zat upgrades close to that level they undergo a physical change, developing new powers, and the eye color signifies they’ve risen to that level.”

“You obviously haven’t, which is why I don’t understand how this happened,” Kara said, frowning at Morgan.

“How do you know I haven’t?” the trailblazer asked.

“How many other abilities do you have?”

“I’ve got a touch of spherical sight.”

“Pefbar,” Kara corrected. “And that’s how I know. You’re not supposed to be able to access level 2 powers until you’ve really developed your basic 7, and you don’t even have access to 6 of them yet.”

“The eyes come at what level?” Jason asked, glancing at Morgan, then back at Kara.

“The third tier is called Mvor, as are the assassins. They’re pretty much the Super Saiyans of the Zen’zat.”

“How many tiers are there?” David asked.

Kara was about to say something, then stopped with a word half-formed in her mouth. She closed her eyes hard for a moment.

“What’s wrong?” Jason asked.

“Give me a moment,” she said, still wrestling with something internal. “This happens when something new worms its way out.”

The Archons took her at her word and remained silent for some twenty seconds before Kara opened her eyes again, then looked at David. “I don’t know. The abilities imprinted into our genetics are known because of what we’ve seen develop in other Zen’zat, the actual blueprints of which the V’kit’no’sat refuse to tell us, and the same goes for the Zak’de’ron. It’s like they’ve hidden genetic easter eggs for us to find, so we don’t know how many are actually out there. Mvor has 3 known abilities, but what else is there to discover is anyone’s guess.”

“What about level 2?” Jason asked.

“There are 15 well documented abilities there, and it’s assumed that those are fully charted, because you can’t skip from one tier to another…yet you seem to have,” she said, looking hard at Morgan.

“Why does that bother you?” the trailblazer asked, picking up on her mood.

“Because I was ahead of everyone else,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “And I’m nowhere close to level 2.”

“What level ranger are you?” Morgan asked, noticing her uniform stripe.

“43…this thing upped my strength and speed,” Kara said, tapping her jewel, “but I didn’t use the armor in the challenges. With it I can still take you, even with your Jumat.”

“Jumat?” Morgan asked. “I assume that’s the concussive energy?”

“Yes.”

“And you think your armor can stop it?”

“It can do a lot of things,” Kara said, a bit of cockiness returning.

“Morgan,” Jason interrupted, “she can fly.”

The trailblazer frowned. “Fly?”

“Dragonball style,” Kara confirmed. “When my armor is on.”

“Before you two decide to throw down,” David said lightly, “give us the rundown on these powers.”

“We’re not going at it in armor,” Morgan said dismissively.

“The basic 7 are Rensiek, Fornax, Ikrid, Sesspik, Pefbar, Lachka, Ensek. Rensiek is an ability to generate heat. It’s not so much a combat ability as it is an environmental skill. You can walk around in a snowstorm naked and not be bothered. You can also use it to start fires, and if someone has you in a headlock you can cause them to become very uncomfortable.”

“You can throw flames?” Jason asked.

“No, but you can warm other things up,” she said, telekinetically grabbing a nearby water bottle, since hers was empty, and bringing it over to her. She undid the cap and stuck her finger inside it and concentrated. “I’m not used to doing this, but I should…there.”

A small wisp of steam puffed out the top, followed by a few more as she heated the water inside.

“I really want one of those Vorch’nas,” David said, drawing looks of agreement from the others.

“It’s not doing it,” Kara said, withdrawing her finger and sending the water bottle back down the table to where it belonged. “I am. The rest of you will be too once we find the right equipment.”

“What equipment?” Jason asked.

“The same equipment they use to make Zen’zat in the first place. With it we’ll be able to turn on your abilities without me having to sleep with all of you…though I will need to fix the damage already done.”

Jason caught Morgan’s questioning glance. “Not what you think,” he told her, then looked back at Kara. “You think this machine is here?”

“Should be.”

“Easy Santa,” Tyr said from behind Kara.

“When’d you get here?” Jason asked.

“Been in the back listening. Before we go on a scavenger hunt, finish with the basic 7 psionics. We’ve identified several already, but not all of them.”

“Fornax,” Kara continued, “is what Kian has. It acts like white noise in your nervous system in its most basic form, and can advance up into pain surges and other distracting things.”

“Can it be defended against?” Jason asked, a bit worried.

“You can learn to resist it,” Kara said with a smirk, “but the immunities come into play as level 2 abilities.”

“Good,” the trailblazer said, leaning back in his chair a bit. “I don’t like someone being able to mess with my head at will.”

“Better get used to it,” she warned. “There’s a lot more going on than Fornax. Ikrid is the largest skill, and involves telepathy, being able to sense the location of other minds, memory hacking, override control, and a bunch of others. They all have to be developed, so don’t think of level 1 abilities as simple or easy, they’re just ones that you get a foothold on initially.”

“Pefbar is your third eye, which you’re already familiar with. Lachka is your telekinesis. Sesspik is a healing trance for when you don’t have a Kich’a’kat handy. Zak’de’ron Zen’zat don’t have to worry about that,” she said, tapping her Vorch’nas again, “but the others do if they’re not wearing their gear. This is a difficult one to practice, and the Zen’zat countered that by intentionally injuring each other. Not something I’d recommend.”

“How fast can you heal?” Morgan asked.

“Depends how good you’re at it. Something around 10x normal is standard. It still has to pull nutrients from your bloodstream, unlike a regenerator, but it’s good at dealing with low level damage, say, post workout.”

“Power nap?”

“Something like that.”

Jason frowned. “I’ve been doing that for years.”

“This isn’t sleeping,” Kara clarified. “You have to lockdown in order for it to initiate and then you have to keep focused on it throughout. You doze off and it’ll end. Besides, I already checked you. You don’t have the brain tissue for it.”

“How does brain tissue affect that?”

“It’s not new tissue so much as a reconfiguration of what you’ve already got, so no growths that will show up on a typical scan. You’re just lacking a bit of processing power, same thing with the Rensiek.”

“What about me?” David asked.

“Wasn’t there either,” Kara said apologetically.

“I could have sworn I was doing that,” he said, not quite believing her.

“Me too,” Jason added.

“Ensek,” Kara continued, “is an ability to function as an Ikrid relay, even if you don’t have strong Ikrid skills. It is a special growth and lets a telepathic message from a distant individual reflect off of you and transmit on to another. By reflect I mean the power level is nearly identical to the incoming signal, even though you’re producing it. The power of the signal is absorbed and released, losing some in the process. It can be enhanced with your own Ikrid power, but it will let an Era’tran relay a message over multiple miles to another command unit by positioning Zen’zat in a chain across the gap.”

“They can view some of the transmission, but if it’s above their Ikrid ability they won’t understand it. It’ll just get copied and retransmitted reflexively. This is a straight line ability…the more you use it the better it gets, but it’s essentially complete at the outset.”

“Are you finished eating?” Morgan asked when she paused.

Tyr glanced at her. “Want to find that machine?”

“Yes,” she said emphatically. “So long as it won’t interfere with my Jumat?”

“I would guess not,” Kara said, standing up. “But this is uncharted territory. Yeah, I’m done eating…mostly,” she said, telekinetically pulling a cookie off of Riona’s tray.

“Hey,” she mildly complained.

“Let’s go,” Morgan said…then another cookie floated up into the air and into Jason’s hand.

“Guys…not cool,” Riona said, grabbing the last three before they could wander off as the group of Archons broke up.

4

“Did they let Ter’nat in here,” Jason asked Kara as they walked up through the Zen’zat levels of the pyramid one stair/ramp at a time, “or just Zen’zat?”

“Depends on the planet. If there’s a local Ter’nat colony these levels would have a lot of them, call them ‘possibles’ that are being evaluated or liaisons from the colonies, because the rest of the V’kit’no’sat don’t go there. Even the Zen’zat stay away unless there’s a problem. The Ter’nat are beneath the rest of them, so facilities like this serve as an embassy for them as well.”

“Hence the restricted sections,” Jason added.

“Not just to keep the Ter’nat out, but the smaller V’kit’no’sat races as well. Those are Zen’zat only areas, while these,” she said, referring to what they were walking through, “are more communal. The Rit’ko’sor used these passages to get to the higher exits, which they shared with the Zen’zat and others, while the larger races used the lower ones.”

“To get to the pyramid surface?”

“Landing pads,” Kara clarified, turning a corner and heading for the lower entrance into the restricted section of the Zen’zat zone. “Each ring is reserved for specific types of ships, and the smaller races tend to have smaller ships, so they use the upper ones mostly.”

“Who got the top?”

Kara glanced back at Jason, who was following off her left shoulder along with a handful of other Archons behind her. “You do know there are weapons in there, right?”

“So not a landing pad then?”

“In a pinch, sure, but you don’t want to make a habit of parking over top of the big gun…besides, there are no entrances up there.”

“How much tech in here is new, compared to your memories?” Jason asked, continuing to ply her with questions.

“Very little. These structures are built to last…forever, pretty much. I don’t know when this one was built, but it could have been before the purge. The structural materials don’t weather, so unless they’re damaged they’re going to be shiny new for a long, long, long time. Some of the equipment has been upgraded, but I haven’t seen anything brand new yet. Then again I just got here too, and I never had the chance to visit before.”

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“Yep.”

“How?”

“Standard design. When the V’kit’no’sat have something that works they don’t mess with it. They do tech research as needed, but they’ve advanced so far their knowledge is more dogma than experimentation. Show them a hole in their defenses, though, and they’ll cover it quickly. They’re counterpunchers, and they’ve had so much combat experience their tech tree and battle tactics are quite refined.”

“You’re saying they’re stagnant?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but as of 850,000 years ago they weren’t in a hurry. Militarily they don’t have a lot of challenges outside of the Hadarak, but they’re formidable enough that when they make a push they’ve got their hands full. As for their techs, each race does its own research and shares the results. That, really, is the reason they’re not advancing by leaps and bounds anymore. They don’t need to, and they don’t want to be doing the hard work while the others sit back and reap the rewards. If a need arises they’ll get very industrious, so even if we could theoretically match them technologically they’re sure to make a pushback there.”

“They’re so dominate they’re just coasting forward now?”

“Coasting…yeah, good word.”

“On that note, gonna need you to teach our techs some new words.”

Kara sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“You’re the only one with the full vocab,” Jason reminded her.

“I know, I know. It’s just boring. I want to be out fighting the lizards or Nestafar, not handholding a bunch of techs,” she said as they came to a sealed door. Kara touched it with her bare fingers and the stone-like material verified that she was Zen’zat, splitting apart to give them access to the restricted sections.

“Why was this door shut?” Morgan asked.

“I guess it’s not used much,” Jason said, glancing around and confirming that they hadn’t walked into some new area. “The techs come down from above.”

“Still, I thought we’d opened all the doors,” Morgan added, following them in.

“Me too,” Jason said, raising an eyebrow at Kara.

“Don’t look at me. It’s just a door,” she said, making a right turn shortly after passing through. “Here we are.”

“A closet?” Morgan asked, seeing the small room she was opening.

“What? No. Why do you say that?” she asked as the door split in half and revealed an empty room about 10 meters wide and ovoid with the door being on the longer axis.

Morgan waved a hand at the empty room.

“Seriously?” Kara asked with a look of disbelief, then she glanced at Jason. “Please tell me you know.”

“Know what?”

“There are hidden components,” a tech said from the back of the group of Archons, one that they’d grabbed in the cafeteria, and a few other curious ones had followed along. “Some are accessible by control panel, but some rooms don’t have them.”

“Some rooms are more important than others,” Kara said, closing her eyes for a moment…then the floor opened up and a host of machinery began to rise up a la transformers and assemble around a central pedestal. “Some of the doors and equipment function off of genetic identification through tactile contact…others, like this ‘closet,’” Kara emphasized, glancing at Morgan, “have a telepathic trigger. Call it a mental ‘on’ switch.”

“You knew this?” Morgan asked the tech.

“We knew the dinosaur chambers had components that responded to mental command, but we’d assumed a physical link or sensor was required. These chambers have no sensors or interface pads, so we assumed they were just for storage purposes or extra rooms to be configured at a later date.”

“The room doesn’t have a sensor,” Kara explained, “in so much as it scans your mind, but it does have a sensor right there,” she said, pointing at the center of the ceiling. “I have to use my Ikrid to link with it, because it’s little more than a switch.”

“How do you know where it is?” Jason asked.

“I can see it. It has a telepathic presence, just like all of your minds.”

“Kara, is this the device?” Tyr asked, taking a few steps forward and past her.

“This is a medical station where genetic alterations are made. It’s one of the more impressive pieces in the V’kit’no’sat collection, and if misused could cause all manner of trouble.”

“Like what?” Morgan asked.

“Well, if you’re wanting to live you’d better not alter the wrong bit of genetics, otherwise you’ll grow a third arm or your heart will shrink down to the size of a quarter. Bad stuff like that they didn’t really care about, because the idiot using the machine would just kill themselves. What they needed to make sure didn’t happen was one of the races physically advancing themselves beyond the others. Any upgrades had to be approved by the collective, otherwise you could customize your body like you do your armor and create all kinds of abilities.”

“Like the Hjar’at,” Morgan pointed out.

“Their Saroto’kanse’vam were sanctioned, but their medtech is so advanced they could literally create super-monsters if they wanted. Think Godzilla and you’ll get the idea on the small end. Problem is, that sort of tampering with the genetic code has unanticipated consequences, so any sanctioned upgrades are heavily tested before general implementation.”

“This machine,” she continued, “has only one setting, which is basic Zen’zat. We can’t use it to open up powers like Morgan has, that would have been cheating as far as the V’kit’no’sat are concerned, so all we can do is trigger the transformation and then dig out the powers through training.”

“With core access to the pyramid, shouldn’t we be able to override that?” Tyr asked.

“If you’re insane, sure,” Kara scoffed. “Even the V’kit’no’sat techs don’t fully understand genetics. There’s an element of the core interaction with them that can’t be predicted. It’s a symbiosis effect, and they have nothing that can touch the core, gratefully. You don’t want to go messing around with this stuff, trust me.”

“By core, you mean life force?” Jason asked for clarification.

“Yes.”

“What about bioweapons?” Morgan asked.

“They can make them, if desperate, but they prefer not to.”

“Can we make them?”

Kara glared at her. “What exactly did you have in mind?” she asked with a bit of venom.

“Easy youngling…I wasn’t suggesting anything grotesque, but if we could create something to interfere with their powers, or even render them unconscious it could be useful.”

“Possibly…but not with this machine. It’s set up for Ter’nat biology.”

“You look like you don’t think that would be a good idea,” Jason commented.

“They’re counterpunchers,” Kara reminded him. “If you want to fight that kind of war they’ll reciprocate. And the potential they have, considering they know our biology intimately, is downright scary.”

“Can we use the technology to develop immunities?” Tyr suggested.

“That’s something worth looking into,” Kara agreed, “but it’s way over our heads right now, and my knowledge doesn’t extend into tech areas very much.”

“So what can we use it for?” Jason asked.

“Tyr, step inside,” Kara prodded.

“Uh, what for?” he asked skittishly.

“Just a scan,” she promised.

“Don’t go making any changes,” he said as he walked onto the pedestal with the various arms of the equipment forming a loose cage around him.

Kara stepped up to the device and a slew of holographic control icons appeared before her that she began tapping on, working her way through the control menu. “This will let us see what’s going on in far more detail than I can.”

A moment later a holographic version of Tyr manifested beside her at about half height. She zoomed in to his brain and highlighted the portions that were beginning to develop psionic growths.

“You,” she said, pointing to the medtech, “get over here. Follow along as best you can. I’m not going to do this thousands of times, so you guys are going to have to learn.”

“Do what?” Tyr asked.

“Nothing yet,” she promised, then began sifting through additional scans until she finally got to what she wanted, though she had to rely on the machine’s own diagnostic equipment to handle most of the work. “There.”

“There what?” Jason asked, standing behind her other shoulder.

“That’s the bit of genetics that has altered, along with several other pieces. The Zen’zat powers are there, lying dormant. If we can reconfigure the machine to only target those areas it’ll set them to defaults and trigger the growth of the new tissue like I did with you. This machine is also a regenerator, but on a level far beyond the other Kich’a’kat. It has nutrient stores…correction, it had nutrients stores so it wouldn’t have to cannibalize other parts of your body to grow tissue. We’ll have to replace those.”

“You’re saying we can turn on everyone’s powers by turning them into Zen’zat for a second time?” Morgan asked.

“Basically yes, but I wouldn’t do that. There’s a lot of other little genetic changes that occur over time, and if we use the default setting for the entire body we could lose some things we’ve gained or gain some things we’ve lost. Either way, it’s not something to go playing around with…and it’ll cost you your Jumat, because it’ll reset you to newb status.”

“No thanks,” Morgan whispered in a ‘over my rotting corpse’ tone.

“Which is why we need to target only specific sections of your genetic code, turning on what we want while leaving the rest alone. That will stop the developmental headaches you’ve been getting,” she said, glancing at Jason.

“But it’ll reset anyone who already has the abilities manifesting?”

“I can fix those personally, but there should be a way to reconfigure this machine to fix them the same way. I know how to use my regenerator because it’s a part of me, but it’ll take some time to learn how to use this bad boy.”

“Ok, so bottom line,” Tyr asked, still standing in the machine. “We can give everyone minimal skill levels in the 7 basic psionic powers, correct?”

“If you want to bring everyone down here, one by one, yes.”

“And we can fix those who are…having difficulties?”

“Once I, or we,” she said, glancing at the medtech, “figure out how to operate it properly, yes we can.”

“Not all of us,” Morgan said flatly.

“No,” Jason agreed, getting her point. “We’re keeping these powers for Archons only.”

“Really? Why?” one of the other techs asked from the back.

“Telekinesis would be advantageous for working with tiny parts,” Tyr pointed out. “The engineers could use that.”

“We might consider that later,” Morgan wavered, “but for now Archon only and…” she said, thinking out loud, “only rangers and high level acolytes have been developing them on their own, so I say we run them through the machine at acolyte level 1. The adepts have enough on their plate as it is to work on, we don’t need to throw this at them from the get go.”

Tyr nodded. “I like that. They get the upgrade when they become acolytes, and if an adept happens to break through on their own we can deal with that individually.”

“We’re going to have to rework the level requirements,” Jason said, realizing how much this was going to change their ranking structure, “and develop new challenges for these skills.”

“Not to mention reworking the existing ones,” Morgan added. “Some will be pathetically easy to beat with telekinesis.”

“Everything adept stays the same,” Tyr reminded them. “So the younglings won’t be affected, but we are going to have to retool everything else.”

“Looks like we’ve got some homework then,” Morgan said, crossing her arms and glancing at Kara. “How long before you can get me and the other trailblazers opened up to all 7 skills? We can’t design challenges unless we can test them.”

“No promises,” Kara said, glancing at the medtech, “but if I can do it in my head, then it’s just a matter of figuring out how to do the same on this machine. Give me a couple of days and I should have something.”

Morgan nodded, satisfied. “Tyr, Jason…let’s go.”

“Go where?” David asked.

“Secret stuff,” Jason said with a wink as he passed him by and wove his way through the others back to the door.

“What we’re best at,” Tyr said as he came by last of the three. “Trailblazing.”

“Yep,” David said after they’d gone, “that feels more like it.”

“Always second gen, huh?” Kara asked with a knowing look.

“I get the feeling that I’m about to lose my level 77 status,” he said with a frown, though at the moment he didn’t really care so long as the headaches didn’t come back.

“And me my ranger,” she said, one eye closing half way in a suspicious look. “Makes me think they’re doing it on purpose just because I busted up their party.”

“Actually, it puts us all even for once,” Riona commented. “Except for you, Kara. You’re ahead of everyone else now.”

“She has a point,” David said, his mood improving considerably. “A lot of the trailblazers haven’t even developed an ability yet. They may be stronger and faster than us, but as far as these powers go we’re dead even. I kind of like the idea of a fresh start, now that you mention it,” he said, nodding his head towards Riona.

“It won’t last,” Chad said knowingly. “They didn’t have much of a head start on us the first time.”

“We’ll see,” Kara said, sizing up their odds. There were thousands of acolytes, but only 100 trailblazers…most of whom were out fighting the war.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” David asked her.

“I say it’s on…us against them.”

“What…” Riona asked, wide-eyed. “You’re serious?”

“If Kara only trains with us…”

“Oh…I like where your head’s at, boy.”

Chad rubbed his hands together, building up a little friction-based heat. “They do like doing things on their own…and they claim to always be up for a challenge.”

“Kara, get to work,” David said, exchanging glances with Riona. “We’ll get our team up to speed.”

Archon-111 smiled. Having been only a couple of months shy of being a trailblazer herself, Riona had always resented the divide between the first 2 classes, which had been of the trailblazers’ making. Now it was time for a little payback…or at the very least, push them into another round of greatness, from which everyone else could pattern off of and learn from. Either way, the Archons as a whole would be better off for it.

“I’m in. Let’s get going. We can’t waste a minute against these guys.”

“Not a word from you,” David said, pointing to the techs as the rest of the Archons made their way out, leaving Kara alone with them.

“What was that all about?” one of them asked with a confused expression on his face.

“It’s an Archon thing,” Kara said dismissively. “Come on over here and start taking notes.”

5

November 14, 2409

Solar System

Earth

A mantis landed on the snowy rooftop of the foodstuff production facility in Antarctica and disembarked 12 Archons, including Paul, then just as quickly took off again and disappeared into the sky heading back to one of the nearby spaceports on the southern continent. The twelve men walked across to the nearby, hut-like entrance and descended down into the facility and made their way to the covert access shaft that led down into the V’kit’no’sat pyramid underneath.

As they walked down the catwalk Paul reached a hand out and stroked his fingers against the smooth green/black stone, finding it warm to the touch. It’d been a very long time since he’d visited this place, and once again the sheer magnitude of the construct reminded him of the terrible power their enemy wielded…a power that still dwarfed their own, despite how impressive Star Force was becoming and their growing role in the Alliance.

The two-front war they were fighting was showing mixed results. Taryn’s and Morgan’s fleets were continuing to harass the Nestafar as they pounded the Calavari. Even with support from the other races in the Alliance, limited as that support was, the Calavari were losing the fight at a snail’s pace. Both sides were grinding it out, both in terms of ships and personnel being lost, the benefits of which were obvious to the lizards as they continued their part of the war with campaigns against the other races on multiple fronts.

The Calavari weren’t lost, not by a long shot, but the Nestafar had prepared well and were hitting the Calavari where they were weak while suffering through their air superiority with sheer numbers until they ground down their fighter core…essentially taking the Calavari’s best shot to the face and still standing. It was gutsy and, in Paul’s opinion, sloppy strategy, but it was proving effective none the less.

Star Force’s two fleets were breaking up the Nestafar onslaught, hitting their supply lines, backwater planets, and other areas that the Nestafar either had to abandon to them or devote more resources to defending…resources that would have to be pulled from elsewhere. Ship to ship, Taryn and Morgan’s forces were proving superior, but the vast scale of the warfront made whatever gains they earned seem inconsequential, given that the entire Nestafar and Calavari civilizations were going at it, with populations in the hundreds of trillions and militaries greater in size than the entire population of Earth and its colonies.

Such wars did not occur quickly, even if it had been a rout. The war against the lizards had been going on for centuries, and that was with them steadily winning. The dynamics of interstellar warfare dictated as much, given the distances between star systems and the inherent advantage of the defender when one was assaulting a homeworld or other major population center, making kings of those who could plan strategy years in advance…and those who could coordinate such massive fleets with little or no communications between the various pieces on the galactic chess board.

To that end Paul’s part of the war on the lizard front was proceeding well, with Star Force having eradicated the enemy presence on a total of 8 worlds. Despite several attempts to negotiate surrenders the lizards still battled to the last individual, and the Archons were willing to oblige them after a point.

Their largest conquest to date was in the Eritath System, where they’d eventually been able to clear the third planet of all lizard habitation…but at a cost of massive devastation to the surface. There had been so many lizard bases and full blown cities that they’d had to eradicate most of them through orbital bombardment, with millions of rail gun slugs falling down in spurts whenever the orbiting fleets received additional ammunition shipments.

There had been some ground fighting to mop up the remnants, which the trailblazers had wisely kept to a minimum, though it had netted them access to a number of structures that were semi-intact. Nothing new to discover, however, because Star Force already had the lizard tech tree at their disposal and had built a full-fledged base/city of their own on Corneria using the captured equipment, from which they were studying the enemy tech for weaknesses or strengths to copy.

Greg had taken some of the last lizards left on the planet captive, around 100 or so, and had worked on them for more than three months before Jason had come back and replaced Paul, but the last word he had from the trailblazer indicated that the lizards were fully non-compliant, as if their individuality had been hardwired out of them. He’d told Paul he was going to stick with it a bit longer and see if he could get them to show any cracks in their fanaticism, then as planned they were going to release them in a captured lizard cruiser in another star system so they could convey a properly insulting message back to their superiors.

Even though the lizards might prefer killing themselves, Paul and the others weren’t going to put up with that. The lizards might be barbaric, but they weren’t going to return the favor. The handful of trailblazers assigned to the lizard front had decided amongst themselves to keep pressing the surrender option whenever applicable and not assuming that all the lizards would be so intractable, though thus far they hadn’t encountered any more reasonable…not that they were a talkative lot. All transmissions to the lizards were summarily ignored, making for a determined and illusive enemy that honestly wanted nothing more than to kill every Human they came across.

Fortunately that wasn’t happening and Star Force was busy setting up a significant foothold in the region, recently off Namek as well. Kyler had begun the construction of a second major base in the Retari System on a waterworld they’d named Atlantica. At present it was uninhabited by the lizards or any other race…just a big, wet playground for the aquatics division of Star Force to play with, though given the size of the world and the nearly encompassing ocean, which covered 98% of the planet, they couldn’t be sure it was totally lifeless, but the most recent report from Kyler indicated that they hadn’t discovered so much as a minnow to date.

Paul knew the lizards had the capability to fight under water, but if they wanted to counterattack Star Force there they’d have to fight them fully on that front, which was an area of warfare that neither side had seen the other active in, though from Ariel Paul had learned a great deal about their capabilities…and he’d stopped by Corneria on his way back to Earth to further confer with her.

All in all, things were progressing well on the lizard front, but Paul knew the blowback would be coming eventually, and the more time they had to prepare the better. Right now Greg, Sara, and the others were out hunting for more lizard-occupied planets, essentially cleaning out the region around Namek while Jason continued Paul’s development plans there, further building up the planetary infrastructure and defenses while he and other Archons rotated home from field assignments so they could get their heads realigned prior to any developmental difficulties like Jason had gone through.

 The eleven with Paul now weren’t from the group he’d traveled back with. Those had come on ahead of him while he stayed on Corneria for more than a month dealing with duties that he’d had to entrust to others while he was way out on Namek. Duke Hightower had done well with continuing to grow both the planet and the system, but there were some things that Paul had to see to himself, as well as laying out future development plans for planetary defense, underground weapon stores, and other things that administrators had no strategic sense for.

Paul knew, as well as the other Archons did, that every planet they settled on would more than likely become a warfront at some point in the future…whether it be against lizards or V’kit’no’sat, so with that in mind Paul was laying out the infrastructure in a way that would give them a defensive advantage. One way to do that, he knew, was to make the streets and hallways small enough that the larger V’kit’no’sat races couldn’t physically enter, forcing either aerial bombardment or sending in the Zen’zat and other smaller races, which Paul felt that the Archons could more or less stand toe to toe with.

Building underground would shield them from some of the aerial bombardment and force the V’kit’no’sat to come down at them…unless they had their big guns with them, at which point it was more a question of how you wanted to die rather than mounting a proper defense. The lizards were another story entirely, and he’d already seen firsthand in Corneria Prime how city layout affected their surface warfare.

Building and training had occupied Paul in recent years, while the others were out actively fighting the lizards. He envied them, but knew how important the setup efforts on Namek were and didn’t hesitate to take that responsibility on himself. Now, as he walked down the catwalk staring at the still mostly buried pyramid beside and beneath him, he grudgingly admitted that as good as he’d gotten in the ‘master builder’ department, he still had a long way to go. This pyramid could take a kamikaze starship strike head on and barely show a scratch…and that’s the type of dug-in, hard hitting infrastructure that Paul dreamed about building.

But, like all things, a change of routine could be beneficial and Paul was eager to spend some time solely on training…not to mention getting the force powers that Jason had been none too hesitant to show off when he’d returned to the front. He had a couple of years head start on Paul, not to mention now outranking him as a level 17 acolyte, given the reset in rankings they’d all suffered. Their original scores were still there, waiting to be utilized, but with each level ranking there came prerequisite scores in a number of areas, of which psionics were now included.

It was those scores that were holding the rest back, so while the Archons were still training to increase their strength, speed, agility, etc, it was those who were progressing through the psionics skills the fastest that now held the highest ranks…with Kara now number 1 with an acolyte level 85 ranking.

Paul had mixed feelings about that, because she was a Saber, but he and the other trailblazers didn’t like getting beat out of anything, let alone their overall ranks. It was true that Kara had a cheat, but that didn’t do anything to quell their competitiveness. Not only had Kara advanced ahead of everyone, several other second geners were pacing the trailblazers as well…and at the moment they were all ahead of Paul, given that he was officially a level 1 acolyte, or would be after he got his psionics turned on.

That was the reason he and the others were here. Most of the psionics training was happening in the main sanctum alongside Atlantis, which was the only fully-refitted sanctum where all the psionic abilities could be trained for…and as a result it was packed full of acolytes working on their skills while construction crews busily worked to upgrade the other sanctums in the system, as well as across interstellar Star Force territory, including those on the jumpships.

While the Archons walking down the long catwalk with Paul would only be staying in the pyramid a day or two at most, he would be staying for a longer period of time and training with the elites in the interior sanctum…that, and doing some research of his own into the unmapped portions of the database.

When they finally reached the personnel entrance, higher up the pyramid than the main one the dragon had come in through not so long ago, a dark blue uniformed attendant met the Archons on the platform outside and led them through what was now a well-choreographed procedure. Paul let them go and stayed outside for a moment, letting the view of the enclosed pyramid sink into his bones.

There were scattered flood lights providing illumination to the otherwise blackness, but the pyramid almost seemed to soak them up, offering little reflective glare. The air was warm and moist, as usual. The pyramid gave off enough heat to pull moisture out of the surrounding soil, most of which still covered the green/black stone. The foodstuff factory set atop of it rather than burrowing down all the way to set on top of the pyramid itself. For security reasons and structural ones…because no support struts could reach the bedrock that the pyramid was blocking…most of the dirt/rock mix that had buried the pyramid remained in place, and Paul could almost feel the millennia in the smell of the chamber they’d hollowed out.

It also reminded him that they weren’t supposed to be here, for the catwalks, flood lights, and underside of the structure overhead clashed with the pyramid’s seemingly omnipotent construction.

“We have so far to go,” he whispered, kneeling down and pressing his fingertips against the tiny symbolic grooves in the ‘floor’ that led to the entrance. “And there’s no way of knowing how far you’ve come since this was built. If I didn’t like a challenge I’d be scared out of my mind.”

Paul stood up and blew out a breath. “Fortunately, we do like challenges,” he told the pyramid. “And though I don’t know how yet, we are so going to kick your ass.”

On that note the trailblazer walked inside the ovoid-shaped hallway and joined the casual flow of personnel wandering about the pyramid…far more than he’d been expecting. There were techs everywhere, with a scattering of security personnel that he’d never seen on sight before. As Paul moved through the halls and down some of the ramps the number of people increased, then as he finally got down to the command deck his jaw nearly dropped when he saw the small city of Star Force structures and the hundreds of mongooses zipping about between them.

“Davis, what have you been up to?” he said aloud as he stared up at the spire in the center of it all that was part of the Archon sanctum.

“Excuse me?” a nearby tech said.

“Nothing,” Paul said, waving him off. The man shrugged and continued walking on along with a group of three others, all of which boarded a nearby passenger-sized mongoose and drove off around the corner of one of the enormous dinosaur pads.

Paul shook his head at the spectacle around him, feeling like he was in a giant Star Force themed amusement park, and walked over to the mongoose corral and grabbed one of the traditional smaller ones…not the tech version, but one of the Archon’s, of which there were currently three in waiting. He flicked it on and drove off on the whisper-quiet engine with the oversized wheels seeming to turn over an infinite number of times to even gain a few meters on the gigantic plain of a room, though he knew it was only a trick of perception.

Paul took a long half lap around the command deck until he found a pad that was unused…one of the Voro’nam ones, otherwise known as Pachycephalosaurus. He parked near the foot of the staircase and jogged up, then found a single tech working the Zen’zat controls.

“Archon,” she said at seeing his white with silver stripe uniform. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Just need a console,” Paul said, walking up to one of the positions beside her. “What are you working on?”

“Deciphering the social codex. There are lots of racial logs depicting the interactions between the V’kit’no’sat races, written from their own point of view. I’m sifting through them looking for anything of interest. You?”

“Going where no one has gone before,” Paul said, only half paying attention to her. “Kara gave me some translations and this is the first chance I’ve had to look them up.”

“Kara…the Archon with the neural download?”

“The same,” Paul answered as he typed in Menonga’fil and executed a search.

“It’s a pity she didn’t stay longer. We really need her expertise here.”

“She has several types of expertise,” Paul said as entries popped up in a hexagonal grid. “I have need of her elsewhere, but I assume she’s still sending back her homework assignments?”

“We’re getting back translation requests, yes, but the lag time is unbearable. Pardon me if I ask, but what’s your name?”

“Paul,” he said, bringing up one database entry in particular.

“Number?” she prompted.

“024,” he said, reading intently.

The tech’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think…your uniform isn’t a ranger uniform.”

“We made some adjustments to our ranks, given the psionics…son of a bitch,” he said, emphasizing the last word.

“What’s wrong…if I might ask?”

“Just found something…really clever. A way to mine material from a star using an anti-grav syphon.”

“Is that something we can use?”

“They didn’t exactly leave one laying around,” Paul scoffed, still scrolling through the details. “It’s way too advanced for us to build, for now, but long term it’ll be very useful in planet-less star systems.”

“Outside my area of expertise,” the tech said with a bashful smile as she turned back to her own console. “I’ll let you to it then.”

Paul nodded, but didn’t turn around. Instead, he pulled up the schematic of a mobile unit, far larger than any jumpship Star Force had constructed…larger than even one of the Hycre ones, and he stared at it for a long time, hardly believing his eyes.

“They actually built one,” he whispered to himself. “They built a freaking Star Forge.”

6

November 15, 2409

Solar System

Earth

“You’re up,” the tech said to Paul as Darren-7933 walked out of the genetic alteration machine, his procedure now complete.

Paul passed him halfway and clapped him on the shoulder as he walked by, then he stepped inside the small cage-like confines as the tech on station began scanning him.

“Your ID?”

“Paul-024.”

The tech raised his eyebrows as he pulled up his file on the V’kit’no’sat equipment. “Last of the trailblazers…or no, second to last. Taryn’s still missing, isn’t she?”

“She’s on the Nestafar front. She won’t be back for a while.”

“Where have you been?” the tech asked, working the controls. “The others got here quick as they could.”

“Lizard front,” Paul answered simply, forcing himself to be calm. Something about being in the center of the machine unnerved him.

“Well, looks like this is going to be a simple procedure…you’re not showing any growths as of yet, so I’m just going to activate your latent abilities. No repair work needed. You want any changes made?”

Paul frowned. “What do you mean?”

“We figured out how to make some small modifications about 6 months ago. It’s a part of the standard program, but like most V’kit’no’sat coding it was hidden in the customized options. We thought the machine was locked into Zen’zat genetics…which it is, but there’s some variability there. I can change your hair color, eye color, stuff like that…”

“Don’t suppose you can turn my facial hair off?” Paul half joked. He hated shaving.

“Sure can,” the tech said, “but I’ll need you to pick a line for your sideburns.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yeah, it’s not hard. Some of the others turned off their body hair too, and some their head hair. I don’t know why you’d want to be bald, unless it’s something to do with the helmet thing? I can turn off or on any follicles you want.”

“How do I show you the sideburns?”

“Step over here.”

Paul walked out and around to the operator’s side of the machine and saw a hologram of his body. The tech zoomed into his head, then his right ear.

“Draw your mark,” the tech prompted.

Paul looked at the hologram, seeing all the hair follicle locations tagged…including places on his face that currently didn’t have hairs. He took his finger and traced a line across the side of his head, cutting off his hairline where he currently had it shaved. The tiny red icons switched to blue, indicating that they were tagged for deactivation.

Paul spun the hologram around and did the other side of his face, then ran his finger over his ears, taking off the tiny hairs there, and drew a line across the top of his neck.

“Is there an area highlighter?”

“Here,” the tech said, pulling up an option on the menu.

“Thanks,” Paul said, dragging it over his face to cover his facial hair while missing his eyebrows and eyelashes…then he chiseled those the way he liked, zooming in quite close to get the shape he wanted. “I assume these can be turned back on later?”

“Can be, but right now this is the only unit capable of doing it.”

“Good,” Paul said, highlighting his entire body below the neck and turning all the follicles blue.

“Hair color?”

“I’m fine with black,” Paul said, checking over to make sure he’d tagged everything he wanted. “Looks good,” he said, walking back around and inside the machine.

“Going with the streamlined look, huh?”

“Will the hairs fall out?” Paul asked.

“Give it a few days, but yeah, you’ll be shedding for a while. You might have to scrape your face a bit to dislodge the tiny pieces, given that there’s not much there. I had to.”

“You’ve used the machine?” Paul asked, a bit concerned.

“Only Archons have gotten the Zen’zat upgrades, but we experimented with some of the other stuff on ourselves. Now I’ve got a perfect goatee that I no longer have to trim up, just shave down to length. Takes all of 30 seconds where it used to take 10 minutes.”

“Is that why I noticed a female tech with aqua-colored hair?”

“Sharron…yeah, she did that with the machine. You can get some really weird combinations…even some striping. There’s quite a few ‘experiments’ walking around the pyramid right now.”

“Any side effects?”

“Not so far, and I don’t think there will be. It’s pretty straight forward stuff. If anything I’d be concerned with the psionics upgrades, but there hasn’t been one reported case of problems to make its way back here.”

“There hasn’t been,” Paul confirmed.

“I guess you’d know before me,” the tech admitted. “You guys seem to keep things pretty close to the vest, if you ask me.”

“When you do what we do,” Paul explained, “other people just don’t get it. If we want to share something, better to share it with those that will understand. Are we good to go?”

“Just running a few final checks. There’s a bit of anomalous coding in your genome. Don’t want you to end up growing another arm or something,” he joked.

Paul frowned. “Define ‘anomalous?’”

“Something that doesn’t match the Zen’zat template. I’ve seen a few of these before. Standard protocol is not to touch them, but I like to give the person the option…which is why I’m trying to isolate what the deviation is. Don’t want to take away any accidental superpowers you’ve developed,” he said with a wink.

“What were the others?”

“The ones that I personally handled were mostly dormant, so we lost them in the wash. Two were active. One was an alteration in the lungs, the other was a growth in her feet. The lungs was an improvement, the feet weren’t, so we undid the growth. Never heard how that turned out, but since we didn’t get back any bad news I assumed there wasn’t a problem.”

“Do you remember who she was?”

“Don’t have to, have the file saved,” the tech said, pulling up a side menu and going back through the history logs. “Agnieszka-2117. Came through here a little under a year ago.”

“What was the growth?”

“It waaassss…” he said, checking, “a lump in the ankle. A bone growth, to be specific. It wasn’t hindering movement, but it didn’t need to be there so she opted to have it removed.”

“How long did that take?”

“The regenerator in this thing can take you apart and put you back together alarmingly fast, though technically it doesn’t tear anything down, it just regrows you to specs…but if there’s tissue there that’s not in the specs it has to get rid of it.”

“What if you use the wrong scan? Do I end up with someone else’s body?”

“No, it doesn’t work off a scan. It pulls directly from your living genetics, which is why we have to alter those first. There are gobs of safety protocols built in, so don’t worry. I’ve been using it enough that I pretty much know what I’m doing,” he said with a smile.

“I’m overflowing with confidence,” Paul said sarcastically.

“Here we go…your anomalous coding is centered around your nose. Looks like a deformity.”

“How does it know that, based off of Zen’zat standards?”

“Zen’zat genetics don’t include any deformities…or, to put it another way, there’s a range of possible body shapes, and when something is outside of them it flags it as a deformity. Yours makes your nasal passage a bit larger than normal. That probably allows you to get a bit more air into your lungs…”

“And water up my nose?”

“I can’t say to that, I’m not much of a swimmer.”

“Tempting…” Paul said, considering the revision, “but leave it as is for now. Anything else?”

“Nope…scan is clean aside from that. Well, I mean clean as in big stuff. There’s a lot of dormant coding that will uncover that won’t have any immediate effect. Stuff that’s supposed to be dormant at the outset, but not buried as far as it is now.”

“Second tier psionics?”

“Not what I was getting at, but probably. Over the millennia our genetics have adapted to fit the requirements of our daily lives. Zen’zat are fighting and training. The populace…not so much, so some of the shifts have been detrimental, making you work harder for advancement than you should have been. Think of it like a parking lot that gets snowed on and never used. Builds up a thick layer a foot or so deep. Then you try and drive in and park and have trouble moving through it all. When we reset to defaults, the snow gets wiped away.”

“End result?”

“You get a little more superhuman than normal? I don’t really know. You’d have to ask the other Archons that have had the procedure…though it would be different for each of you, to some degree. I would guess the younger ones would see more of an effect, given that you guys have already brushed off most of the ‘snow’ already with your insane training…hence the spontaneous psionics appearing.”

“Or I can just find out firsthand,” Paul commented.

“Yeah…can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“We’ve all got Zen’zat genetics…so when are you going to let non-Archons get the procedure?”

“For what purpose?” Paul asked neutrally.

“Well…you’d think that the Knights should, at least.”

“The Knights are trained to do one thing and one thing only, and that’s fight hand to hand. If they branch out into other areas it will dilute their efficiency. They’re not as good as us, so the only way they can keep up on the battlefield is to focus all their training into one area. That and the drug enhancements are the only reason they’re on par with us.”

“What about the rest of us then?”

“Other than it just being cool, what do you need them for?”

“General advancement of the Human race, for starters. I’m sure I could cite several specifics if I had time to think about it.”

“Let me ask you a different way…why aren’t we giving all the Archons the procedure?”

“I wondered that myself.”

“Because the adepts already have a lot on their plate, and they need to focus on other areas of training. Throw too much at them and it’ll slow their development. Let them master a few things first, then give the psionics a go. Stair-step advancement.”

“I suppose that makes sense, from a certain point of view.”

“Feeling left out?”

“I suppose you could say that…especially since I’m operating the very machine that makes it happen and I’m not allowed to use it on myself.”

“I can understand that,” Paul sympathized.

“But you’re still not going to let us?”

“I won’t say an absolute no, but if we’re not letting adepts, why would we let anyone else of lower rank?”

“What about the Director?”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Has he been down here?”

“No…just thinking out loud.”

“Fine, you win…” Paul relented. “When 900 years old you reach, get the procedure, you will.”

The tech frowned. “You’re not even 900 yet.”

Paul shrugged. “Archon.”

The tech pointed at him. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

Paul smiled. “How old are you?”

“112.”

“Remind me in 788 years.”

“Deal,” the tech said, glancing over the final settings. “Looks like we’re good to go. Try and hold still while the machine makes contact. After that you’ll be numbed up and can’t move anyway.”

Paul rolled up his sleeves as he’d seen the previous Archon do and placed his hands on two circular pylons in front of him. “Ready.”

“One Archon car wash coming up,” the tech said deadpan as he activated the machine.

The entryway Paul had walked in through disappeared as several arm-like mechanical extensions twisted around the chamber like fast-growing roots of a metallic tree, with several of them moving in and making contact with Paul’s body. Both of his arms and the back of his neck were targeted, then he felt a numbness creep down his back and up his arms as the liquid metal spread out across his body underneath his clothing like a regenerator, finally spreading up over his face in tendrils and causing him to get drowsy enough that his eyelids flopped down and cut off his vision.

“Just relax,” the tech said reassuringly. “Your genetic code is being reset, and it takes a while to hit every cell of your body, especially the deep tissue. The range of the filaments is rather short, but considering the rewrite they’re doing it’s downright amazing. I’m tracking the progress on the hologram and everything is proceeding normally. Just wait this out for a few minutes.”

Not like Paul had a choice. He felt like he was wrapped up in a numbing cocoon.

“If you’re curious to know, the genetic reset would be sufficient on its own,” the tech said, purposefully making conversation to give Paul something to focus on, “but the growth process of the new tissue would take time and could develop problems, somewhat like your fellow Archons were suffering from. By building the tissue here and now that problem is avoided…and you have instant access to the new abilities, though it will take time to learn how to use them…you’re at 25% now and looking good.”

Paul would have nodded, had he any control over his head. He sensed it was still upright, but had no way of knowing if that was an illusion or the machine was locking it in place. All he saw was staticy black with a disembodied feeling, almost like he was floating in a cool sea of nothingness.

He’d used a regenerator before, but it had never taken this long, nor had it had this total body takeover…then again, his injuries had never been so massive as to require it, either. He wondered how much this would hurt if he wasn’t numbed, or if the genetic alterations could even be felt.

“50% now…still going strong. Getting down into your skeleton a bit. This thing goes after every cell, no matter how compacted or dead. Even the hairs on your head get altered so there’s no competing genetics. A bit of overkill if you ask me, but the V’kit’no’sat tech has a reputation for being thorough…at least the medical implements are. Don’t know about the rest.”

“Looks like it’s into your major organs now,” the tech continued. “Don’t worry, operation of your heart and lungs won’t be affected, the machine hits them on the run, so to speak. 75%, and now transitioning up into the brain. Last stop for the changes…and don’t be alarmed if your vision and hearing go…”

Paul heard a pause, then several seconds later the man’s voice returned.

“…and that’s when it gets reset. Looks like it’s just about finished…now. 100% genetic transformation. Congratulations, you’ve just had your Zen’zat genetic bath, now to get your physical parts matching up.”

In mind’s eye Paul’s legs and arms came back into existence, but only partially. He could feel they were there but still couldn’t move them.

“Don’t try to move, even though you may be sensing some motor control returning. The psionics are all centered in your brain, so it’s important to keep your head still while the regenerator grows them. You’ll be gaining a few grams of tissue, by the way, so you may have something of a headache for a day or two while your equilibrium resets. The regenerator takes care of most of that, but I’ve heard stories of it taking a few days for the effects to fully wear off, and you Archons aren’t given to whining, so I assume it must be significant if you’re talking about it.”

As he spoke, Paul could feel a pressure building inside his mostly numbed head, then it subsided, only to repeat again several times before the regenerator liquid leads finally retracted from his back and gave him full use of his body below his neck, but his head was held in a brace that the machine arms had formed that wouldn’t let him move so much as a millimeter.

As instructed he tried to remain still, but had the urge to twitch his finger…which he found was firmly stuck to the pedestal his hand was on.

“Almost done now,” the tech said. “Making some final calibrations to the rest of your brain tissue to accommodate the new hardware. Your hands should disconnect shortly. That’s where the extra material for the new issue is entering your body. If you could see the hologram you’d be impressed with all the micro-conduits the regenerator is creating and disassembling inside of you. How it doesn’t damage your tissue in the process still amazes me…there, procedure complete.”

Paul’s head unnumbed to a slight headache as the mechanical arms retracted, both away from his body and into their previous placements, opening up the doorway out of the transformational cage.

“Take it slow,” the tech urged. “Best to let your head settle before you try…”

Suddenly Paul’s vision snapped open…or rather his visual information was augmented by his Pefbar ability, allowing him to see the cage around him in all directions, lacking in detail as it was save for the areas still in his vision, which now seemed to be laden with extra clarity.

“Holy crap,” Paul said, getting used to the spherical vision, “this is so cool.”

“I hear that a lot,” the tech mildly complained. “Guess I’ll have to wait 788 years to find out for myself.”

Paul grinned. “Test out as an Archon and you can do it in less than half that time.”

The tech sighed. “I think waiting is my only hope. You’re done now, so you can step out.”

Paul walked out, seeing his field of vision go with him, which he measured at about a meter or so in range. He concentrated, trying to get it to shut off, and succeeded on the third attempt, then he turned it on and off several times until he’d gotten the feel for it.

“Are you alright?” the tech asked.

“Bit of a headache…and head rush. These new perceptions are intense.”

“You’ll adjust…what are you smiling at?”

“Nothing,” Paul said, forcing the expression off his face. “Thanks a million.”

“If you feel like sharing with the rest of us let me know,” the tech said, trying one more time.

“We’ll see,” Paul said as he walked out. There wasn’t anyone else standing in line, which gave him a few meters of clear space where the tech couldn’t see his face and Paul let his unguarded smile return.

Now…a Jedi you will become, he said mentally in Yoda’s voice. And a powerful Jedi you will be.

7

April 2, 2410

Solar System

Earth

Paul raced across the obstacle course, stinger rifle in hand, and ducked down behind a low barricade just as a flurry of shots passed through where his head had just been. He ‘heard’ a telepathic signal in his head, a sort of sound/image that the Archons had developed as copies of their hand signals, with this one meaning to stay down…followed immediately by the wait command.

Paul did as instructed and stayed hunkered down behind the wall as he heard more whiffs of stingers being fired elsewhere on the course. He couldn’t see much beyond the floor in front of him and the wall to his left, so he flipped on his Pefbar and immediately got an image of what was on the other side of the wall, including the turret that had been firing at him. He saw its barrels rotate around and away from him, quickly followed by him receiving a telepathic ‘go’ command.

The trailblazer rose up on a knee and spun, bringing his rifle around and disconnecting his Pefbar as soon as his regular vision crossed the contact…then he reached out and felt for a presence in the turret, finding the mechanical version of a ‘mind’ inside the device. He mentally latched onto it and concentrated hard as the barrels fired a few shots off to the side then began to track back around towards him.

Summoning what felt like all his mental strength he used his limited Fornax ability and sent a disruption beam into the turret, specifically targeting it and not generating an omnidirectional field. The mechanism in the turret registered the telepathic white noise effect and deemed it to be above the threshold limit…which triggered the targeting sphere to quickly rise up out of the top of the turret for a few seconds of vulnerability.

Paul peppered it with green paint splatters then duck-rolled to his right, coming back up just in time to hit it with two more before the target sphere retracted. With enough stun energy delivered to the target it ceased firing, though no other visual sign was given that it was deactivated. The target sphere retracted and the turret remained silent, prompting Paul to launch himself over the barrier and run up towards a vertical pylon just on the other side of the turret where he began climbing a ladder built into the side one handed, as he still held his rifle but without any armor or strapped rack to attach it to for carrying purposes.

Knowing that the turret behind him would eventually reactivate Paul moved quickly, but hesitated when he got to the top.

Clear? he asked Angel-676 telepathically, focusing specifically on her mental location. Like his Pefbar ability, he could sense minds in all directions simultaneously. Some appeared like stars, tiny pricks on the horizon, while others stood out much larger, despite their varying distances. The tiny ones were the telepathically active machines, while the other Archons in this challenge were the larger signatures.

He got the ‘hand signal’ version of ‘clear’ coming back rather than the word, which they’d learned to use to differentiate between saying it was clear and asking if it was clear. Paul’s transmission ability had progressed to the point where he could articulate words, but signaling to an individual person was still tricky and required him to stop and concentrate to do it.

Fortunately one didn’t require any Ikrid ability at all to receive signals, so while he popped up over the top of the ladder and began crawling across the raised platform that led to a suspension bridge he heard Angel’s telepathic warning loud and clear.

New target on the ceiling…move Paul!

Trusting her he launched himself across the bridge at a run, only sensing the new pinprick above him as he hit the halfway point. He didn’t bother trying to knock it out with a Fornax beam, because there was no way he was going to be able to hit it with his rifle over his head on the run before it nailed him…so he just tried to outrun the stingers that began falling around him.

Had this been one of the old school turrets he would have made it across…but the newer versions had been improved with greater rotational and tracking speed to counter for the Archons’ growing agility, and despite his official level being only an acolyte, his physical skills were still ranger level and the difficulty of the turrets had been adjusted to match.

He got clipped in the right foot and left calve as he got to the other side, tripping him up and sending him face first down to the planks that made up the bridge, but he managed to curl up into enough of a ball to roll forward and into cover on the other side…though his rifle didn’t make it with him. He dropped it mid fall, and as his recent luck held, it careened over the side and off the bridge.

“Damn it,” he said, pulling his numb legs further behind cover as he concentrated and found Angel’s mind up in the observation nook on the far end of the course. I’m down and I lost my rifle. Leg hits.

How fast can you crawl?

Are we that close?

Frank is almost there. If you can open up the turrets from range we can still do this.

Guide me, Paul insisted. He didn’t see how this was going to work, but she had a better view of the situation than he did.

Zigzag left. Stop at square.

Paul crawled further away from the bridge on his elbows, getting some use out of his half numb knees in the process as he ducked down a side hallway in the tree house-like enclosure he was in. Like Angel said there was a zigzag-shaped hallway that exited into a square intersection that had two possible choices. When Paul got to it he signaled his readiness and waited.

Go right and tell me if you’re in range of the turret.

Paul did as instructed and dragged himself through another hallway and up to a corner but sensed a turret nearby so he didn’t duck his head out, though the corner of the hallway junction had the nook of the outer wall missing, exposing it to the course exterior, offering an opportunity to shoot out…or in.

I think I can get it, Paul told her. His Fornax range wasn’t great, but when used in beam mode he had extra juice to work with and fortunately the target wasn’t moving, otherwise it would have been another story entirely.

Paul received the shorthand ‘standby’ signal and he kept hunkered up near the inner corner of the 90 degree turn, but far enough back inside the hallway to keep out of view of what other turrets might be operational outside. Each time the Archons ran the course their locations would alter, not allowing them to trust their memory and forcing them to stay on their toes each time they attempted the challenge.

Paul felt Angel’s ‘go’ command and he concentrated again, sending a Fornax burst along the tight beam trajectory to the target. Though Paul couldn’t see or feel it, the disruptive telepathic energy washed over the receiver in the turret around the corner like water from a squirt gun, save for it passed through the target and out the other side, diminished only by the amount that soaked into the receiver.

The rest continued on, spreading out as it went and dissipating. According to the V’kit’no’sat database this was a simplistic use of the ability, but what Paul thought of as ‘second level’ because it required coordination with his Ikrid to feel out the targets…not to mention learning how to produce the white noise in a straight line rather than ‘shouting’ it in all directions.

Still, he knew there was a way to disable a target directly, without having to ‘beam’ it…which meant if another person got in the line of the beam they’d be hit too, whether on this side of the target or the other. The dynamics of that still perplexed him, because he was thinking of energy transfer like a laser…but there was some way to ‘hack’ into the target and deliver the Fornax to a single point. It required Ikrid, he knew, but beyond that the explanation of the dynamics was still beyond him and his vocabulary…of which Kara had been no help, because there weren’t English translations for much of the ‘mental’ terminology that the Archons were having to discover through their training.

Paul’s best guess was that there was a binary nature to the Fornax, and that two ‘strands’ had to overlap at a certain point in order to take effect…but in truth that was just a stand-in explanation for Paul’s head to wrap around until he figured out the truth. It worked, somehow, and Paul seemed to automatically go to naval metaphors whenever he needed an explanation for something, hence the binary, which was the way several weapon systems worked in the V’kit’no’sat archives. They didn’t use them, but several of the races they’d defeated had, being able to target one building through another for demolition and other more interesting applications…some of which were downright grotesque.

As bad as the V’kit’no’sat were, their purges of sufficiently advanced races in the galaxy had the side effect of cleaning up some of the other nasties out there.

You’re clear, Angel told him, up to the platform.

Paul crawled around the corner, acknowledging her with a simple telepathic ping in their shorthand meaning ‘copy’ as he saw the turret set in the middle of a little roofed cupola with its target sphere coated in green paint. He hadn’t heard the shots, but judging from the angle they must have come from one of the other Archons in play that had a sniper rifle. There were six of them in total, plus Angel working as coordinator. She had no weapon and couldn’t move from her observation spot, per the rules of the challenge, but could use her telepathy to aid them as much as possible.

The other Archons weren’t trailblazers, but they were the more advanced psionic acolytes remaining in the pyramid, acting both as trainers and trailblazers of their own as they pushed the boundaries of their abilities and logged their progress for others to follow. The trailblazers, meanwhile, continued their training in the field as they attended to war duties that were growing by the year as both fronts began to expand, leaving other Archons with more and more significant duties…things that otherwise the trailblazers would never have let them take the lead on, but given current circumstances that had changed drastically.

War aside, many of the second geners were as skilled or more skilled in the psionics than the trailblazers…though Paul’s class was catching up, despite their field training disadvantages. That said, Paul was helping the group here advance as much as they could, and they were returning the gesture, helping him catch up where they had the lead. His ranger-level physical skills surpassed theirs, and their psionics in turn surpassed his, making challenges like this tricky to execute, but advantageous if they could organize properly.

And organizing properly was one of the Archons’ greatest skills…even if they had to do it improv.

Paul knew the turret would come back online soon, and with a random downtime so they couldn’t know for sure exactly when, so he crawled as quick as he could, keeping below the low fence-like walls of the cupola that the turret stood within and around its base…then off the opposite side and into a short hallway, hoping that he wasn’t going to get shot in the butt on the way.

He pulled off around a corner before that happened, thankfully, and had a few meters of hallway to work with before it opened up onto a platform half the size of a volleyball court…underneath which he could feel two more turrets down at an angle.

I’m here.

Stay put, the platform is guarded. What can you hit from there?

Paul concentrated again, sensing a third turret up high on the ceiling. Three. Two low, one high…but they’re at range. 50/50 on reaching threshold.

Dual strike, she suggested. Lower right from your position on my mark.

Paul sent the ‘copy’ signal and waited, keeping his mental lock on the contact and excluding all else from his mind. Some 20 seconds later the ‘go’ signal popped into his mind and he beamed as much Fornax energy as he could down through the platform floor towards the target, knowing that it was going to mushroom out trying to go that far away, not to mention that passing through matter scattered it a touch as well.

Meanwhile, Kanse-449 sent his own disruption beam at the same target from an even greater range. Combined they overwhelmed the threshold on the receiver and the turret’s target sphere raised…then was hit by a sniper from even further away, enabling a closer Archon to move up and duck behind cover as the other lower turret peppered his steps with blue paint splats.

Paul couldn’t see any of it, aside from the mental image of the Archon running forward once he stopped concentrating on the individual turret. He waited for Angel’s next signal, not wanting to bombard her with questions while she was talking to the others…that would work almost as well as white noise, as they’d learned from previous challenges, so he knew they had to keep communication to a minimum and let her decide when to make contact…that was her part in the challenge, which worked to train her communications skills in an improvised setting.

Paul waited what felt like a long time then finally couldn’t stand just sitting still while the pins and needles began to work up his legs. Status?

Almost there. Stay put.

Paul sighed, glad that they were making progress but not liking to be kept in the dark. Half of the Archons were visible in mind’s eye, but the others had moved off far enough to escape his tracking ability…or more accurately, his tracking radius had begun shrinking with fatigue. At the outset he’d been able to sense nearly the entire course, now he was down to about a third of it.

A few moments later the course was bathed in blue finish light as a challenge-end klaxon blared once, indicating that they’d won. A few seconds later Victor-773’s hands appeared on the edge of the platform, then the Archon pulled himself up on top and walked over to Paul.

“Need a hand?”

“Legs, actually,” he said, letting the Archon pull him up onto his feet and dip a shoulder underneath his arm, allowing Paul to wobbily stand.

“One more down,” Victor said as he helped Paul waddle across the platform, referring to the new challenges that kept popping up seemingly every week, of which the super hard ones were being given to Paul and the other higher level Archons to work on. Their success/failures would then be analyzed by other Archons/trainers and the challenges would be tweaked, eventually getting them to the ‘standardization’ point, which would result in them being officially sanctioned and sent out to the other sanctums across Star Force territory for them to add to their training regimens.

“My range still sucks,” Paul said as they neared the edge. “And it shrinks faster than I’d like.”

“You’ll get there,” Victor assured him, setting his feet and acting as a living rope as Paul stepped off the edge and climbed down his arm until their hands latched, then Victor knelt down, eventually dropping to his belly and lowering Paul over the side as far as he could before releasing his hand.

Paul dropped the last few inches, knowing his legs were going to give out, so he made his landing as elegant as possible, dropping into a roll that left him standing on his knees below as Victor swung over the side and dropped down beside him.

“Me…it’s going to take me decades to get as fast as you are. No way any of us could have made it across that gap. Your turret settings are insane.”

“Morgan’s are insane,” Paul corrected him. “Mine are just hard,” he said as Angel came towards them from somewhere on the course carrying a vial of destun serum.

“Thank you,” Paul said, telekinetically grabbing it as she tossed it into the air in front of him. It took a moment to slow its momentum, but he landed it in his hand deftly enough then jabbed it into his neck, feeling a wave of cool relief pass through his body, swiping away the bit of dizziness in his head, arms, and chest, then eating through the roadblocks in his legs, taking with it most of the uncomfortable pins and needles gathering there.

He gave it a couple of seconds to work its magic then he stood up, nodding to Angel. “Nice work up there.”

“Yes, very,” Victor added.

“Team effort,” she deflected. “They’re not making it easy on us, though.”

“Easy isn’t the point,” Paul reminded her.

“Duh,” she said sarcastically. “What I meant was these co-op challenges are getting more complicated. Clones of me couldn’t have done this together, nor could clones of you,” she said, gently putting her finger in his chest. “It’s taking different skill levels combined to complete these, and that’s something we haven’t worked on before.”

“Half right,” Paul offered her. “We have, but in the past we didn’t have such varied skills to work with. Ten years from now, when more of us get caught up, you’ll see the disparities disappear…somewhat. If some of us really pull ahead in one area, then we might be getting more varied challenges. I can promise you we won’t be doing that, but I wouldn’t put it past some of the others.”

“Meaning you’ll stay balanced?” Victor asked, knowing by ‘us’ he meant the trailblazers.

“Only way to get our ranger ranks back,” Paul said, seeing the other Archons approaching from various points on the rather large training course. “Plus we don’t like having weak areas.”

“I’ve seen your swimming scores,” Angel said with a smirk.

“Which I continue to work on,” Paul reminded her with a bit of wounded pride, though not much. With Ariel’s help he’d made up some ground on the others, though he still hated going underwater without breathing gear. “But I can see some of you guys focusing on one skill almost exclusively just so you can show off.”

“Us…show off?” Victor asked mock wounded. “Perish the thought.”

“Can’t level up our ranks that way either,” Angel said, reminding him that they weren’t that different…which Paul already knew, though he still liked to mess with their heads a bit from time to time.

“We going again?” Riona asked, walking up behind Paul and stopping just off his shoulder. “Or moving on to the next one?”

“Next one,” Paul said, knowing that meant they had to switch rooms. “Unless you guys are too low on brain juice?”

“I think we’re fine,” Angel said, suppressing a smile. “Are you good to go?”

“I’ll manage,” Paul said, realizing he’d walked into that one. He was still low man on the psionic totem pole in this group. “Let me find my rifle, then we’ll head over to the poppers.”

“Lovely,” Victor said with a cringe.

“That’s the spirit, newb,” Paul said, clapping him on the shoulder before he walked off back towards the underside of the suspension bridge.

8

July 12, 2410

Solar System

Earth

Paul blew out a slow breath and pressed his left hand against the synthetic material of the measurement wall in front of him. He felt out the contact point and kept his mental handprint focused in his senses as he increased his internal body temperature. His entire physical structure began to run hot, then he began shifting the excess heat into his core and out through his arm to his hand in a process he still didn’t fully understand.

It had been explained as increased control over his body’s internal functions, but he knew from a physics standpoint that something had to be either pushing or drawing the heat out of his tissue in order for it to move away from equilibrium. He also knew that his body couldn’t take too much of a temperature increase, so he tried to focus it to only a few degrees higher than normal, then drag it down to his arm where it began to build up to uncomfortably hot levels as he held most of it inside and away from his skin to keep from dissipating it into his clothes and the air.

That amount of control intrigued him, and while his mind couldn’t academically explain how it was happening he was learning to do it by feel alone…as well as knowing he was going to royally cook himself if he didn’t stop soon.

But he didn’t. He kept the heat building and flowing down into his arm, pulling it away from the vital areas of his body down into that one extremity, then before he could burn his hand again…as he’d done a month ago…he channeled the heat through his palm and into the material of the wall in front of him, feeling it drain out and open up room for him to move more heat out from his core.

Now was the tricky part. He needed to heat the wall past a required point, which was well above the boiling point of water. Doing that would burn his hand again, but whatever part of his body allowed him to move the heat around internally also acted as a blowback shield…if he did it right. There were no useful instructions on how to do that, which left Paul having to figure it out through trial and lots of errors, though some of the other Archons had tried to give him a few tips.

Today, though, was going to be one of his successes. While he couldn’t store a massive amount of heat inside his body, including his hand, he could create a continual flow of it, which was now pooling in the wall directly beneath his hand. He could feel it there, but for some reason it wasn’t burning him, almost as if he had a one-way force field covering his palm that allowed the heat out but not back in…yet it allowed him to sense how much heat was there.

Some of the other Archons had been investigating this phenomena as well, but their sifting through the V’kit’no’sat database ran into the same problems his had…a lot of vocabulary they didn’t understand, and Kara was no longer around to translate. However they were doing it, they were able to shield themselves from the heat coming back into their body, and both Paul and the others knew that if they could do that in their hands, then it might be possible to do that over their entire bodies and give themselves some level of immunity to high heat situations…or at least a little bit of air conditioning on hot days.

Right now Paul was just focused on this test which, if passed, would rank him up again, given that he had the other 5 psionics areas already sufficiently advanced to reach level 11 acolyte, with the Sesspik healing trace something that they’d chosen not to measure, given that it would require an injury to test.

The wall in front of his hand didn’t glow, but he could feel the heat building on the other side of his palm as he channeled more and more of it from his core, out through his arm, and past the barrier on his palm, reducing his internal temperature…which then required him to create more heat, and at a rate that would be sufficient to affect the wall, for every bit he put into it, it was also bleeding off into the surrounding material and air.

It was a race of dissipation, with Paul barely winning out. In the computer monitoring program the degrees in the wall continually and slowly ticked up, though there was no hologram for Paul to monitor it with. He was completely on his own, and had to guess how close he was coming based on the ‘feel’ through his magical barrier…which was very tenuous at this point, so he just kept creating and pumping heat into the wall and hoping it would be enough.

His concentration slipped twice, with a hot spot quickly forming on his index finger the first time, then his thumb the next. He got the barrier back into place almost immediately, but he knew he’d have a couple of burn marks afterwards. Cursing himself for his lapse, he concentrated as hard as he could without shaking himself and kept at it…eventually reaching the 110C/230F mark that resulted in a completion tone.

Paul pulled his hand off immediately and vented the remaining excess heat out of his body like releasing the air from a balloon. The internal constrictions he’d been using to contain and move it where he wanted disappeared and the heat flushed out to his skin and began to vent in the air…along with beads of sweat breaking out across his body. Oddly enough, his natural cooling mechanism had been deactivated somehow in the heat redistribution effort, but now that he’d released it his internal thermostat had reverted back to normal function.

Paul swiped his forehead with his right hand as he examined his left, seeing the two red marks from where the heat had bled back onto his skin. He held still and closed his eyes, ignoring the statistics popping up on the console and taking the opportunity to practice his healing trance as well as wanting to get rid of the annoying pain. It wasn’t much, but the sting was annoying.

In mind’s eye he deactivated his hand, locking it up rigidly in its current posture and essentially putting it into hibernation as he mentally forced a calm energy into it, or at least that’s what it felt like. The database said it wasn’t a type of energy, but rather an excited state being induced in the cells, causing the tissue to regenerate faster than normal. Paul could partially understand that, but it still felt like an energy surge, and he wasn’t going to completely discount his senses in favor of the V’kit’no’sat notes.

“That puts you where?” Ben-5449 asked as he entered the small training chamber.

“Level 11,” Paul said, feeling the first few whisks of cool air on his neck as his heat plume finally dissipated. He held his hand still in front of him but turned his head to face the other Archon.

“In what…a year?”

“8 months,” Paul corrected him, still holding his localized Sesspik trance. For that psionic, at least, failure in Rensiek provided extra training opportunities, painful as they were.

“You hurt your hand?”

“A couple of small spots. Just trying to get a head start on the healing process. A couple of minutes and I should be good for the rest of the day.”

“Can you do that walking?”

“So long as it’s just my hand, yes,” Paul said, thinking. “If I don’t bounce too much.”

“Message came through for you. Some guy named Tennisonne wanted to see you as soon as possible. I didn’t want to bother you with it until you’d finished.”

“Thanks,” Paul said, stepping back from the now cool wall thanks to the internal heat sinks that had activated as soon as the test was complete. “All yours.”

“Appreciated,” Ben said, toggling the control panel and dismissing Paul’s completion emblems, then selecting the parameters for his own training/testing session.

Paul walked out, keeping his hand fairly rigid and energized, and made his way out of the training sanctum. He paused for a minute or so next to the mongooses outside, then deemed his hand pain-free enough to grab the handle bars, deciding he’d finish healing the damage later when he took a nap.

Paul drove across the command deck and down the ramps, moving lower in the pyramid until he came to the Oso’lon section. Inside those large rooms he found another mini Star Force cityscape that held a local research and development facility where the upper level techs were continuously working to crack the secrets of V’kit’no’sat technology.

Paul wove his way around several of the buildings until he came to a smaller complex and parked outside next to three larger mongooses designed to carry four passengers. He went inside and grabbed an elevator up to the 15th level where one of the small scale fabrication labs was located.

“Mr. Stark,” Paul said loudly as he walked in on Tennisonne with his head buried in the side of a mechanical monstrosity, “what have you for me today?”

The man wearing a dark green uniform with 5 gold stripes running down the sides pulled back out and stood up, frowning in Paul’s direction. “Grand Admiral Thrawn…nice of you to finally show up.”

Paul returned his frown. “Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t call me Stark,” Tennisonne countered.

“Stark is cool,” Paul argued, walking over to the man and having to navigate his way around equipment trays and other random projects to get there.

“And he has toys compared to what we’re working with,” the master tech said, pointing across the room to a small booth. “I need you to try the mental interface again. I think I’ve got the feedback connection powerful enough this time.”

Without a word Paul walked over to the booth that was a compact version of the command nexus the Archons used to control their fleets and organize ground battles from afar. There was a control pedestal, as usual, but the walls were so close it almost felt claustrophobic…or would have if the back side hadn’t been cut out, though once he stood inside his peripheral vision didn’t extend far enough back to notice the gap, making it appear that he was inside a vertical tube.

In addition to the usual control board there was a central sphere sticking out a foot or so above the board and recessed into the wall to keep it out of the way. Paul pulled it out, bringing it to chest level in front of him, and placed his hands on it.

“Ready.”

“Just a sec,” Tennisonne said, walking around the backside of the chamber and fiddling with something. “Ok, give it a try.”

Paul closed his eyes for a moment, finding the telepathic receiver in the sphere and extending his Ikrid energy into it remotely, just as he’d done a week ago, making a mental link with the device.

“Anything?” Tennisonne asked.

“Just a connective tone…no sequence,” Paul said, ‘listening’ with his mind.

“Well…I didn’t think that would work anyway. Give the tactile interface a go.”

Paul severed his mental connection with the receiver and shunted his Ikrid over to physical ‘hacking’ that used his nervous system as a conduit for the Ikrid energy, increasing the efficiency dramatically. The material of the sphere had been designed to allow the energy to pass to the receiver in the center, similar to how another person’s nervous system allowed the physical transfer to the mind via touch, establishing a bridge between the two while bypassing the ‘wireless’ linkage that had been disabled for all Zen’zat.

The type of interface that Paul was attempting required 2-way communication to access information, and with all Zen’zat configured to only be able to transmit information at will an individual could receive all kinds of external control influences, but the return part of the neurological ‘handshake’ would never return, thus blocking the connection. If you couldn’t link with the target all you could do was blindly transmit, which in the case of a message was all you needed. If you wanted to remote control someone’s mind or dig into their memories for information that wasn’t possible with Zen’zat, save for physical contact…which then bypassed the transmission blockage due to the fact that the person’s own nervous system was being used to get in through the ‘backdoor,’ so to speak.

The sphere in front of Paul was supposed to operate the same way, allowing him to link with the receiver to not only send signals but get return information.

“2…3…1…1…5…4…2..3…”Paul said, counting the beats in his mind.

“Good, good…” Tennisonne said distractedly from wherever he was working on the opposite side of the curved wall in front of Paul. “Here we go, switching to full access.”

Suddenly Paul’s head froze up with shock…but it quickly bled off as the information coming in began to process. It was all scattered at first, like watching a video screen that was malfunctioning, but his mind started to pull bits and pieces of it apart and he could sense certain areas as being distinct from the others.

“Well?”

“I’ve got something. What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Power up the screen, Admiral,” Tennisonne said sarcastically.

Paul frowned, then reached over with one hand and turned on the hologram, with the walls around him disappearing as they were replaced by status displays and charts. As soon as they did the information in his mind seemed to process, and he could feel icons for many of the things he was seeing, as if the telepathic signals were overlapping with the visual ones.

“Much better,” Paul said, ignoring the tech’s jibe.

“Do you see the program?”

Paul looked around a bit, then saw the start function directly in front of him…with four options.

“What do you want me to run first?”

“Doesn’t matter, just pick one.”

There were four labeled icons…A, B, C, D in front of him, so Paul mentally reached for ‘C’ and, to his surprise, was able to press the telepathic button, despite the fact that he didn’t know what it was that he was really doing.

“Eureka!” Tennisonne said. “There’s four months of hard work being put to use. Keep running with it as much as you can. I’ve got a diagnostics program measuring your interface, so even if you screw up it’ll be beneficial.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Paul said as a tactical program popped up. It was a watered down version of a videogame, with icons for mechs and vehicles of Star Force make aligned against a similar force of Nestafar units…and they began engaging each other without Paul’s prompting.

He concentrated, highlighting a single mech in his mind and feeling three ‘growths’ appear, as well as seeing three new options pop up holographically over that mech. He ‘touched’ one of them, with another branch of four options appearing. When he mentally chose one of those the branches disappeared and the mech in question veered off from its current target and began tracking the strongest one.

“Not bad,” Tennisonne commented. “Thought you’d have more trouble than this. Have you mentally selected targets before?”

“I’ve tracked the turrets, but never had to interface with them.”

“How are you pushing the buttons?”

“Um…not quite sure. If they were a box, I’d be shaking it every which way until it did something.”

“Randomized action then,” Tennisonne said thoughtfully. “Good thing I went with isolated commands. Binary would probably have been too hard.”

“Binary?” Paul said, moving another mech around on the map, this time to a specific point he highlighted, mentally dragging a ‘mouse’ icon to the spot he wanted and ‘clicking’ it.

“On and off. Right now you’re just hitting a button. The receiver can read different signals, so I can set up an ‘on’ switch and an ‘off’ for lots of things. Pushing ‘on’ twice won’t turn it off like it does now, because all your options are one command, like a handheld controller with only one button to press.”

“I get it, I’m just glad I can finally press a button.”

“Well, the mechanics of it aren’t that complicated, but our fabrication techniques for some of the components are still crude. This should have worked last time, but there were some impurities that I had to refine out. The Nerantium is tricky to work with. It wants to pick up hitchhiker molecules whenever possible. I’ve got it coated in a sleeve of aluminum now, but we’re going to have to redesign the manufacturing process. I can’t be manually refining each piece coming through because of sloppy processing.”

“What do you need?”

“The V’kit’no’sat processors,” he said scornfully. “I know the reason we’re not using them, and I agree with you, but it’s times like this that are damn frustrating.”

“I’ve heard similar complaints from some of the Archons, wondering why we don’t use the Zen’zat weapons or armor. Bottom line is, if we can’t produce new ones, we’re not going to get hooked on using them.”

Tennisonne nodded, knowing that both men were on the same page. “What I really need is a slew of new fabrication equipment, but I don’t have the time to design them with my current projects. We just don’t have enough level 5 engineers, to be frank. We’re rarer than you Archons, come to think of it.”

“Mild offense taken,” Paul said, still practicing the telepathic control interface. “Not all Archons are the same. We’ve got our newbs too.”

“Maybe that wasn’t a fair metaphor,” Tennisonne said, still on the opposite side of the chamber working his analysis equipment, “but we need more hands. Assistants can only do so much when they don’t understand the underlying physics. I know far more about V’kit’no’sat tech than it looks, I just can’t build it all from scratch fast enough. You’ve got the same problem with the military, I can imagine. Not enough trailblazers to go around leading war fleets?”

“So what do we do about it?” Paul asked him.

Tennisonne sighed. “Nose to the grindstone and work the problem. Like always.”

“At least we’re of the same mind there...what are these other programs?”

“Different applications of the interface. I need you to go through them all.”

“This is getting easy. You might want to go ahead and work up a binary.”

“Have it for you by the end of the week,” Tennisonne promised.

9

November 22, 2410

Solar System

Earth

Paul pushed his complaining quads a bit further, coming to the second to last lap on the training track within the sanctum. His holographic marking ball was getting ahead of him, but he’d managed to keep within a couple meters of it and now he was within half a mile of the finish, nearing a new personal record at the 5k distance and another tick up the speed charts…so long as he didn’t let it slip this lap. He knew he’d have at least a little kick at the end, which meant this lap was the key lap, so he squeezed just a bit more energy out of his legs and aching chest, ignoring what it would do to him on the last lap if he held the effort that long.

The trailblazer knew all he had to do was focus on the pacing marker, but over the next 100 meters it inexplicably inched out even further ahead of him, despite the increase in speed he’d already made…or rather thought he’d made. Coming into the backstretch he accelerated up into a low sprint and ate up a meter of the four he was behind, regretting it instantly as his already aching quads tripled in complaint. He felt his form starting to swim but held the effort, eating up another half meter by the 200 mark and feeling his tank emptying, but if he could only keep it close he’d have a shot at the end.

The next 100 meters was a wash, keeping him 2.5 meters back of the glowing marker running ahead of him. Had it not been for the tracker there was no way he could have hoped to have gone this fast, and it was one of the more important, yet underrated pieces of technology in the sanctum, in that it allowed the Archons and other Star Force personnel to really work themselves into collapse so long as they could stubbornly stay with it.

Paul inched up his effort again once he hit the straightaway, but the marker pulled back out ahead and he crossed the finish line with one lap to go being 3 meters back, at which point he pushed beyond all sanity, knowing with his legs being as wobbly as they were he couldn’t wait for the last 100. With his subconscious mind knowing he wouldn’t have to be retracing his steps again on the 400 meter track, it loosened up what was left of his energy reserves and he began closing in on the marker, eating up a full meter over the next 100 and pulling almost even with 200 to go.

At that point he knew he had it, but he couldn’t mentally relax otherwise he’d fall back a bit. With his steps pounding a bit as his form suffered, he started stepping ahead and through the holographic marker.

When he hit the final straight his form returned just a touch as he stretched out his legs, no longer having to hold the tilt in the turn, and the marker disappeared behind him as he accelerated up into as much of a full sprint as he could manage, gaining another 2 meters of distance on the marker over the final stretch.

Paul coasted to a stop past the finish line, staying on his feet even though his legs were thoroughly gassed and he was feeling the downside of an ambrosia deficiency. He didn’t need to look at the clock, knowing that he’d breached a significant milestone just by beating the marker to the line. The other Archons who’d respectfully cleared out of lane 1 when he passed them by knew he was flying, but they didn’t understand how fast or how far he’d gone until they saw the clock, with jaws dropping in sequence as they worked their way around the track and found his finish time alongside the dozen others still counting on the virtual display board on the inside of the track.

“Damn, Paul,” Addison-673 said as she ran by.

Paul raised a hand to acknowledge her, but was too busy breathing to mouth a reply.

What was your time? another Archon telepathically asked from across the track.

Paul didn’t recognize the ‘voice,’ nor could he tell who the guy was who’d asked out of the group on the backstretch, but he did have the mental signature locked so he sent a quick reply on what he thought of as a ‘tight beam’ transmission.

10:59.22

Where’s that put you?

9th.

And what, a minute ahead of the World Record? Nice work.

Paul didn’t respond, but did see that Mathis-831 was the person on the other end of the telepathic connection as he and a group of four others rounded the turn onto the straightaway in 1x2x2 formation as they chased a much slower moving pacing sphere. His comment about the World Record was a joke, given that it was officially 12:14.83. Star Force personnel had been banned from record setting privileges and professional competition because they wouldn’t comply with anti-doping regulations that had grown to the point where the sports acted as if they owned the athletes…requiring daily testing along with a controlled travel schedule, all in the name of ‘fair play.’

That wasn’t going to fly with the Archons at all, let alone the rest of Star Force. While the corporation had grown to immense size and scope, there were still detractors trying to stick it to them relentlessly and sports had been a familiar avenue of attack. Many of the nutritional enhancements that Star Force used had been labeled as ‘performance enhancing drugs’ and therefore banned, not including the ambrosia, which no one could get their hands on to analyze anyway, though they’d tried by bullying non-Archon Star Force personnel into blood tests to try and see what it was that they were ingesting.

The few times they’d succeeded and caught some of the weaker minded individuals off guard at casual competitions had resulted in Blue Team raids to recover the samples, after which Star Force instituted a ‘no testing’ policy that flew directly in the face of the various sports organizations and tournaments, including the Olympics and System Games.

Paul found it laughable how a bunch of administrative know-nothings sitting on some panel thought they got to decide what substances were ‘fair’ and what were ‘cheating.’ After all, calling something ‘performance enhancing’ was akin to saying ‘duh’ as far as sports were concerned. Enhancing your performance was the point of training, so if there was some supplement you were taking to give your body a boost, how in the galaxy was that cheating?

Cheating was cutting the course or interfering with an opponent, not eating certain foods and boosting levels of chemicals that your body already produced. The drug nazis had existed all the way back when Paul was in high school and unfortunately had only gotten worse, with the officials jerking the athletes’ chains around, telling them what was and wasn’t acceptable to the point of stupidity.

During high school Paul had looked up the definition of ‘drug’ in the dictionary after reading the list of substances that were not permitted in Indiana high school sports, and he was galled to find that it was a joke of a definition.

Drug: A substance that has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.

He immediately pointed out the hypocrisy to his coach, saying that included everything, including food, water, and even oxygen. His coach disagreed and gave him a speech full of nonsense, supporting the ban on performance enhancing drugs, with the only bit of coherency in it all being the idea of protecting the athletes from overdoses that could kill them.

Paul had followed the rules back then, not wanting to lose his eligibility for competition, but looking back it was painfully obvious that the nonsense definition of a ‘drug’ was simply something the people in control used to exert their influence whenever and wherever they wanted. Gatorade, as Paul had also pointed out to his coach, was a substance ingested with the specific purpose of enhancing your performance…but no, that wasn’t deemed a ‘drug’ despite it fitting the ridiculous definition.

Fortunately, within Star Force they had learned enough about biology to rid themselves of such nonsense. The Knights in particular had been instrumental in that, considering that their size and physiological enhancements were due specifically to a cocktail of V’kit’no’sat drugs that Vermaire had pushed Davis to let him use. Davis, as he’d told Paul at a later date, had been reluctant to do so, but eventually permitted one, then another, and another as the Black Knight successfully showed that they were not only safe, but remarkably beneficial.

After that Star Force’s policy on ‘drugs’ disappeared, as did the term in their dictionary, though it still stuck in the living language. Medical staff used more specific terms, like supplement, additive, chemical, etc while some of the backwards populations on Earth and elsewhere still clung to the nonsense of ‘performance enhancing drugs,’ acting as if they were magic pills that gave you superpowers and thus an unfair advantage.

Knowing something about superpowers, Paul was continually disgusted with occasional news reports coming from the Pro Track circuit on Earth. In truth it had become a bastion of defiance against Star Force, despite the laughable performances, with supporters making it financially viable despite the fact that Star Force’s colonies had a much larger circuit that held superior competition…as well as older individuals. The Earth track circuit, along with many other sports, had instituted a 50 year age limit to competition, deeming that if you were viable after that point it could only be the result of illegal enhancements.

Stupidity, Paul had learned over the centuries, was something you could never completely stamp out. It grew like weeds, and some people, no matter how much you taught them, were always going to be dumber than a box of rocks…and for some reason they liked it that way, which was the real problem.

Star Force had taught the populace so many things that there had been a substantial shift in culture back in the 2100s, with a divide forming between those who held to tradition for tradition’s sake and those who wanted to learn and improve. That rift was still present, but barely a shadow of its former self as new generations were born into a ‘world’ where 200 year old individuals were common and a host of other new things were present in society to combat the stupid traditions. Children grew up processing the reality of the world around them despite the competing influence of traditions…all the while the stupid adults eventually died out.

There was still a sliver that tried to isolate themselves from reality in order to preserve their traditions, and unfortunately Earth’s sports federations had fallen into that category, claiming to be the only bastions of ‘clean’ competition and preaching to those who wanted to find an axe to grind against Star Force.

As such, they’d become sort of a philosophical enemy of the Archons who, if they chose, could have wiped the floor in every sports competition in existence with little effort…and there were many ‘regulars’ within Star Force’s ranks who could do the same, not to mention colonists who’d achieved self-sufficiency and grown to impressive skill levels, of which many competed in Star Force’s sports leagues and tournaments.

On occasion an Archon would step out of a sanctum and into one of the competitions, just to give the public an idea of what they were capable of or to give the dominant players a greater challenge. Most of them relished the challenge of getting to face an Archon, and the viewer numbers for those competitions skyrocketed, far higher than the Olympics or System Games had ever managed.

Paul had only done so twice, both times of which had been running, and like today he hadn’t prepped as he once had back in high school, which normally would have required at least 1 easy or rest day before competition. Archons didn’t take easy days, for they didn’t want to lose their streak of workouts, so Paul’s drops into the public competitions had always carried with them a level of fatigue, as had this 5k attempt. He knew he could go faster rested, but that wasn’t the point…improving was, and the quickest way to improve was to keep the workouts flowing.

He didn’t usually go for a personal record in his runs, so today was a bit of a special challenge. Getting under 11:00 had been his goal, and it was a full 18 second improvement over his previous best. It also pushed his prerequisite score for that piece of his overall level up to ranger 94, but then again he’d always been stronger in running than other areas, and it was the overall completion that tallied their ranks.

Paul walked off the track to clear room for the others and deactivated his time from the display, clearing the space as the others reset to more favorable positions so the active runners could note their progress if they wanted. He got a few other congratulations on his way over to the edge, then he stopped to rest a bit as his legs were thoroughly complaining. That he welcomed, because it would give him another chance to train his Sesspik skill with a long nap, after which he’d head back out for an afternoon training session.

So it was with a happy discomfort that Paul eventually left the track and walked over to the small cafeteria/kitchen in the sanctum and helped himself to a stack of wafers and cookies laden with the ‘performance enhancing drug’ the Archons were infamous for using.

Paul considered that as he ate, recognizing the stupidity of it once again after that remark about beating the World Record. Truth be told, using supplements and chemicals in training was more troublesome than helpful, because the body operated with a delicately controlled internal balance. Injecting additional testosterone, Human growth hormone, or any of the other substances your body already produced would cause an imbalance. Most people, back in the day, had assumed that imbalance would boost your body’s performance…but what it really did was unbalance you, and while you might gain an advantage in one area you’d lose in others, not to mention the advantage gained was usually unstable.

Paul had eventually learned from his own training and discussions with the other Archons, as well as reading the research logs of Wilson and other trainers, that proper supplementation required giving your body what it needed and letting it choose the dosage levels, rather than having some doctor guess as to the proper amounts. If you needed more testosterone, your body would produce more, so give your body the building blocks for the testosterone and let the body build what it needed, in the precise amount, rather than trying to do so ‘manually.’

The ambrosia Paul was busily eating was just that…building blocks for the body to use. The ambrosia itself was fuel, highly compact and refined fuel that the body would happily deconstruct and put to use in other compounds and chemicals it would manufacture internally. Nearly all of Star Force’s supplements, Archon and civilian alike, were based on fuel rather than chemicals, with a few small exceptions, like caffeine. Those supplements would enhance training, and from enhanced training you would gain enhanced ‘performance,’ but if you went with a largely chemical route you’d unbalance yourself to varying degrees, which in the long run would actually cause a decline in performance.

Which was why banning ‘drugs’ was pointless. If they hurt your body’s balance, and therefore caused negative effects, they were a disadvantage…and if in the rare case that didn’t occur, good for you. Improving was the whole point, and if the ‘drugs’ really were helping you to do that then have at it, the faster and stronger a person gets, the better. But what people didn’t see, or maybe they didn’t want to see, was that without proper training, no amount of ‘drugs’ was going to make you fast or strong. All the ‘cheats’ out there were still training their asses off, and that’s what caused them to improve temporarily…before the imbalance caught up with them and they began to decline.

Greg had pointed that out to the Earth sports federations a century ago at their request, and Paul had been impressed with how eloquently he’d laid out the obvious for them. They hadn’t thought the Archons would respond when invited, and had been somewhat dumbfounded when not only had one come, but a trailblazer at that. Still, despite the fact that billions of people had heard that speech, there was a percentage of them that still refused to accept the fact that ‘drugs’ were a myth, and that if you used chemical enhancement there was nothing wrong with that, so long as you didn’t screw with your internal balance, which was almost impossible to do, meaning the ‘dopers’ were essentially cutting their own throats and killing their longevity.

Greg had also pointed out that such foolish attempts yielded competitive results because Earth’s sports federations had such weak competition. He wisely, and boldly, pointed out that, had the few ‘dopers’ that had been caught in the Earth federations been competing in the Star Force leagues they wouldn’t have been able to win anything, because those who had achieved self-sufficiency and trained themselves up to a high level over the decades were beyond their reach. Doping yourself up with chemicals couldn’t compete with years of training and improvement, so if you had a strong field of competition you wouldn’t have ‘dopers’ succeeding in the first place.

The sports summit he’d been invited to had taken a turn downhill after that speech, which Paul found hilarious. Half of the people present or viewing started to voice their doubts in the ‘traditional’ model of drug regulations after that and the traditionalists nearly had a heart attack dealing with the aftermath…of which saw many of the athletes in the Earth federations switch competitive leagues and come over to the Star Force side, taking their fans with them.

As Paul started to feel the ambrosia working its way into his legs and a bit of energy returning he finished off what he guessed would be the appropriate amount of doses, knowing that his body would suck what it needed out of his bloodstream and leave the rest there to sit…and give him a headache if he took too much, but it wouldn’t affect his chemical balance, given that it was fuel, not chemicals that he was ingesting.

He took a moment to reflect on the past few years of psionics development within Star Force, realizing that the desire for chemical enhancement hadn’t really manifested along with these new abilities. That was surprising, really, because the medtechs were always looking for some advantage outside of pure training to offer, and with the brain being thrown into play he’d have guessed they’d come up with…or rather found in the database…many different chemicals that could affect the new tissue growths and how they interacted with the rest of the body.

But rather than suggest the use of injections, the medtechs had simply identified the chemicals that could have an effect on the psionics as a sort of ‘heads up’ to the Archons so that they would be aware of what could happen. That, as far as Paul was concerned, was proof that even their own egg heads had finally accepted the importance of training and letting the body make its own upgrades, rather than manually attempting to do so with chemical or physical augmentations…though the V’kit’no’sat had become skilled in doing just that and Star Force medtechs had always been trying to rise to their level, distant as it was.

“Training rules,” Paul said to the empty room as he snagged a couple of carb-heavy chewy sticks and headed in the direction of his quarters. Impressive as the ambrosia was, it still couldn’t replace food, and that short, but intense run had left him rather hungry.

He finished the forearm-length foodstuffs before he got back, then grabbed a quick shower before settling down on top of his bed in a static pose and trying to kick himself into a healing trance before he nodded off to sleep…getting all of 15 seconds into his rest before his earpiece chirped from the nearby table.

“Uh,” he said, deciding to get it given that he wasn’t that far into the trance. Had it come a minute later he would have just ignored it.

“Yes,” he answered after slipping it on.

“Did you just run a sub 11:00?” a female voice asked.

Paul didn’t recognize it at first, so he touched a small button on the earpiece and a hologram appeared in front of his left eye with the ID of the caller…Jillian-402.

“Surprised?” Paul asked, walking back over to the bed and laying down, starting the Sesspik cycle in his legs.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be,” she rebuked herself. “How tired are you?”

“What’s up?”

“You up for another dunk in the fish tank later?”

“How much later…I’m about to start on a nap.”

“Three hours.”

Paul blinked his eyes, already starting to feel sleepy. That 5k had taken more out of him than even his dead legs had attested. “I can do that if it’s a quick match. I need to get a pretty long training session in this afternoon.”

“After that run?”

“Yes,” he said as if it should have been a no brainer.

“Well, we’re going to be there a while, but it’d help if we could add you to the mix for at least a couple head to heads.”

“A couple it is, minimum,” Paul promised his fellow Saber.

“Thanks. The Ninja Monkeys have gotten a bit cocky since Eran got here, and we need to give them a good smackdown.”

“I’m in…so long as I get the red one.”

“I’ll get there early and save it for you, Speedy,” she said, referring to a particular submersible…the underwater counterpart to the mongoose. “Sleep well.”

“Night,” Paul answered sarcastically, switching off his earpiece so that any incoming calls wouldn’t chirp, then he set his mind into Sesspik mode and got his whole body healing at an accelerated rate, eating into his post-run micro-damage while drawing on the food and ambrosia in his stomach. Best of both worlds.

He let himself drift off, never fully going to sleep as he held the trance, and held it for the better part of an hour before his concentration slipped and he finally nodded off for a good twenty minute powernap.

10

June 29, 2412

Solar System

Earth

The 97th thud shot out from the wall of the chamber from Paul’s left side, visible immediately in his spherical sight, but slowing it before it hit his seated form was difficult. His total ‘pushing’ power was still limited, and his energy reserves were nearing depletion, but he managed to slow and then stop the soft projectile before it could smack into the side of his head.

It came within four inches, then moved back off a ways in Paul’s telekinetic grip before being released and rolling off to the edge of the chamber.

“Three to go…hold it together,” Paul told himself, watching in mind’s eye for the next thud, which was expected sometime within 6-12 seconds. That amount of time wasn’t enough for his mental power reserves to recharge…not even close, but it did give him a moment to refocus between each projectile, making this test about power and endurance, not reaction speed.

A thud shot out from directly in front of him, aimed straight at his nose, but Paul caught it a bit earlier than the last, slowing it to a stop before it could hit him and then dumping it off onto the ground as he felt like he was squeezing the final bits of energy out of his Lachka reserves. This was as far as he’d ever gotten on this test, falling short every previous time as he ran out of energy, but he’d spent the past month focusing heavily on his telekinetic endurance and had thought he was finally ready to knock this one off…but he wasn’t sure how much he had left, if any, so when the next thud came in at the back of his head he cringed, throwing whatever power he had left at it.

The small sphere slowed on a longer deceleration track, ending just two inches shy of the back of his head. Surprised he’d had enough to stop it, he quickly released his hold and let it roll off in order to preserve as much power as possible. He was 1 away now, so he had to concentrate and scrape together whatever he had…and throw it at the thud as soon as possible, because he didn’t think his power level could go quite as high again.

He pushed his Pefbar ability out, concentrating it as much as he could and hoping to eke out a little bit more forewarning. Paul had plenty of energy left there so he didn’t skimp, though he did have to keep himself focused, otherwise his mental fatigue would leave him a little foggy, and that would cost him inches on his reaction speed…which he needed to maximize, given that he was now underpowered.

Paul felt the last one coming from his left, out of a launcher slightly ahead of him. Sensing that, his Lachka energy field concentrated in that area and gripped the little bit of mass flashing out, putting a small, curved wall in front of it as he didn’t even try to suspend it in midair by gripping it. He bled off momentum but his power wasn’t there, as expected, so he went for broke and just pushed as hard as he could.

On instinct he tipped his head back as the thud came in at him…then it stopped an inch from his nose and dropped into his lap, with Paul coughing out a breath of air that he’d been holding tightly. It hadn’t hit him, but he wasn’t sure if it’d passed the halfway point, which also would have disqualified the stop. Regardless, he’d improved considerably, but at the moment he didn’t care. He wanted to know if he’d made it or not.

Paul stood up and turned around…then smiled widely as the stop counter read 100.

“Ow…” Paul said as another thud shot out and hit him in the leg. The sensors registered the impact and stopped the scenario, logging Paul’s 100 mark and flashing a large holographic symbol into the air above the control board, indicating that he’d completed the Lachka test requirement.

A completion tone accompanied the hologram, which lingered there for three seconds before transforming into another symbol with another tone. This one indicated the ballistic Lachka subset had been completed, due to the fact that this test had been the last in the group that Paul needed.

The trailblazer sighed and waited, knowing it wouldn’t be the last one and taking in the moment even as his head began to ache from the previous effort, now that he was no longer pushing back against the fatigue.

A third tone accompanied another symbol, indicating the completion of the Lachka defensive skillset, followed by a fourth indicating completion of all Lachka skills.

But that wasn’t the end of it, because with that last test he also completed the requirements for all of the psionics, with a symbol twice the size of the others flashing into view in front of him.

Three seconds after that the big one came, which he’d been working towards for the past two and a half years, training round the clock and excluding all other duties while most of the other trailblazers were out on the war fronts. While they were training on their own in addition to their current missions, Paul had elected to remain in Antarctica and see how far he could push his training…both for his own sake, and on behalf of the other trailblazers, who’d lost their higher ranks with the psionic reset.

The second geners, by virtue of there being so many of them, had people on the war fronts and in the pyramid, training round the clock to develop their psionic skills and keep even, if not ahead of the trailblazers. With Jason already having taken over the lead on the lizard front and them seeing no significant pushback as of yet, Paul had elected to stay in the pyramid and remind the second geners why the trailblazers had the reputation they did and take it to them on an even playing field…or in Paul’s case a disadvantageous one, given that he’d gotten his upgrade later than the others. 

So when the level up symbol appeared, indicating that Paul had completed all of the prerequisites in every measured skillset, psionic and otherwise, he felt quite satisfied, putting yet another level up on the others and continuing his breakneck advancement, given that his physical skills had already reached prerequisite levels years ago, allowing him to focus the bulk of his training on psionics and catch up on his levels faster than the second geners.

The huge level up symbol in front of him, which was larger than his body, lingered for a full 10 seconds before disappearing…then another tone sounded, and the half the room above the control pedestal was filled with a gigantic green symbol, indicating that he’d just made the transition from acolyte to ranger, with the level upgrade having gone from acolyte 99 to ranger 1.

“Green again,” Paul said, glancing down at the silver stripe on his uniform and mentally making a note to change out all of his clothes by the end of the day. He looked up at the glowing symbol and let it sink in, knowing that he’d literally done the impossible. 99 level upgrades in less than 3 years. That was something not even Morgan had achieved.

It was a bit of a cheat, given that he was retreading ground already covered, but his psionic skills were now above and beyond all the rest, save for a few isolated skills by individuals pressing them as far as they could while largely ignored the rest. Some of those specialists still held an advantage on him, but he’d caught many of them already, surging ahead of them in skill and power despite the fact he was training for all 6 areas evenly.

Physical skills aside, Paul’s psionic rating was now ranger level, which was 7 levels ahead of the next best Archon…that he knew of. With the other trailblazers spread out across this corner of the galaxy, their scores were updated with considerable delay, especially those fighting on the Nestafar front, where Morgan was still on her second deployment. As of last check she hadn’t made ranger again, so it was possible that he had even surpassed her…though that wasn’t something he was going to make any bets on.

Still, he was curious, because even with her Vorch’nas Kara hadn’t made ranger yet either, as of last check. She was out on the lizard front working special ops assignments and finally getting some of the field work she’d desperately wanted…all of which diminished the amount of training time available to her. Paul hadn’t been fighting any lizards on Namek, but when he was there he had been dealing with a lot of administrative work that took hours away from his training, and this training stint in the pyramid had been something he’d badly needed.

What he and the other trailblazers were doing, both on the fronts and in the prep work back home, was vital…but they needed heavy training blocks if they were really going to step up their advancement, and Paul hadn’t realized how much he’d been missing until he’d gotten down here with the other Archons, second geners as they were, and started training with/against them, as well as devoting 24 hours a day, every day, to pushing his training into unknown territory.

Whether Paul was the only ranger now or not, he’d regained the rank, if not the level, he’d had before, cementing the trailblazers’ dominance and leadership…as well as schooling the other Archons as how to really train.

Paul waited out the even longer duration of the hologram until it finally shut off and left his updated statistics behind in much smaller form. That brief moment of reflection was all the celebrating the trailblazers ever did, knowing that taking any sort of break would just be wasting time. To that end Paul shut off the console and left the training chamber, heading off to Balboa Lane for some agility runs while his Lachka reserves slowly regenerated.

Even if he had beat Morgan back to ranger, he knew it wouldn’t last for long, and he intended to goose whatever lead he might have on her as far as he could.

Three months later…

Paul pulled himself out of the pool, coughing out a bit of water that had worked its way up his nose during his laps. He’d been swimming on his back with symmetrical arms so he could breathe constantly and not splash too much water in his face, a form he’d come to call ‘butterfly backstroke’ that got made fun of by most of the better swimmers, but as he’d learned, he was an air hog and his body performed much better when he had a constant supply of air, so whenever he was doing distance swimming on the surface he used this style…but never the less he always managed to get at least a few drops of water down his airways.

He pulled in a few mouth breaths and blew out of his nose, clearing the water as he always did and walking over to the locker room where he changed out of his jammer-style swimming suit and into a ranger training uniform which he wore with considerable pride around the pyramid, especially around the second gen swimming specialists.

“Paul,” a voice said as soon as he left the locker room and stepped out into the main hall.

The trailblazer frowned. “Director?” he asked, seeing Davis standing off to the side in a Red/Gold/White Duke’s uniform.

“I didn’t want to interrupt your training,” Davis said, leaning against the wall and doing a good job of blending in with the Archons milling about, fit as he was. “But there’s something we need to discuss.”

“Hungry?”

“In private, if possible?”

“Do we need a terminal?” Paul asked, wondering what this was about.

“No.”

“Alright,” the Archon said, pointing to his left. Davis followed him a few steps down the hallway and into a side door. Paul turned to the right down a short interior hallway to a stairwell and headed up two levels, leading to an observation deck overlooking the four Olympic-sized pools below.

Paul leaned against one of the windows after taking a glance down at the scattering of Archons swimming laps. “What’s up?”

“What are we going to do with the psionics?” Davis said, mimicking Paul’s pose and leaning against the window opposite him.

Paul sighed. “You mean with non-Archons?”

“The Zen’zat are more than just warriors, they’re techs and analysts too.”

“They don’t need them just for kicks,” Paul said, looking Davis in the eyes. “What do they need?”

“The ability to diagnosis by touch would be useful for medtechs,” he pointed out.

“True, but I don’t know how far we can narrow it down. Ikrid has more sub-skills than any of the other 7.”

“What’s your biggest concern?” Davis asked.

“Breeding,” Paul said without hesitation.

Davis blinked. “I guess I’ve gone more Archon than I thought, because that thought hadn’t even occurred to me.”

“Not only do we have only one machine to make alterations with, not counting Kara, I don’t want the general public getting access to powers that even Archon adepts don’t have. We’re having to earn ours, and for good reason. We’re not having children, so there’s no issue there, but we can’t assume the same for all Star Force personnel. Even if they work for us for 100 years they may have a change of mind and go civilian…then what happens if their kids develop psionics?”

“It could kill them,” Davis said first off.

“Yes, but that’s not my point,” Paul said, raising an eyebrow and wondering where the Director’s head was at. “They’d be getting access to powers they hadn’t earned.”

“I read more into your tone than I’m thinking. Why is that a serious concern?”

“Why don’t we sell weapons?” Paul countered.

“Psionics are that much of a threat?”

Paul sighed. “I guess if you haven’t used them you can’t understand. Give me your hand.”

Davis frowned but did as instructed and held out his right hand. Paul took it in a handshake…then the next thing the Director knew he was waking up, staring at the ceiling.

“What…”

“Your head’s a little groggy,” Paul explained, leaning over him. “It’ll shake off in a moment.”

Davis blinked several times, then finally sat up and looked around. “Explain.”

“Ikrid,” Paul stated simply. “It’s far more powerful than communication. Zen’zat are shielded against telepathic interface, but not tactile. Give me access to your body, skin to skin, and I can hack into your mind through your nervous system.”

“I knew that,” Davis said, still sitting on the ground and shaking his head to try and clear it. He felt like he’d just woken up from a long nap and couldn’t get his brain to fully function. “What exactly did you do to me?”

“I rendered you unconscious with a single touch,” Paul said, and there was no mistaking the severity in his voice. “Me and some of the others have been practicing on each other in the hopes that we could develop an immunity to it, and so far we’ve learned to resist it when our minds are focused, but catch us off guard and we’re still vulnerable. All we need is a moment of contact, and the more skilled we get at it, the briefer the contact necessary. It took me about 4 seconds to fully knock you out.”

“That wasn’t in your updates,” Davis mildly complained.

“A lot isn’t,” Paul admitted, helping him to his feet. “We’re keeping some of these things to ourselves until we get a handle on them, and when I say ‘to ourselves’ I mean myself and a handful of others in the pyramid. Not even the rest of the trailblazers know, not for security reasons, but because I don’t want to give them information that may or may not turn out to be true. We’re learning to do a lot of cool things…but in the wrong hands those cool things get rather scary. Not something you want to trust to some random kid.”

“They’ve already got the genetics,” Davis said, mentally working the problem. “How sure are we that they’ll stay dormant?”

“We’re not sure why they went dormant in the first place, but best guess is that it was a function of time. I don’t see the general populace developing them on their own, though there may be isolated cases popping up that we need to be on the lookout for. But speaking from personal experience, I’ve done just about as much training as any of the others and I didn’t have so much as a psionic blip before I got upgraded. I may have been headed there, maybe not, but if it is linked to our training, then there’s zero chance of the general public accessing the repressed genetics through the same route.”

Davis nodded. “And Morgan?”

Paul cringed. “Traumatic events may serve as a breakthrough, but combat is traumatic enough and the V’kit’no’sat didn’t have people skipping over to the third tier powers. None of us have any reliable theories as to what happened with her…aside from her being typical Morgan.”

“Assume Ikrid is out then,” Davis said, floating options. “What about Lachka for some of our high level techs?”

“There’s still the reproduction issue…and Lachka is worthless without Pefbar. Plus, I’m not even sure if we can activate the powers individually. The process was set up as all or nothing.”

“Kara was able to make some alterations, I read.”

“That was to keep the machine from deconstructing the tissue some of us had already grown…and I’m not sure, but the 7 might have additional levels of interconnectivity that I’m not aware of. Going piecemeal could cause unforeseen problems.”

“Bottom line, is there any scenario you’re comfortable with outside of the Archons?”

“Other than you, no.”

Davis smiled. “I appreciate your vote of confidence, but I certainly haven’t earned them where adepts haven’t.”

“Check that,” Paul corrected himself. “Throw Wilson in there too.”

“I’ve already spoken to him about it. He seems to think as you do. I just want to know if there’s any reasonable advantage we can get out of them with non-Archon personnel, and you’re saying there’s none?”

“There are probably some advantages, but they’re not worth the risks. We keep ambrosia in-house, and psionics should be the same.”

“More than Archons use ambrosia,” Davis pointed out.

“But they can’t take it with them when they leave…and you haven’t trusted anyone else with its manufacture.”

“Not counting Canderous,” Davis said, tapping his lip with his finger as he thought. “I have a nagging feeling that this is something we’re not going to be able to contain within the Archon ranks forever, and I’d like a plan set up before it breaks out on its own.”

“Breaks out?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Davis admitted. “I’ve just got a bad feeling about this.”

“So do I,” Paul agreed. “Which is why we need to keep this Archon-only…at least until we’ve got more experience with it. We’re still in the discovery stages.”

“I guess we’re both on the same page, just working it from different angles.”

“This is changing the Archons more than you know,” Paul told him. “Let us get a handle on it first, then we can sit down and analyze where else it might be of use.”

“Agreed,” Davis said, glancing down at the swimmers through the window. “Though I wish we had the ability to turn it off. Right now we have no safety net if someone else develops the ability…or an Archon goes rogue.”

“If the second case occurs we’ll deal with it,” Paul promised, “but that’s another reason to restrict it to acolytes and above. The few quitters we’ve had didn’t go very far past basic training.”

“Sounds like your thought process is well ahead of mine.”

“For once,” Paul joked.

Davis looked down at the floor, then back up at Paul. “But now you’ve got me wondering just how powerful the actual Zen’zat are…and what all they can really do to us.”

“Not just the Zen’zat,” Paul said, barely louder than a whisper. “The V’kit’no’sat have psionics too.”

Aquatics

1

July 2, 2429

Retari System

Atlantica

“Captain, we’re receiving a distress call from Manaan.”

Voru turned from the aft observation display screen ‘window’ and walked across the small bridge, abandoning his ocean view. “That cruiser we picked up coming down from orbit?”

“No, sir,” the comm officer answered. “There’s a major assault underway, with additional aerial forces coming in from the east.”

“Show me,” Voru said, glancing at another bridge officer.

A hologram of the planet popped up just in front of his empty Captain’s chair, then it zoomed in to cover a third of the planet’s surface with icons marking all Star Force ships and installations on the waterworld. The city of Manaan was a few thousand kilometers to their northeast, and Voru could see the additional lizard contacts moving in that direction.

“Sir, the Dutchman says they’re moving to relieve the city and are asking our intentions.”

“Tell Captain Isso we’ll be there as soon as we can,” Voru said, gripping the back of his chair as he studied the hologram. “Mr. Cadren, get us airborne…plot course for Manaan.”

“Aye, sir,” the helmsman said, beginning to work his console.

“Give me ship-wide.”

The comms officer pressed a few buttons, then nodded to the Captain.

“Attention all hands. Manaan is currently under lizard attack. We’re moving to assist, but it’ll take us some time to get there. Make ready all war assets and wait for deployment orders,” he finished with a nod to cut the intercom. His eyes moved back to the hologram, seeing the icon for the Dutchman not far from Manaan and moving out to interpose itself between the approaching contacts and the city…leaving the onsite defenders to handle the ensuing assault.

All around the perimeter of the bridge were ‘windows’ relaying video images from the exterior of the aquatics battleship, and as Voru studied the tactical hologram he caught the image of the ocean line sinking in his peripheral vision, though the view was much better from the outside, had anyone been around to see it.

The 1,840m long warship looked like a giant sea creature, without a single sharp edge or line to the flowing, deep blue hull shaped like a flattened whale. The center line was raised, but from there the sides went well wide of any traditional design, stretching out to a maximum width of 720m. The perimeter of the ship was a curved edge that looked like a blade, but was in fact flat rather than sharp when viewed in close. The angled hull rolled wave after wave of water off it as the blade edge of the ship came up from below the water line, showing the battleship to be much larger than she appeared from the surface.

As the low-powered gravity drive lifted the aquatics warship out of the water the underside of the hull came into view, dripping gallons upon gallons of water back down into the ocean beneath as it cast a shadow on the resettling water, blocking the harsh yellow sun that quickly began to dry out the upper hull. The underside was the top’s mirrored twin, with a single long, shallow ridge running down the midsection with the rest of the hull angling up and out to the blade-like edge that narrowed to a rounded peak near the ship’s bow and a much more gentle, overarching curve on the aft end.

No engine ports were visible, nor was there any other obstruction of the hull. It was one solid piece of machinery tailored to be as smooth as possible to reduce friction…both in the water and above it.

As the battleship rose to a kilometer in height it began to slowly spin around, pointing itself on the heading for the distant city of Manaan like a compass needle turning round the center pin. When it finally settled into place the differential gravity drive within the ship excluded the mass of the planet ahead of them and pushed against the mass behind, providing limited lateral propulsion…limited at least as far as naval warships were concerned, but this ship wasn’t moving through space, it was heading through the atmosphere to another point on the globe and couldn’t attain the super-speeds only capable in vacuum, so the ‘limited’ lateral propulsion was all it needed to create a smooth acceleration curve off across the sky in ‘airship’ mode enroute to the Star Force city to counter the lizard assault just getting underway.

“Ready?” a voice asked over the comm of Dan-1191’s skeet as it sat nose up in a series of mechanical restraints inside Manaan.

The Archon pressed a few remaining buttons, bringing the aerial fighter’s anti-grav into standby mode.

“Lock me in,” he ordered, bringing his opaque cockpit into full holographic mode and seeing the inside of the launch bay through the walls, ceiling, and floor around him, as well as the stubby T-shaped frontal wings on the fighter sitting directly ahead of his dual control handles. Silently the hologram began to shift as the Clan Cloud yellow skeet was hauled upwards into the base of the hangar’s ceiling and into a narrow tunnel barely wider than the fighter.

The tunnel wasn’t empty. Ahead of him were two other skeets, viewed from the tail, while others were packing in beneath him as the vertical column was loaded up as the pilots stood by, knowing enemy air assets were approaching the city. The Dutchman had intercepted two lizard cruisers escorting transports towards the city and had engaged and destroyed one of the naval warships, but the rest of the hoard had slipped by during the fighting.

Those were going to be the skeets’ targets…well, not the cruiser. That was out of their league, but the transports coming in to bring reinforcements to the lizard aquatics forces already engaging city defenses beneath the ocean’s surface had to be hit prior to emptying out, otherwise the already heated battle beneath the waves was going to get even more dicey.

“Standby,” the controller said, transmitting to all of the waiting skeets as the top of the tunnel/tubes were opened to the water, which was held back by a powerful force field. Though Dan couldn’t see it, he knew what they were standing by for. Overtop that force field another one was forming…a tiny sliver running from the top of the submerged city straight up to the ocean surface and a little above it. Once connected all the way the sliver would widen, pushing the water back until the physical shield had created an open air conduit through the water for the fighters to exit the city from.

“Launching in 3…2…1…”

Dan gripped his skeet’s controls, knowing that he wouldn’t be the first to go, but when the tail of the skeet ahead of him in the tunnel/tube flashed up and out he knew his acceleration would be less than 2 seconds delayed.

He didn’t have to touch anything, for the process was automated. An inertial dampening field was created around his skeet, emanating from a mechanical ring in the tunnel. That ring essentially held the fighter locked to it via energy, so when the ring was accelerated upwards the fighter came with it, but without feeling any sort of acceleration. Just before hitting the top of the tube the inertial dampening field cut out and the ring decelerated, allowing the fighter’s momentum to carry it up and out of the city, essentially coasting up the open air conduit through the ocean water surrounding it for a heartbeat before it broke into open air and Dan kicked in the craft’s anti-grav, rocketing up even higher into the atmosphere.

He wasn’t alone. Fighters were pouring up from multiple launch tubes within the underwater city, about a third of which had Clan Cloud pilots. The rest were a mix of Star Force regulars and an assortment of other Clans, though none were officially given a chunk of Atlantica to colonize. It was a massive co-op designed for one purpose…to draw the lizards in and use the planet as a battlefield, keeping them away from Star Force’s actual colonies.

Almost as soon as Dan leveled out his skeet he got a command signal, requesting him and the others in his squadron to form up around their leader, Eric-2056, a slightly younger member of Clan Cloud whose aerial skills surpassed his own. Without need of comm chatter Dan and the others found Eric’s location on the very active battlemap and flew to his position while the other 6 squadrons did likewise before heading off towards their various targets.

They didn’t have to wait long, for the lizards were on their doorstep within a minute, decelerating hard with the kilometer-long, flat lizard cruiser coming in above them and peppering the air with plasma shards to try and keep the skeets away from the transports coming in behind it low to the surface.

More commands came through Dan’s display and he followed the symbol-driven orders, splitting their squadron apart and giving the lizards multiple groups to deal with as the cruiser launched its own Wisp-class fighters. Dan ignored them and dropped to the deck along with four others. Once there they leveled out and accelerated towards the incoming transports as plumes of steam lit up the ocean around them as the cruiser’s plasma tried to intercept them in a deadly, hot rain.

Dan’s skeet took a hit, but the enhanced shields held up and he zipped across the ocean towards the first of some 36 transports beginning to slow to a stop and descend into the water. They had the same yellow-tan hulls as the cruiser, but the smaller objects that two of them began dropping into the water from side doors opening up were altogether different.

Dan lit up one of the dark brown attack craft with his lachars, hitting it as it dropped down to the water, but most of the dozens of objects got through, though he did see a plasma streamer hit one of the side bays and get inside the transport, given that its lateral shields were down for the unloading.

Dan’s skeet closed to effective plasma range within a few seconds and he targeted the transport behind the front pair, knowing that most of their goodies were probably already in the water. He hit it with a long, blue plasma streamer, eating into the shields along with three others before they finally popped and let additional weaponsfire through.

Pulling his skeet up for a bit more altitude Dan clipped off a lachar blast at a transport behind the one he’d been targeting, then delivered two more plasma streamers to other transports before flying out the backside of the enemy formation and swinging around to come in on another pass…which was when the wisps from the cruiser finally caught up with them.

Knowing that the transports were the main priority Dan went evasive and tried to get clear of the swarm of fighters long enough to line up another plasma streamer…but only at the cost of several plasma hits to his shields. In the past that would have been enough to take them down, but with every year that passed the Star Force techs back home were learning more and more about shield matrixes from the V’kit’no’sat database, and from that they were designing progressively more advanced shields that operated off the same power output, enhancing the protection the aerofighters had without adding weight.

Dan couldn’t ignore the wisps forever, so after getting a plasma lance into the topside of one of the smaller transports that he saw another squadron picking on, he spun his skeet around on its anti-grav and reversed direction, confusing the wisps momentarily and giving him a clear shot at two of them.

He fired off a series of ‘chips’ at the shieldless fighters, killing both with the tiny blue energy arcs. The chips didn’t have much range before they dissipated, but with fighter to fighter engagements being what they were, they literally shredded the fighters on impact, given that his skeet was firing 7 with each pull of the trigger in a rapid-fire burst.

After easily killing those two weak fighters, Dan crisscrossed the impromptu battlefield downing several more as he hoped the rest of the pilots would focus on the transports…then he noticed another contact on his battlemap incoming, followed by a painfully bright blue sun that emerged to the west.

That ‘sun’ was the chips’ big brother, designated a ‘mauler,’ and it had just impacted the side of the cruiser floating high above them that was returning heavy green plasma fire on the aquatics battleship just coming into the fight.

Dan saw the ship, designated as the Black Pearl, fire another mauler blast into the side of the cruiser as the Star Force vessel dropped in altitude, heading for water where it held a bigger advantage. Fortunately it could handle most of the troops the lizard transports were dropping off, but Dan knew they needed to hit as many of them as possible while they were on the surface to thin their numbers, so he dropped back down to the deck, burning another wisp on the way, then turned most of his attention on the biggest of the transports as it lowered ever so slowly into the water.

Several other skeets were pounding its topside, so when David lit it up with a plasma streamer of his own it got through the shields and burned a long furrow into the hull, which the others quickly expanded upon as he flew off and swung around for another pass.

As he did he caught sight of the underside, still not all the way down to the water, as the ventral bay doors opened up and began releasing a very long, narrow aquatics craft. Grinding his teeth in frustration at their inability to stop the mass of deployments, Dan went as low to the small waves as he dared and flew towards the transport, zigzagging around two others to get a good approach vector, and then repeatedly firing his lachar until he got within plasma range.

He burned a fiery blue lance into the side of the corvette being deployed as it dropped into the water, but its own shields held up to the assault…then it sunk into the ocean and was suddenly beyond the skeets’ ability to touch.

“Get us into the water,” Voru said from the bridge of the Black Pearl as the aquatics battleship traded weaponsfire with the space navy warship in an odd confrontation that had become almost commonplace on Atlantica ever since lizard assault fleets had arrived to reinforce their frontier colonies that Star Force had been handily tearing up. Given that all the Human colonies on the planet were beneath the ocean and had eschewed the tiny bit of available landmass, the lizards were forced to fight them underwater if they wanted to remove them from the planet, but there were no shortage of air assets in play, with most of the heavy lifting being done by the enemy’s nimble fleet of naval cruisers.

As the Black Pearl dropped towards the ocean it continued firing its mauler cannon, blasting away at the cruiser’s shields with the medium-sized weapon that seemed to defy reason. It was another little ‘primitive’ gem discovered in the V’kit’no’sat database that operated off of an exotic type of energy that was extremely unstable, giving it an ultra-short range of only a handful of kilometers in space and less than that in atmosphere, but the destructive potential was undeniable…not to mention it wreaked havoc with shield matrixes.

With the third salvo fired from the Black Pearl the lizards’ shields went down over a small section of their hull, but Voru didn’t have much conventional weaponry onboard his ship to exploit the breach with, though several medium-sized plasma cannons opened fire and targeted the critical systems on the lizard hull that were now vulnerable, knocking out at least one weapons battery before most of the Star Force vessel’s batteries submerged beneath the waves. Once settled in, the battleship’s spinal bulge was all that remained above the waterline, making the vessel appear as a very large and long whale…but the mauler cannon was located in that section of the hull, so it continued to fire unmolested as now most of the ship was protected by a ‘water shield’ that would continue to replenish itself to no end.

The cruiser responded by narrowing its plasma fire onto the above water portions of the ship, with its misses vaporizing huge plumes of water and sending them into the air like geysers, especially over the shallow portions where the hull of the Black Pearl helped to reflect the concussive pressure of the flash vaporization.

All of the aquatic battleship’s weapons were medium grade, when compared to naval implements. That was due to both the size and design of the ship, which was not a drone vessel and not designed for space combat. The lizard cruiser was, which would have given it the advantage if not for the continuing tech progression Star Force was spewing out, with the mauler cannon more than evening the odds now that the Black Pearl was in the water and having to defend very little hull area with its shields…which were now being redeployed to strengthen the upper matrixes by drawing power from the lower ones.

In the past that sort of shield alteration hadn’t been possible…but there again, the pyramid database was playing into their hands, offering them much more dynamic shield matrixes that the V’kit’no’sat still considered to be child’s play.

Entrenched in the water as it was, the lizards knew they weren’t going to win out against the Human battleship, but they maintained the exchange until their transports…or what was left of them…finished unloading and flew off, with the cruiser following. They retreated off into the sky, heading either into space or to one of the many hidden lizard bases on the besieged planet.

“Keep an eye on the sky,” Voru cautioned his sensor officer. “Subsurface hologram, please.”

The surface of the planet, a smooth curve with the Black Pearl, Dutchman, and several Star Force cities and marked craft, including the overhead skeets, literally inverted at the waterline. The units above the waves disappeared and the flat ocean morphed into the crumpled terrain of the seafloor…with Manaan and the assaulting forces arrayed around it outlined in hundreds of moving icons.

“Full submersion,” Voru ordered. “Let’s take it to them up close.”

2

“Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Voru commented to the bridge crew as he saw the underwater army the lizards were throwing at Manaan…not to mention the incoming reinforcements that the transports had just deployed. They were still off a ways from the confrontation points, centered around 2 city defense towers that were stationed outside the boundary fence.

There were six in total, spread in hexagonal formation around the more or less circular fence and set well off its perimeter to give them better firing lines. The lizards had tangled with enough of this type of turret to know better than to close within firing range, otherwise their ships would be obliterated…thus they were doing the next best thing.

Voru saw hundreds of small craft zipping in past the towers’ impotent attempts to target them. Once at the base of the tower they were being engaged by both its own perimeter defenses along with the city defense forces. The two engagements at the towers appeared about equally numbered while the bulk of the lizard underwater fleet sat out of range and continued to feed reinforcements into the tower battles.

Amongst the enemy fleet were several large lizard aquatics ships…mostly carriers for their infantry, but there were three cruisers in amongst them, with what looked like multiple destroyer escorts. More than enough firepower to assault the city shield should they get past the towers and other turret defenses, meaning this was no mere skirmish. They were making a serious play for the city.

“Helm, head us straight for their capital ships. Launch squids in our wake and tell the Archon to do the same.”

Vander-6933 was straddling the pommel seat of his ‘streak,’ the underwater cousin of the aerial’s skeet, when the deployment order came over the comm. He was already waiting in the small underside launch bay of the Black Pearl, which was schematically squeezed between the much larger squid launch bays that ran the length of the ventral side of the battleship, and only had to nudge the throttle to punch through the containment shield holding the internal bay water separate from that of the ocean.

The needle-like nose of the streak poked through the differential containment shield, widening the breach until the conical midsection of the attack craft reached its maximum width, then the shield reformed as the thinner tail segment passed through. Vander accelerated the craft slightly, passing through a ‘waterlock’ before getting to a second shield that finally let him exit the aft of the ship.

Once through the second shield he punched the throttle, using the internal anti-grav engine to push it out while maintaining a slight downward angle to null out the lifting property of the differential thrust, which was pushing off the aft half of the planet, but since it was located below the streak it was also providing an unwanted upwards vector in addition to the lateral. When in the air or space this wasn’t relevant, because the anti-grav was already pushing against the planet to maintain altitude, so that ‘push’ was simply scaled back to maintain position.

In the water gravity was no threat, so any unwanted upwards vector had to be compensated for…which Vander accomplished by nosing down enough that the angle of the streak acted like a fin, dragging it downward slightly. That wasn’t the most efficient way to move about, but it wasn’t relevant at the moment, for all he wanted to do was get clear of the Black Pearl before the squids started coming out.

When his movement and that of the battleship pulled the gap between them to over 400 meters Vander turned the streak to starboard, causing the pointy cylinder to bend along the middle, arcing the needle-like nose and using the hull itself as a maneuvering fin. It curved around in a tight U-turn and accelerated forward, bearing to port to get alongside the battleship as the streak’s speed increased…but then the Archon cut out the anti-grav and leveled the nose of his underwater fighter out, activating the jet engines and running them up to full power.

Small inlets on the middle of the craft opened just aft of the widest portion, pulling water in towards a concentration tube from 8 locations. That tube then sent the compressed water off in multiple directions inside the streak along tiny lines to provide maneuvering thrust, with the bulk of the water going directly aft to the main nozzle and launching it out the blunt tail.

Vander’s streak shot forward again, this time faster than before, punching through the ocean water as the silver hull of the craft became coated in shiny gloss as the defense shields activated and responded to the pressure of the water flowing over them. The speed he was moving drained them of some energy, as was typical, but they held steady at 94% strength as the power core fed additional energy in to replace that which was lost to the friction.

The streak’s battlemap flickered with new glowing icons coming out the aft of the Black Pearl, and though Vander couldn’t see them from his holographic view…which was enhanced with sensor data in the form of computer projected overlays onto the limited visuals he was getting from the hull of the streak…he could see them being tagged as independent allied units as they cleared the containment shields of their own bays, save they weren’t staggered, coming out in close sequence like the battleship was dropping two trails of crumbs behind it.

The crumbs began to move of their own accord, gathering into formations and flanking the battleship as they caught up, but Vander knew they weren’t quick enough to catch his streak so he put them out of mind for the moment and focused on the enemy fleet formation ahead.

There were eight big ships, too far away for him to have a hope of seeing visually, despite the running lights the lizard ships traditionally displayed once in battle. His view of the clear waters ahead was dim due to the depth he was at, but every now and then he’d see a bit of light to port coming from Manaan, though he was still too far out to see the city lights…meaning it had to be coming from the defense towers.

He was beyond their range, comfortably, as was the lizard fleet ahead as he closed in on the enemy quickly. Depressing the nose he began to drag the streak further down below their elevation, searching for the seafloor visually even as the hologram and battlemap electronically displayed its location. Fast as his ship was swimming, it took him a while to get down there, then he leveled off 20 meters above the rough, irregular rocky ground and sped across the shrinking gap to the lizard ships, seeing a line of ‘ants’ popping up on his sensors in greater detail.

The ants were lizards swimming towards the city. They were a biological variant designed to swim and breathe in the water, meaning they weren’t in craft, but rather ‘hoofing’ it across the gap on their own power, with more and more pouring out of the sides of several of the big lizard ships ahead.

Vander picked one of those points and tagged it on his battlemap as a personal target…with a visual waypoint popping up on his holographic display marking the exact spot.

The Archon primed the four torpedoes he had onboard, glad he’d had the streak rearmed after their last little skirmish, and opened the launch tube set on the topside of the needle-nose. No water entered, due to the shield overtop of it, but when the moment to fire came the streak’s computer would quickly deactivate that section of the shield to allow egress of the warhead, then snap it back into place to maintain the smoothness of the flow lines as much as possible.

Vander knew there would be a firing ‘bump,’ but that was unavoidable when launching from speed and he mentally prepared himself for it as he saw the enemy ships began to get higher from his point of view, though they weren’t actually gaining altitude, he was just starting to get underneath them.

Happy that the stream of infantry was still pouring out of his target, meaning they wouldn’t have had a chance to close the bay doors or raise the shields, Vander waited for the proper moment, already having mentally plotted out his trajectory, then activated the anti-grav engine and added its thrust…along with the upwards momentum…to the jet propulsion he’d already maxed out.

Like the skeets, the streak also had its own ‘super pursuit mode,’ and it allowed the Archon to move faster than any lizard craft could hope to, making Vander feel like he was literally flying through the water. As the streak slowly lifted up towards the waypoint he adjusted his trajectory, keeping his aiming sight on the open bay door that was growing large by the second…with only a few more remaining before he slammed into the side of the carrier.

Mind the bump, he reminded himself as he thumbed the firing button.

The silver needle that was the streak shot in towards the lizard infantry transport on a perfectly smooth line, then it jerked ever so slightly as a tiny piece of it lazily shot out the front end. The streak bent hard at the middle, curving its hull line and trajectory so that it pulled up and passed over the top of the carrier as the torpedo it’d launched slipped inside the bay doors, knocking a number of infantry aside on the way in.

Vander couldn’t see the detonation, for it was internal, but he saw a hiccup in his climb as the pressure wave rebounded out of the confines and ironically helped to push him upwards as he shot overtop the ship, holding onto the anti-grav ascension for a few more seconds then flicking it off and snaking around in a tight, jet-propelled turn to come up on the aft end of one of the lizard cruisers.

That was too big of a target for his lone streak so he didn’t try, but it did try to swat at him, sending an expanding arm out in his direction like a kid’s toy lightsaber that extended up out of the hilt…save for this version had exploding nubs along the length, meaning that if it contacted his streak it’d get a nice detonation directly on the shields and really ruin the Archon’s day.

Quick as the tendril was, it wasn’t quick enough, and Vander had no problem maneuvering around it…for it could only extend quickly in a straight line, then almost drift about to other locations on its bendable frame because it had to push water out of the way, making it more of an explosive net strand than a weapons battery.

Then again he was piloting an agile ship. The squids the Black Pearl were bringing with it to the battle were not so agile, and the lizards had been making good use of the defense tendrils in an anti-air fashion, though that term didn’t quite apply underwater, so they’d come to call such things ‘point defense’ weapons.

There were several smaller targets ahead, akin to gunboats that the lizards used as slow fighters. They’d nicknamed them ‘sharks’ for the multiple fins they had spread around a double hull that reminded Vander of TIE Bombers from Star Wars. The fins allowed them to pivot at sharp angles and turn around on pursuing ships…just as three of them did now on his approach, launching tiny ‘minnows’ his way.

The automated missiles locked onto his streak and zipped towards him, leaving Vander with three options…try and outrun them, outmaneuver them, or take them out before they hit him.

Mentally calculating his odds he opted for the third, cutting thrust and letting the streak drift forward for a second as he raised a pair of nubs on the hull’s surface, with the shields altering to accommodate the bumps. From them fired even smaller projectiles…the aquatics version of naval intercepts. Nine of the tiny, pen-sized objects were shot out of the pods towards the 3 incoming minnows, getting about halfway there before their momentum started to fade out from the friction of the water, despite their needle-like shape. When they slowed their short-lived internal batteries activated a tiny jet engine and maneuvering fins, turning them into self-propelled anti-missile missiles that tracked towards the lizards’ minnows.

Vander reactivated his own jet propulsion before they made the intercept, knowing the little devices were quite effective at what they did…as well as knowing that the sharks had many more of their own to fire. Before that happened he closed range with the nearest one and buzzed it, dropping a bowling ball-sized hockey puck in its wake. The small drone swam the remaining meters down to the shark and latched itself to the side, bypassing the pyrotechnic arm that made up the second half of the lizards’ weaponry.

The little plasma mine sucked itself down to the hull, chemically welding itself in place as Vander swiveled his streak around, launching more intercepts at additional minnows coming his way from other sharks moving into the fray. As he danced his sea snake around an activation light appeared on his control board, indicating that the remote mine was now in place. With a touch of a button he detonated it, causing the hockey puck to produce a plasma flare directly into the side of the shark like a roman candle firework.

It burnt into and gutted the inside of the shark, taking it out of the fight while maintaining hull integrity and not allowing so much as one drop of water inside. Getting plasma to the target was the lizards’ primary hindrance underwater, given that they couldn’t launch it from point to point, and they’d become innovative in creating weapons to circumvent that problem…as had Star Force.

Finding himself with way too many sharks around to play with, Vander kicked in his anti-grav and ran hard away from the group, outdistancing several of the minnows while taking one to the hull. It exploded prior to contact with the shield as the streak maneuvered to the left, diminishing the range indicator’s closing speed enough that the minnow assumed that it might not reach the target and detonated once it reached proximity.

Due to the few meters in between the damage to the shields was reduced, but the concussive wave buffeted the streak around something fierce, causing Vander to lose directional control for a moment as the controls seemed to fight him. Once it subsided he did a quick check of the status hologram on his right, which indicated no hull damage, but severely weakened shields over the aft/starboard quarter.

His eyes flashed back to the battlemap to confirm no more minnows were closing on him, then he steered an evasive course around the shark formation that was trying futilely to keep pace behind him…then they suddenly broke off and returned to the flank of the large lizard ships as they began moving en mass in towards the city.

“Damn it,” Vander swore, realizing what they were doing as he saw the Black Pearl coming up on their other side. They knew they were about to get their asses kicked, even with their incoming reinforcements…so they’d decided to forego the slow method of taking down the nearest defense towers and just overwhelm them with numbers.

It would work too, because as powerful as the towers were, it took time to kill aquatics ships…and the torpedoes they were carrying, big and slow as they were, would be moving too fast and in too great a number for the point defenses to take out. Vander knew the towers had larger intercepts than he was carrying to deal with the stronger torpedoes, but put that many ships up close and there was no way they were going to get them all.

On the battlemap he saw the Black Pearl turn early, diminishing the distance it would have to travel if it fell in behind the fleet and instead angled to intercept it closer to the city, all the while sending its entire fleet of squids ahead as fast as they could move to engage the lizards before they overwhelmed the nearest tower.

Take two out and they’d have a clear approach on the city defense fence, for the other four couldn’t overlap firing fields to cover more than those adjacent to them…which was why the lizard infantry and smaller ships were currently engaging only two of the towers.

What to do? Vander knew he had to stay away from the firing zone, otherwise the detonations from the lizard torpedoes would crack his ship apart, not to mention those coming from the towers, though that wasn’t their primary weapon.

He couldn’t take on the capital ships directly, and at best he could only damage the smaller ones…so he figured he might as well provide cover for those he could and curved his streak around and headed for the approaching squids, picking out the closest sharks to them and tagging them as priority targets, with his hologram marking them appropriately.

Vander fought his anti-grav, nosing down heavily to drag him lower in altitude while crossing over the top of the lizard fleet as it transitioned ever closer to the city, then he went with jet engines only and swerved around on the flank of one of the sharks as it launched  two minnows in towards the approaching squids.

The Archon lined up his approach and came in quickly, glad to see the shark was preoccupied. When he got within 100 meters he nosed down and used his anti-grav to brake hard, skidding his streak to a stop less than 20 meters away.

Vander powered up his primary weapon and the shields over the streak’s nose pushed out into a flat circle on the end of a cylinder like a battering ram. Using his jet engines Vander goosed it forward, dropping off distance meter by meter until the 12m long shield vacuum hit the lizard hull and morphed around it, maintaining a watertight seal.

The Archon thumbed the plasma cannon firing button, sending a pulse into and through the gap directly into the side of the shark even as it began to move off. The blue plasma hit the hull a split second before shield cylinder slid off the back of the moving shark, quickly filling with water.

Vander flicked it off, letting the shields reset to their normal, hull tight mode, as he maneuvered the streak around to the back of the damaged shark…then he slid up behind it and extended the shield column again, butting it up against the back side and delivering a three shot salvo of plasma at pointblank range that cracked open the lizard craft via an internal explosion.

The Archon pulled back enough to allow him to slither the ship to the side and accelerate away, moving towards the next closest isolated shark he could find as the squids finally got to the lizard fleet and the heavy fighting broke out.

3

The three big lizard aquatic cruisers and the 5 carriers held their line, heading straight for the nearest of the underwater towers with their destroyer escorts, but the support craft and smaller capital ships veered off to engage the squids as they began to get close and open up their forward arms, diminishing their speed greatly as they each angled towards their chosen target. Being flown remotely by pilots within the Black Pearl, the squids, each about the size of a small house, were expendable grappling weapon platforms. They contained no offensive torpedoes, but they did carry defensive intercepts that began launching en mass as the lizard sharks swooped in to engage them before they could come into contact with their target ships.

Minnows were being shot off from all directions, along with larger torpedoes coming from the frigates who were three times the size of the squids and shaped like a stingray…flat and wide with a sharp edge to cut through the water laterally. They’d spun about and broke formation first, thus getting to the incoming squids ahead of the other lizard ships and they were pumping out sizeable torpedoes that the intercepts were having to swarm with multiple hits to take down.

Several got through the initial wave and hit four of the squids, two dead on. The concussion wave from the explosions rippled through the surrounding water, rocking all craft nearby as the debris seemed to float near to the kill point, unlike land combat that saw pieces of shrapnel flying large distances through the air from the point of impact.

The other two squids managed to put up their shields in time to block the attack…but not their energy shields. Those were already active and too weak to stop a frigate’s torpedo, though they would ward off a minnow or two before breaching. Each of the squids had four forward arms emanating out of a tail section that contained the jet engines that drove the craft. The tip of each of those arms contained a metallic net that could be expanded like an umbrella, and it was with these that the lucky two squids stopped the incoming torpedoes from impacting the main hull, though one lost half of its arm in the blast while the other lost only the tip and the porous shield that was on it in the detonation.

In the massive exchange the ocean became turbulent, buffeting Vander’s streak around violently as he closed on the heels of one of the sharks as it was weaving its way through the squids and peppering them from the flank with minnows. He didn’t want to waste one of his three remaining torpedoes on it, so he fought the chaotic currents and rammed it from behind with his shield extension, peppering it with plasma shots and taking some fragmentation backlash on his own shields as he chewed the enemy submersible apart.

He stayed at it until something internal exploded, shredding the shark. It’d probably been one of the minnows onboard, or perhaps a fuel cell…he didn’t know nor truly cared, so long as it was out of the fight. Vander pulled his nose out of the backside of the carcass, having drifted into it as he delivered the final shots. The schematic of his streak showed minor hull damage on the needle nose, which he hoped wouldn’t affect his steering…though at the moment, with torpedoes exploding around him, that minor inefficiency in aerodynamics was hardly going to be noticeable.

Vander swung around the dead shark and accelerated towards the next closest one as the rest of the lizard support ships came into contact with the squids, of which there were 3 varieties. The largest was a light destroyer, only 20% shorter in length than the full destroyers that were getting more distance between them and the battle by the second. The main difference was the weaponry on the whale-like hull, which consisted of tree-like arms that the ships deployed when they arrived in position, essentially staking out their little piece of the ocean and becoming mini battle stations.

From them flowed streams of minnows, for they had none of the heavier weaponry the smaller frigates carried, but the defense ‘trees’ were laced with plasma nubs that would burn anything that came into contact with them. In between the ‘branches’ of the trees there were smaller filaments that would catch objects before they could hit the hull, much like the squids’ arm shields did. Both designs allowed water to move through them in the gaps, but the rigid net lines of the squids were replaced with barely visible strands on the light destroyers, making them almost look like a hoard of spiders had set up in the trees and strung their webs between them.

The light destroyers were definitely anti-fighter platforms, making them a significant threat to both Vander’s streak and the squids, and he knew better than to go play with one. When deployed, the defense trees would prevent him from getting close enough to the hull to use his plasma cannon, and his torpedoes would get stuck in the webbing. When they detonated they’d clear an area for additional weaponsfire to get through, but the light destroyers required a disproportionate amount of firepower to take down for their size.

In addition to the light destroyers, the lizards also had ‘hammerheads.’ These T-shaped craft vaguely resembled a skeet, though they were much larger and on a scale akin to the frigates. They were anti-ship vessels with the express purpose of ramming larger craft and using the hundreds of plasma nubs to burn into the side of their hull in explosive fashion. It was no wonder, then, when several squids bypassed other lizard ships and went straight to targeting the hammerheads, swimming up to them and using their superior mobility to attack them from the flanks and avoid the dangerous kill zone up front.

The first one to get hit got a squid on either side along the tail segment, with each wrapping its arms partway around the hull and bringing the ‘mouth,’ located between the four arms, up against the hull or as close to it as possible. Like Vander’s streak, a short stub of a cylinder-shaped shield reached out and sealed itself to the lizard hull as the squid’s arms compressed and depleted the hammerhead’s own shields.

That wasn’t necessary, but it removed one impediment for the plasma streamer that followed. A pinprick of bright blue was visible from outside in the gap between hammerhead and squid, but otherwise the destruction that followed was all internal. Both squids latched on like ticks and instead of sucking blood out, poured plasma into the hull and tore apart the deadly craft before it could even think about getting close to the Black Pearl.

Up and down the line the hammerheads were targeted first and taken out, often with the squids being targeted by torpedoes as they stubbornly latched onto the hulls of their targets. A quarter of the attack drones were lost within minutes, half of which fell to the lizards’ smaller corvettes. They were barely larger than the squids and resembled long tubes until they deployed, making them the second fastest vessels the lizards had after the sharks.

Several of the squids got caught by the corvettes’ armored claws. Unlike the larger ships the corvette didn’t have shields, but instead made up for it with thick armor that was difficult to crack by explosive concussion, meaning they usually required plasma to take out or successive torpedo strikes. Like a crawdad or other clawed sea creatures, the corvette had four deployable arms…two front and two aft, allowing it to attack/defend itself from either direction. Several squids got caught by those claws and literally cut in half once they latched on and ratcheted up the pressure, and though Vander wanted to help them he knew it’d be suicide to come anywhere near those claws.

So he did the next best thing and buzzed one, dropping a plasma mine that swam in and latched onto the side and burnt through…though most of the charge was used up in penetrating the armor leaving little to damage the interior, plus the ship was much larger than the sharks and one mine wasn’t going to take it down even if it had tissue paper for a hull.

Vander swung his streak around in a spiral turn, getting a bit more altitude as he did and came back at the corvette as it finished cutting through a squid that’d just finished killing a hammerhead. That was the only way the corvette could catch the squid…when they were latched onto something else, which made them appear to be the cleaning crew amongst the lizard fleet, going around picking off the Star Force ticks.

This one pulled apart its claw and released itself from the crushed midsection of the squid, pulling back and tucking in its claws before accelerating away towards another target with the remains of Vander’s plasma mine still attached. Using the depleted mine as a targeting lock, the Archon fired off his second torpedo from the flank and watched it swim an arced line right into the device and detonate.

With the hole already punched through by the mine, part of the concussive explosion got through to the interior, and as Vander fought the explosive turbulence in the water he saw a gap had formed in the corvette’s hull. It wasn’t big, barely twice the size the mine had been, but it was definitely a breach allowing water in…as well as an opportunity he wasn’t going to waste.

He swam his streak up alongside and slightly ahead of the corvette as it suddenly slowed, then he dove in towards it and launched his third torpedo, targeting the gap. It zipped across the now less turbulent water, autocorrecting as it went for the various currents, and slipped inside a moment before the hull cracked apart and blew out armor shards in a slow motion fireworks display that was shrouded by a cloud of dust.

“Got one,” Vander said aloud, adding one more capital ship to his personal kill list as a bright blue streak illuminated the water in front of him.

“Whoa,” he said, diving his streak lower to get out of the firing line of the Black Pearl that had now caught up with the squids. Now that he was paying attention he saw two more almost invisible strands shoot out from the gigantic hull and touch the side of one of the light destroyers, pushing right through their defense trees and triggering the plasma nubs to discharge on one. That strand disintegrated near the lizard ship, then it seemed to regenerate from halfway back towards the Star Force battleship, reaching out to touch the hull again, this time slipping through the branches and punching apart the strands.

Vander knew that was an illusion, and in truth the extremely long shield column the Black Pearl was extending originated at a width akin to the size of his thumb, then expanded out to more than a meter, giving the medium plasma cannon it was attached to a few inches of clearance for it to fire directly on the enemy craft.

The shield column flashed blue as another squirt of plasma traveled down the vacuum the shield had created in the water, essentially cheating the two kilometers of distance between the ships. As much as the lizards loved using plasma, and had adapted it to function underwater, their form of ship to ship combat relied on physical contact, due to the water interfering with conventional plasma delivery, but thanks to the ever enhancing shield designs Star Force was fielding, the Archons had found a way around the problem.

Which meant the lizards were heavily outmatched, requiring them to either flee or charge the ship and get within touching range…something the squids were not allowing to happen, at least not for the more dangerous capital ships. Several small torpedoes and minnows streaked towards the massive hull that was creating an underwater tsunami with all the water it was pushing ahead of it, which actually made the lizard projectiles twitch on approach before they slammed into the shielded hull.

One advantage of having a ship more than a mile long underwater was the fact that you could carry very large power cores, which fed an unbelievable amount of power to the shields, allowing the battleship to shrug off the bee stings of the minnows and weather the smaller torpedoes. Not only that, they also provided the power necessary to force and hold back the water along the shield columns, something that was not easy to do, with the downside being they were easily disrupted by weaponsfire or collision.

But their ability to regenerate made them resilient, if not mobile. They couldn’t swing to the side very well to target a moving ship, but rather had to come out of a fixed vector from the Black Pearl, meaning you had to pick your spot to fire on several seconds before you could pull the trigger, making them almost impossible to target the sharks and smaller lizard craft. Moving through the water also put more stress on the shield columns, reducing their effective range, but once the giant ship settled into position its 16 plasma cannons made for an impressive fireworks display at range, though the firing rate was slow compared to aerial or naval combat.

Everything in aquatics seemed to move at a snail’s pace comparably, giving Vander plenty of time to note the advance of the lizard heavy capital ships into the firing range of the defense tower, which held its own array of shield column plasma cannons, only these were the large variety.

Those blue flashes appeared off to the left, while the Black Pearl was currently on his right as he swerved around again looking for another shark to pursue. He saw several futilely targeting the battleship and ignored them, looking instead for some opportunity to aid what squids were left. More than half had been destroyed, but all of the enemy hammerheads and a chunk of the frigates were gone, leaving the corvettes and light destroyers as the primary threat…and they were going down quickly under the Black Pearl’s plasma cannons.

There wasn’t much more Vander could do here, so he set out to find the closest, but yet untouched squid that appeared to be in danger, sighting one that a corvette was pursuing. It wasn’t going to catch it, due to the speed difference, but Vander could see that the squid was heading to one of the remaining frigates and downing a torpedo coming its way with a wave of intercepts…clearly intent on closing to lethal range with the lizard craft…which would then allow the corvette to come up from behind and cut it in half.

Vander kicked in his anti-grav for a short speed boost, coming up behind the corvette and seeing that all its arms were tucked in for maximum aerodynamics, giving him an idea. He snuck up behind it, getting closer and closer to its aft end, essentially daring it to open its claws and grab him, but it seemed to either not care or not want to slow down from the drag, because it didn’t respond to his presence.

“Ok, you’re making this too easy,” he said, nudging a bit closer, ready to hit the brakes when needed, as he extended the short shield column out in front of him and nestled up against the back of the corvette, fighting against its jet engine wash. The lizards, so far as Star Force knew, had differential gravity drives in some of their equipment, but it wasn’t very advanced, meaning their naval cruisers had to rely on thrust engines for their more extreme lateral thrusts.

Some ships had the differential engines, some didn’t, but to date none of their aquatics ships did, according to the schematics Star Force had recovered from the lizard bases captured on Corneria some two centuries ago. A lot of technological enhancements could have been made in that time, but so far using anti-grav for aquatics propulsion didn’t seem to be one of them, so the lizard ships had to rely on water manipulation.

The corvette had intake vents on the side, pulling water into an internal caterpillar-like drive unit that exited out the back end between the retracted claws…and was spewing water directly onto the streak, making it difficult to stay close enough to get the shield column in place. Vander had to maneuver a bit high, so he was riding just over top the jet stream, in order to get in close enough to make tentative contact…fortunately the shield designer had accounted for some variation, because it auto-adjusted to the erratic movements, maintaining the vacuum corridor with a solid seal on the aft end of the corvette.

Still no claws came out, so Vander pumped a plasma shot into the hull…then jammed on the brakes as the minimal damage seemed to awaken the lizard ship, for it deployed both claws simultaneously and arched them back to grab at his slender streak.

Cutting his jet propulsion and flicking the maneuvering vents in reverse he quickly put some distance between the two ships, with the corvette continuing to chase the squid that was just now reaching its target. Vander thought hard, trying to figure something he could do to distract the corvette away from the squid, knowing that his one remaining torpedo wasn’t going to do much to stop it, and with the claws now deployed he wasn’t going to get close enough to hit it with a plasma shot again.

Just then he noticed another contact on his battlemap closing fast as the corvette slowed to align with the squid that was now latching onto the frigate as it tried to flee, dragging it through the water as it did so. The corvette moved after the pair, then turned to the right suddenly, but not before another squid shot in and rammed it in the midsection between the forward and aft set of claws.

It latched onto the ship with its arms…then inexplicably let go as soon as it had a grip, escaping the incoming claws and swimming off sharply, leaving the corvette to drift momentarily with a crack in its hull from the impact. The squid’s arms were even more damaged, but not so much that it couldn’t tuck them up into a fat needle and zip off elsewhere.

Vander wondered what that had been all about, then saw a tiny silver tendril shoot across his vision and into the side of the now more or less stationary corvette. It widened ever so slightly, then a blue plasma blast shot into it from the not so close Black Pearl, thanks to the squid having set up the shot.

“Good work,” Vander commented, though his comm wasn’t open. He accelerated forward and under the shield column as another plasma blast was delivered, off to hunt more opponents in the ever shrinking battlefield…then he noticed the distant contacts on his battlemap, seeing that the turret tower was now under heavy assault with the incoming reinforcements getting painfully close to joining the fray.

Too close for the Black Pearl to intercept in time, meaning the defense tower was as good as lost.

4

At the base of the defense tower, well lower than the altitude of the battling fleets, part of the lizard infantry was swimming across the rocky ocean floor while the rest assaulted higher portions of the huge, narrow cylinder sticking up out of the ground and running almost all the way up to the ocean’s surface 1.4 miles above.

It was an immense construct, guarding an even more immense city beyond it, but given its size it was difficult to properly defend. This the lizards had learned in previous years as they assaulted the Human cities, trying to find a way past their defenses so they could eradicate the infestation from the planet even as orbit was being contended for in an ongoing naval chess match between massive fleets.

Reinforcements kept coming down to bolster the growing lizard colonies, even as the Humans continually raided and destroyed those they could find. Give the lizards time to build and grow and they’d overwhelm the planet, but hit them early and often and they could stem the tide…as well as causing them to divert resources from other planets to this one, all the while Star Force’s infrastructure continued to grow.

The defense tower was one of the more impressive underwater constructs that they’d come up with, and even now, further above, the heavy plasma cannons were lighting up the ocean with streaks of blue as they targeted the incoming lizard capital ships in between the massive explosions of the incoming torpedoes, which had the nasty habit of breaking apart the shield conduits the plasma flowed down. That bit of offensive defense was also something the lizards had learned, and it kept their fleet intact long enough to vie for the tower in what otherwise would have been a short battle.

Multifaceted attacks were the lizards’ specialty, and even as the fleet and other infantry units assaulted higher portions of the tower, this lower detachment was using the seafloor for cover to get in close and plant the det packs they were carrying against the base…assuming they could get that far.

Star Force had set up weapons emplacements all along the height of the tower, including point defense weapons akin to the intercepts that would fire out and intercept incoming infantry…but send enough troops in to bleed out their ammunition and zones of vulnerability would open up. This they had also learned from past, unsuccessful attacks, and this time they had come prepared.

The lizards swam forward, propelled by their own fin-like legs as they carried their det packs, escorted by others with rod-like melee weapons that each had one plasma nub on the end for them to jab into enemies. On physical contact the glowing nub containing the plasma would discharge through a specially designed membrane and into the target, contacting very little water in the process, but enough would slip through to cause a burst of steam in the form of bubbles, visibly marking weapon strikes.

The tips of the plasma rods glowed green as they contained a ready amount of plasma for discharge, but the troops swimming across the ocean floor had their rods turned off, so as to not draw immediate attention. Also, the rocky outcroppings made it harder for the Human sensors to detect their approach until they were virtually on top of them.

When the lizards finally broke cover about 300 meters away from the tower, where the rocky cover disappeared into a pancake flat plain that Star Force had carved down as a perimeter, little swimming missiles shot out from the 200m wide tower, each tracking towards individual infantry, taking out many of them with surprise hits resulting in muted explosions that ripped into the fleshy, yet flexible exoskeletons on this variant of lizard.

The others saw the point defense missiles, or PDM for short, coming and activated their shield gauntlets, which were little more than a second rod that deployed an energy shield that they used to block the small detonations…though they had to stop swimming forward in order to deploy the large barriers, for they dragged heavily against the water.

The remote targeting systems in the tower, relayed to controllers back in the city or nearby battleship if it needed to assume control, suddenly began spewing out more PDM with groups tagged to each individual they spotted with a shield, knowing that several successive hits would breach it and take the infantry down, which started a bit of a stalemate in the advance, with more and more lizard infantry popping up from the rocks and deploying their defensive walls that they slowly swam behind, inching their way in towards the tower like a scattering of Roman Legionnaires.

A hundred and fifty meters up the tower, one of the plasma cannons extended a shield column down to the surface where a knot of the infantry were, with them scurrying out of the way as it touched bottom and widened, followed by a plasma blast that vaporized a bit of rock and left it superheated enough that when the shield disappeared and the water flowed in it resulted in a pyre of bubbles rising upwards like a marker beacon…but the attack had little chance of hitting an individual lizard, making it almost worthless against infantry, though it did manage to scatter those in the immediate area.

 More PDMs flowed out of the tower like schools of tiny fish, zipping this way and that, keeping the lizards thoroughly occupied even as their numbers continued to grow as more kept coming up out of the rocks…but as they did a school of much larger ‘fish’ came in to flank them, each with a person at the helm of the water-version mongooses known as ‘arrowheads,’ named for their triangular design.

A quartet of blue arrowheads skimmed the rocky terrain, having emerged from the back side of the tower and moved out laterally, coming in over the irregular surface to help hide their own approach. Some of the lizards saw them coming and turned to face them…opening themselves up to the PDM, which took a few down before the arrowheads got to the first group and split up into separate attack vectors.

The first one, with an Archon at the helm, dropped down level with the lizard ahead of it and increased its speed, ramming the water lizard with the tip and delivering a punch to its midsection that doubled it over before knocking it to the side, unconscious from the stun energy delivered on contact. The arrowhead jetted on, ramming another while the others in its quartet did likewise until the rest of the lizards noticed their appearance and began huddling up into groups and overlapping their shields while sticking their plasma rods out through the gaps, hoping to catch one of the arrowheads with the tip as they came at them.

Tucked safely inside the arrowheads’ sleek hull, the Archons and aquatics regulars knew better than to get that close, so they ignored the knots of infantry and picked off the individuals, many of whom were just coming up out of the rocks. As they did more formations of arrowheads popped up in various locations, ramming the lizards into unconsciousness with the specially designed ridge on the little aquatics craft that delivered stun blows against solid targets rather than the liquid water…which was a tricky bit of engineering.

Other than the V-shaped stun edge the arrowheads were just quick transports, unsuited for any other combat. Going up against infantry was almost too easy, aside from when they turtled up like many were doing now…but as they’d quickly find out that wasn’t a good idea.

A group of six lizards had formed a complete dome around themselves with their plasma rods sticking out to hit any arrowhead that tried to ram them when a shield column descended on top of them, forming a seal against the topmost lizard shield. A split second later a plasma blast came down through the vacuum and vaporized both the lizard shield and the lizard underneath it, along with all the water surrounding the other 5 lizards.

A huge steam cloud blocked out any vision of the site, but then it lifted up, heading for the ongoing battles above, revealing bits and pieces of charred lizard floating about where the shield huddled formation had been.

Those lizards near enough to see what had happened suddenly rethought their defensive maneuver and broke up into smaller groups, using their shields as side walls as they swam forward. Some of the arrowheads went after them, ramming into the groups now that their plasma rods weren’t deployed, but rather tucked inside as they swam forward. The Star Force pilots concentrated on them like sharks spinning about a school of fish, darting in and out making strikes.

Like the streaks, the arrowhead bent at the middle, approximately where the pilot’s knees were located in the flat machine, allowing it to make sharper turns. With that agility, and no vehicular backup for the infantry, the arrowheads had no problem keeping the lizards from getting to the tower and planting their explosives…but as they zipped around, picking off those lizards that were closest while even more continued to arrive, a large piece of debris fell down from above and landed on the 300m wide plain around the tower.

The lizards immediately took to it for cover and turtled up behind it. A shield column came down and shot it, but it was too big to dislodge quickly, so it continued to fire down into it, having to reset the vacuum lock each time by pushing a ‘plug’ of shield down the length and getting all the water out that was flowing back up.

Clean, mate, fire…clean, mate, fire. That was the cycle that had the plasma cannon chewing apart the lizards’ new cover, but it wasn’t the only piece to come down. Two more smaller ones joined it, then a cascade of large ones began raining down…pieces of the turret that the lizards were chewing apart from above.

The arrowheads had to dart out of the way and eventually retreat to the backside of the tower to avoid the debris, allowing the suicidal lizards a narrow window of opportunity, though a number of them were still going down to the PDM coming from the base of the tower. They swam forward in a massive charge, many of them being crushed as the debris landed on them while they tried to get to the side of the tower.

A few brave arrowheads zipped around near the giant cylinder, using it for cover given that the debris seemed to be leaving a narrow clear zone right up next to the massive construct. Those arrowheads zipped around the perimeter like they were making laps, never slowing down or turning around and ramming lizards as they passed. Soon more joined them, forming an unending train making circles around the tower and ramming any lizards that got that close.

An explosion from above rocked both the arrowheads and lizards below as their counterparts higher up successfully tore out a section of the tower, with the shockwaves being felt all the way down to the seafloor. Further up the construct was a mass of blue lights and occasional green flickers from lizard contact weapons. More and more debris continued to fall down until the arrowheads got an evac order and made a beeline back towards the fence that surrounded the city…just as the top section of the tower began list.

It looked like a log that termites had gotten a hold of, with huge chunks missing from it, but it was a section along the middle that had taken the worst damage. It was from there that the imbalance occurred…along with a bit of pushing by the surviving lizard carriers. The entire top half buckled and tipped over, then the break point completely snapped and slid off, tossing 3/5ths of the tower off to the side where it floated down and crashed into the seafloor tip first, then continued to slowly keel over until it landed on its side, crushing into the rock formations below.

A number of weapons on the bottom half continued to fire, even with the water flowing in from above. The design had been compartmentalized, and there were no personnel inside, so some of the plasma cannons below were still functional and reached up towards the ships overhead vengefully, but they didn’t last long. The infantry that had survived the falling debris swam up to the tower, now that the arrowheads were gone, and planted charges directly next to the plasma cannons.

Some set timers, others didn’t bother and just blew themselves up with the Human weapons, but as the arrowheads retreated back to the fence the remaining defensive capability of the tower was picked apart and eliminated as the remains of the lizard fleet and their now arrived reinforcements concentrated on the second tower, attempting to do the same there.

Vander didn’t see the tower go down, as he was busy with the sharks from the reinforcement fleet, but he did notice it disappear from him battlemap…then he saw the holographic depiction of its remains laying across the ocean floor.

“Damn it,” he swore while keeping attention on the pair of sharks ahead of him. He was going to ram the slower of the two, but so far neither had broken their paired formation. The Archon was about to pick one and hope he could get a decent plasma shot off before the other turned on him when a new contact appeared on his battlemap, emerging as a long, large line in the sky that spread out into the comforting curves of the underside of the Dutchman as it landed in the ocean directly beside the second tower and was slowly descending into the fight.

Shield columns extended from 8 locations on the underside, streaking out to connect with the large lizard ships, then pumping plasma shots down them as the Star Force battleship engaged multiple contacts at once. Its bays began pumping out squids as well, ensuring the demise of the lizard fleet as the Black Pearl pressed in from the western side, offering the enemy an escape vector to the southeast, but they were hell-bent on hitting the tower to the north and continued to press their attack, hoping to do at least some damage to the gigantic underwater pillar.

The two battleships and the tower itself took their stupidity face on and systematically cut the lizard fleet to shreds over the course of the next 20 minutes, with only a pair of torpedoes actually reaching their target. Neither breached the shields, given that they hit in different locations at different times, though they did suck a considerable amount of strength out of them, and had the Dutchman not arrived when it did, the lizards would have at least seriously damaged the tower in the last stages of the battle.

Once the last of the capital ships were destroyed the arrowheads were recalled from the city to help deal with the infantry, along with other Star Force transports that followed in their wake, collecting the stunned lizards, corpses, their equipment, and other pieces of salvage, clearing away the 300m perimeter around the base of the tower. After that the recovery crews began chewing apart the dead lizard ships, along with recovering their own damaged squids, both those from the battleships and those the city had deployed in the first stages of the battle along with a scattering of other ships, including other streaks that Vander finally came across as they patrolled the area post battle.

He was recalled first, given that he’d been out on assignment with the Black Pearl, and headed in towards the gigantic net-like wall that surrounded the city in a spiral, offering only one entryway between the overlapping sides. Vander’s streak, however, was narrow enough to shoot the gaps in the fence and he did just that, passing through the metallic grating that kept larger ships at bay. Given the side of the city that he was on, he actually passed through two sections of overlapping fence, then he was inside the perimeter looking in on the giant seashell-shaped city of Manaan.

Vander headed for one of the hangar bays, passing through the water conduit that sported defense turrets of its own, and up into an internal lagoon that held an atmosphere similar to the small bay on the Black Pearl that the streak had originated from. His long ship floated up to the surface then trolled its way into one of the many docking berths where a mechanical walkway extended out to the streak and attached to its midsection, holding the ship in place and giving Vander an easy way to get to the nearby dock as he popped the hatch on the streak and stood up off the pommel seat.

He stretched his back and popped his helmet off, sucking in a deep breath of marine air and scratching a spot on his head that had been nagging him for several minutes, then he stepped up onto the short bridge and walked over onto the dock where a maintenance crew of three were waiting.

“Welcome back,” a female tech by the name of Heather offered, knowing Vander well, given that Manaan was his base of operations. The stint on the Black Pearl had only been a 2-day mission out hunting lizards near one of Star Force’s mining sites.

“Needs torpedoes and some plasma,” he said, all business.

“Did they get one of the towers?” a male tech asked as the third slid off the dock and swam two meters over to the side of the streak and opened up a side panel in the armor with a specialized tool.

“Unfortunately yes,” Vander said, pausing for a moment as he visually did an inventory on the ships in the bay…seeing very few of what was usually berthed here. Most of them were still outside, either patrolling or working the recovery and cleanup effort. “And I’d expect they’ll be back soon to take advantage of the weakness. Get her reloaded as soon as you can.”

“Will do,” the female tech answered, then got busy with another panel on the topside of the ship as Vander walked off, heading for the large pressure doors that led into the city, on his way to see Kyler. Between his previous mission and the recent assault, they had quite a few things to discuss.

5

On his way up to the command level Vander stopped by the armory and got out of his silver aquatics armor, a more robust version of the standard Archon armor that included small jet propulsion units in addition to a larger air supply…along with the means to manufacture oxygen directly from the ocean water.

He’d been in it for the past 9 hours, having pulled two missions back to back, but didn’t stop by his quarters for a shower nor the cafeteria to grab a bite to eat, instead he went straight up to the command level that sat 2/3rds of the way up the city superstructure and was imbedded deep inside, making it one of the last places that would be breached by weaponsfire or invading troops.

When Vander got there it was quiet, yet busy, with staff and a scattering of Archons moving about showing more activity than they should have been, given that the battle was over. Recovery efforts would take some coordination, but he sensed an angst in the room that belied something else was going on.

He found Kyler in a circle of three other Archons around the central planning table, talking amongst each other while looking over a holographic map of the surface of the planet, so he didn’t interrupt, but he did step up beside the trailblazer and listen in, letting him visually know that he’d arrived.

“Take it,” Cryson-933 urged.

“Can we?” Preston-1229 asked, raising an eyebrow. “We lost a lot of squids today. They’re not going to be easy to replace.”

“They lost a lot more than we did. The attrition rate’s in our favor.”

Kyler shook his head. “No. They got exactly what they wanted when they took that tower down. They may have wanted both, but I’d guess that was more to split our defensive forces and maximize their chances of getting one, which they did.”

“What are we looking at,” Eaton-2503 asked, “9 months to get a new one built?”

“If we have the resources on hand, yeah,” Kyler wavered. “If not,” he said, glancing to his left at Vander. “How bad did we get hit?”

“The lizards junked two with det packs,” he answered, referring to the processing units in the mining outpost his previous mission had sent him out to deal with. “The rest saw superficial damage and are still operational.”

“How’d they get past the defenses?” Cryson asked.

“They tunneled,” Vander said, his voice taut with frustration. “There was a natural fissure running underneath the perimeter defenses. They added to it in some key points, but most of it was already there waiting for them. We got it sealed up, and the techs are working to fill it and others in so this won’t happen again.”

“What’d they use to dig through the rock?” Kyler asked, frowning.

“I could barely fit into the hole in my armor, so it wasn’t anything big, but we couldn’t recover anything. I’d guess they took their time and set up the tunnel well before the attack.”

“How many got in?” Eaton asked, leaning forward so far on the table that his arms dipped into the hologram a bit.

“Six with det packs and another 40 or so escorts. We couldn’t find the ship that brought them, so it must have bugged out as soon as it dropped them off.”

“Damn suicide run,” Cryson bit out.

“Not atypical of them,” Kyler commented, rubbing his smooth chin where his stubble used to be as he thought. It was a habit that he hadn’t broken yet, despite the fact that his facial hair follicles had been deactivated years ago. “But they had no chance of destroying the entire facility with only six det packs?”

“Not even close,” Vander answered his glance. “Maybe they thought they could hit the power core and cause a chain reaction, but they’ve got to have better intel on our tech than that. My guess is they just wanted to cause damage and slow down our growth rate.”

“We’re the stronger here,” Kyler reminded them. “In the past that hasn’t been the case. I think we’re starting to see a shift in tactics, not unlike what they’ve used against the Kvash in space…save there’s more opportunity to slink about down here than in vacuum.”

“We need a bigger sensor grid,” Eaton insisted, referencing the sensor limitations that had the stealthy lizard aquatics hulls disappearing from view at a range of about 3-4 kilometers, with their biggest ships registering out to about 5-6km. Their infantry showed up first, in some cases, because they didn’t carry the armor that their craft did. Like their space navy, their aquatics forces became ghosts at range, despite the continually advancing Star Force detection capabilities.

“We can’t defend much more than we’ve got,” Cryson pointed out. “They’re already disabling the perimeter nodes.”

“Two ideas,” he countered. “One, we make mobile units and have them swim random paths. Two, we build larger units with defenses, linked into city or outpost control.”

“The second will require resources that we don’t have,” Kyler reminded him.

“If it saves us having to replace equipment they would otherwise have damaged, I’d say it could logistically be worth it.

“We need to go hunting,” Vander pressed. “That will take some of the pressure off of our defenses…and allow us to build what we need. If they keep us on the defensive they’ll win the resource race, because the fleet isn’t able to keep their cruisers in orbit and it’s a big planet.”

Kyler looked at his fellow aquatics specialist. “Other than sending the battleships out, what are you suggesting?”

“They’ve got more shipyards out there than we’ve been able to locate. We need to find them.”

“If you have any suggestions as to how to do that?” Cryson implored.

“The assault fleet didn’t come in via air,” Vander reminded them, referring to the initial assault on the city. “That limits their range.”

“Unless they took their time getting here,” Eaton pointed out.

“No, he’s right,” Kyler said, looking down at the map. “There have been too many raids without air drop. They have to have at least a transitional base somewhere close. Any guesses?”

Vander looked down at the map, seeing the section of the planet where Star Force had set up the bulk of its operations. There were 3 main cities, each a huge independent colony identical to Manaan. They were spread out in a triangle approximately 3600 kilometers apart from one another. Around each were clusters of additional facilities, mining the seafloor for resources. Rail lines didn’t connect them, as was usual Star Force protocol, given that the lizards could easily disable them, though some of the closest facilities were connected via subsurface tunnels.

That tunnel network was expanding out slowly, leaving the bulk of the shipments having to occur either through air, point to point, or through the water via transports. Both were used, but the lizards had quickly started poaching the air transports, either by dropping fighters via cruiser and having them run them down, or by deploying them from aquatics craft and doing the same. Skeet escorts then had to be used, and the overall process essentially ground to a halt with Star Force shifting almost everything underwater where the fighters couldn’t go.

The result was large convoys traversing the grid of mining sites under heavy escort. Usually those weren’t hit, given the number and size of ships protecting them, but the lizards weren’t above putting ambush forces down in the rocky seafloor and trying to damage a freighter as they passed over with det packs or a torpedo salvo, chipping away at the freighters whenever they could get the chance.

The bulk of other production, aside from the mining sites, was located around the cities but inside the massive fences that protected them from direct assault. Those included bioharvest facilities, processing centers, shipyards, and the rest of the standard allotment of Star Force infrastructure that couldn’t be housed within the city itself as Kyler and the rest of the Archons continued to expand their production capability.

“I’d suspect somewhere here,” Vander said, jabbing a finger into the hologram about 300 kilometers to the east of Manaan, “but that’s just a gut feeling.”

“How do we check on your gut feeling?” Preston asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “That’s a lot of deep, dark ocean to search with a tiny sensor brush.”

“I know,” Vander agreed, “but we’ve got to do something. It’s been 3 years since we found and killed a lizard base…and no, I’m not counting those startups.”

“At this point,” Kyler interrupted, “I’m willing to concede that the lizards can out build us, but they seem concerned about stunting out growth as well, so I don’t think we have the same situation as we would if this was on land. Their aquatics are less robust, and I’m guessing the same goes for their underwater resource collection, otherwise they wouldn’t keep trying the resource drops from orbit.”

“They’re used to stealing resources that they haven’t been able to do here,” Cryson added.

“A fair point,” Kyler offered, “but it’s more than that. I get the distinct feeling that they don’t want waterworlds…they just don’t want us to have them. Agree/disagree?”

“Possible,” Preston said.

“They wanted Ariel’s,” Cryson pointed out.

“She said they were learning a lot in the process,” Eaton added. “I agree with Kyler. This is putting them out of their element, but they are learning.”

“And they’re dangerously clever,” Vander finished. “Water or no water.”

“We can’t search the entire planet,” Kyler said, “and they’re not taking the land bait. So other than following what leads we get and waiting for them to come to us…”

The other four Archons were silent for a moment, until Preston finally spoke.

“I don’t know why, but I get the feeling like they’re starting to win. We don’t know how many ships they have, where they are, and they just knocked down a mark 5 defense tower on our front door. I think the only place we know they’re going to be is right here,” he said, pointing to the city under his feet. “We’ve got a weakness in our defenses that we can’t easily patch. This feels like a prelude to a larger assault. Now, we can track them through the atmosphere easier than we can underwater, so that’s where we should focus our detection efforts,” he said, nodding at Eaton.

“How?” Kyler asked.

“We need more forewarning,” Preston continued. “We have to push the sensor nodes out further.”

“They’ll pick them off, one by one,” Cryson warned.

“Do you still think they’re approaching along the seafloor?” Kyler asked Eaton.

“Yes.”

The trailblazer zoomed the holographic map in on Manaan and its satellite facilities, bringing up a more detailed topography of the region. “Best guesses.”

“We know they come in through here,” Vander said immediately, pointing to a curvy valley that ran south of the city, coming within 20 kilometers at the closest point with shallower veins running all the way up to within 3 kilometers. “I’ve personally seen two groups passing through there, and there have been other contacts noted.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Cryson said, jumping ahead in the conversation, “but it’s the trench sensors they always take out first.”

“I wasn’t thinking sensors…I was thinking fence, plus sensors, plus towers. A quartet of mark 3s or a lot of 2s.”

“That’s a lot of resources we don’t have,” Eaton pointed out.

“And all it’ll do is cause them to make a detour,” Preston added. “If we had better sensor range it might be worth it, but their damn armor makes them ghosts outside of a few kilometers. I don’t see how a fence is going to be effective.”

“I do,” Vander countered, “but it’s over our heads right now. We need more battleships, and wasting resources on anything else is foolish.”

“Go back,” Preston urged. “How is a fence effective given the sensor limitations?”

“What’s the lizards’ sensor range?” Vander countered.

“25-30 kilometers for a midsized vessel,” Eaton answered. “As of 200 years ago.”

“And we know that because we captured their tech tree schematics,” Vander pointed out. “Do they know what our sensor range is?”

“They probably have a good guess by now.”

“Do they?” Kyler asked. “Aside from firing on them, how do they know? Given perfect water conditions our shield columns extend out almost to the edge of our effective sensor range.”

“You’re suggesting they don’t realize how blind we are?” Cryson asked.

“Why would they bother running trenches?” Vander pointed out.

“Even if you’re right, all that does is tell us they’re being extra careful about their movements.”

“It also tells us,” Kyler added, “that they’re worried about our speed. If we detect them 500 kilometers away we can get a battleship there in a blink of an eye, relatively speaking, and they know it. Their ships are pinned to the water, and therefore vulnerable, so they’re doing their best to stay hidden as they move around…they just don’t know that we can’t see them.”

“You think a fence across the trench will scare them off?” Preston asked.

“I think it might disrupt their routes, which is the point.”

Vander nodded. “If they’re using the terrain like roads, strategically placed fences could be useful in the long term.”

“But it’s still a bluff,” Cryson pointed out. “And I say we can’t be wasting resources on mind games.”

“He is right.”

Kyler looked behind him to the small pool of water built into the floor. “How long have you been there?”

The Elarioni smiled from just beneath the surface. “Long enough,” the computer translation said.

“Thank you,” Cryson said, walking around the display table so he could see Ariel more clearly. “How am I right?”

“The lizards are used to dealing with longer sensor ranges, so they are cautious. They do not know of your weakness, because their armor did not stop Elarioni sensors. They may suspect, but given our flying ships and the speed of our smaller ones they are reluctant to try. They will not remain reluctant forever. The more contact they have, the more they will learn. They do not learn today, for there were no survivors.”

“Actually there are 52 captives…so far,” Kyler pointed out.

“You will release them?” the mermaid-like alien asked.

“I’d like to, but where? Not going to drop them off in the middle of nowhere to starve to death.”

“They’ll be dead by the end of the day,” Vander guessed, reminding him of the lizards’ suicidal habits when taken prisoner.

“I ordered them sedated for the time being,” Kyler said off hand.

“Do not,” Ariel warned. “Give them no information from the battle to study.”

“Assuming they didn’t send telemetry out,” Vander noted.

“We detected none,” Ariel countered.

“We can hold onto them indefinitely, though Vander is probably right about them killing themselves,” Kyler added.

“I have need of escort,” the Elarioni said bluntly.

Kyler and the other Archons frowned. “Where to?”

She swam to the side of the small pool and interfaced with an underwater console, altering the hologram above the table to match a small one inside the water, allowing her to confer with the Humans. Using that ability she zoomed in the regional map all the way down to the city, then highlighted the debris field, tagging one of the three dead lizard aquatics cruisers.

“I need to go there. Now.”

“What is it?” Kyler asked, having learned to trust her instincts.

“A hunch.”

“I’ll take you,” Cryson offered.

With barely a nod of recognition Ariel swam down to the bottom of the pool and disappeared into a water tunnel, heading elsewhere in the city through the personal transit system Star Force had built for her when she volunteered to help them fight the lizards on the frontier rather than be returned to the splinter group of her race in Nestafar space.

Cryson walked off, nodding at Kyler on the way out, leaving the other Archons to continue their now pointless discussion. Something was up, and they didn’t have a clue what it could be.

“I want a perimeter patrol around the debris,” Kyler said, tagging the area on the map and using it to send out the order. “Double lines.”

“I’ll head back out,” Vander said. “I want to see what she finds.”

“Might want to move the battleships out further,” Eaton suggested.

Kyler twitched his head, silently giving him the go ahead to send the order, leaving the trailblazer and Preston at the holographic table staring at the map.

“Ok, the fence was a stretch,” he admitted.

Preston smiled. “We have to do something. I just wish we knew what it was.”

6

Cryson slipped his streak through the large gaps in the fence surrounding Manaan, aiming for the square holes between the meters thick strands making up a narrow, inverted ‘V’ that ended just shy of the ocean surface, finishing the last bit of elevation with a single line of fencing that reached up to block the remaining waterways into the city’s perimeter. The gaps wouldn’t keep small craft out, but they would keep most of the lizards’ warships back from the infrastructure, forcing any battles to take place at a distance rather than directly over the city.

The fence itself comprised a huge mass of metal, stretching 1.4 miles in height with a circumference of 38 miles, but the investment of resources to build it and its two twins surrounding Ackbar and Seaquest had paid off given the number of raids it’d thwarted. The spiral design overlapped for a span of 3.2 miles, creating a corridor that all traffic had to travel through, and was just wide enough for a battleship to pass, though given their flight ability they had the option of just hopping over the fence on anti-grav.

The streak was one of a few Star Force craft narrow enough to shoot the gaps in the fence, with plenty of smaller defense towers inside the perimeter to deal with lizard craft of similar size that tried to get through without their larger cousins backing them up. They’d tried a few times, but had given up the attempt after city defense patrols kept intercepting them. This most recent assault had been the largest to date, and signaled a significant shift in tactics.

Cryson zipped his streak out the second side of the fence and accelerated over to the ruins of the defense tower, then altered course to the gap between it and the adjacent one that had come under attack, following the littering of ships like a trail of bread crumbs. When he eventually got near the second he found the dead cruiser Ariel had indicated, having been killed before it could close range. Cryson lowered the streak in a spiral down to where it lay on the seafloor with the aft end sticking up at an angle and made two full rotations around the wreck looking for trouble before heading to ground.

Cryson parked well out from the cruiser as a number of squids and arrowheads circled around the area, making sure no one was going to get a shot off at their aquatics expert. The Archon pressed a button on the streak’s control board and the water-filled canopy opened to the ocean, allowing him in his armor to swim up and out as Ariel deftly pulled ahead of him, emerging from behind his seat in the cockpit. Her tiny form wriggled as she swam ahead, with Cryson using the propulsion units in his armor’s arms to keep pace behind her.

“Anything?” Cryson asked, tagging those personnel already scouring the ship in his comm choices.

“Ship is clear,” Vander reported. “They caught a few survivors hiding inside, but they didn’t last long. One was taken prisoner.”

“Stay sharp,” Cryson reminded him and the others listening in.

“We’ve got your back,” his fellow Archon promised.

Cryson switched to Ariel’s comm and highlighted it individually. “What are we looking for?” he asked as they swam towards the broken cruiser, which looked absolutely huge up close, and they were still more than 200 meters away.

“One of the tendrils on this cruiser is still intact. I need to examine the internal mechanics. Hopefully they are also still intact and accessible,” she said, speaking through a necklace that translated and transmitted her native language, otherwise she was completely naked, as was typical of her species, given this was her natural environment.

“Where are we going in?”

“Midsection breach.”

“Let me go first,” he prompted.

“Don’t make me slow down,” she teased.

Cryson smiled and kicked in his ankle jets, pulling up beside her and inching ahead. His armor was bulky by Archon standards, but in the water it felt extremely agile…aside from compared to the Elarioni, who could swim circles around him at will. On the back where a weapons rack and pack would normally have sat was a smooth flap extending from the shoulders down to his waist, underneath which he had a pair of ‘needlers’ stashed away, just in case.

The weapons, colored pink in Halo homage, contained the pen-sized anti-personnel PDMs that the towers and streaks carried, only in much smaller numbers. He had 10 per weapon, each of which would kill a lizard on contact, though their legionnaire shield gauntlets would hold up to several detonations before going down.

The weapons had a targeting laser that could be used to paint targets for them to swim to, otherwise they were just point and shoot with an optional proximity detonation setting, though if they didn’t actually hit the target the odds of them doing sufficient damage were slim, given their low yields.

The PDM on the streaks were slightly larger, as were most of those in the towers, but in a pinch the Archons could use the needler to shoot down incoming minnows…if they were a good shot.

Cryson and Ariel swam up to the most viable breach point on the hull…a massive blast point where plasma had triggered some sort of internal explosion, opening up the dark brown hull to the ocean water, though in the depths it appeared nearly black, save for the scattering of lights the patrols were carrying.

Cryson had sensor telemetry overlaid on his helmet’s HUD to navigate by, but he also had lights on the exterior of his armor, one of which was on and glowed a dull orange, marking his position along with those of the other Archons and regulars out swimming about. Otherwise it was a dark, empty graveyard of hull fragments surrounding the bulk of the dead lizard ship, with the giant blast crater making it look even more intimidating.

Ariel didn’t seem to mind, and could see quite well on her own, given her bioluminescent eyes. They glowed golden, while tiny patches of skin along the length of her body provided aqua-colored lights depicting her location alongside Cryson’s orange marker.

The Archon swam into the breach point first, flicking on the rest of his armor’s external lights and bathing the area in a white glow along with the help of a regular who was already swimming about inside the ship. Ariel stayed right behind him, whipping her tail back and forth to provide thrust while using her arms as rudders to control her orientation and direction of movement. Her normally loose green hair was tied back in a sleek ponytail, a sign that she felt excessive speed might be necessary, thus the additional streamlining.

“Guide me,” Cryson prompted.

“Right,” Ariel’s computer processed voice said, sounding identical to the Disney version, thanks to whatever joker had done the programming. Most of the other Archons hadn’t noticed, but he’d had a younger sister who’d been a Disney fanatic growing up, and as a result he’d become knowledgeable in a lot of movies and TV shows he’d otherwise never have watched on his own.

Cryson swam around a corner and down a corridor that looked like a hamster tunnel. It was totally different from the lizards’ typical interior designs, indicating that this ship had been built with water-filled interiors rather than air-filled ones.

“New model,” he commented.

“A good sign,” Ariel’s cartoon voice said in his helmet. “It increases the likelihood that the equipment will still be functional.”

“Point,” the Archon said, coming up against a section of tunnel that was sheered in two by some type of bulkhead that was now blocking their way.

“Left,” Ariel prompted.

Cryson pointed his right arm away from his body and reversed the flow, using it to push rather than pull, while leading with his gun-wielding left around the corner. They moved through several more sections, having to backtrack twice around damaged areas, before they finally got to a main corridor that led them to the area where Ariel wanted to go.

They passed by a piece of lizard hand floating in the corridor, with the webbing between the four fingers clearly visible…yet one of the many genetic augmentations they’d made for their water-breathing variant. A little further ahead they turned a corner and came to another damaged section, with more bits and pieces of lizard and machinery floating about.

Ariel bypassed them all, swimming ahead of Cryson to a nook in the large room they’d come to and trying to access a particular console. She got some function out of it while the Archon merely waited and watched, then the Elarioni swam to the side and pointed to a section of the wall.

Cryson swam forward, using his body rather than his jets, and latched his armored fingers into the grooves on a wall panel, then planted a foot beside it and lightly pulled, popping it off with Ariel swimming into the gap before he even had it halfway removed. Clearly she was eager to find something, because this was above and beyond her normally energetic mood when out in open water.

Cryson waited again, not sure if he could even squeeze into the passageway with the width of his shoulders. He was visibly sizing it up as he pulled his needler back off its hook and into his hand, knowing there were lots of places in here were a survivor could be hiding out, though they usually preferred the frontal attack or suicide charge to laying ambushes…but it wasn’t unheard of.

A few minutes later Ariel came back out head first, having somehow turned around in the narrow shaft. In her hand was a small component, a type of control node by the look of it. The Elarioni held it up in front of Cryson’s helmet for him to see clearly.

“This is what I was looking for. It controls one of their defense tendrils, seeking out nearby targets and differentiating between friend and foe without crew input.”

“An upgrade?”

“More than that. This was made from Elarioni technology. Reverse-engineered, for this isn’t our construction. The materials are lizard, but the design is not.”

Cryson frowned. “How bad is it?”

“I’ll need the techs to analyze this in detail, but it’s not good. Even if the programming is half as effective as Elarioni technology, this will be a problem. We can disable these batteries on their ships from afar, so that’s not significant, but if they implement it large scale…”

“I’ve never seen the real ones, so you’ll have to fill in the blanks for me.”

“We won’t be able to use any of our direct contact weapons. The tendrils will take out our ships with ease. Even the streaks could get caught, depending on the speed of the mechanics, because this,” she said, tapping a blue finger lightly against the control node, “will help them predict the movement of incoming objects, increasing the odds of intercept. Even if all they have them armed with are plasma nubs, they will be effective against our technology.”

“Are you done here?”

“Yes, though we need to recover the tendril pinned beneath the ship, if it’s salvageable. Tell them to be careful, this one still has power. I wasn’t able to deactivate it from here.”

“You want me to carry that?”

“I have it,” Ariel said, swimming by him and heading back through the ship fast enough that Cryson knew he wasn’t going to have a chance of staying with her.

“Showoff,” he muttered.

Two weeks later…

“They’re making another drop run,” Captain Ender commented as he watched the tactical hologram from the bridge of the Hawkeye.

“Who’s got it?” Sara asked via the comm.

“We do.”

“Do we have an angle?”

“Slim. They’re coming in hard.”

“Damn it,” Sara said, tossing aside her towel and hastily pulling on her uniform over a still shower-wet body. Her earpiece was the only thing on her that was actually dry. “What have we got moving?”

“Two corvettes. They’re running three cruisers, two of which are transports.”

“What do we have for an atmospheric intercept?” the trailblazer asked, pulling on her shoes sockless and running out her quarters’ door.

“Nothing. They’re headed for the backside of the planet.”

“How is that in our zone?” she asked, running through the warship’s corridors, dodging personnel on the way.

“The lizards are being creative in their approach vector. Looks like they’re going to aerobrake pretty hard, so even if we did have surface assets we couldn’t give them a decent prediction of where they’re going to come down.”

“What’s the corvette loadouts?”

“Maulers both,” he said, referring to the section of each ship that was modular and could be swapped out for different weapon systems.

“How long till we get a shot?”

“12 minutes.”

“Copy that,” Sara said, ending their conversation as she ducked into a stairwell, bypassing the elevators in favor of running. She knew she didn’t have to be on the bridge for the intercept, and could have left Ender in command and not given it a second thought, but the lizard fleets in orbit around Atlantica were constantly playing games with them and a gut feeling said she needed to get up there and follow this live.

In addition to her fleet, which consisted of 6 warship-class jumpships, there were five others in orbit, along with 3 Star Force battle stations in close formation, mere kilometers apart so they could overlap their defenses. It was those seda copies that had allowed Star Force to retain a presence in orbit, for when the lizard counter offensive began 6 years ago they’d arrived with a fleet 4 times as large as theirs and had immediately set upon clearing orbit of anything alien.

They hadn’t been able to remove the battle stations, which gave the Star Force fleets a fixed point to retreat to. That first assault had lasted 3 weeks, during which the lizards lost half their fleet trying to take them down. The surface damage to the stations was extensive, but between their numerous cleansing beams and the backing of the warships, they systematically tore apart the lizard ships when they came at them, enough that they hadn’t tried to assault the trio of stations again…despite the fact that their insystem fleet now numbered twice what it had been during that first assault.

Star Force had lost a lot of ships in that first defensive effort, but with that little piece of orbit secured Paul had been able to work his naval magic and keep the lizards continually frustrated. Both sides maintained orbital presences around the planet, attacking whenever they saw an opportunity while their surface forces vied for possession of the planet.

Paul had managed to secure the low ground…which in orbital terms was the prime zone around the planet within a few hundred miles of the atmosphere. That gave their ships the ability to maneuver around to different latitudes faster than the higher orbits, making response times better, as well as positioning themselves between them and the lizards, as hilarious as that notion was, given how much open space there was around a planet that simply couldn’t be shut off to ships wishing to pass through to the surface.

Like their basic training had first taught them long ago, getting down to a planet from orbit was easy…so the only way to stop someone from doing it was to get to them first, which the pair of Corvette-class drones were attempting to do now.

Sara arrived on the bridge with a few minutes to spare, shaking water droplets out of her short hair as she walk/jogged across to the Admiral’s chair and slid in, using the control interfaces to get up to speed rather than have the Captain talk her through it. He was seated nearby in his own command chair, monitoring the catch attempt.

The trailblazer pulled up an assessment program, which calculated the various trajectories of the 5 ships in question, seeing the difficult angle the corvettes were having to come in at and the speed of which they were going to pass by each other given they were travelling on two different lines that were about to cross.

“Ahead or follow?” she asked Ender as to which orders he’d given.

“Follow…given we don’t know their exact arrival point. We can go atmosphere if we have to when trailing.”

Sara nodded, then her eyes switched to the large hologram directly in front of her chair that detailed the orbital situation around the entire planet, though at the moment it had been zoomed in on their quarter of it. Touching a button she zoomed it back out, knowing that the people who needed the close-in data would be able to access copies of it on their individual consoles.

“A feint?” Ender asked, catching her line of thought.

“When’s the last time they only sent three ships?” she countered. The rest of their warships were split up into 17 different fleets occupying various points around middle orbit, some of which were very far out, essentially parking themselves for use later. Others were set up strategically on various jumplines, both from the star and the other planets, hoping to catch incoming Star Force jumpships while simultaneously protecting their own on arrival.

But again, a planet was huge, so with a little work, finding pirate jumplines past the entrenched fleets wasn’t difficult, but it did keep one on their toes, especially with lizard ships deployed elsewhere in the system trying to ambush incoming and outgoing convoys. So far they hadn’t succeeded in doing more than scaring Star Force ships into short delays as they circumvented the threats, but given the lizard ships’ ability to remain undetected at long range, a napping officer on duty could lead to a nasty surprise attack.

Fortunately, no one in Star Force’s military was even remotely lazy, given that most of them were over 100 years old and had achieved self-sufficiency long ago.

“I’ll be in the nexus,” Sara said, all but jumping out of her chair and jogging across the large bridge to the open door annex that held the Archon-only control chamber. She walked up to the control podium and activated the encircling holographic display, pulling up the telemetry from one of the corvettes and watching from its perspective as its twin was running slightly ahead of it and to the right.

Three closely spaced contacts, highlighted by ID tags, were crossing from left to right ahead of them, and the corvettes turned slightly as they continued to accelerate, causing the enemy ships to move back left again, before proceeding to creep to the right towards the planet’s atmosphere.

A line suddenly was drawn, emanating from her corvette, marking the line of a lachar being fired. The camera display that the holograms were being created from didn’t see it, given that there was no glowing trail to see, which was why the computer tagged the long range weaponsfire…and the impact on the leading ship.

“Good shot,” she said, putting it down to luck until several more blasts were fired, all missing with one additional hit, suggesting that it was more than luck. Sara hadn’t expected anyone to be able to hit from this range, not that it was doing much good. The heavy lachar blasts would penetrate most of the lizard shields, but unless the pilot got really lucky, it wasn’t going to do much more than chew up a little armor. They’d have to get considerably closer to be able to target key hull structures. 

As if in response to the attack, the three contacts spread out a bit as they accelerated again, causing Sara to frown. They were already moving at crazy speed for being this close to the atmosphere, but now they were just being reckless. Shields or no shields, come in too fast and they’d burn up in the friction.

The trailblazer typed in a quick set of orders to her two ships to not try and match their speed, just keep in close. Due to the corvettes’ smaller size they’d be able to decelerate faster, but even they were approaching dangerous speeds.

A few moments later the lizards finally decelerated…hard. Sara was happy to see the corvettes match their maneuver while cutting the distance between them to a fourth of what it had been. Both ships opened up with their lachars, poking small holes into the ships but too far away for plasma fire. As they fought to get within range to use their more powerful weapons the lizards began to enter the atmosphere, creating huge plumes of disruption as they tore into the gas layers as if they were liquid, given the speed they were still carrying.

The shields on the corvettes elongated into spikes, helping to decrease their friction, but Sara could see their power levels begin to continuously drain as they fought to stay close to the lizards. The enemy’s shields must have been likewise deplenishing, meaning if/when they caught up to them they’d be able to break through with only a few shots…but the same would be true for the lizards’ weapons.

No intercept was to occur, though, because the lizards kept up their insane speed, forcing the corvettes to lag behind. Should their shields fail, the friction of the atmosphere against their block-like hulls would knock them askew and tear them apart. Either the lizards knew this or they were taking a gamble, because all three ships managed to escape their pursuit and get to the lower atmosphere ahead of the Star Force warships.

They weren’t free and clear yet, Sara knew, because they had to get into the water first, and the corvettes were still coming. As she watched the fiery disruption clouding the camera view, and likewise disrupting any potential lachar fire, clear she could see blue ocean below…along with three orange blips. With a touch to the controls she zoomed in the view and saw all three lizard starships heading down to the surface, their hulls aglow from friction damage and the kirbies on the escort cruiser having been torn off in the descent.

The glow died out quickly, and soon the ships stopped their fall just above the water…then they lowered themselves into the ocean, throwing up pillars of steam as their hulls superheated the water. The two transports began to lower down into the ocean, halfway submerging before blue plasma blasts from the corvettes hit their hulls and the water around them, trying to do what damage they could before they sunk beneath the waves.

Sara saw several hull breaches pop up, in addition to the friction damage already done…then the transports were gone, covered by a protective layer of water as they gained more and more depth. The escort cruiser, however, wasn’t submerging, but rather releasing other, smaller aquatics ships from its cargo holds while its upper surface shielded them.

Plasma blasts ripped into its topside, blowing out chunks of armor but the cruiser held position, returning fire with about half its plasma cannons, for the rest had been damaged during the descent. There was a brief exchange as the corvettes came in closer, then both opened up with their single mauler cannons, adding a baseball bat to the plasma bee stings.

The maulers were more than the cruiser could take, and it reluctantly lowered itself down into the water, with the waves flowing over and into the damaged areas of the hull and flooding several internal sections until they got them locked down, killing a number of the crew in the process.

The corvettes’ weapons fell silent, with both ships hovering over the ocean silently.

Sara used the control podium to open a comm line to the nearest aquatics battleship, the Nautilus, halfway around the planet.

“You up for a side mission, Captain?”

“Possibly,” Anderson said, noncommittally.

“The lizards just made a drop. Two transports and a cruiser. The latter submerged and I’ve got two corvettes hovering over it. They’ll keep it pinned until you can get here.”

The aquatics captain smiled. “Always happy to add another naval kill to our boards. We’ll get underway immediately.”

“Happy hunting,” she offered, cutting the comm and sending appropriate orders to the corvettes.

They should be able to kill the cruiser, one way or another, but the transports, designed to move underwater, would get away, if for no other reason than there were 3 lizard ships and only two corvettes, meaning if they all traveled in different directions they could only follow a pair. The lizard cruiser wasn’t moving, however, and was probably doing what damage repair they could, hoping to wait out the corvettes, who couldn’t stay in hover mode forever.

Sara bit her lip, frustrated. One less cruiser was a good thing, but their sensors could detect multiple smaller aquatics ships descending into the ocean and scurrying off. Now those and whatever the transports contained would be added to the lizards’ underwater front. And given the number of supply runs they were getting through to the surface, Star Force was in danger of losing the war purely from attrition. 

7

September 9, 2429

Retari System

Atlantica

Ariel read the final report on the techs’ analysis of both the control unit and the offensive/defensive tendril recovered from the downed lizard aquatics cruiser, seeing a mix of conflicting data. The unit was patterned after an Elarioni tendril, but the lizards had done a very poor job of copying it in some ways, while others were nearly exact duplicates.

The mechanics were shoddy, with little flexibility and speed compared to the Elarioni designs, which ranged in size from 2 meters long up to a kilometer. Ariel had tried to help the Star Force techs recreate the technology for their own defensive uses, but they hadn’t got far. While she was knowledgeable in many things aquatic that the Humans were not, she was not, in fact, an Elarioni aquatics tech and only had a basic understanding of their underwater technology.

She’d been a mathematician, focusing on navigation systems for their spacefaring craft before her capture. Now she was the foremost aquatics expert Star Force had to draw on, pathetic as that was, which was one reason why she’d elected to stay with the Humans rather than return to her own race. They needed her, badly, despite their impressive adaptive skills. They’d learned much from her over the past 2 centuries, but there was still much more she couldn’t teach them without having access to Elarioni tech, which wasn’t an option.

Paul had offered to arrange her transit through the Alliance and into Elarioni custody, where they would spirit her through Nestafar space to their oceanic colonies…but it was a one way trip, and despite her wish to see her own kind again, she found she truly didn’t want to leave the Humans. Not only had they become a family for her, in an odd way, considering they were repulsive air breathers, but they’d given her the gift of training and self-sufficiency, and she was all but certain that if she returned to her own kind she wouldn’t be able to maintain the levels of workouts the Archons so easily completed, despite their ineptitude in the water.

Also, the Elarioni in Nestafar space weren’t her people. They had died or fled, and despite what Paul had said about this group having picked up survivors from across the galaxy, including those from her destroyed colony, all those that she had known would be long since dead, given that they typically lived 100-150 years. No one that she’d known was still alive, she figured, so what was there to return to? The Humans gave her whatever she wanted, and were constantly encouraging her to dream up new requests for them to create, which helped them grow their own knowledge of underwater life.

Ariel was proud of what her Humans had accomplished, not only here on Atlantica, but on many other worlds, some of which she’d been able to visit before transitioning out here. Their aquatics leader, Lens, had built a magnificent city on a world they called Reach, which was split 40/60 water to land. It was far larger than the three on Atlantica combined, and according to the plans he’d showed her it was barely a fraction of what they were going to eventually build.

Kyler had been doing well here, and the three cities they’d constructed had stood up well to the enemy’s attacks, until recently anyway. The loss of a defense tower was troublesome, but the lizards had paid a high price for it. No matter how hard they hit them, she knew the Humans would win out eventually if they could only build more of their battleships, for while they were crude in design, they were more effective than she’d given them credit for…and not to mention massive, even by Elarioni standards.

The enemy had no answer for them, and she was pretty sure the lizards knew it too, which was why they were so desperate to penetrate the city defenses before the Humans could build any more.

Ariel shut down her terminal, filing away the analysis reports in case she wanted to access them later, and swam through her research lab, waving at the Humans on the other side of a large window in their air chamber as she left and heading through a connecting tunnel, finding one of many branches that wound its way through Manaan’s internal structure and headed towards the outer surface.

She exited through one of 26 external ports and swam out into the open ocean overtop the slight downwards curve of the city behind her. The water out here felt different…slightly warmer and cruder than the processed internal environment Kyler had built into Manaan specifically for her. The other two cities were not so equipped, but they did have some chambers she could use when visiting. Most of her time on the planet she stayed and worked out of Manaan…but sometimes she just needed to get out and feel the wild water on her flesh.

Knowing better than to venture anywhere close to the perimeter fence, Ariel followed the curve of the city, feeling the pressure on her body increase while her body’s size decreased slightly in response. She could go deeper than the city sat, but there were some regions of the planet beyond what her physiology could deal with, but those were far from here, and aside from some mapping expeditions Star Force hadn’t ventured down into those regions, which covered about 18% of the planet.

Ariel wore her communications necklace, so she wasn’t worried about being away from the lab, knowing that the Humans could contact her if needed, so she lazily swam down the side of the city until she reached the polished seafloor, running her fingers across it and dragging up just a bit of silt that had settled on top of the rock that the engineers had ground down to a flat plain. She didn’t know why, but Star Force seemed to dislike any structures that didn’t have straight lines or aerodynamic curves, and the irregular rock of the seafloor seemed to irritate them to no end.

The mermaid-like alien swam a few meters above the polished rock, kicking with her powerful tail in a twitchy, underpowered way that scooted her along quickly with her long green hair trailing behind her while her arms were tucked in next to her sides. She respired through her skin, as all Elarioni did, and the movement through the water actually enhanced her breathing process, much akin to wind stoking a fire by providing more oxygen to it, giving her a boost as she swam, though it was less than half of her top speed.

Still, it took some time to cross the gap to the nearest structure. Another dome/seashell shaped building rose up out of the ground, this one housing a bioharvest facility annex to supplement those inside the main structure, and was connected via a subsurface tunnel, though it did have water entrances should one want to take the long route to get there.

Ariel bypassed it, swimming up and over the visible part of the structure, for it extended well down into the bedrock below. That was another oddity of the Humans. They preferred burrowing beneath their cities, both on land and water. Elarioni built on the seafloor, but did not like living beneath it. Their mining operations were the only exception, out of necessity, but even most of those simply involved cutting out a huge section of material and processing all of it…then returning the unwanted material in to the chasm, filling in the hole they’d just dug.

The Humans liked digging and then building underground, and a good part of Manaan was actually subsurface. The Archons had told her that was for defensive reasons, but she sensed it was more of an aversion to the open water. Elarioni didn’t like being indoors, and built their structures to be as open to the environment as possible, with their spacecraft being ‘oversized’ in order to provide excess internal living space.

When Ariel swam up over the top of the bioharvest facility she got the view of another prime example of their resistance to open water. A building almost as big as the main city structure stretched out more than a mile long, yet was low to the ground, having been built with the bulk of its internal structure below the seafloor.

There were eight massive, armored doors spreading across the top, each covering a piece of the 2x4 grid and protecting the clear water doors beneath. Those enclosed an air pocket in which the Humans were building another of their giant battleships. Even though they were air breathers, she found it difficult not to criticize their decision to build a water ship outside of the water. The hull at least should have been constructed in the open ocean, then they could have pumped in air so they could finish the rest of the construction inside…but no, they had to build them completely away from the water, only exposing them to their primary environment after total construction was completed.

Then again, they were also airships, so in some respects they weren’t true water craft, she often found herself telling herself, but that wasn’t fair and she knew it. They were beasts compared to what the lizards were throwing at them, and to be totally honest, she didn’t like being cut off from their construction.

There were a few waterways in the structure so she could enter and interface with the engineering crews, but she couldn’t touch the ship or anything else inside until they finally opened the main doors after flooding the bay.

That wouldn’t be happening for many more months, as the current occupant wasn’t anywhere close to sea worthy. Currently they had 4 operational battleships, with a fifth due to be finished in a few weeks in Seaquest, but it was taking them almost 2 years to finish a single ship, which was far longer than Kyler had told her it should take…with the main reason for the delay being available resources.

A slight vibration in the water caused Ariel to turn her head to the left where she saw a convoy of transports rising up from their berths at the nearby waterport. They were no doubt empty vessels beginning the return trip to one of the mining sites, and their guardian destroyers were moving out alongside them.

All of their jet engines firing off had created the vibration, but the destroyers were moving on anti-gravs, as the battleships did, though they didn’t share their same design aesthetic. The Star Force aquatics destroyers had an angular design to them with multiple hulls, similar in design to the Normandy from Mass Effect. There were two going out with the convoy, one in the lead and one bringing up the rear, literally daring the lizards to jump them, for each one had a single medium-grade plasma battery of the same make the battleships carried.

That gave them an unbelievable combat rating, given their much smaller size, and allowed them to fire on approaching ships before the raiders could even get within firing range of the convoy. It took most of their available power to do so, but the ships definitely lived up to their classification name.

In addition to the primary plasma cannon, they also had multiple smaller versions with shorter range to deal with a close-in mass attack, similar to what the battleships had, only these were tiny in comparison. Still, they had the ability to reach out and touch the enemy before they could get within plasma nub or grapple range.

Ariel watched the convoy form up in the predictable formation and begin trolling out through the overlap in the perimeter fence. The ships were hazy at the range she was looking from, but her eyes were more than equipped to pick up their running lights and thermal signatures from a distance where the Humans’ couldn’t.

The Elarioni didn’t stop to gawk, but continued swimming forward, taking an angle down and around the edge of the shipyard, then popped out a few bubbles of air from her nose, startled. With her keen eyesight she’d spotted three splotches on the seafloor wriggling their way between the buildings.

She took a moment to be sure of what she was seeing, then she activated her necklace. “We have a perimeter breach,” she said excitedly, though the computer translation didn’t take that into account when the message reached the city’s command level. “We have a perimeter breach, do you understand?”

“Where, Ariel?” Kyler’s voice came back, though she couldn’t tell given the translation. Fortunately the communication came with an ID tag.

“In between the buildings. There are three of them, at ground level, in between the industrial buildings.”

“Which ones? And where are you?”

“I’m outside…and they’re next to the non-metallic processors.”

“Our sensors aren’t showing anything,” Kyler said, his voice calm but worried. “What do you see?”

“They’re practically crawling across the ground, very slowly.”

“Infantry?”

“I believe so. They move like biologicals, but I’m far away.”

“Stay away,” he said firmly. “Get back inside.”

“No. I’m going to watch them until you get someone out here. If you can’t track them you need my eyes.”

“Are you in any danger?”

“I don’t believe so. They are all I see.”

“If they got through there could be more,” he warned. “Keep an open link. I’m deploying streaks to your location. One of them will pick you up.”

“Very well,” she relented, keeping her eyes on the lizards as they crept forward. How did they manage to get past the perimeter defenses?

True to his word, a streak zipped over to her position within minutes, decelerating hard but well away from her then moving in closer at a casual speed.

Not wanting to delay, Ariel swam towards it, seeing the cockpit crack open just before she got up to it. The Elarioni swam inside and the Archon in silver armor triggered it to reseal, but kept the internal water so she could breathe while his suit’s reserves sustained him.

“Ahead and to the left, down on the seafloor,” she said, tagging his armor’s comm on her necklace’s display rather than relying on his external audio pickup.

“How many are there?” Levi-1832 asked.

“I’ve only seen three…there,” she said, reaching an arm up past his helmet and pointing into the hologram that surrounded the cockpit in lieu of a window, leaning heavily on his back in order to reach that far.

The Archon focused his streak’s sensors ahead, but the ship still couldn’t pick up anything, though he could see a faint smudge on the ground, illuminated by the city’s running lights, though that was hardly a substitute for the sunlight that failed to reach this far down.

“Get closer,” she urged, seeing several other streaks closing in from multiple directions on the battlemap over his left shoulder, though the bulk of his armor required her to slither around inside the cockpit to see even half of it.

“I’m supposed to get you out of here, but if they’re not showing up on sensors then you’re all we’ve got, so hang on,” he said, accelerating them forward, intent on doing a swimby.

“To what?” she asked, seeing no handholds.

“Just an expression,” he said, cracking a grin. With the inertial dampeners they wouldn’t feel a crash, let alone the acceleration swings of some fancy piloting. “Keep your eyes on that spot, I’ve still got nothing on sensors.”

“I will,” she promised, watching the fuzzy blip enlarge. Thanks to the external cameras’ complexity, they were retransmitting all images captured, including those outside the Humans’ vision range, allowing her a bit more spectrum to work with, though her eyesight in the water was still superior to the technological hologram.

Finally, as they came within 200 meters the sensors lit up with three tiny contacts.

“Got them,” he said as they suddenly accelerated and split up, with him opening a wide comm. “Sensor contacts. Come get them. I’ve got a passenger onboard and will play eagle. Hurry up, they’re moving fast.”

“Shoot them,” Ariel urged.

“This is as close as I’m getting with you. Keep your eyes on the surroundings. Tell me if you see any others.”

“I can watch better from outside,” she said, but glanced around the encompassing hologram none the less, including the part on the wall behind her, playing Gumby so she could twist her head around to multiple angles.

“I’ll take you up to a better view in a moment. I just need the others to get in sensor range. Until then they’re using ours to key off of.”

“I know how it works,” she said dismissively, though the computer translation spat it out in the cute cartoon voice.

A few moments later a streak moved in and one of the little icons on the battlemap disappeared…then the holographic view vibrated as a concussion wave rippled out towards them.

“Det packs,” Levi said, pushing them forward through an ascending spiral to get more altitude as additional streaks moved into the area below. “If there are any more we need to find them now.”

“Let me out,” she insisted as the streak rose up to several hundred meters above the seafloor.

8

“There…and there,” Ariel said, pointing to two different positions as a pair of streaks beneath her in the water finished off the other two lizards, with the wash of their distant concussion waves rippling her hair as they passed. “They’re coming from the north.”

Levi floated beside her, with the streak floating above them thanks to a touch from its anti-grav, and placed an approximate waypoint in both areas she indicated, though it was impossible for him to spot the lizards at this range.

“Can you see any others?”

“Not from here.”

“Get back inside,” he said, twisting around with his forearm jets and climbing with his leg-mounted ones to get back up to the cockpit, with Ariel beating him there easily. He grabbed the edge of the open cockpit and pulled himself over the pommel and sat down, then triggered it to auto-close before he moved the water fighter off to the north.

“Another there,” Ariel pointed out a good distance from the others but still holding to the branchlike-pattern emerging from some northern entrance point.

“How the hell are they all getting in?” Levi mumbled inside his helmet, placing another waypoint.

“Levi, report?” Kyler’s voice asked.

“We’ve got lizard infantry with det packs inside the perimeter. They don’t show up on sensors unless you’re within a couple hundred meters. Ariel is visually picking them out from range, and we’ve already identified 4 separate groups, all coming from what looks like a northern vector.”

“I see the markers,” the trailblazer said, referring to the waypoints on the battlemap, “how many per group?”

“Three for the first. The others are unknown. We’re heading north trying to spot more.”

“Keep her clear of the blast radius.”

“Understood.”

Kyler cut the comm line and walked away from the hologram of the city as other command staff readied their defenses. He worked his way through the workstations and consoles until he got to a wall and ducked into one of three alcoves that contained command nexuses.

He powered it up and was immersed in his own private holographic underwater world with the city, the surrounding buildings, perimeter fence, and exterior turrets all there in a 3D display. He adjusted the zoom and triggered the playback of the battlemap data to when Levi had encountered the first lizards, watching the sensor records carefully.

First there were no lizards, then three blips showed up. Those blips got better resolution when additional streaks came into the picture, chasing them down as they split up. Kyler zoomed in again, sorting through the little data they had, and got a half decent picture of one of the contacts with just a touch of visual light added in.

It was lizard infantry alright, carrying heavy loads that were obviously det packs, but the lizards were wearing clothes, oddly, for the water variants never did. These covered them in a black body stocking, leaving only small patches of skin showing on their hands/feet/face. The same black material stretched over the det packs, making them very hard to see visually in the dim light.

Kyler opened a Star Force-wide comm channel. “Be advised, the lizard infantry are wearing some form of stealth suits. They’re probably based off their hull armor, so expect nil from your sensors. Everyone with external lights, pump them up as high as you can. That goes for buildings too. Let’s not leave any shadows for them to swim through.”

As he said that the command level staff heard his order and began flicking on the external lights on the main city structure, bathing the area in omni-directional flood lights and turning the giant seashell into a Christmas tree. The other buildings soon followed suit, as did the 5 functioning towers. Even the perimeter fence lit up its running lights as bright as possible, making the dark ocean come alive with light thanks to the more or less clear water that encircled the planet.

Not long after that another waypoint popped up on the map, followed by three others in the following minutes. As more streaks got into the water and out to the targets Kyler was able to get sensor hits on the enemy, seeing that while they were coming in groups they were splitting up and heading for separate targets, most of which appeared to be the expansion buildings around the city.

As Kyler studied the seascape, trying to divine their battle plan one of the mark 3 towers inside the fence line stuck out one of its shield columns, visible on the battlemap, and peppered the seafloor with plasma strikes, aiming at something that wasn’t on sensors or near the existing waypoints.

With a few button presses Kyler opened a comm channel to the Archons/Regulars manning the consoles that were remote controlling that particular defense tower. “What are you shooting at?”

“Movement on the seafloor. If it’s not us, and there’s no wildlife, then it’s got to be lizard. We can’t get anything on sensors though…wait, check that,” the gunner said as a contact manifested near to where they’d been aiming.

Kyler zoomed in and saw that the steam bubbles had carried one of the infantry up off the ground, allowing the sensors to finally get a lock.

“Keep at it,” the trailblazer urged, “and knock them off the ground. I’ll send units to take them out, but we need at least a momentary sensor ping to tag their location.”

“Will do.”

Kyler highlighted a squadron of arrowheads just coming out of the bay and ordered them to the most recent contacts with spotter-only orders, given that ramming explosive-carrying infantry wasn’t wise, nor was trying to connect a short range shield column to blast them with plasma, meaning they were going to have to rely on PDMs or larger torpedoes.

Several larger ships than the streaks were already in the water, namely those too large to enter the standard bays, and Kyler started moving the destroyers, frigates, and corvettes around like chess pieces, putting them into gaps between buildings and other sensor towers to try and spot infantry moving about. In addition to that he worked out patrol routes for the arrowheads, of which there were now more than 50 zipping about in the water, but with around 110 square miles to cover inside the fence perimeter, there was a lot of ground to cover, giving the sneaky lizards the advantage in this situation.

More of their demolition teams began popping up as their visual detection grid expanded with more ships and higher visibility, not to mention the ones Ariel was spotting. Kyler knew they were lucky that she happened to have been outside to spot the first ones, otherwise…

A damage indicator lit up on the battlemap, and not at one of the tagged infantry locations. This one was on the edge of a power distribution node for the surface guns, one of five each that fed power from the main generators and by necessity had to come aboveground. All other power transfer lines were protected in tunnels carved out of the seafloor rock and thus inaccessible to the lizards.

“Damn it,” Kyler muttered, glancing over the map and realizing he’d missed the obvious, due to the fact he hadn’t assumed the lizards would be that ambitious. With a flurry of keystrokes he began redeploying ships…then he said to hell with it and pulled out the interface sphere and placed both hands squarely on it, linking to the system directly through his Ikrid ability and mentally reorganizing the defensive effort at a speed his hands could never match.

He wasn’t as well practiced as Paul, but he’d mastered the basics of the technology years ago.

On that note he opened up a comm prompt to orbit with a side thought, and a few moments later a hologram of his fellow trailblazer popped up beside him in quarter scale.

“Trouble?” Paul asked.

“They’re targeting the power feeds for the surface batteries,” Kyler said, still mentally ordering units around and recalling the Black Pearl and Highwind from their current missions. “That suggests we’re going to have aerial problems…”

“We’re seeing activity up here too,” Paul said grimly. “They’ve been prepping for something big lately, maneuvering pieces around in a very atypical fashion. What are you dealing with now? I can only see a handful of targets.”

“Damn demolition infantry…wearing a knockoff of their sensor-absorbing hull armor would be my guess. We’re having to spot them visually. The sensors don’t do much good until you’re about to trip over them so long as they stay tucked to the seafloor.”

Paul was silent for a moment as he analyzed his own holographic battlemap onboard his flagship, Excalibur. “Bubble lift?”

“They’ve knocked a few loose, high enough for the sensors to tag. One of their teams already got to a target, and I don’t know how many more there are.”

“Any idea how they’re getting in…or do you think they’re just crawling past the front door?”

“No clue right now. Don’t suppose you could send a few ships down to babysit us?”

“I’ve got a corvette close that I’m sending down, along with a frigate and destroyer that you’ll have to wait a bit longer for. They should be able to cover you until this attack runs to completion. No approaching ships yet?”

“Not a twitch on sensors, but these lizards obviously got here somehow, and I don’t think they swam the whole way.”

Paul’s hologram frowned. “I’m picking up incoming jumps, low orbit. Something’s afoot. I’ll get back to you. Got some warships to blow up.”

With that his hologram winked out and Kyler turned his full attention back to his own part of what looked to be the opening salvo in a much larger battle…check that, them taking down the tower earlier was probably the opening gambit, in which case that meant they’d be attacking from that vector if they did have ships in the water.

Kyler pulled a pair of destroyers off their current search positions and marked an elaborate course over to the fence overlap, having them search that route and then head out to open water to patrol the area where the destroyed tower was currently being rebuilt, getting some extended sensor range from them as he signaled for the construction crews to pack up what they were doing and return to the city.

Another detonation pinged on his screen, this one on the opposite side of the city and again against once of the power transfer nodes. A handful of seconds later a second explosion on that same node from a slightly different position knocked it offline, though there were no pyrotechnics involved. It simply registered as disabled on the map, though the turret island it fed remained undamaged nearby.

As if in response a group of tagged infantry blinked out as those units were destroyed shy of their targets by a streak launching a torpedo on the still clustered group. Elsewhere individual units were winking out sporadically, all the while more were being tagged on the battlemap as the streaks moved out to the waypoints being provided by Ariel and some of the smaller defense towers. Kyler didn’t know how many units they were dealing with, leaving his assessment of the enemy as a giant question mark.

He hated not being able to know what was going on, but this was the situation he had to deal with so he made some guesses as to where the lizards were coming from and had a group of arrowheads looking for the infantry’s entry point when a third power node took a hit.

One of the frigates simultaneously spotted a pair of infantry approaching another node and got to them first, blasting the surface ahead of them with their tiny plasma cannons, then knocking them out with PDM when they floated up high enough for sensors to lock on. Ships of all sizes across the city began swirling around the other nodes, looking for more enemies and finding many on approach, but they weren’t only targeting the nodes, for a few minutes later a large group of lizards appeared directly in front of one of the access tunnels leading into an interior docking bay, having been creeping along the connection of the main structure and the seafloor, using the almost 90 degree nook to hide from both sensors and vision.

As soon as they swam out into the short waterway they immediately were pinging on sensors as a swarm of PDM came at them from wall turrets, exploding on contact and taking out half of them without detonating the packs on their backs, for they were hit in the head or chest. The rest of them did detonate, cracking the surrounding walls and sending an overpressure wave into the internal bay, save for the egress shields stopped it at the end of the tunnel.

The reflection of the concussion wave pushed the debris back out into the ocean, leaving bits and pieces of lizard and wall floating about before the heavier bits slowly sank through the dust cloud generated from the silt on the ground and the pulverized debris. Ambitious as they were, the lizards should have known better than to assume the entrances to the city wouldn’t be defended.

Similar incidents continued to occur across the city landscape, with about half of the lizards getting through to their targets being obliterated by standing defenses, but the others that chose just to detonate against exterior walls were proving effective, both against the power nodes and other structures, two of which saw minor interior flooding as the detonations cracked the exterior armor and allowed the ocean to begin seeping through.

Just when Kyler thought things were winding down and the number of enemy contacts began to dwindle the pair of destroyers he’d sent outside the city on patrol picked up a contact a few kilometers outside the city…a hammerhead judging by the size and shape, small as the sensor silhouette was. A few seconds after it appeared Kyler saw another pop up beside it, followed by a slew of others as another lizard armada was making its way towards the side of the city where the mark 5 defense tower had been taken down.

He checked the aerial sensors, seeing that the Black Pearl was 4 minutes out, meaning it would arrive before the enemy did, and he tagged the exact spot he wanted it to land, putting it between the city and the lizard fleet just in front of the partially reconstructed turret…then he indicated the depth he wanted it, so that both the dorsal and ventral weaponry would come into play. Then he sent a message to Captain Voru indicating that he wanted the battleship to be aggressive and dive right down their throats once they were in position, to which he received the following text reply.

WITH PLEASURE

As those two words hovered in the air beside Kyler inside the command nexus, more lizard ships began appearing behind the others, making this group far larger than the one that had hit them before.

The destroyers launched a salvo of torpedoes at the leading hammerheads, then they turned and retreated laterally, both of them taking different directions and keeping extended sensor range out from the city for Kyler to observe the enemy fleet with, given that they were still outside the range of the city’s sensor grid.

When the Black Pearl slowed to a stop, floating overtop the submerged city and began its descent into the water, Kyler’s gut clenched up as another group of lizard ships appeared on one of the destroyer’s sensors, coming in from a different angle and heading for the adjacent intact defense tower. If they could take that one down, then they’d have a clear run to the fence where the other towers couldn’t reach.

Then, to make matters even worse, a slew of aerial targets emerged well away from the city but coming in at considerable speed. Kyler flipped over to a surface map as one, then two naval cruisers appeared.

That two became three…then four…and five…and six…with a slew of transports mixed in between them.

“Making this hard on us, aren’t you,” Kyler said with plenty of venom in his voice, mentally requesting an update on the incoming naval corvette. Gratefully its ETA put it ahead of the lizards, but it was severely outmatched, and the other two ships Paul was sending down were considerably farther behind in their atmospheric entry.

Kyler keyed for an open comm again, addressing all Star Force units across Manaan.

“Alright people, looks like they mean business this time. Let’s light ‘em up.”

Kyler sent another mental command into the nexus, with the battlemap flipping back to underwater view. Six of the buildings on the seafloor suddenly detached and began rising up on extendable columns, pushing a huge amount of water askew as they rose. Attached to each of them were connecting lines looking like 5 ropes stretching down to the ground to tether it in place. Those ‘ropes’ were the armored power lines feeding the turret islands that were rising up to the surface, whereas the central column was solely for lifting purposes.

Some of those power lines were now dead, their connecting nodes on the surface having been taken out by the lizard infantry, but each of the six artificial islands breached the ocean surface with at least 3 lines intact, allowing the smooth mushroom-shaped surfaces to sprout numerous plasma cannons, lachar turrets, missile racks, and anti-air batteries, ready to defend the submerged city from an aerial attack trying to drop units inside the fence perimeter.

9

Blue plasma lances leapt out from three of the six turret islands towards the first of the incoming naval cruisers as Paul’s corvette moved out to engage the enemy before it could get to the fence perimeter, lashing out with its own plasma and its single mauler cannon, painting the forward edge of the flat yellow/tan ship with a wash of energetic fireworks that punched through the shields in short order.

The cruiser took the hits with impunity, letting the Star Force defenses chew into it as the rest of the aerial assault force slipped by…right into the face of a coordinated missile assault rising up from all six turret islands. They got chewed up by the lizards’ anti-air batteries, but there were so many coming in that more than half got through and nailed the leading transport, completely ignoring the cruisers that the plasma cannons were targeting.

The transport, half the size of the cruisers, went down hard in a cacophony of explosions…then dropped into the ocean with a massive splash that sent water up onto the nearest cruiser and two more smaller transports behind it. If any lizard units inside the transport survived, they now found themselves sinking outside the fence, meaning the missile barrage had done its job and stopped at least one transport from reaching the target.

The lizards apparently came to the same conclusion, realizing that the city’s aerial defenses were tougher than anticipated, so the 5 cruisers not entangled in the slugging match with the corvette moved ahead of the transports, leaving them momentarily exposed as they swatted down more incoming missile barrages at closer range. The turret islands in the back opened up with their plasma cannons when the enemy ships came in, but the cruisers kept moving forward, then suddenly split up, each going to an individual island and hovering over top of it.

Their underside shields fell before they got into position, but their hull armor soaked up most of the weaponsfire, with the rest being absorbed by the hull. The ships were so big they could take the damage and keep on fighting…though that wasn’t their intent.

Almost in unison the elongated starships dropped down on top of the smaller turret islands and pancaked them with their mass, crushing the weapons batteries on top while damaging their own hulls in the process. The weight of the cruisers pushed the islands back down into the water, leaving the starships partially submerged and firing at the nearby corvette and last remaining turret island with their topside weaponry as Paul’s frigate and trailing destroyer were approaching firing range, with the destroyer slightly in the lead and both coming in from different angles.

“Son of a bitch,” Kyler swore, both in anger and frustration at getting their defenses owned by such a tactically brilliant maneuver. If he didn’t know better, he could have sworn Paul was on their side directing the naval attack.

He tagged the incoming transports as priority targets for the remaining turret island, knowing they needed to knock down as many of them as possible before they got over the fence…and the corvette pilot obviously knew the same, because it’s smoking hull pulled out of its fight with the cruiser and diverted, ramming into two of the transports and taking a third down with what was left of its weapons batteries before the mostly intact cruiser finished it off and dropped its hulk down into the ocean perilously close to the approach of yet another lizard aquatics fleet that hadn’t shown up on city sensors yet.

The other transports moved on and ducked down into the water just on the far side of the fence, some 19 in total, and began releasing their contents even as they began the submersion process. One of the largest 3 remaining took a hit from the topside by a heavy lachar from the approaching naval destroyer, followed quickly by a low powered rail gun slug from the frigate who had a better firing angle.

The slug breached the shields and dented the hull, then the transport dipped underneath the water’s surface even as plasma lances from the destroyer targeted it, blasting plumes of steam up into the air marking the position of its descent…only to be followed by another rail gun slug that didn’t seem to mind the water, for it punched straight through it and into the topside of the transport delivering a lethal kill shot.

Two other transports were damaged by plasma before they all disappeared beneath the waves, leaving the two starships with only the 5 sitting and 1 flying lizard cruisers as targets…and firing on them with rail guns was problematic because of what lay in the water beneath them should they miss.

The destroyer flew straight in towards one of them and started blasting away with plasma, lachars, and missiles all at once while the frigate dropped as low to the water as it could and set up a rail gun shot that wouldn’t jeopardize any buildings if it missed or passed through the target, then started spitting out metal slugs at one of the bastards…only to have it rise up off the crushed turret island along with the others, all damaged, and start running away...following the one that had already been in the air.

The two Star Force warships, each smaller than the lizard cruisers and not normally a match for them, peppered them with weaponsfire as they fled, trying to do as much damage to their shieldless hulls as they could, but even if they’d wanted to they couldn’t have pursued more than 2 of the 6 ships. Instead they stayed over the city, guarding it against who knew what, while the 6th turret island streamed smoke into the air, a visible sign of their utter defeat as it had only 2 plasma cannons left operational.

That didn’t matter now, for the purpose of the aerial assault had been to deliver transports to ground…and they’d done just that. But if those transports thought they were going to fly off after they deposited their troops they were severely mistaken, and the destroyer and frigate were floating over the submerged city just waiting for them to poke up above the surface to offer them viable targets.

Up in one of the orbiting warships the pilots of the drone frigate sat at their stations, controlling its weapons, shields, propulsions, comms, and every other system it had, spreading out the responsibilities between three people to maximize efficiency, as were most of the drones in the fleets, a lot of which were now engaging the lizards in an even larger naval battle.

The three pilots, all regulars, sat and monitored their sensor feeds, waiting for one of the lizard transports to come up but otherwise had nothing else to do while those pilots sitting at nearby stations were busily working their consoles as they pursued the naval battles occurring in orbit.

Then something they’d never had happen before caught all three off guard. Their control interfaces suddenly lost connection, though they were still able to observe all of the ship’s systems, as a strange, dark voice spoke through their headsets.

“Assuming direct control.”

It was followed with an ID tag, indicating that Kyler had remotely taken over their frigate.

“What was that?” one of them asked aloud, glancing to the man beside him.

“Never had that happen before. What’s an aquatics specialist doing overriding us? Even if he is a trailblazer?”

Another pilot sitting opposite them behind their backs overhead and turned around, given that his drone ship wasn’t currently engaged in combat. “Did it say ‘assuming direct control?’”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t a regular voice.”

The other regular smiled. “Had that happen once to me. It’s an Archon joke. A reference from an old video game.”

“But what’s he doing with it?” one of the three pilots asked. “There’s nothing left to shoot.”

“They always have a reason,” the other pilot said, glancing back at his own console to make sure nothing new was happening there. “Wait and see.”

All four pilots ended the conversation there and put eyes back on their readouts, with the three dispossessed pilots watching as Kyler flew the frigate well outside the perimeter fence and brought it to a halt again…then it began to pivot, tipping the front end over so that it faced straight down.

“No way,” one of the pilots said in disbelief. “There’s too much water.”

“Yes way,” another one said in a whisper over their linked headsets. “Though there’s no targeting system to handle that. He’s going to have to do it old school.”

“Here we go,” the third said as the diagnostics indicated that a fresh slug was being rotated into the barrel from the ‘on deck’ position, with one from storage being rotated over to replace it. “Oh shit, he’s powering it up to full!”

“Splish splash,” the other said, guessing as to what was about to happen.

With a small enemy fleet inside the perimeter fence engaging the internal defenses and the few ships that remained, who were already busy hunting down the rest of the det pack carrying infantry, along with a massive battle brewing outside and several more looking to crop up at different positions around the perimeter, most commanders would have gone into panic mode…but not Kyler. Like all the trailblazers and most of the other Archons to some degree, when the intensity ratcheted up he got calmer…icy calm, with his adrenaline channeled into boosting his focus rather than fraying his nerves.

He knew he couldn’t get the troops inside the fence back out, so a battle was going to have to be fought there and they did have assets to counter the threat, though he knew it was going to be messy…but it was going to get even messier if the approaching fleets threw down with the perimeter defenses. A third had just popped up on sensors, with the second now coming into weapons range of the targeted defense tower, with it reaching out its shield columns and tagging the largest enemy ships as their armada pressed forward as fast as possible to close within their own weapons range.

Thinking ahead, Kyler took control of the now useless frigate hovering overhead and brought it into position just ahead of the path the 3rd lizard fleet was taking, knowing he needed to take out as many as he could while they were well away from the city, because he couldn’t risk doing this close to his own ships or infrastructure…for he didn’t know for sure how much of a concussion wave it would produce.

When the spot he’d staked out via coordinates showed lizard ships passing under he fired, using battlemap telemetry given that the frigate’s sensors couldn’t detect the aquatics ships below. The pointed rail gun slug flashed out of the front of the frigate, passing through a couple hundred meters of air before slicing into the water and parting it with kinetic overload.

The slug’s momentum created a cavity in the water, pulling air down behind it like a tornado as the water walls spread out in a concussion wave that tunneled down deep into the ocean…then the back pressure of the collapse shot a geyser up out of the impact point that splashed the shields on the lowest point of the frigate. A few seconds later it fired another slug, and kept firing as fast as it could reload, sending deadly metallic spikes down into the water, fighting the friction to get deep enough to hit the enemy aquatic fleet.

The first shot missed its target by 50 meters, but the concussion wave knocked it and a dozen other ships askew before the slug eventually floated down and settled on the seafloor. Kyler eyeballed a correction, adjusting the aim of the weapon inside the hull of the ship by a tenth of a degree, coming closer with the second shot but still missing. Its concussion wave buffeted the ships around, and with the third shot and miss he actually succeeded in causing two of them to bump into one another, though the damage was little more than cosmetic.

He finally made contact on the 5th shot, though it was more by luck than skill, given that the turbulent water he was creating with the shockwaves with each shot was throwing off the slug tracks, some of which appeared to be skewing laterally as they dropped. The ship he did hit was a destroyer…following the cruiser he’d been aiming at. The metal bullet, the size of a bathtub, hit the ship’s shields and punched through, scratching the hull beneath. Normally it would have passed clean through, but the amount of water it was traveling through was killing its kinetic punch, making it less effective the deeper the lizard ships were.

And they knew that too. After the first few shots all of them began sinking deeper, getting more and more water between them and the rounds that kept falling. Unfortunately for them aquatics ships didn’t move very fast, and with each shot that the frigate fired Kyler got better at guessing where the slugs would fall and began racking up hits with every other shot, or so, against their aquatic cruisers and a few others that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on some of his misses.

What had been a long convoy of ships scattered in all directions, trying to put more space in between their ships rather than running directly into the impact zone that was a mass of water and air being mixed up like a blender as each shot dragged more air pockets down with it, and the effect was accumulating…allowing each shot to get a little deeper, because passing through rising air pockets was a lot less drag than the water.

Kyler kept up the attack, damaging their ships in limited fashion while managing to kill only two until the Highwind arrived and he let the ironically larger aquatics ship take the place of the smaller naval vessel as it dropped down directly on top of the last few bubbles coming up from where Kyler had been raining metal down into the water.

The battleship reached out with its shield columns as soon as the underside hit the water, with some of them stretching out more than 2 kilometers to hit medium sized targets that were running hard, knowing that if they could disable a few of them they could deal with the closer ships later as they futilely began attacking the larger ship’s heavily armored and shielded hull.

Kyler tilted the frigate back up parallel to the ocean and had it gain some altitude before he relinquished control back over to its naval pilots, then turned his attention to the other three ongoing battles…and was galled to see that a fourth lizard fleet had been detected on approach.

How many ships did they have to throw at them?

He put that fleet out of mind, given that it wouldn’t be here for some time, and checked in on the internal city defenses, seeing that they were slugging it out with the invaders admirably…then he followed the lizard ships, seeing what it was they were targeting. To his surprise it was the internal defenses themselves, all the while deploying hoards of infantry into the water that were heading down to the seafloor.

Inside the nexus a side map flashed a warning, indicating that the mark 5 defense tower had started to take damage, and Kyler knew that the lizards had enough ships assembled to take it down, but it would thin their numbers enough that the Black Pearl should be able to finish them off after it got done blasting apart the first lizard fleet.

Kyler took a moment, eyes darting from spot to spot on the overall battlemap, evaluating their standing. This was winnable, he determined, but it was going to stretch their defensive capability to the limits…and even if they won it’d leave them vulnerable for another round of attacks.

That was, if there weren’t more than 4 lizard fleets on approach…and he wasn’t going to put money on that.

10

“We have incoming,” Jess Walker said from her seat on the four man bridge of the Star Force destroyer leading the cargo convoy away from besieged Manaan as fast as the bulky freighters could move.

Commander Carver, sitting in the middle of the back edge of the triangle made up by the three control stations stared at his personal hologram rising up in front of his chair and behind the backs of the three bridge crew. Jess made an alteration for him to see, detailing a pack of lizard ships angling towards them from considerable distance away…and yet they were coming from ahead, not from the battle occurring behind them.

He opened a comm channel to the other destroyer, with a short image of Commander Rena popping up over his armrest.

“Looks like our troubles are ahead of us. Suggestions?”

“Going back is a really bad idea,” she said, getting the most obvious question out of the way.

“Fight or run?”

Rena hesitated. “If we send the transports off we could be sending them to their deaths. We don’t know how many lizard ships are out there, or in what direction. I’d divert to station 4, that’ll delay this group’s arrival and give us some more guns if we can get there.”

“Agreed. Tom, get them turning,” he said to his comm officer…who also handled several other duties, given the multi-tasking, low crew bridge layout.

“Back door still looks clean,” Rena continued. “Do want us to move up?”

“No, we’ll come back to you as you drift out on the turn, and keep our spacing wide. We can’t let them slip by us.”

“Bit of a gamble, but I agree,” she said, seeing dozens of targets building the snake-like sensor swarm of approaching dots. “We need to hit them early while the angles are to our favor.”

“Looks like hammerheads and smaller. We can handle this so long as they come in stages. If they get tricky we’ll disrupt them here while you fall back.”

“Agreed,” the commander’s hologram said as the large transports on the battlemap began altering course to port like a school of fish swimming in a long line…save for they didn’t stay in line, with all of them turning at once to maximize distance over the enemy. Carver’s destroyer turned with them, but at a less sharp angle, drifting out further north to insure that there weren’t more enemies on their doorstep.

“Happy hunting,” Carver said, ending their brief conversation. Rena nodded and her image blinked out, leaving him with his bridge crew as they powered up the weapon systems and reconfigured the shields into the most advantageous settings. “400 more meters, then stall out. Bring the bow around to face the enemy and get me a shield column as far out as we can. We’ve got to destroy or damage them at range or they’ll be able to slip by us.”

“Depth?” Kevin Smallee asked, manning the helm controls.

“Match them,” the Commander said, steepling his fingers in front of his face and leaning his chin against them as he watched both the convoy’s sluggish turn and the lizards’ far more agile approach. The closer they got the more information the computer had, with Jess helping to ID the types where the automation was confused.

He saw more hammerheads get tagged first, for they were the largest ships with the biggest sensor profile, given their forward hulls. After that came a slew of corvettes, followed by the larger frigates, who’s stingray-shaped leading edge gave the sensors little to lock onto from straight ahead, but from above or below they made for easy targets…which meant their crews would try to keep them on edge as much as possible relative to the Star Force ships.

Smaller dots began popping up in between the larger contacts, which the computer quickly tagged as sharks, given their size…then a larger contact appeared in the back, which Jess felt like vocally announcing.

“Light destroyer,” she commented, even though the battlemap already had it tagged.

“All stop,” Kevin announced. “Adjusting attitude.”

“Standby shield column. Put it on the destroyer and stretch it as much as you can.”

“We don’t have a straight shot,” Tom said, already making track plots even though the battery wasn’t fully rotated around yet. It sat on the top/front edge of the ship, giving it a good field of fire, but typically the destroyer crews liked to fire it straight on ahead, though the mechanics didn’t favor one angle more than another.

“Blow apart whatever gets in the way, just start doing damage,” Carver ordered.

“Powering up shield generators,” Tom commented unnecessarily, but there was little else to do at the moment. “Currents are cross. That’s going to eat up some distance.”

“Get what you can,” the Commander said, encouraging him to stretch the shields to the breaking point in favor of extra range. If they did go down they’d have to reset and it’d waste time, but until they got within range they’d be wasting it anyway so there was little point in waiting.

“17 is extending column,” Jess noted, referring to the other destroyer’s ID number. Only aquatics battleships received names, so all smaller manned craft got designators, with their destroyer tagged as A-7, meaning it was the 7th produced on planet. Other worlds would have copies of their designators, given that they didn’t transfer off planet very often, making almost all aquatics ships of this size local builds.

“What are they going for?” Carver asked, seeing a tiny line extend out from A-17, followed by another from themselves a few seconds later.

“Something closer,” Jess answered without being specific, for the trace didn’t match up with any particular ship.

Both lines extended from the ships on the battlemap, then changed color starting near the destroyers and extending out as the shield columns widened from a pencil-width out into a waterless, airless vacuum corridor wide enough for the plasma to travel down without it touching the shield walls. That second color also indicated the positions they were capable of firing down, should a ship cross their lines, for the shields were set to automatically seal around any solid objects they came across rather than deflect them.

Which is what the A-17 was doing. It stuck its shield column into the lizard lines at a shallow angle, cutting across the paths of all but the leading ships and waiting for one of them to run into it. The smaller sharks saw and dodged it easily, with the other ships attempting to do the same, though they weren’t so agile. One of the corvettes nicked the edge of the column with its cylindrical hull, immediately drawing a blue plasma streak from the destroyer.

It traveled down the 3.4 kilometer length in a flash akin to a lightning strike, save for it was perfectly straight, and blasted into the armored hull, vaporizing the outer layer and pushing to the interior before the plume of plasma against the target broke through the very weak shields, given the range they were stretched, and brought the water in on itself, quelling any hope of an explosive radius.

The shield matrix, detecting the breach, sent a ‘plug’ up the length in a heartbeat, pushing out the vaporized water spreading back up its length in the vacuum and clearing the firing line again, though it had to slow drastically to push back the liquid water at the end and reconnect with the corvette…though by that time the enemy had passed out of the column, so it extended on past the point of attack and stretched out the ‘trip line’ to the far side of the lizard formation as the rest of the enemy ships, with more forewarning, diverted around it.

The A-7’s shield column passed over it by 75 meters, heading almost straight up the lizard lines, running into one of the flat frigates as it rose up to miss the other destroyer’s column. Tom sent a plasma blast straight into it, then two more as the column cycled and resealed, though on different portions of the hull as its momentum moved the point of impact. By the fourth cycle the way cleared and the column stretched out even further, leaving the enemy frigate with three hull breaches to contend with.

A shark got in the way and was toasted in a single shot, then a hammerhead which Carver was glad they hit, taking out a slew of its plasma nodes that it would undoubtedly be trying to ram either the destroyers or the freighters with, then the way cleared and the column reached all the way back to the light destroyer that was trying to move aside.

“Gotcha,” Tom said, pumping the first plasma lance down the pipe and hitting the large ship’s hull with a satisfying damage plume popping up on sensors…but then the ship began to rotate out of line, looking like they were only going to be able to get one or two more shots on it at best.

“Stay with it,” the Commander ordered.

“Don’t know how much play we’ve got,” Tom said, mentally crossing his fingers. He continued pumping the trigger as fast as the computer would allow him to, but at the same time he used the controls to move the shield column laterally…which was usually a bad idea, because the amount of water that would have to be pushed out of the way would drain additional energy out of the shields, threatening their integrity.

To minimize that Tom only nudged them a little, watching the strain meter. If a little targeting drift gave them another shot it’d be worth it, but there was no way they were going to be able to keep the shield column on the target at this range. If they’d had the power of a mark 5 tower with their large plasma cannons/shield columns then they could have managed more movement, but they only had the medium variety, and that alone required a huge energy drain on the ship’s power core.

Carver watched as the light destroyer got hit again and again…then it moved out of line to the right, as well as dropping in altitude.

“Let it go,” he ordered. “Focus on mid-range targets. Split them up so we can deal with them piecemeal.”

“They’re not charging ahead,” Jess warned. “They’re sticking to formation, so we might not have that option.”

“See if you can change their mind.”

“On it,” Tom said as the other destroyer’s shield column suddenly reached out and touched the light destroyer at its new location, prompting a grin to stretch across Carver’s face.

“Tag team,” he whispered, seeing the enemy ship take several more hits.

The long range shooting gallery continued on for several more minutes, with the Star Force destroyers picking off six vessels…then the lizards figured they were close enough and broke ranks, sending their sharks on ahead while launching torpedoes of their own towards the A-7, completely ignoring the other destroyer.

“Looks like we’re popular,” the Commander commented. “Standby PDM, ready offensive torpedoes and spitters.”

Kevin nodded, assuming control of the extra light plasma cannons used for short range defense, given that there wasn’t a need to maneuver the ship right now so long as they were playing battle station. The destroyer had 4 spitters in total, spread around the ship so that at least one could cover every angle. It was possible to hit a shark with one of them, but not likely. They’d use their torpedoes for that, but if the larger lizard ships came close enough to grapple with them the spitters would make them pay for it.

“Here we go,” Carver commented as the fireworks started. “Keep the fight here. Focus on disabling, not destroying. We can clean up later, right now we have to keep them away from the transports.”

Rena’s hologram popped up again. “We’re coming across ahead of you, then turning and paralleling them. We’ll pick up what you drop. Try not to shoot us, please.”

“You can’t outrun the sharks,” he reminded her.

“The transports aren’t completely unarmed. They can swat down a few gnats, it’s the big ones we have to knock down.”

“Permission to cross granted,” Carver said sarcastically, then watched as the friendly destroyer eeked its way out in front of them and dove into the lizards in slow motion…except for Carver saw it as fast, given the amount of time he’d been in the aquatics division. Aerial combat thoroughly confused his mind, given the insane speeds they operated at. He’d completely converted over to the physics of water combat and knew that the destroyer was actually moving in quite fast, using its narrow hull design to cut through the water like a thick knife.

It reached out with its shield column at short range, dragging it through the water and draining an insane amount of energy out of it in the process, but given it didn’t have to extend more than half a kilometer the maneuver was feasible and it pounded a nearby hammerhead mercilessly, adding to it with a couple of spitters. Simultaneously the ship launched wave after wave of offensive torpedoes out against multiple targets while defending against incoming torpedoes with hoards of PDM acting as intercepts.

The water around the destroyer roiled with turbulence, steam, and muted explosions…with the battlemap updating the damage it was unleashing, as well as receiving. By the time it came out the opposite side and turned into the same direction the lizards were traveling its shields had gone down and multiple hull damage points were tagged on the hologram, but none were breaches, though more torpedoes were coming its way and trying to take advantage of the downed shields.

It spat out more PDMs to knock them down, as well as shooting out another shield column and tagging a flanking frigate, who couldn’t escape given the shorter range and the fact that both ships were traveling in the same direction, meaning its momentum offered it no dodging advantage. It tried to turn away but couldn’t in time, with repetitive plasma salvos coring into its hull and depriving it of power through internal damage.

“Our turn,” Carver said as the sharks began to zip around them, some firing minnows and others just trying to get past so they could head for the transports. Those trying to go around were giving the destroyer a wide berth, which required offensive torpedoes having to be fired to intercept them. Carver watched their speedy tracks on the battlemap, satisfied when they intercepted and destroyed their targets one after another, though he hated wasting the larger ordinance on the tiny ships.

Before long the water around the destroyer was lit up in blue as the spitters began firing on the corvettes that were trying to get within ‘pinching’ range of the hull. They worked over the targets one by one, based on their proximity, with the main plasma cannon helping out when it could. Torpedoes were used as a last resort, and many did have to be expended to keep the enemy off the hull as the A-17 passed them by and left the main hoard to their guns…but then the lizards changed tactics, and rather than trying to get some ships by the destroyer, they adjusted their side slipping courses and angled directly for it, intent to wipe it out first, then go after the convoy.

“Oh shit,” Jess said as she worked the torpedo and PDM controls.

“Calm yourself,” Carver said stoically. “We want to draw their attention away from the transports…just not this much. Reverse course, give us some more closure time for targeting, best speed.”

“Reversing,” Kevin acknowledged, taking a moment away from the spitters to reverse the jet engines and get them moving backward, adding a bit of anti-grav on top of it. As they accelerated all the computer calculated ETAs for the approaching vessels began to lengthen on the battlemap.

Rena’s hologram popped up again. “Hold on, Carver. We’re circling back. Didn’t think they’d be this game for a fight.”

“They’re always full of surprises,” the Commander said, taking control of one of the spitters while Kevin was busy with the helm. He used it to shoot another corvette coming in, lighting up the bridge ‘window’ holographic view ahead of them with a blue lightning strike into the cavity in the enemy ship where one of its forward claws had just extended from. While the Star Force destroyer had thick armor plating, there were several points on the hull that the lizard ship could get a grip on, and it had enough compression power to punch through their adamantium armor.

A torpedo shot out from the hull below the ‘window’ and streaked up into the corvette, literally punching it in the face and visually knocking it back a bit while two more spitters reached out and tagged it with plasma…after which it began listing, unpowered and out of the fight, or so they hoped.

Carver tagged it with another spitter for good measure, then let Kevin reassume control as their backwards path was now set into the helm’s autopilot. The carnage ahead of them continued, with the torpedo and especially the PDM count in their armory dropping perilously low. Enough scattered torpedoes were getting past their intercepts that portions of their forward shields had gone down and power from others was being shifting around to regenerate them faster.

Just as their hull began to take a beating from more hits the A-17 came up underneath them and drifted out ahead, firing up at the underside of the stingray frigate’s wide silhouettes with both plasma and torpedoes, distracting a good portion of the incoming weaponsfire away from the A-7.

Carver blew out the breath he’d been holding. “Helm forward,” he ordered, knowing they needed to stay close to their sister ship. “Hold it together, people. A few more minutes and we’ll be through the worst of it.”

That prediction didn’t hold entirely true, for ‘a few minutes’ turned into more than an hour of pitched fighting before the incoming hoard thinned, for more ships had continued to enter sensor range behind the damaged light destroyer that eventually made its way into the fray. By the time it got up to the pair of destroyers most of the rest of its fleet was already drifting about as semi-operational rubble, blocking the straight on firing lines and requiring the hundreds of minnows it launched to swim evasive routes to get to their targets.

Both destroyers shot down what they could with their remaining PDM, but they were soon depleted and they had to resort to taking the small missiles impacts on what was left of their shields and the hull as the enemy ship extended its defense ‘trees’ and sat in place, spitting out more and more minnows until the destroyers double teamed it with their primary plasma cannons and pounded it into submission, eventually triggering an internal explosion that cracked the ship in two.

That left a few dozen smaller ships to deal with, but they were dropping fast given the attention the medium plasma cannon on each ship was giving them. The A-17 managed to get a lizard corvette attached to its left ‘wing’ where it dug in and began slicing up the hull piece by piece, conveniently tucked where a spitter battery couldn’t get at it, nor did they have any offensive torpedoes or PDM left to knock it off with.

Fortunately its sister ship was there, and with some fancy maneuvering from both destroyers, the attached corvette was brought into the A-7’s targeting range, which latched a shield column onto the clawed ship and burnt it off the hull while both ships’ other weapons finished off the remainder of the lizard fleet…with a few strays having turned off and taken after the now distant convoy.

“Kevin, how we set for speed?” Carver asked, surveying the damage statistics on his chair’s hologram. The hull was pot-marked with various levels of blasted armor, but the interior breaches numbered only 2, and were both minimal. He had the other 2 crew members not assigned to the bridge working on sealing them up, but there was nothing they could do about the exterior damage while they were moving.

“Just a limp,” the helmsman answered metaphorically. “Shall I get us underway?”

“Go,” Carver said, getting Rena back on the holographic comm. “We’re going after the ones that slipped by. You’re chewed up worse than us, what kind of speed have you got?”

“We won’t be able to keep up with that chunk out of our hull. The convoy will be station 4 before we can catch up to them. We’ll stay here and pound the wreckage while we make repairs. One of their torpedoes made it inside and made a mess of deck 3. Luckily the armory was empty.”

“Alright, we’re getting underway now. Good luck,” Carver said, knowing that there could be more lizard fleets roaming out beyond their limited sensor range.

“Likewise, Commander,” Rena said formally, then signed off.

“You want me to head aft and lend them a hand?” Tom asked.

“Go,” Carver said, toggling the hologram as his crewman walked past him and went to help with the repair efforts. The battlemap before him expanded out to include Manaan and the battle still ongoing there…with a lot more ships in play than there had been before.

“Damn,” he commented, prompting Jess and Kevin to glance back.

“They’re under siege,” Kevin said, aghast. Two more defense towers were gone, and multiple lizard fleets were encircling the city, with another one coming in from the edge of what was left of their sensor range. Both battleships were now tucked inside the fence and exchanging fire with ships outside it, targeting through the gaps.

“I’m glad we’re not there,” Jess said, a mixture of worry and relief on her face.

“I know we don’t have much left, but…” Kevin began.

“No, we have a duty to do,” Carver reminded them. “If Kyler wanted us back he’d tell us. Focus on the convoy, there may be more enemy ships headed after it. We need to get to station 4 and bolster their defenses, we might be in for another fight there...and if they have to evacuate the city they’ll do it by air. We’ll be of no help to them on the outside, as much as I’d like to try.”

“Copy that,” Kevin acknowledged.

Jess nodded her agreement and both crewers turned back to their stations.

Carver kept his eyes on the battlemap, zooming in to Manaan and watching the carnage occurring there while trusting his crew to keep an eye on the immediate area.

Mastermind

1

September 15, 2429

Retari System

Atlantica

Kyler hit the water in his arrowhead late, well behind the other Archons who were already outside the hangar bay, and locked the flat topside panel in place by means of a switch on the right side control stick. It retracted down into place and sealed itself flush with the rest of the small craft, fully concealing the trailblazer’s armored body inside, then the control jets fired up and began pumping water out behind where his feet were set against a pair of foot pedals, allowing him to adjust the thrust levels and skillfully arc a curve through the bay and hit the first containment shield at decent speed.

The shield, designed to hold back water, allowed the arrowhead through once sufficient pressure was applied, causing a jolt in the craft that did not have inertial dampening technology. It was little more than a water mongoose and barely twice the length of the land version, flat like a knife and light enough that Kyler could have picked it up out of the water using nothing but his bare hands.

That light weight and angular design also allowed it to be very fast, so after he suffered through another jolt exiting through the second shield in the waterlock, he was able to punch the throttle and accelerate up to near torpedo speed as he tore off from the side of Manaan towards the infantry battles occurring at now three points inside the perimeter fence…the third of which had prompted him to abandon the command nexus and get into the fray himself, given how outnumbered they were.

In the six days since the initial attack on the city’s defenses, all 6 defense towers had been taken down and the littered remains of the lizard ships that had accomplished it were spread out on the seafloor next to the Star Force debris. Kyler had been both amazed and intrigued that the lizards could bring as many ships to bear as they had, with more continuing to arrive via water from locations unknown.

The Nautilus, Highwind, Dutchman, and Black Pearl were all tucked inside the perimeter fence, guarding over the 110 square miles of seafloor as the bulk of the lizard fleet was stationed outside. They’d made several raids over the past few days, some up the gauntlet approach where the fence overlapped, others through breach points they’d created in the gigantic metallic monstrosity, but none were successful in doing damage to either the city or the battleships given their shield column plasma cannons.

Had the fence not been in place that would have been another story, but since it was forcing them to attack piecemeal the assault had essentially come to a standoff, with the lizards circling around the besieged city and continually probing the defenses, trying to find a way to either bring the fence down or to damage one of the battleships from range, which they’d attempted to do with onslaughts of torpedoes fired through the gaps in the wire-like barrier. The Dutchman had taken hull damage from one of those assaults when it ran out of PDM, but given the amount of damage the shields soaked up before breaching, too few torpedoes remained to seriously hurt the gigantic ship.

But give the lizards an inch and they’d try to take a mile, and once the Dutchman was wounded they began to try and repeat the effort, getting resupplied from underwater convoys carrying ammunition and bringing more ships into the fold, as well as some aerial drops that made it through the city’s limited defenses. Manaan still had skeets to deploy in response, but when anything large came their way and naval warships weren’t in range to intercept, the lizards would get their supplies through.

Some of those supplies came in the form of infantry pods delivering thousands of the swimming lizards into the campaign, and although the enemy hadn’t given up on taking out the battleships through coordinated torpedo strikes through the fence, they were circumventing the battleships’ primary advantage by exploiting its weakness…which was their inability to track small targets with their plasma cannons, meaning a mass of infantry could literally walk right underneath one of the battleships and only lose a few in number to lucky shots.

In fact, that seemed to be their choice of attack now, for they were launching the largest infantry invasion to date. Thousands of the little swimmers were crossing the perimeter fence at now 3 locations, all intent on getting into the city’s auxiliary structures and doing what damage they could. Whether that meant external explosions or actually boarding the city Kyler didn’t know, but with so many in the water they needed all the Archons they could get to thin their numbers that were quickly overwhelming what interior turret defenses the city had left.

Once outside of the main building Kyler followed a group of arrowheads that were already halfway to the eastern boundary where a pair of frigates were trying to stop the flood of infantry coming through at a point more than a kilometer inside the fence line, otherwise the Star Force ships would draw too much weaponsfire from the surrounding lizard ships eagerly awaiting a chance to get to the interior. They’d lost several ships over the past few days when they’d responded to breach attempts, and while they’d been successful in stopping those ships cutting into the fence, they’d taken significant losses of their own, resulting in several wrecks of ships having to be abandoned.

On the battlemap Kyler saw that part of the lizards were taking up residence under some of that debris on the seafloor, using it as a shield against the pair of frigates that were pumping out PDM at everything they could see. The tiny missiles were in high demand right now, with the factories inside Manaan producing replacement ammunition as fast as possible to counter the lizards’ attempts to disarm Star Force by weapon attrition. Once again they didn’t seem to care how many lives they lost, so long as they could do some damage in the process.

A flashing light on his battlemap, which was located inside his helmet rather than in the craft itself given the tiny confines, indicated that another link in the fence had been cut, opening up a slightly larger hole for reinforcements to come through. Kyler knew that it’d take a square of four being removed to allow a corvette through, and even then that was a squeeze.

In response to the flashing, a tiny sliver of a shield column extended out to that point on the fence from the Nautilus, then several flashes of plasma passed through it, lighting up the ocean in tiny blue streaks from Kyler’s point of view, and impacted the lizard frigate on the other side that had been blasting away at the fence with a series of short range torpedo strikes.

The enemy contact went out after some additional pounding, but the small damage to the fence remained and Kyler knew the enemy was playing a long chess match towards the destruction of the city, with every little nick in the fence putting them one step closer to attaining their penetration goals.

Kyler wasn’t going to let them play that game, however, and as he watched the continually updating battlemap as he zipped his way across the large internal ocean space that the fence had sectioned off from the rest of the waterworld, he saw the Highwind rise up and disappear from the map, leaving the other three battleships to patrol and protect the base from the inside.

 A few minutes later it came back down outside the fence, dropping in on top of a fleet of lizard ships in the southeast…where none of the infantry were coming from. It hit a section of the enemy armada that had thought it was safe, and one that contained many transports. When the giant battleship began to submerge into the water overhead, the lizards had a choice…stand their ground or run.

Given how many ships there were at that location and nearby, the lizards opted to fight, as the Captain had hoped. Kyler hadn’t ordered him to make the maneuver, but he’d encouraged all the battleship Captains to be aggressive in their defense and to not let the enemy get to feeling as if they owned the perimeter.

Even as the Highwind had barely gotten submerged Kyler knew it was going to come away damaged…but therein lay their advantage. Though it moved slowly, the battleship was also an airship and could retreat from an underwater battle by going up into the air and flying away, making it very hard for the lizards to kill one unless they had aerial support, which at the moment they did not. In truth, Manaan would already have been lost if it hadn’t been for the presence of the 4 battleships, but so long as they were on site and the perimeter fence was holding off an onslaught, it was going to be very hard for the lizards to destroy or captured the Star Force city, and that was one advantage that Kyler intended to milk as much as possible.

The battleship Captains knew it as well, which was why Kyler was glad to see the Highwind redeploying outside the fence to land another gut busting blow to the enemy and eat up more of their ships to compensate for those reinforcements still coming in. After the first two days of the engagement he’d sent Vander off on a reconnaissance mission, hoping that he could quietly backtrack where the lizards were coming from, and he hoped that as long as the besieging forces continued to receive support that meant Vander was getting closer and closer to pinpointing at least one of their transitional bases nearby.

Let the lizards get too many ships on site and they’d be in for a nightmare of problems, thus it was necessary to thin their numbers when they could, just as the Highwind was beginning to do now. Kyler watched the battlemap briefly, then turned his attention to the engagement ahead of him as he approached the location where the other 13 arrowheads were zipping about across the seafloor and tagging what infantry they could as what looked like a mass of ants was swimming its way further inside the perimeter.

The column of ‘ants’ broke up at the ship debris, pooling underneath it before branching off in multiple strands and small groups, making it hard to pin them all to one location. These lizards, fortunately, weren’t wearing stealth suits, so they showed up on sensors from a considerable distance, allowing Kyler to pick out a small group ahead of the others and zoom in towards it, with a jet of high pressure water propelling him and his arrowhead through the dark depths where the sunlight couldn’t reach.

Given that he was the only arrowhead near this lizard group he didn’t turn on his exterior running lights, nor had the lizards powered up their plasma rods or legionnaire shields, but he could clearly see them on sensors, giving him an advantage.  Maintaining a high speed he flicked on the V-shaped band around the arrowhead’s front edge and charged it with stun energy, then adjusted his heading as he picked out a single lizard amongst the 8 ahead of him.

He rammed it less than a second after it flicked on its plasma rod, apparently having heard him coming. It careened off the side, doubled over at the midsection as the impact simultaneously broke its back as well as stunning it unconscious. Kyler turned to the right and clipped another in the arm before exiting out the back of the group. He flipped the arrowhead on its side then bent the machine at the waist, arcing it back around and searching for his next target.

The other lizards’ lights suddenly flashed on, both from their plasma rods and the forearm length shield gauntlets that they held out in front of them. They swam together and huddled up into a group, extending their plasma rods out between their shields to zap the arrowhead should it try to ram them again.

Kyler slowed his speed as he programmed the autopilot to make a simple out and back maneuver, then he hit a button that sucked out the air in the compartment into a container while flooding it with seawater. Inside his armor Kyler didn’t notice the change, other than seeing it on his faceplate, then when the indicator panel informed him that there were no longer any remaining bubbles to give away his presence he cracked the cover partway open and pushed himself out the back near to where his foot pedals were, hand climbing/propelling himself out as the arrowhead continued to move forward under its own power, compensating for the drag of the half-open compartment.

The Archon got caught in the jet wash and shoved back away from the arrowhead even as he activated his own much smaller jets on his legs and forearms, lowering himself in the water while he moved forward, intent on coming up at the lizards from below as the arrowhead passed over top of them. As he closed he reached his hands inside the cover on his back and pulled out one of two needler pistols and powered it up, but kept his arms tucked against his sides to maintain a smooth trajectory.

The arrowhead succeeded in buzzing the 6 lizards, getting their attention and keeping it as it executed the preprogrammed U-turn and started heading back towards them to make another pass, thoroughly distracting them enough that Kyler was able to swim up underneath them and fire up at their webbed feet.

He held off until he was only a few meters away, then put a laser dot on one towards the center that was holding a shield up high to cover their topside and fired straight up into the mess of legs, seeing a puff of compressed water move out to obscure the group as the water was explosively knocked away to produce a short lived vacuum/vapor sphere that the 5 remaining lizards got pulled back into after having their formation knocked apart.

One of them was injured from the explosion, having been next to the one that was now missing its pelvis. Kyler cringed at the gruesome damage, but pushed the thought aside. He didn’t like messy kills, but he didn’t have much choice at the moment…though in two more meters he would.

The trailblazer didn’t fire again, but instead jetted his way up into the midst of the lizards, grabbing one’s plasma rod out of its hand in the confusion and jabbing it into another. The green plasma glowing in its tip discharged into the water lizard’s head, burning out a section of its brain in less than a second, though a plume of bubbles disguised the point of impact briefly.

Two down, four to go.

As Kyler spun the rod around as quickly as he could considering the water drag, the green tip reformed and he jabbed it towards another lizard, but the thing got its shield moved in time and the plasma impacted it, discharging on contact and weakening the shield considerably.

Another PDM from the needler blew apart what coordination the other lizards were regaining as it detonated against the leg of one to Kyler’s left. During that disruptive compression sphere Kyler got knocked slightly askew, but was able to jab the plasma rod into the shield of the lizard on his right a few more times, fully breaching the energy field.

The tip of the rod slipped past and poked the lizard in the chest, though no plasma was present. Kyler did a double tap and got a little bit to discharge as it built back up, enough to painfully distract the lizard. The Archon dropped the plasma rod and jetted forward, wrapping his arm around the lizard’s neck and spinning it around…right into another plasma rod jabbing towards him.

Using the friendly fire to his advantage, Kyler pushed the now dead lizard back into the others, using his armor’s jets to provide more leverage than the swimmers could, then he shot another PDM in between the group and saw it pop against the center one’s midsection before his view was obscured. When it cleared that lizard was dead and the two nearby were injured, one missing both an arm and a leg.

Kyler grabbed one of the floating and still glowing plasma rods and finished off the survivors with a couple of taps rather than waste his own ammo, then he located his arrowhead, which was floating in place 40 meters off where he’d told it to wait. He swam out to find the remaining unconscious lizard and tagged it once in the chest, then discarded the plasma rod and tucked the needler into the fold on his armor’s back. Kyler jetted over to his arrowhead and climbed inside, sealing himself in then evacuating the water to reduce the craft’s weight. That produced a bit more buoyancy, but once he got moving the shape of the arrowhead would keep him in line due to the deflection angles.

8 lizards down…who knew how many thousands more to go.

Kyler checked his battlemap as soon as his body got back into the arrowhead, looking for his next targets with several to choose from, none of which were nearby…at least not within 30 seconds anyway. The arrowhead was fast, allowing it to cover a lot of water quickly, but the lizards were doing well to scatter past their bit of cover near the downed warships, which was making it difficult for the other 13 arrowheads to get after them as well, though they were mostly focusing on the main flow, trying to take them out while they were still bunched together.

Kyler would have preferred to be there doing that, but right now someone was needed to knock down some of the groups getting past…and there were many of them, too many for him to get them all.

He glanced at the fuel cell gage, which indicated that he had enough power for at least 30 minutes of heavy combat, though it would vary depending on how many stun charges he used and how many little breaks like this he took. Guessing that the other arrowheads were in a similar position, he knew they were going to have to make several round trips, utilizing their speed to move to and from the city while the lizard infantry progressed forward slowly.

He’d just have to whittle down as many as he could, then let the point defenses around the structures thin them down further. To that end he randomly picked another group and jetted off, hoping to ram at least some of the lizard groups out of commission so he wouldn’t have to suffer the delay of getting out and dealing with them hand to hand.

2

Paul replayed the battlemap data from the previous day’s battles in his quarters, just back from a lengthy training session in the Excalibur’s sanctum. The lizards were getting more reinforcements coming in and Star Force had attempted to mine the jumpline from the star with a few heavy objects. They’d delivered them far out in mid orbit and sent them drifting in, with their internal engines keeping the house-sized lumps of metal directly on the line whereas orbital paths would have moved them laterally out of position within minutes.

Star Force had thus tagged that jumpline off limits, with a beacon informing all ships entering the system to avoid that route stationed in orbit around the system’s star. Greg’s fleet was stationed there, escorting incoming convoys and trying to poach lizard ones whenever they entered the system. The beacon was set up as a small space station that transmitted constantly, rather than having one of Greg’s ships do it. That way his ships could move about at will, rather than having to guard a fixed point.

The beacon was using a new communications technology, one built from the V’kit’no’sat database rather than reverse engineering the lizards’ interstellar comm tech, that used telaris energy. Star Force was still working on the sensor package, but it had already started to build new ships and facilities with telaris comm systems, as well as producing upgrade packages for the others. The key value in telaris energy was that, unlike an accelerating signal, it naturally traveled at 3.205 times the speed of light.

That wasn’t instantaneous communication across a star system, but it was a considerable improvement over systems that had been relying on various forms of electromagnetic radiation for both communications and sensors. Telaris energy was emitted from riol, a tier 3 subatomic particle that was only present in corovon-bonded atoms. It would pool around the corovon in the gaps between attached protons, then would be dislodged fairly easy, resulting in huge bursts of energy that was very repellant to other matter.

That gave it a huge spring capacity coming off the corovon, resulting in its 3.205 lightspeed instantaneous acceleration. It also meant that the telaris energy would be deflected rather than absorbed by most substances, making for some very fast and very powerful sensors. Paul and others hoped that it would overcome the lizards’ sensor dampening armor, but to date the techs hadn’t got a viable sensor array prototype worked out, though they were getting close.

The comm system was crude, but functional, and was allowing Paul and Greg to exchange information faster. If the lizards were quick they could still enter the system from a specific jumpline and get to Atlantica before Greg could send word if the navigational angles were favorable, given that the planets were continuously rotating around the star and changing their relative positions to the incoming stellar jumplines the lizards seemed to favor.

The other day Paul’s fleet had got a heads up that another lizard convoy was incoming, one that Greg’s fleet hadn’t been able to intercept. With the kinetic ‘mines’ in place in low orbit, where they were essentially hovering on their gravity drives, Paul had moved some drone warships into more favorable positions to intercept the convoy once it arrived.

The lizards came out of their jump early, decelerating most of their momentum away before they crossed through the mine field…which only contained 119 objects. That was a very diffuse net, but given the size of the lizard jumpships it was probable that at least one would get hit.

Two had, punching deep into the hulls on 2 out of the 16 that had arrived. At least part of their gravity drives had been damaged, for the last bit of their deceleration was delayed, pushing them out ahead of the others, and fortuitously for Star Force saw one ramming another on a deflection angle, sending both damaged ships spinning about on a descending route down towards Atlantica’s atmosphere.

To the lizards’ credit, they managed to stall out their fall and keep the damaged ships in space, though the wounds were extensive. With all three jumpships out of the position they had expected to be, Paul’s fleet, which was technically all ships in orbit despite which Archon’s warship they came from, had pounced on them in their damaged state and killed all three, but not before the other lizard ships could respond, including one of the newly arrived jumpships that was a carrier containing a slew of cruisers and a pair of battleships.

It was that battle that Paul was now reviewing, not to mention the cleanup effort the lizards made on the other mines. They couldn’t vaporize them, and breaking them up into bits was hazardous to navigation as well, so after locating the others…which had been sensor stealthed…they used some of their jumpships to capture and remove them from the jumpline, as well as shooing away battle debris down into a lower orbit that was even now starting to tickle the atmosphere and drop into the oceans below.

The chess match in orbit was getting more and more complex. While Paul and the other trailblazers were learning more about their enemy, the lizards were doing the same with them in a punch/counterpunch timeline that saw both fleets improving their strategy while the lizards and Star Force continued to run supplies down to the war taking place on the planet below. Every now and then Paul would be able to catch a lizard supply run and disrupt it, forcing them to either turn back before they got to the atmosphere or destroying them as they attempted the insertion.

Those that did drop down consistently went to the backside of the planet where Star Force had no infrastructure…then the supplies/reinforcements would make their way beneath the waves where the Humans’ sensors couldn’t track off to who knows where, then it would eventually end up on Kyler’s doorstep, as it was doing right now.

Paul had forced himself to stop watching the live battlemap feeds from below, focusing on the naval confrontation and his training. Kyler had told him he’d request evac if they needed it, otherwise there wasn’t anything he could do to help other than trying to keep more lizard resources from reaching the planet.

He had insured that the airspace over Manaan stayed clear of enemy warships, keeping small capital ship groups close in orbit that could drop down if/when needed, and so far the lizards had respected that threat and kept their assault subsurface where Paul couldn’t get at them. That way, at least he could provide a secure evacuation route for the city. Thankfully Manaan didn’t contain any colonists, but there were thousands of Star Force personnel inside, and if the city was going to fall they would be hard pressed to pack them all into the battleships and would need the aerial route kept open.

The orbital situation was less strenuous, mainly because Paul was successfully chewing up the lizard reinforcements as fast as they could send them. Earth was supplying them with new fleets as soon as they came out of the shipyards, all with upgraded weapons technology, primary of which was the mauler cannons, but they were also fielding better plasma and lachar batteries along with higher densities of adamantium armor. Paul never knew what the next convoy would contain, but Davis had yet failed to disappoint him.

With those incoming resources, part of which were meant for the aquatics front, Paul was overseeing the construction of a 4th battle station in the shadow of the other 3 where the lizards couldn’t get at it, though they had attempted a few hit and run raids which the fleet had successfully blocked. Right now he had 1 strong point in orbit and he intended to spread that out to two, but whether he could do that by splitting the stations into pairs or not was still up in the air. Most of it had to do with the lizards’ capabilities, of which he was trying to get a handle on.

In some respects he understood them very well…in others, they seemed almost like the Borg from Star Trek, in that they would adapt to whatever he threw at them. Their commanders were probably from the strategic class, though with lizard naval crews he could never be sure. Sometimes they were comprised totally of the standard variant, which were devious enough, but he knew they also had the ability to grow specialized commanders when needed.

There were 11 known variants, of which they’d personally encountered 6, now that they’d met their swimming version, but Star Force had the genetics profile on all of them, thanks to the battles on Corneria and the copycat version of lizard infrastructure they’d produced from the technological ‘seeds’ they’d recovered. They hadn’t grown any new lizards to study, though they maintained that capability. Rather, they had medtechs pouring through their genetic code trying to learn what they could.

One thing they’d learned was that they were all sterile. Not one of the lizards could reproduce, for that ability had been genetically removed from them. They now reproduced totally through technological means, which also gave them the ability to increase their numbers rapidly if they had the resources to do so, as they were doing now on Atlantica. Their achilles heel had always been having enough raw materials to build ships, but somehow they were also overcoming that hurdle, given the numbers Kyler was facing at Manaan.

The lizards had tried setting up other bases in the system, given that there were 18 planets. None of them were habitable, but most were minable, and several small engagements had been fought to weed infant lizard bases off those worlds before they could gain a foothold. At present Sam’s fleet was patrolling the system, scanning every planet and moon periodically and dealing with any new infrastructure popping up, for they knew from experience that they had to keep the lizards resupplying from outside the star system. If they gained a resource base from within, it would be very difficult to overcome their growth rate.

The lizards had succeeded in building their own battle station in orbit, though they’d had to cheat to do it. One of the less recent supply convoys had brought a jumpship variant they’d never seen before. This one was covered in weapons and appeared to have few bay doors. It didn’t match any schematic in the known lizard tech tree, and after some careful prodding Paul had determined that it was essentially a mobile battle station.

The lizards used it like Star Force had used the seda copies, establishing a foothold that their fleets could base themselves around…except that the lizard station didn’t have the firing range of Star Force’s cleansing beams. After a two week period of cat and mouse engagements, Paul had succeeded in destroying the jumpship/base and removing the lizards’ strong point from orbit, costly as it had been.

Even now, as he watched the replay of yesterday’s battle, he could see the weapon strikes against his ships deliberately targeting their weakest points rather than just blasting away at their shields and armor as the lizards had once done. Likewise his gunners were targeting the critical systems on the lizards’ ships, now knowing exactly where to hit them, not just because they had their schematics available, but because both sides were now well experienced with their opposition.

Star Force, Paul assumed, had more of an advantage due to the fact that they weren’t cycling personnel like the lizards were, for every ship they destroyed required a new crew being grown, whereas the drone ships in Paul’s fleet had the same pilots flying them no matter how many were destroyed…so long as the lizards didn’t knock out a warship, which to date was something that Paul had not allowed to happen here, though he had heard that Morgan had lost one fighting the Nestafar.

Some of the regular crew had begun to label this conflict as the forever war, for they couldn’t see an outcome on the horizon…other than Star Force capitulating and abandoning the system. Paul and the other trailblazers had an entirely different view. Where others saw an insurmountable and unrelenting enemy, the Archons saw a challenge…and the bigger the challenge the more they wanted to face it rather than run away, making this just the situation Paul wanted to be in rather than guarding Namek as it continued to grow its infrastructure oblivious to the lizards.

Well, not totally oblivious, for the supply convoys running to Atlantica were coming from there and the lizards had backtracked them, but they hadn’t done more than scout the system, seeing that Star Force was well dug in on the planet. Namek, though, was less close to existing lizard colonies, with Atlantica practically on their doorstep. Paul and the others had planned on defending both locations, though they’d hoped the lizards would focus on the waterworld.

Now that they’d gotten their wish, the enemy wasn’t disappointing. They were drawing an unbelievable amount of resources off from their main territory, resources that could have been sent to fight their allies. That said, Paul knew what they were facing here was merely a drop in the bucket compared to the total military might the lizards possessed.

The sheer amount of their warships was mindboggling, but what Paul had learned early on is that if you had a lot of territory to defend, you had to spread your fleet out. That meant the lizards couldn’t just pick up their massive fleet and pound it all against a single world. Given the distances involved they had to leave defenses in all their systems else risk losing them to a handful of enemy ships. Even with their considerably quick gravity drives, getting from one end of their territory to another could take more than a year, depending on the route.

Paul wished that Star Force could one day possess that amount of territory, not just for the resources and capabilities it would afford them, but for the challenge of managing it all. Their allies all had far greater realms than the Humans did, and they didn’t all do the best in managing them. It was hard to think of an entire planet being lost in accounting, but when you had thousands of them spread out across this piece of the galaxy with little communication between them…it wasn’t all that uncommon.

Which made the V’kit’no’sat’s much larger empire all the more impressive.

Paul finished watching the replay, seeing nothing new tactically, but he always preferred studying his enemy directly rather than being handed a spec manual, especially given the lizards adaptive abilities. Those in this system could very well behave differently than those in others, based solely on what they were learning here. Paul didn’t know how much they’d transmit that knowledge back to the rest of their empire, given that they’d have to do it in the form of couriers, so really his fight wasn’t with the whole of the lizard empire, but this local branch of it.

He flipped back over to the realtime battlemap and checked the position of the lizard fleets, noting that Oni-081 had repositioned some of her heavier warships further out. It took Paul all of four seconds to figure out why, then another two seconds to deduce the lizards’ probable countermove.

This was how their chess match was usually played out on a day to day basis. Both fleets would reposition, attempting to pull off supply runs, catch incoming convoys, or draw the enemy fleet into a formational weakness they could exploit. Paul had come to nickname his lizard counterpart Thrawn, and saw that it/them were breaking up their largest fleet and spreading it out into multiple appendages, each on a different trajectory.

“Here we go again,” he whispered, knowing that this was standard practice when the lizards wanted to run a convoy down to the surface. Each of the tendrils had cargo ships in them, and picking which one to intercept was mostly guesswork, unless they knew which ones had the goods and which ones were empty.

He had no clue in this go around, and very possibly they were all full given the recently arrived reinforcements…but Paul sensed that Thrawn was being cagey again, expecting Star Force to see their move and likewise reinforce their extreme low orbit fleets, readying themselves to make intercept runs at anything heading down to the surface.

Thrawn should have kept the rest of his ships stationary, but several of them were creeping into new formations, tipping their hand. Paul saw that he had no choice, given their current locations were outside of effective range from a hit and run on the outermost defense fleet that Emily commanded.

Oni saw it too, which was why she was moving her heavy cruisers out further, not all the way up to Emily’s orbit, but close enough to cut down the response time should the lizards make the move.

Paul looked at the hundreds of ship icons on the small hologram in his quarters like pieces on a chess board, then let a smile creep across his face as he saw a move that he was sure Thrawn was trying for. Ever since they’d launched their main underwater assault they’d been getting bolder in orbit, for what he hadn’t known, since the two campaigns were more or less separate entities, but if Paul’s instincts were right, in a few hours time their partially constructed battle station was going to get blasted.

Paul opened up a comm channel to the three battle stations and delivered a text message.

Prep for incoming assault. Probable target is the 4th station. Quietly bring up to full battle readiness. We have a counterattack possibility that I don’t want to waste.

3

A group of 3 lizards swam along the polished seafloor inside the Manaan perimeter fence headed for the large underwater mount that was the Humans’ shipyard. It was totally contained inside an armored shell, with the unfinished battleship obscured from view, but the det pack one of the lizards was carrying was about to make a dent in it.

The trio swam along lazily, along with more than 10,000 others already inside the perimeter fence and spreading out on so many different routes that the Humans couldn’t get to them all. They all had their preferred targets, with secondary options if they couldn’t reach them, but so far this group hadn’t so much as even seen a Human craft near them.

They swam up towards the base of the shipyard where the slightly angled wall met the stone seafloor, with the escorting pair drifting laterally and falling back as the det pack carrier eyed his spot on the dark wall. It didn’t know if the explosion would breach the barrier or not. If it did they would move inside. If it didn’t, they’d wait until another group came their way and added to the damage, defending their entry point as more lizard groups pooled outside.

As the lizard with the det pack swam up to the base of the building it pulled the explosives off its back, intent on setting them in position and triggering a delay timer, but it noticed a faint line in the silt a meter out from the building just before passing over it…then it smashed head first into the defense shield surrounding the shipyard.

Unaware that the building had been shielded, the lizard reached out its webbed hand and ran it over the odd surface of the invisible energy shield, but without enough pressure to make it visible from the disruption. For that it had to bring its plasma rod forward and jab it into the invisible wall, discharging its green load into the shield matrix and producing a meter-wide patch of momentary static.

It wasn’t nearly enough to penetrate the defenses, but it did confirm the fact that it existed.

Unsure how to proceed, the lizard used the small comm device strapped to its head to report the presence of the energy barrier and ask for instructions in a water dialect of their native language that adjusted for their inability to use their vocal chords without air, instead having to rely on a genetic modification inside the roof of their mouths to modulate sound within the water.

The reply wasn’t swift in coming, leaving the three lizards floating in place up against the enemy structure as another group swam up behind them, only 20 or so meters further west and diverted to join them. By the time a strategy had been formed their small group had grown to 18 in number, with 4 det packs amongst them.

Then as one they all received new instructions via their comm units and they began swimming away from the shipyard towards one of the smaller enemy buildings that did not have defensive shields. Apparently only their largest two did, meaning they could access the others and the connecting tunnels beneath and use them to gain access to the primary targets.

Like a school of slow moving fish the lizard infantry redeployed as more around them were snatched up by the quick moving Human craft. By luck or sheer numbers the group of 18, which had now grown to 22 as it picked up another bunch enroute, made it across the gap to a moderately small building rising up some three stories above the seafloor and stretching out across it for a considerable distance.

Using a series of chirps the lizards coordinated with each other and the first one swam up and set its det pack at the base, hoping to use the seafloor to concentrate the blast into the structure, though in truth it wasn’t sure how strong it was. It swam off, with the others even further back forming a small semi-circle, and waited for the brief delay to expire.

The det pack exploded with a muted ‘thump,’ kicking up a cloud of silt in the process. As soon as the ripple reached the lizards the next one began swimming towards the target and placed its det pack in the crater the first explosion had left, which had done as much damage to the rock as it had the wall. The lizard wedged it in the best it could, set the timer, and swam off.

When it blew a third moved in, and with its detonation contained even further inside the growing crater it succeeded in cracking the outer wall, allowing a bit of water to begin leaking inside.

The fourth det pack then punched a hole in the side large enough to begin draining in water with considerable suction. The waiting lizards without det packs swam forward, staggered, and let the flow grab them and pull them through the small breach. They landed inside in what looked like white water rapids as the ocean water flowed from one chamber into another before it leveled out enough for the first of them to find their feet and stand up, finally opening the flap over their air breathing lungs and sucking in the Human atmosphere.

With their plasma rods held at their sides, glowing bright even underneath the Human lights, they began working their way through the flooding areas looking for enemies to kill.

“Go, go, go!” Uma-19448 shouted at the techs running through the corridors to her position near the entrance to the subterranean tunnels that connected the processing center to the other buildings around Manaan, five of which contained routes straight into the main building of the city. Already there was a couple of inches of water around the Archon’s feet, with the running techs splashing up a storm as another explosion was heard from inside the building.

Twenty seconds later a surge of water made its way to her position, knocking two techs off their feet and dunking their heads in the white water that was now up to her knees.

Uma fought her way through it and yanked one of the techs up, pushing him back towards the entrance to the tunnel.

“How many behind you?” she yelled to be heard over the rushing water that containment fields were fighting to hold back, but the lizards were systematically knocking them out and letting the water precede them further into the building.

“I don’t…know,” the man said, coughing as the other tech climbed to her feet, her long hair stuck to her uniform soaking wet.

“Down,” Uma ordered, pushing the man back a couple of meters. “Deep breath,” she warned before pushing him back another as the rushing water was now up to the red armor on her thighs.

The tech grabbed his nose then fell down as he stepped on a containment shield designed to hold back water and not solid objects. The transition was slow, like he was sinking into sand, but his feet came out into dry air beneath him and quickly found a steep staircase that he stumbled his way down until his head came through and he was able to both breathe and regain his balance.

He walked down the stairs and around a corner, coming out onto what looked like a highway-sized tunnel that led straight to the left and right, with a junction visible not far to the left that a lot of other techs were running down. Not wanting to get left behind he took off after them, stumbling at first in his wet shoes before adjusting and picking up the pace.

“Anyone behind you?” Uma asked the female tech when she got to her.

“At least one,” she said in a controlled panic as the water continued to rise, though it was being stemmed as it drained out into other areas of the building.

The Archon pointed down and the tech nodded, then dove head first into the water and pushed her way through the containment field as Uma fought her way upstream looking for other personnel that had failed to evacuate in time. This wasn’t the first building the lizards had hit, and the evacuation orders had come out a few minutes prior to the hull breach, but there had been a lot of personnel continuing their work refining the raw materials already collected so other factories within the city perimeter could keep making ammunition to feed to the defense forces.

The level 79 adept took a knee in the water near the doorway where the current was the strongest and activated one of her leg jets, helping to propel her through into the corridor as she grabbed the doorjamb for additional leverage. She had plenty of air in her armor, and could produce more oxygen from the water itself if needed, but the techs weren’t so equipped and were in danger of drowning if they didn’t get them all out. They also didn’t have comm units or locator beacons, so she and the few other Archons in the building were having to improvise.

“Anyone out there!” she yelled, using her helmet’s external mic to amplify the sound.

“In here!” a muted response sounded from her left, prompting her to walk/swim that way painfully slow as she fought the current. “Hurry!”

“Trying,” Uma said to herself as she slogged her way down the hall. “Keep talking!”

“In here!” the voice repeated, then a hand shot out into view just above the waterline.

“Got it!” she answered back, dropping down underneath the water and using all four of her jets to plow her way forward, using her toes for additional leverage until she got to the door and ducked into its smaller side current.

When she came up she saw two female techs perched on top of a table, one of which was bleeding and probably unconscious. A door on the opposite side had water flowing out into another section, creating the cross current.

“I couldn’t leave her,” the conscious tech said, crying in addition to the water dripping down her face from her braided blonde hair.

Uma let the current help her along then gripped the side of the table to steady her as she got to the pair…immediately seeing the plasma burn on the prone one’s left leg.

“Is she alive?” Uma asked, not able to feel for a pulse with her gloves on.

“She passed out, but she’s still breathing. I couldn’t get her out the door with the current, and there are lizards that way,” she said, pointing to the far door.

Uma thought that odd, being essentially downstream, but she wasn’t going to argue with the wound on the other woman’s leg.

“Go,” she ordered, picking up the unconscious one and setting her over the armor on her shoulders to keep her head away from the water as much as possible. “To the right. I’ll be behind you.”

Without hesitation the tech jumped into the water and swam against the current, pushing with her feet when they touched bottom up until she got to the door, then she grabbed the wall and leveraged herself outside and into the heavier current.

“Hang to the right and take the next open door,” Uma said, having to fight the water without her jets, but thankful for the extra weight helping to pin her feet to the floor. When she got to the door she reached her right leg out and latched her ankle around the doorjamb, then pivoted the unconscious tech through as the water was now up to chest level. Down the hall she could see the other tech waiting, hanging onto the open doorway.

Uma twisted out into the flow and kept at least one foot in front of her at all times, using it to balance herself upright so she didn’t tip the tech over into the water, knowing how quickly someone could drown when they weren’t conscious to close their mouth and hold their breath against even a little water.

The other tech ducked out of the doorway just before Uma arrived, where the Archon used her left leg jet to nudge herself into the side flow and into a long room that split at the end.

“Stay with me,” Uma said, letting the current carry her down to the other end of the room as the tech latched onto her arm twice for balance.

When they got down to where the containment shield was, Uma swung the tech off her shoulders and held her head above water with an arm latched around her shoulders, but with the rest of her body in the water.

“I need you to close her mouth and hold her nose, we have to go down,” Uma instructed, pointing below them with her free hand. “There’s a shield two steps ahead holding back the water. Keep her lungs clear and I’ll pull you both through, ok?”

“How long…do I have to hold my breath?”

“Less than 10 seconds,” Uma said bringing the two techs together, with the conscious one wrapping the other up in a bear hug.

“Ok,” she said shaking as the water was nearly up to her neckline. The ceiling was high with plenty of air left, but the before long the pressure would start building to painful levels even if they did have air pockets remaining above the doorjambs.

Uma ducked down underneath the waterline so she could see exactly where the shield was and moved over to it, sticking a foot in while gently dragging the pair of techs her way, with the conscious one walking the other through the still flowing water and keeping her upright. When Uma’s legs were partway through the shield and found a stair beneath she tapped the tech’s leg three times…then twice…then once more before pulling both of them down into the water.

Using her weight the Archon pulled both of them down through the shield as fast as possible, dropping them into an uncomfortable fall that she only managed to halfway catch.

Uma immediately got the unconscious one upright and tipped over, then tapped on her back just to make sure she didn’t have any water in her lungs while the other one coughed considerably, probably haven gotten water up her nose or maybe not having understood the tapping countdown.

For good measure Uma picked up the unconscious one off her feet and inverted her for a moment, using gravity to drain any water out of her lungs but apparently the other one had done a good job of keeping it out of her friend, just not herself.

“Let’s go,” she urged, picking the tech up over one shoulder and hurrying down the stairs with the other one following in her footsteps. Once out into the underground tunnel the only people visible in the distance were Archons, one to her left and one further down on the right that ducked out of sight at the same time she heard plasma fire…which meant the lizards were close.

As she jogged with the techs she toggled her battlemap and comm system, identifying who that Archon was.

“You got lizard trouble?” she asked Jaden-11833, another adept who’d gotten internal security duty while the acolytes were busy fighting the lizards outside.

“Their…rods can fire like rifles in the air,” he warned, apparently in the middle of a skirmish. “I could use some help, they keep popping the containment fields.”

“Got some techs to deliver, then I’ll be back.”

“Use your plasma rifle. They’re not waiting for the chambers to fill up.”

“Copy that,” Uma said as they made their way down the hall to the other Archon who was guarding a spur tunnel that ran over to another building, one that wasn’t yet flooding. Those areas that were under assault were being tagged on the battlemap so they could tell at a glance where it was safe to move the techs through as all the external buildings were being evacuated, though it seemed like those that used this tunnel were already on the move and long gone.

“I’ll take her,” the other Archon offered, freeing up Uma so she could head back the other way.

“Thanks,” she said, all but tossing the unconscious tech into the other’s hands before sprinting back down the tunnel. The aquatic armor she wore wasn’t exactly graceful, given its bulkier nature, but it was still Archon armor and therefore had to be at least partially agile, allowing her to run at a decent gait all the way down to where Jaden’s tag had ducked down a side entrance.

She found another stairwell up and took it, unslinging her plasma rifle from the rack underneath the flap on her back, next to which she carried a needler, both of which were standard issue for internal deployments, given that one never knew when they’d need to step outdoors for a swim or when the water would come pouring in as it was now. The plasma rifle was configured to be water safe, though firing it submerged was next to pointless unless you just wanted to make steam bubbles.

Uma charged up the staircase and through another containment shield, coming up through only a few inches of water, meaning this section of the building must have only recently been breached, given the cellular nature of the design and the hundreds of individual containment fields set up throughout the structure.

“Bringing them to you,” Jaden’s voice said, with Uma seeing his approach on the battlemap. “Ambush please.”

“Gladly,” she said, ducking back into the room away from the doorway so they couldn’t see her. A moment later Jaden’s red armor splashed into view then out the opposite doorway…then a trio of lizards came through after him, with Uma lighting up the second in line first with a shot to the midsection. As it fell she targeted the first before it could snap its unwieldy plasma rod around, downing it with a pair of shots before turning back to hit the third as more lizards were pushing through after it.

Jaden came back into the room and between the two of them mowed down the wet lizards with plasma, leaving a foggy haze in the room from all the vaporized water.

“Thanks,” he said, ducking out of the room and heading back towards the tunnel.

“Any more?” she asked, following him.

“Not here…not that I saw, but I want to stay ahead of the water as long as they’re doing the same.”

“Lead on,” she said, checking her battlemap as she followed him back to the containment field and the now half foot of water covering it.

4

A mongoose zipped down the main tunnel from Manaan and turned hard, tipping up on its left-side tires slightly as its shocks banked it through the inertial-laden curve, but it managed to stay upright thanks to the squat wheeled design and leveled out in one of several spur lines that ran through the bedrock and out to the adjacent buildings under lizard incursion.

As soon as he made the turn Kyler could see flashes of weaponsfire in the distance, so he didn’t spare any speed and ramped the mongoose up into its top gears as he held to the right side of the tunnel, passing by a few straggling techs running away from the fighting and towards a trio of parked mongooses taking on passengers. They were the larger versions, used to haul personnel out and back through these tunnels regularly, but Kyler’s was the individual variety and it most definitely wasn’t stopping to pick up and evacuate people…he was heading straight for the fighting.

Most of the arrowheads were still in the water, taking down what infantry they could, but that front was already a lost battle with hundreds of lizards now down inside the network of tunnels and more swimming in to join them. Knowing that, Kyler had come back to Manaan and hit the armory, grabbing as much combat gear as he could carry on one mongoose and heading out to the ground fighting as quickly as he could.

He had to zigzag a bit to avoid other pedestrians, most of whom were Archons redeploying from other assignments to reinforce their subsurface lines. Kyler sent out a telepathic warning ahead of him and most of them moved to the sides, though they had little forewarning given the speed the mongoose was moving.

Even as he watched the road ahead he was monitoring the battlemap inside his helmet and was well aware of what was happening up ahead. The lizards were breaking through shield after shield in the tunnel, allowing it to flood and fighting out of it to the next section, figuring that they stood a much better chance against the Archons in the water than they did in the air. They may have been right about that, but that didn’t mean the Archons couldn’t defeat them submerged, it was just that at the moment there were too few to counter the incursion, which was why the lizards were gaining ground.

That and the problem of weapons. Plasma couldn’t fire into the water at the lizards…and needlers couldn’t fire through the air to get into the water, making the transitional areas that were partly flooded up for grabs and the lizards were pushing these zones forward all the way down into the tunnels, having essentially water-grabbed several buildings above that they were no doubt setting up shop in as far as their incoming reinforcements were concerned.

That was about to change as soon as Kyler got up to them. This wasn’t the only tunnel under assault, but it was the one that had seen the lizards get closest to Manaan and the trailblazer was going to put a stop to any more forward progress here while other acolyte Archon teams were moving out to the other tunnels to reinforce the adepts that had been on station at the time of the first incursions.

The lone ranger on the planet, Kyler continued to speed down the tunnel in his green aquatics armor that looked odd on the back of a mongoose, but none the less it was getting him up to the fighting quicker than any other transport along with a stash of weapons for the other Archons tied down to the back of the vehicle.

When he came up on the fighting he didn’t slow, but telepathically told the other 6 Archons ahead of him to make way. Their 5 red and 1 silver armored bodies shifted positions, giving him a narrow line through them as they continued to fire plasma blasts into the shield ahead of them as several lizards stepped through from the half-flooded tunnel and into the air, firing green plasma orbs from their rods back at the Archons who had no cover to hide behind.

Kyler couldn’t see it, but several of them already had armor damage…but in a moment they were going to have a mongoose to hide behind, along with some new toys to play with. He didn’t have enough time to tell them that much, but if they couldn’t improvise then they didn’t deserve to be Archons, so he didn’t worry about it as he killed the engine on the mongoose and let it coast forward towards the gap the others had made.

As he steered to maintain his line, Kyler got his feet up on the seat and set himself in a squat, then jumped forward as he passed the other Archons, letting his momentum carry him up over the mongoose as he yanked the handle bars to the side. It curved sharply and bounced off the wall, flipping over and careening to a stop a few meters shy of the shield while Kyler’s body continued straight ahead and he punched through the shield superman style about 2 meters up from the ground.

Given that the shield was only holding back air on this side, it didn’t resist his entrance too much, but there was still a considerable deceleration as he hit the water on the far side, shooting him into the mess of lizards and knocking his head enough to disorient himself slightly.

The two dozen or so lizards floating in the water that was continuing to rise up towards the high ceiling were caught off guard, but quickly recovered and brought their plasma rods up and around to tag him with…then they suddenly lost their grip on their weapons and began to twitch around unnaturally.

Kyler pulled out a water-version stun stick from his back rack and jabbed the closest one to him while maintaining the Fornax disruption field with as much intensity as he could. He jetted to his left, jabbing another into unconsciousness as he grabbed a plasma rod with his free hand and began going through the lizards with the two weapons, knocking more than half of them out of the fight before he could hold the Fornax field no longer and had to mentally take a breath.

With their nervous systems now functional again the lizards got their situational awareness back and grabbed for their weapons, most of which had floated down to rest on the floor. Kyler stunned two more and killed a third while one near the shield reached down and picked up its weapon, then brought its glowing end up a couple of meters away from the trailblazer and kicked its legs back to propel it forward into him.

The lizard moved all of two inches before a pair of hands punched through into the water behind it and latched onto the creature, then it was pulled back through the shield and into the air, no longer a threat to Kyler.

Another lizard swam up to him and tried to jab him with his weapon, but Kyler parried it with his own plasma rod, then sent a tight beam Fornax burst directly into that lizard’s mind, allowing him to knock its weapon aside and move in to tag it with the stun stick.

He released the selective Fornax generation, which required far less power, and spun around just in time to knock aside another incoming plasma nub that missed his torso by a foot. Kyler took that lizard hand to hand, then summoned up another short range omni-directional Fornax field to distract two more long enough for him to swim up to them and take them down, one with each weapon he wielded.

Behind him two of the adepts had already come through and picked up plasma rods, using them to take down the rest of the lizards, which was when Kyler pointed them towards a det pack on the floor underneath one of the bodies.

“Get that out of here,” he ordered over the comm, “and secure these weapons and bodies. I’ll keep them busy ahead.”

“Copy that,” one of them answered back just as Kyler straightened out parallel to the ground and jetted off a la Ironman, using both leg jets and forearm jets to maximize propulsion and holding his weapons tight alongside him to reduce drag. It took several seconds for his speed to build, but once it did he was zipping back up the tunnel through the waterlogged bottom half to the point where there were individual lizards swimming down towards the shield.

Kyler jousted with them as he passed, not reducing speed. He won seven quick confrontations, given that he was able to cheat with a directed Fornax burst and knock their plasma rods aside in the confusion, tagging them in the chest or head as he passed and delivering a lethal touch of plasma in most cases. Each physical contact required him to corkscrew around to regenerate his line and speed, making his dash down the tunnel a feat of aquatics acrobatics that he pulled off well all the way up to the door some of the lizard reinforcements were coming in from.

Kyler stopped there, letting the water drag him to a halt, and waited in ambush. Using his Ikrid tracking ability he stretched out his senses to the point where he could ‘see’ the minds of the approaching lizards in a radius of about 15 meters, more than enough time to set himself and his stun stick in place to poke at it the moment the first one came through the doorway.

He grabbed the unconscious lizard by the neck and hauled it aside out of view, then repeated the process with the next one, staggered as they were. Behind them was a group of three, several seconds behind, as well as a pair coming down the tunnel from ahead, so he pulled out his needler and fired a PDM down the tunnel, using the laser targeting to lead it straight into the chest of the first lizard who tried to scramble out of the way.

It detonated with an audible pop and a slew of vaporized water from the brief vacuum created by the spherical concussion wave blocked his view of the other, which was still outside of his Ikrid range. He let it be for the moment and swung the needler around into the doorway and fired off another at the group of three lizards coming up.

The backwash knocked Kyler out away from the door, then he jetted back up and into it, grabbing the nearest plasma rod and finishing off what was left of the threesome after the detonation. Sensing no more lizards immediately close by he ducked back out into the tunnel and jetted down to the other lizard and finished it off before returning to the door and taking up sentinel duty. More lizards were on the way, and he intended to make them work very hard to get past him.

Off in another tunnel, Mero-7833 got knocked off his feet as the containment shield ahead of him fell to a lizard det pack and the water behind it burst forth. He fell headfirst to the ground but the rushing water never let him hit, instead carrying him further down the tunnel like a raging river, picking up a scattering of other Archons along the way.

Not far down another shield activated and caught the water, quickly filling up and condensing the air above it for the shield wouldn’t let anything less than solids pass through. Already, with the weight of the ocean filtering in through the numerous breaches in the infrastructure, the pressure being exerted on both the air and water was being translated into the shields, which were gratefully holding up, save for when a det pack blasted apart the emitters in the surrounding wall, as had just happened.

When the water hit the shield the backlash knocked Mero around, but eventually it settled down enough for him to get his mobility back, after which he jetted over to the shield and pushed his way through. Once he got his footing he backed up alongside two other Archons waiting with plasma rifles raised for the lizards to move up and bring the fight to them again.

A couple more Archons followed him out and helped reform their defensive line. All of them had plasma damage to their armor, but it was superficial and their water seals were holding. Behind them was the open arch leading into the loading bay for the shipyard where dozens more were setting up barricades and a more proper defensive line. One more shield remained between it and them, ready to activate if the current one was breached, and it was up to Mero’s team to delay the lizards’ advance as much as possible.

As they watched through the clear shield, the churning water up top settled and cleared down towards the bottom where they could see the lizards’ swimming forward in a tight group a few seconds away from passing through the shield. Mero held his plasma rifle ready, taking a knee in front of an adept and using his silver armor to cover the red legs of the other, minimizing the available silhouettes the lizards had to fire at while overlapping their own protection.

The first thing through the shield was a deactivated plasma rod, for otherwise the nub would have discharged against the shield on contact. Mero squeezed off a shot immediately and hit the weapon, melting into the nub casing and rendering it useless.

The lizard didn’t know that, and when its body came through the shield it flicked on the activation button and aimed at the first Human it saw…but no plasma orb shot out. Instead two blue lances came in and shot it dead while more lizards popped out more or less standing erect and firing green plasma at the Archons.

There were too many to hold off without letting them fire a few return shots, some of which hit the defenders. Between that accumulating damage and the Archons’ limited ammunition, coupled with the seemingly limitless number of lizards moving forward, the defensive line had to fall back, with Mero being the last to move, given his armor was thicker than the others’.

He held his position, taking a couple more hits as he killed three more lizards, then he jumped up and ran across to the other side of the tunnel, turning as he did into a sprint back towards the archway some 50 meters back. He took a hit to his back before reaching the barricades and jumping over the crates and taking up position behind them.

The lizards didn’t follow immediately, but more of them were popping through the distant shield while some of the Archons fired off plasma lances that hit several of them due simply to them being clumped together so closely, but they didn’t move off, charge, or scatter…they just held position until a few seconds later the ones in the front were passed forearm length rods from behind, and soon the leading lizards deployed their legionnaire shields, overlapping them as much as they could and beginning to walk forward while blocking the incoming plasma lances for at least a couple hits each.

“Shit,” Mero said, dropping his rifle on the ground beside his knee and concentrating on the minds ahead of him. His psionics skills weren’t very strong compared to some of the others, but most of those around him were adepts, leaving situations like this to him to deal with.

He picked out one of the minds on the front line and summoned as much Fornax intensity as he could and mentally shot it out on a straight line into the target.

That lizard suddenly stumbled, dropping its shield and tripping over its own webbed feet.

Half a dozen plasma lances shot out through the gap into the lizards behind and for a moment there was chaos in their line…but it quickly reformed as another picked up the shield and stepped into place.

Then as soon as the lines reformed they were blown apart by a wall of water from behind as the containment shield succumbed to another det pack.

The lizards were knocked forward in the wave, disappearing for a moment in the water until it ran up against the last containment shield in the tunnel inside the Archway and meters away from the horseshoe-shaped barricade line.

Right after the water hit, the lizards reappeared, plopping through the shield from their momentum and falling to the ground where the Archons made quick work of them. Those that didn’t get knocked through began assembling just inside the rising wall of water on the other side of the shield.

If they were able to knock that one down, the entire loading bay would flood…which was something they couldn’t afford to have happen.

Mero stood up and leapt over the barricade, leaving his plasma rifle on the ground behind it. On his way towards the shield he reached down and scooped up one of the plasma rods that had come through with the lizards then he ran into the wall of water like a football player shouldering into a block, punching through the shield and taking it to the lizards hand to hand with several other Archons following suit behind him.

5

“Kyler, they’re breached the shipyard outer defenses,” one of the aquatic Regulars said over the comm from the command level, given that all Archons had redeployed themselves into battle.

The trailblazer didn’t respond for several seconds, killing lizards as he was down in the tunnels.

“How many surface breach points do we have?” he asked, jetting backwards through the already filled tunnel a bit and grabbing another plasma rod from the floor. He flipped it on and jetted back the way he’d come, sensing more lizards approaching but unsure of the number given the limited effective distance of his already strained Ikrid tracking ability.

“49,” she said evenly with just a hint of strain in her voice.

“Mark them on the battlemap,” he ordered, slinking up against the wall and swimming around a stack of bodies he’d been piling up…the fourth pile, actually, given that he’d moved ambush spots three times now.

Little icons popped up on his holographic map on the edges and he zoomed out to get a better feel for where the lizard reinforcements were coming in from.

“Damn it,” he whisper swore. “Are any of them contained topside?”

“The seafloor is covered with lizards. Without physically patching the breaches we can’t rule any of them secure, but there are a few without current activity.”

“Any big ones?”

“Define big?”

“Arrowhead size?”

“Not to my knowledge. We don’t have visuals on all of them, so I can’t be sure.”

“Hold on,” Kyler said just as another lizard popped out into the tunnel beside him. He sensed another two right on his heels so he let the first one come out then jabbed the plasma rod into the head of the second one, meeting it just as it came into view.

There was an audible pop followed by a stream of steam bubbles as Kyler pulled back and rotated the rod to the left as he kicked off from the wall and jabbed straight into the ribs of the first one, taking it out and jetting around in a pinwheel to face off with the third that had to push its way past the body of the second. Its plasma rod jutted out at him, but Kyler got a hand on it in time and parried it aside. With a firm hold just below the plasma nub he pulled and brought the lizard closer as it chose not to let go, then he jabbed it with his own and quickly ended their little threesome’s advance through the outer city.

“Still there?”

“Yes.”

“Has the shipyard been completely evacuated?”

“Of engineers and techs, but we’ve got combat teams engaged there now.”

“What about the tunnel spurs outside the fence?”

“Those doors have been locked down, but the lizards haven’t gotten to them yet. They’re two sections away on the southeast side though, but that defensive position appears to be holding for the moment.”

“Is the tunnel entrance to the shipyard flooded?”

“Three are.”

“Open one of the topside doors and flood it, then order the arrowheads inside.”

“Did you just say flood the main bay?!”

“If there are no techs left, yes. Flood it.”

“Is that safe? There are probably pieces of equipment that will react poorly to water.”

“Give everyone a heads up then open one of the doors, then have the arrowheads start patrolling the flooded tunnels. They should be able to deal with the infantry better than we can.”

“Alright.”

“And Linda…start prepping the techs for an air evac. We’re not giving up this city, but if the lizards get much further I want them out of the way.”

“Evac to where?”

“If Paul’s not busy have them taken up to the battle stations.”

“Uh, actually they’re under assault right now…”

Kyler frowned, and not just because he sensed another group of lizards coming his way. “To Ackbar then. Don’t suppose we still have that naval support available?”

“Yes we do. He left six ships standing by for our use.”

“Bring them down and get the evac started…and see how many Archons we can pull in from other locations.”

“Vander is on his way back.”

“Any good news?” Kyler asked, readying himself next to the doorway again.

“He said he’d fill you in later, but yes.”

“We need more than him, but any will do.”

“Do you want the Regulars deployed?”

“No, keep them at the city entrances. What gets by us they’ll have to deal with, so keep them together and digging in as much as possible. How are the battleships holding up?”

“The Black Pearl is over the fence trying to hit the transports bringing in more troops. The others are still maintaining the fence-line and look to be able to continue doing so for some time. Lizard activity is centered around the infantry. I think that’s what they see as their ticket in now. They’re not even targeting the defenses anymore, they’re going straight for the breach points and making new ones.”

“Keep tagging any that they make with markers. I’m going to roam around and disrupt their flow as much as I can. Just get those arrowheads in here as soon as possible, and let me know if you have trouble with the evac.”

“Good luck,” Linda offered before cutting the comm.

A moment later Kyler used what little Fornax energy he had left and disrupted the lizards on the other side of the doorway before he pulled his way through and started taking them out one by one with the plasma rod, due to the fact that his stun stick had long since been depleted, as had his needler.

He worked his way through this group of six, then instead of going back to his ambush spot he began working his way through the building towards the nearest of the tagged breach points, killing whatever lizards he came across with a combination of psionics, captured weapons, and sheer determination.

Fred-6992 was one of the closest Archons to the shipyard when the orders came through, offering him an overtop view of the huge building as he zipped his arrowhead along its flank heading for the far corner door as the shields dropped. Visibly it didn’t register. An invisible shield going down didn’t show up, but the vortex that formed above the armored door as it slowly began to retract was.

With the interior clear door already having been removed, once the armor shell that covered 1/8th of the building cracked open the incoming water and out flowing air twisted around each other and made for all kinds of turbulence that Fred was happy to be far from. He continued his approach, slowing his speed so as not to arrive too early, and waited for the air/water exchange to finish out, noticing that the door wasn’t fully retracting.

That was probably intentional to keep the equipment inside from being completely blasted apart by the water. He didn’t doubt he’d have a minefield of parts to navigate through once he got inside, but he’d definitely prefer it if the battleship’s hulk wasn’t broken up as well, that way at least he’d have a predictable structure to zip around hunting lizards rather than a chaotic mess.

Truth was, he wasn’t sure how much damage the water was doing, but given the weight of it falling from the height it was, plus the pressure the water was under with a mile and a half of ocean pushing down above it, he definitely didn’t want to be inside while the transition was taking place.

The fact that they’d gotten to this point was a bad sign, but if the subsurface tunnels were already flooded and filling up with lizard infantry then bringing the arrowheads inside made sense…even if they had to junk the shipyard in the process to do it. Also, he knew they could have taken the long route and carried the arrowheads through the city and down to the tunnels via the cargo lifts, so the fact that they were intentionally flooding the shipyard to allow them access told him that the situation inside must have been worse than he thought.

Fred was pleased to see a number of lizards get sucked up into the vortex. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but there were hundreds swimming over or near the shipyard that got caught up in the turbulence and knocked around, if not sucked inside. He didn’t know if they’d survive or not, but at least it was disrupting their movements, of which the arrowheads and other craft had done little to stop. Fred alone had stunned/killed hundreds of them in the previous hours, but the enemy was pouring an unbelievable number of the ‘ground’ troops into the assault, far more than he’d thought they’d have in play on the entire planet.

The vortex, or more accurately, vortexes, lasted several minutes before the entire mile+ long building was filled with water. Even then there were still erratic currents flowing around the entrance but Fred wasn’t going to wait any longer. By then several other arrowheads had assembled around the area, and as soon as one of them started heading in the others followed suit and jetted up to the crack in the doors, then dropped down inside, visibly quivering as they got buffeted around by the remaining turbulence.

Fred passed through the ‘small’ gap easily, given that it was wider than a football field, and dropped down on top of a skeleton of a battleship directly beneath. He followed the others as they pulled up and skitted along the underside of the doors until they got past the skeleton to the open water surrounding it…which was littered with debris and lizards.

Before he could zip over and tag his first with the V-shaped stun blade on the front of his craft, he got a ping on his battlemap from one of the Archon teams near the entrances. He followed it, or rather navigated to it around the floating junk, and came in slowly on the doorway to an offshoot chamber where he saw numerous Archon ID tags floating.

Making sure not to hit any of them he ducked his arrowhead in first, with another four following behind him with the others moving around the shipyard to other locations, and immediately finding a cluster of lizard infantry to target as they closed with a knot of Archons who were fighting hand to hand with some others. They looked to be holding their own, but the numbers definitely were not on their side.

Fred plowed right into the enemy troops, ignoring their plasma rods given that he was coming at them from a backside angle and he didn’t think they’d seen his approach…nor were expecting it.

He put the point of the arrowhead dead center in their formation and busted his way through, hitting some with the stun weapon and others with the sides of his tiny ship, knocking the whole group apart and making easy pickings for the arrowheads following him. They spun around the large chamber, taking down others and allowing the Archons in the water to finish off the stragglers before the arrowheads left them behind and ducked into the tunnel entrance, seeing a hoard of infantry ahead, most of whom appeared to still be scattered from the currents created by the flooding of the shipyard.

“Hold up, Fred,” Sera-10483 said over the comm as she fought to catch up to him in her own arrowhead. “Let’s go in side by side.”

“Gladly,” the other Archon said, coasting forward until hers came up alongside, then the pair accelerated hard ahead and began catching the lizards off guard as they plowed through them, keeping their mental fingers crossed and hoping they didn’t take too many plasma rod hits in the process.

Far outside the fence line Vander was approaching the lizard fleets surrounding Manaan, jetting forward in his streak as he sized up the enemy alignment. His ship, low on power as it was, was faster than anything the lizards had, but if he got too close he’d be in trouble…and his mission now was to get inside the fence, not engage the ships outside.

“Ok,” he said, flexing his back for the umpteenth time in the cramped cockpit that had been his home for far too long. “Here we go.”

He angled the streak to the left, ran it out about 500 meters then banked back right and started a shallow ascent as he ran the water jets up to maximum power…then he kicked in the anti-grav and his ascent steepened. His speed also ramped up until he became a long, thin missile cutting through the water towards a gap between the lizard ships drifting around the 38 mile perimeter.

The point he’d chosen had no large ships nearby, but there were hundreds of sharks moving about in between and they’d seen him coming, given that they were now moving to intercept him where they thought he was going to cross their lines.

Vander held his nerve and his line, knowing that they weren’t going to be able to predict his exact spot given his anti-grav ascent…plus he kept wavering his line a bit to keep them guessing, which was difficult given the speed he was moving, for every little twitch of the nose moved him several degrees due to the friction of the water, making his entire ship a directional pane despite its needle-like hull.

He kept a close eye on the altimeter, knowing he had to nail that one exactly, or nearly. He had a little leeway there, but not much.

As he got near the sharks, most of which were still lateral of him, he saw minnows start popping up on his sensors by the dozens and forced himself to breathe. There was no shooting them down, he simply had to outrun them, and given the speed he was bringing in, so long as he passed them cleanly, he doubted those already fired would be able to reverse course fast enough to catch him on the other side.

However, as he closed to parallel with the sharks they continued popping out more minnows…and those were coming at him from the side at nearly his speed and accelerating quickly.

He saw most of the first minnows pass behind him and arc around, trying to fall in on his tail. He mostly ignored them, watching his line and just hoping none of the little torpedoes got lucky. The fence was just ahead and he was nearing the end of his ascent as the minnow count pursuing him passed 100. Vander wasn’t counting, and when he saw he was going to stay ahead of them by at least a small margin he ignored all but his trajectory, making a few small last moment adjustments as he neared the fence.

Given the speed he was traveling, which was insane for an underwater craft, he wasn’t going to risk shooting the gap in the fence…so instead he chose to go with something a bit more flashy.

A few hundred meters before he reached the top of the fence, which was a single layer reaching up to just above the waves, he adjusted his angle of climb heavily, pointing the nose higher up and shifting his anti-grav from lateral to vertical, ramping the streak out of the water and into the air…

Like a javelin it shot up, arched over, and came back down in the water on the far side, clearing the fence top by more than 20 meters. The minnows that hadn’t already ran out of fuel lost track of the ship when it was in the air and went after the closest proximity target they could find…which was the fence.

They swarmed to it, detonating against the thick metal pylons and barely nicking them with their small explosions, leaving Vander’s skeet unpursued as he shifted the anti-grav back over to lateral and sped in towards the Highwind that sat in the water a couple of kilometers ahead of him and more than halfway down from the surface.

He could see sporadic blue flashes from the plasma columns as they targeted the seafloor, trying to hit or scatter the thousands of lizard infantry that the battlemap had tagged crawling over the fence line interior like an infestation of ants. Vander wanted to help out with them, knowing that the battleship wasn’t equipped for such small scale combat, but he knew the major fight was occurring indoors so he set course for the now flooded shipyard, passing by several smaller Star Force capital ships floating in place and targeting what infantry they could, though by now most of them had expended their ammunition and were awaiting resupply.

Vander knew that wasn’t likely to come with the support structures around the city under assault, and even as he shot his streak across the interior landscape he saw a large shield column rise up above the city and connect to the atmosphere, indicating that a transport was either coming down or going up.

That meant they were beginning to evacuate the city, and if he was going to get into this fight now was the time.

Once he reached the shipyard he dove his streak down through the large crack in the topside doors, knocking aside lizard infantry that were now pouring down into the facility through the crack as a swarm of arrowheads were waiting below to ambush them.

They made way for his streak, after which he literally had to blow through the unconscious/dead bodies floating inside to get down to the bottom of the shipyard to where he snaked his way around the debris and battleship skeleton over to the tunnel entrances, picking the one he thought held the quickest route to the heaviest lizard concentrations below.

“Heads up, people,” he announced over open comm to the Archons’ helmet receivers, but excluded any ship ones. “Streak coming in. Point me where I’m needed.”

6

“Vander, that’s not going to fit around the corners,” Kyler’s voice said over the comm as the Archon shot his craft down the flooded tunnel, knocking aside lizards that got in his way like they were bowling pins, though most survived the impacts.

“I can at least disrupt their movements,” he argued, coming up to the first crossroads intent on trying to turn anyway. The tunnels had never been designed to be flooded, so he doubted anyone had considered the possibilities of ships moving through them, though he did see several arrowheads moving about on the battlemap ahead of him.

“How many PDM do you have left?”

“Full load, plus four torpedoes if I can find a use for them. They get anything other than infantry in here?”

“No, just the little guys. Play train as long as you’ve got lizards to kill, then ditch the streak and take it to them hand to hand. The only way we win this one is by racking up an insane kill count. They can’t get their fleet in past the battleships yet, so this is their only play and they’re going for broke. They’ve been mass assaulting choke points and using their det packs to take down the containment shields and flood sections ahead of them, so watch it when you get close and use needlers on any carrying packs at range.”

“Evac?”

“We’re not giving up the city,” Kyler said emphatically, “but if they break through into the main building things are going to get messy and I don’t want noncombatants getting in the way.”

“Copy that, but I wouldn’t assume they’ve given up on the fence line. They’ve got a freaking huge fleet camped outside that I had to run my ass through to get back here.”

“I know,” Kyler said calmly. “That’s the battleships’ fight right now, this is ours. Get into Halo mode and work on our kill count.”

“Happy to,” Vander said, stopping at the intersection and bending his skeet at the midsection. Using only the anti-grav for maneuvering he tried to tip the needle-nose to the left into the next section, but the ship was too long and even with the bend in the hull the curve wasn’t sharp enough. He pounded the tip against the wall, then wiggled the hull around a bit seeing if he could goose his way through, but it was no use. He was stuck with forward and back only.

“Ok,” he said to himself, switching over to weapons control as he backed up and straightened out, “let’s make this death row then.”

He picked up a cluster of lizards ahead in his tracking display and fired a PDM out at them. It was larger than the versions fired by the needler pistol but it operated off of the same technology. The little missile spat ahead and swam to its target and detonated, killing the lizard it hit and wounding those around.

Vander’s streak spat out several more, then he reversed direction and backed his way up the tunnel with the more blunt end of his ship pushing a significant wall of water ahead of it. Those lizards that he’d knocked aside before were hit again, then when they became visible in his forward arc he popped them with PDM at close range, making it feel like he was playing a videogame in reverse.

He moved his streak all the way back out into the shipyard, then swam it around to another tunnel entrance and proceeded down it, shooting all the lizard groups he could come across while simply ramming the individuals. This process he repeated for all the tunnels, including an angled spur off of one that he was able to make the bend for.

Vander patrolled the stretches he was capable of maneuvering down while the arrowheads in the shipyard and above kept disrupting the incoming lizard flow as much as they could. The other streaks in play were elsewhere, shooting up the lizards as they crossed the seafloor, as was the rest of the interior defense fleet, but the carpet of invaders kept coming in numbers that seemed unfathomable.

Four hours later…

“Close them, now,” Kyler said in between plasma rod parries with three more of the never ending lizard infantry.

“What about the Archons outside the doors? There are several dozen of you,” Linda said from the command level.

“We’ll be fine,” he said, jabbing one of the lizards with its own plasma rod after a Fornax burst that disrupted the nervous systems of all three. “Shut them now.”

“Closing,” Linda said, nodding to another staffer in the city’s control center who pressed the final commands into the console before him. On the central holographic display detailing the subsurface battles they were gradually losing, the five tunnel entrances into the city flashed with highlights as meter-thick doors began to inch their way into position, physically closing off the entrances where before there had only been containment force fields.

It took the better part of a minute for them to all close, with Archon and Regular troops ducking back through at the last minute as the lizards approached two of the positions on foot, with the wall of water held back a few sections in each location by still intact energy fields.

“Doors closed,” she told Kyler. “Good luck.”

“So long as they have det packs they’re still coming through,” the trailblazer reminded her. “We just bought ourselves some more time. Beef up our defense lines inside.”

“On it,” she said as Kyler cut the comm from his end, no doubt busy killing more lizards.

“We’ve got a flight of dropships and mantises inbound from Seaquest,” another staffer reported. “They’re requesting permission to land in the city.”

“Are we clear?” Linda asked, glancing at the hologram but not relying on her cursory look.

“No aerial lizard contacts showing. No known launch capable submersibles.”

“Open shafts 3 and 4. Launch two skeets on patrol.”

Up on the ocean surface two tiny shield columns reached up from the seafloor and broke the surface, then began widening as they pushed a mile’s worth of water aside, gradually creating a pair of open air corridors capable of carrying the wider aerial craft straight down into the city. As those formed two smaller ones manifested beside them and launched the skeets into the air where they split up and began circling around the perimeter.

All of Manaan’s transports had already left the city with passengers onboard and had yet to return. The incoming flight was from their twin city, carrying Archons and Regulars along with a number of small aquatics craft. Those carrying personnel went straight for the open shafts, with a pair of Falcon-class dropships being the first to settle into a hover and carefully descend down into the shafts with the ocean water poised around them in heavy walls ready to come crashing down on top of them if the shields failed.

 Four Dragon-class dropships ignored the shafts and landed in the water itself above the city, opening up their holds and releasing schools of arrowheads into the war zone below. With their cargo released the dropships slowly rose back up, draining their holds of the water, then made their way over to the entry columns and got in line behind the others, ready to take on additional Manaan evacuees.

Paul’s mind was working frantically, his eyes darting across three different holograms in the command nexus as he was Ikrid linked into the system. He saw an escaping opportunity to take out several lizard ships in the chaos and knew he had to act quickly before the enemy took its good fortune and fled.

One of the Star Force battle stations was rubble, along with over 4,000 people inside. He hadn’t completely abandoned the idea of there being some survivors remaining somewhere in the pieces, and he had the Excalibur’s Captain working on organizing the search and rescue operation, but the fighting wasn’t over and he was focused on taking out as many of the damn enemy ships as he could while he had the opportunity.

He alternated between sending out orders to individual ships and fleet commanders, including other trailblazers, getting their widely spaced battlefield realigned to pounce on isolated pockets of lizard ships that had succeeded in engaging Star Force and pushing hard to take out the battle station currently under construction, going so far as to land a few long distance plasma shots on the weak defense shield it carried.

But it had all been a ploy…or maybe not, and the enemy commander had simply improvised. Either way Paul had failed and let a kamikaze ship through their lines.

‘Thrawn’ was certainly living up to the moniker Paul had given it/them, and the trailblazer was burning with a mix of rage and embarrassment at getting owned in his specialty. He wasn’t going to compound his error by letting the lizard ships within range get free, so he channeled all his rage into his mental calculations and reset his naval chess board into hunter mode, ganging up on several select groups while maintaining defensive pickets around the jumpline between the planet and the battle station cluster so the lizards couldn’t pull the same trick twice.

Using momentum and ramming a ship into another as a kinetic weapon was a tactic Paul had invented for Star Force way back during his basic training, and he’d been adamant about arraying defenses to protect against someone else doing the same thing to them. That was one reason Star Force maintained a large number of smaller capital ships rather than just building all cruisers and up.

The smaller, faster ships would be deployed out from a battle station or command ship at considerable range, enabling possible intercepts of any incoming craft on a high speed collision course. They needed the faster speed to increase the odds of catching the incoming kamikazes, or at least to match them. Paul knew the quicker the ships he had and the greater the range he could deploy them gave him the ability to intercept and nudge the enemy off course, which was why the block-like construction of the drone warships was heavily reinforced with a superstructure capable of pushing other ships without completely deforming themselves on contact.

Then, as a last resort, he could have one of his picket ships kamikaze ram the kamikaze in order to knock it off course so that it would miss the target. He wished that Star Force had shields capable of holding off an impact of that size, but that was far beyond them. In fact, Earth’s defense plan had a number of specially designed kamikaze ships lying in wait for if/when the V’kit’no’sat came back. Paul knew that momentum was the strongest weapon they had, and given the huge size of the their ships it was probably the only chance he had of destroying one, because even as navigational calculations became more and more precise the farther out you made your run, you could always add more speed, and therefore more destructive power if your approach wasn’t challenged.

Paul had defended the battle stations against such an assault, with numerous pickets in position to deploy to intercept any lizard ship that took up an approach that even smelled like a kamikaze trajectory. That picket line was always subject to the number of ships he had to work with, but during this battle the enemy hadn’t appeared to be attempting such an attack, even given their penchant for suicide missions.

During the long, drawn out battle that had several ‘engagements’ within the sequence of events, a small group of cruisers broke off and made a run for the planet. Paul sent a few waiting ships in extreme low orbit after them, hoping to knock out at least one before they got into the atmosphere, assuming they were going to reinforce their aquatics forces with additional weapons/troops/materiel.

During the run down to the atmosphere one of the ships broke off on a spur, looking as if it was heading to an alternative surface site, but it decelerated hard prior to entering the atmosphere and above the intercept Paul’s ships were angling for.

That one ship positioned itself square on a jumpline from the planet that led straight into one of their battle stations. Paul had recognized the threat moments after it stalled out its descent, but his ships were too far away to do anything about it. In agony, he watched as the stationary cruiser rapidly accelerated up away from the planet on its gravity drives, stretching out its acceleration curve into a streak of motion as it made a kamikaze jump straight into the battle station.

At the speed it connected the cruiser punched straight through the shields and armored hull, passing into and through the station with the debris pushing out the far side like a shot gun. Fortunately the other two and a half stations hadn’t been caught up in the spray, though Sara’s warship did take a few shield strikes from baseball sized ‘dust’ much farther up in orbit.

No one else had seen the attack coming, but Paul didn’t excuse himself for making the mistake of letting the lizards pull it off. They’d never used this tactic before, to his knowledge, but that didn’t mean Paul wasn’t aware of it, because he had planned to use it against enemies in the future if the situation merited it.

He should have had ships guarding that jumpline, though in truth a ship could have used the star or any other gravity wells in the system to make similar kamikaze runs, but the planet offered the closest and strongest push off for an attack, and Paul was furious at not having seen that coming in time to stop it.

He didn’t let that anger blind him, and had the Star Force fleet picking off capital ships in the double digits as the lizard forces disengaged piecemeal now that their primary objective had been met. What galled him even more was the sloppy retreat they were making that was giving him the opportunity to thin their numbers. An enemy that could pull of a kamikaze strike like that should have been competent enough to make a coordinated retreat…which showed that despite their tactical brilliance they weren’t that significant of a naval power.

Which meant Paul had got owned by a group of losers. That and the deaths of so many Star Force personnel were really eating under his skin. He hated losing, but he couldn’t stand other people dying because of a mistake he’d made.

At the same time his calculating mind knew he had to cut himself some slack. Without some means of energy-based deflection, such as a tractor beam to push a kamikaze off course before it hit, there was no way he could put up a perfect defense. He’d simmed against himself so many times in that regard, and no matter how skilled a defensive net he laid, he was always able to find a way to penetrate it when he took on the role of attacker.

So in essence his current defense against kamikaze ships was half real, half bluff…and required him to predict the enemy’s movements in order to forestall an attack being launched, because once it was, especially in this case when the transit occurred inside of 2 seconds, Star Force had no way of stopping it.

Paul worked the Ikrid interface skillfully, his anger enhancing his focus rather than distracting from it, and his fleets racked up 17 additional capital ship kills, including 2 battleships that got left behind by their faster escorts during the retreat. Ship for ship, the sum total of the engagement had their kill count at 132 and the lizards’ at 54, though that was skewed given the fact that the lizard ships outmassed the Star Force ones, leaving the adjusted kill ratio at about 4/1.

A victory, that would have been, except for the loss of the battle station. Include it in the mix and, equipment wise, it amounted to a draw…but Star Force naval strategy, of which Paul had written most of, was centered around preserving crews while expending equipment. Only the largest ships had personnel onboard, and they weren’t used in the direct fighting.

The battle stations were heavily armored due to the fact that they couldn’t redeploy away from the enemy, meaning that the lizards would have to expend firepower on the shields to get them down, then slowly chew through the armor to get at the interior that held the crew, most of which would redeploy to the center levels during battle for additional protection.

The kamikaze cruiser had blown right through those defensive precautions in a fraction of a second, making today not only a defeat, but a total rout. Never before had Paul lost a battle this badly, and while it wasn’t going to negatively affect his ability to command, it immediately set his mind on a review process of every tactic and protocol he’d come to rely on.

Paul’s subconscious wouldn’t let him do any less, because he couldn’t accept the deaths of the battle station crew as ‘acceptable.’ Losing personnel was never acceptable, but above all else Paul abhorred the idea of the 1 shot kill, for it meant that those who prepared, who trained, who grew stronger than the rest could be killed as easily as a newb…and his gut told him that was just plain wrong.

Which meant his defenses were at fault. He’d failed those personnel who’d been aboard that station. They hadn’t gone down fighting, been overwhelmed by a superior opponent…they’d been blindsided and that had been his fault.

And he couldn’t let it happen again, no matter what the logistics of their available defensive technology were.

7

September 16, 2429

Retari System

Atlantica

Kyler hadn’t slept since the infantry battle began, nor had any of the other Archons in the tunnels, and he was beginning to feel the effects of both fatigue and lack of ambrosia in his system, but there was no way to resupply given the fact that he was literally surrounded by thousands of lizards, and even if he’d had an arrowhead bring out a satchel of supplies from the main building via the shipyard entrance, there was no way he was getting over there given the infested nature of the tunnels.

He had a slight headache buzzing, but fortunately the power cell in his armor hadn’t given out, and he was relying on his four suit jets for most of his movement through the warehouse he was hunting in at the moment.

Or being hunted. Which was occurring was a bit of perspective, given that the lizards knew his approximate location and the fact that he was isolated. They were diverting troops to hunt him down, given that he’d been raiding their strongholds in the captured buildings. The infantry that were still coming in from ships dumping more of them outside the fence perimeter were carrying more than det packs. The Archons still patrolling around the most popular entry points in the substructure had stopped many of them and done a quick assessment of what they were carrying.

Which was everything…everything they needed to set up for a long siege.

Foodstuffs, comm equipment, portable structures broken down into very small pieces, shield gauntlets, bundles of plasma rods, and a bunch of other useful stuff for a long campaign. Leave it to the lizards to show you where you were weak, because they were setting up shop inside Star Force’s own infrastructure because they hadn’t put up enough damn anti-infantry defenses. He hadn’t conceived of that being a problem, given that they could intercept any troop ships well out from the city…nor had, even in his wildest dreams, he considered them deploying this many into open water.

They were killing so many of them it was literally a slaughter, but they’d sent so many in, and were continuing to send more, that they were overwhelming the defenders with targets. Too many targets to get to before they got past them.

There had been some brief discussion about building a solid wall around the city, but the amount of resources expended on the fence hadn’t been something they’d conceived of lightly. Given the small net it was constructed of the amount of metal they’d had to mine to construct it was enough to build several more cities, but Kyler and the others had deemed it essential to establish not just infrastructure, but strongholds that would seriously hinder any lizard assault attempts.

And it was doing just that. Their larger ships couldn’t get through the net and their smallest ones were toast if they tried. The inverted ‘V’ design made it impossible to topple the fence, and cutting out pieces of it for them to get through took time and made a choke point that they’d have to pass through, and given that there already was a huge opening ‘gate’ set in the design, the lizards cutting their own didn’t make a lot of sense, but if they decided to press that angle the guardian fleets could respond before they could get much accomplished.

Add in the defense towers outside the fence and you had a significant deterrent against large scale assaults. The only reason the towers had gone down was because the lizards were hitting them with an insane scale assault, but even then the fence was doing its job and keeping their ships back…and the battleships were whittling them down, taking turns hopping over the porous barrier and roughing up the fleets outside before jumping back in to recharge shields all the while daring the lizards to make a more frontal assault that they couldn’t do with the fence constricting their approach options.

So even with their towers busted up outside, the city was more or less safe, not counting the turret island devastation, and then the damn lizards had to go and show Kyler that his carefully designed defenses had a weakness he hadn’t considered…nor had anyone else, including Ariel, meaning this mustn’t have been in their enemy’s playbook until recently. Hell, Star Force had probably prompted them to invent it. Nice how they were always teaching each other new things.

And now it was his turn, in which he intended to school them in the art of not pissing off a sleepless Archon in close quarters.

The warehouse wasn’t an area the lizards had set up shop in, which made it an empty zone for them to throw down in, save for the dozens of dead lizards cluttering the water. Given the pressure it was under the lizard bodies more or less floated neutrally, while their slightly more dense weapons sank. Those he was collecting and putting to good use, and though the suspended bodies were a bit hard to differentiate from the living, those he was also putting to use as barricades as he swam about, ducking in and out of the corpses and crates as he wove his way from the floor to the ceiling that still had a few meters of air trapped and compressed there.

Breathing it was a no go, not that he really had time to try. His armor provided him with all the air he needed, and he was breathing heavy as he fought the dense water, leveraging his arms and legs in conjunction with the jets to maneuver around like a predator hunting the scores of lizards also hunting him. Taking them down was easy one on one, but he’d been having to do it for so long that his fatigue was making him slip up every now and then.

Fortunately the lizards’ weapons were point of touch only in the water, meaning they had to get up close and personal rather than pound on him in groups from afar. Given he was using their weapons, since his needler ammunition had long since expired in what felt like a lifetime ago, he had to close with them as well to fight, with the key being choosing the moments of contact and not letting the lizards gang up on him.

That wasn’t the only reason he needed to keep moving about, because he knew that if he got stationary his fatigue would start to assert itself and he’d get sleepy. Without ambrosia to cut into his fatigue he needed his adrenaline at least seeping through, so he had to stay active and the best way to do that was by fighting the enemy…which was fortunate, given they kept coming for him and didn’t seem to feel like taking a breather.

Kyler jabbed, parried, kicked, and punched his way through more and more lizards, reserving his nearly depleted psionics for select cases of need, until there were too many bodies floating about and he was forced to fight his way into an adjacent hallway. From there he jetted down a long, straight length until he came to another appropriately sized room, knowing from experience that he didn’t want to get cornered in a small one again.

They’d previously pinned him in one and tried to run a det pack in to finish him off, with him barely distracting the lizard from pulling the trigger. Had he not had Fornax he’d have been facing an explosion a meter in front of his face, and even with the water dampening the blast a bit his armor would have at least cracked, and the concussion would have left him unconscious even if he’d been lucky enough to avoid getting any shrapnel in his body.

So Kyler kept moving after that, from one large area to another with little chance of rest. The lizards had his position and were coordinating to keep him under pressure, unlike the previous day when he’d been more or less free to roam about. The other Archons, when he had the chance to look at his battlemap, had at least paired up, but they were also under assault, being hunted throughout the tunnels and buildings, though a couple had managed to secure safe zones from which to counterattack from.

Kyler, as he’d hoped, was drawing the most attention, given the amount of infantry he was killing, but he was beginning to hit his limit…and he knew from encountering this level of fatigue in training that his abilities were going to stretch out rather than black out. His speed would slow, his thought processes would fog up, and though he’d still be fighting he wouldn’t realize how debilitated he was becoming until an appropriately sized challenge came up and bit him in the ass.

Only this wasn’t a challenge, it was live combat. And the ass biting in this case would be lethal.

That left him two choices…retreat and rest, or go hyper and keep his energy flowing so much that it would fight off the blowback. That was risky, like continually stretching a rubber band…eventually it would snap back on him, but he had no choice. He had to live in the moment and ignore the biological warning signs telling him he had little left to fight with. Those signs had been wrong in the past and he was gambling that he had more in him than he knew…and this was one of those rare times when you got the chance to find out.

“Kyler, how you holding up?” Vander’s voice popped into the trailblazer’s helmet.

“Still alive. You?”

“They’re trying hard, but failing. You got plans?”

“Nope. You?” Kyler said, spotting a pair of lizards appearing ahead and prepping himself to ram them rather than slow and fight more conservatively, for there were more following behind, and his jets weren’t getting him all that far ahead of them when he had to stop and contend with more infantry every 10 seconds or so.

“We’ve got something cooked up if you can get to us.”

“Give me a sec,” he said, summoning a short range Fornax burst, just enough to disrupt their senses as he got within sparring range. He pushed one of their plasma rods aside and ducked under another, jabbing his own into the lizard whose weapon he didn’t have a grip on, then kicked into the midsection of the one he did when its eyes focused on him in the wake of the Fornax disruption.

Its grip slipped a few inches but it didn’t let go…until he jabbed it with the plasma nub and burnt a hole into its chest. He kicked it in the head as he jetted by, then dumped his old plasma rod and brought the new one with him.

“Go.”

“Got a place where we can get some breathing room. Did a little rearranging and hid an exit. Can you get to my location?”

Kyler checked his battlemap, sensing another lizard about to come out into the hallway ahead. Vander was in a different building altogether, meaning he was going to have to move through one of the tunnels to get there…and the shortest route was a no go, considering it passed through one of the main staging locations for the lizards.

“It’ll take me a while, but I’m headed there now,” he said, adding Vander’s current location as a waypoint in case the Archon moved to another spot.

“The others are heading this way, and those of us here are staging raids out to clear a path. When you get close we’ll do the same.”

“Copy that,” Kyler said, moving off so he was traveling along the leftmost wall, then accelerated harder so that he came up on a doorway just a hair after the lizard’s plasma rod came into view. He grabbed it and used his own to jab the enemy infantry in the head. Once the fiery plasma melted into its skull and the bubble spray dissipated he knocked the body aside and jetted on, turning right at the far end of the hall with a plan and structuring his mind around the task of completing it with what energy he had left.

Kyler jetted out of the tunnel and into an industrial building, zigzagging through a preplanned course that Vander and four other Archons had more or less cleared out of lizards. With every second that went by he gapped those following him and with the multiple turns he got out of sight long enough to momentarily lose them while avoiding the others in the building.

Two more turns and he was into a storage room where Vander was waiting. The acolyte waved him over to a stack of crates and pointed him through a gap where one was set with the side pulled up. Kyler went through first, then Vander swam in and pulled the flap down, locking it in place with a crude latch before swimming through the gutted crate to the other side of the stack set up against a wall covering a doorway to the other side of the building.

“How many exits?” Kyler asked, glancing back at their handiwork. They’d cut and welded the camouflage crate door, judging by the job they’d done on the interior latch, making it impossible for the lizards to pull it open even if they found the spot.

“We have three from our mini complex, which contains six rooms, two bigger than this. We’ve covered the other entrances so they can’t get in, and so far none of them have tried.”

Kyler floated in place, waving his hands around a bit to maintain his position as his head began to swoon from the sudden rest…quicker than he’d expected.

“Head count?”

“We have two yet to arrive, the others are out on raids. We’ve got a stash of lizard weapons, some of our heavy equipment, a few lizard shields, and one of their det packs.”

“What heavy equipment?”

“Industrial stuff, cutters and things that can go bang if we need them to.”

“What’s the status on the city doors?”

“They’re pounding on two of them, but we’ve managed to disrupt some of their supply runs. They’re having to send a lot of det packs up and we’ve stopped several from getting through. I’d guess we’ve got at least 12 hours before breach.”

“How many packs is that?”

“I’m figuring upwards of 200. The lizards keep scrounging them up from somewhere, so I assume they’re still getting fresh supplies in from the surface.”

“Last I heard the supply ships were still dropping fresh armies off outside the fence,” Kyler said, finding his eyelids drooping. “But I haven’t had much time to chat. You probably know more than I do.”

“Yeah, had a few chats with the defense teams. They’re going to randomly open up the main doors to disrupt the assault groups. No more than a meter, but they’re not going to let them just sit there and pound.”

“Are they all waterlogged?”

“Yeah.”

“Well I’m fresh out of ideas…and ambrosia. Thanks for pulling me in.”

“We’re all feeling it, but we’ve been able to take some quick naps. I suggest you do the same.”

“In a bit. Do we have a plan?”

“In case you didn’t hear, my streak got toasted after I left it. We can call for another to come in, but this building is too far from the shipyard to get to easily.”

“What good would that do? Other than the PDMs?”

“They’re real handy for popping det packs,” Vander reminded him.

Kyler rolled his eyes inside his helmet. “Right, sorry. My mind’s not functioning well at the moment.”

“Let me bottom line it for you then. The arrowheads are still patrolling the shipyard and the surrounding tunnels, but aren’t going much further because some of them got winged by det packs. Without eyes ahead, they’re not risking going up against lizards entering from other locations. They’ve closed and reopened the shipyard doors, trying to stem the tide but the lizards just redeployed elsewhere, so they opened it back up and are hammering them on the way in. Numerically that seemed like the best option. They’re not good blowing themselves up in open water where the arrowheads can hit them at speed.”

“Current estimates put the infantry count over 30,000. I’ve killed at least 200 of that, and the others have racked up a considerable amount…but the arrowheads are only stunning most of their victims. They’re reengaging once they wake up, which is why we’ve been snagging as many loose weapons lying around as possible.”

“They’ve got to stop those troop ships. By any chance did you find out where they were coming from?”

“Partially. I found some bread crumbs to follow back to what I hope will be their base, but it isn’t doing us much good right now. The battleships are continuing to hop over the fence and whittle down the enemy fleet, but more ships keep arriving like clockwork.”

“They have to run out at some point,” Kyler argued, wishing he knew when that would be.

“I agree. But there’s not much more we can do from down here. We need to get back to the city and resupply. I’m already getting dehydrated, ironic as that sounds.”

“How long before the others get here?”

“Long enough for you to grab a nap. Pick a corner and I’ll wake you when we’re ready to move. We’ve started clearing a path already. When we go we’ll all go and fight our way into open ocean. I’ve already arranged for pickup if we can get there.”

“I’ll take it,” Kyler said, grateful that the others were already a couple steps ahead of him. “You might need to ring my bell when the time comes. Don’t know if I’ll respond to the comm.”

“Sleep. We’ll handle the rest,” Vander said before jetting off.

8

Kyler woke up suddenly, finding a bit of drool stuck to the side of his mouth as his head fought to bring him up to speed from his power nap. He looked around, his eyes hurting for a moment under the bright lights of the Manaan cafeteria, then he saw Vander standing across from him.

“Sorry. I would have let you sleep, but the other trailblazers want to talk to you.”

Kyler swiped his face clean, then drank what was left of his bottle of water in three gulps.

“Ok, give me a minute.”

“Take two,” his fellow Archon said, leaving him to find his own way to a comm terminal.

Kyler looked down at his watch…he must have been out for nearly an hour. He didn’t remember putting his head down on the table, nor much else at the moment, aside from getting back into the city, out of his armor, a brief shower, and chowing down on ambrosia wafers and concentrated foodstuffs…not to mention three bottles of water that were still sitting before him, now empty.

He must have dozed off without realizing it. With an hour gone by the lizard infantry should still have been outside the blast doors chewing into them with their det packs…and if they’d gotten through early Vander would have said something.

Kyler shook the haze from his head and stood up, leaving his tray where it was on the off chance he’d be able to come back and finish the food left on it. He briskly walked out of the cafeteria and grabbed the nearest elevator, taking it up to the command level and claiming one of the unused command nexuses. When he powered it up he did a quick check of their situation, seeing it was unchanged, right down to the infantry contacts crossing the sea floor enroute to the entry points they’d blasted into the buildings.

Kyler, Vander, and the other Archons had gotten out through one of those breaches, after fighting their way through a couple of lightly defended tunnels and the lizards basing in the building. With surprise on their side they’d gotten through without too much hassle, breaking out into open water in the face of the incoming lizards. They’d briefly fought off some of them, up until a series of streaks and arrowheads got to them and carried the Archons over to the main hangar where they dumped them off before going back out to try and thin the infantry a bit more.

He switched over to communications mode and searched for incoming queries, finding that three were currently active. He joined the linked conversation and three holograms appeared of Paul, Sara, and Rafa.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Fighting’s pretty much done up here,” Sara said, her short blonde hair bobbing slightly as she moved her head to face Kyler’s hologram in her own command nexus. “What’s your situation?”

“Too many ants to stomp on,” Kyler said, disgusted. “Their infantry are running right through our defenses, no matter how many we stun or kill. We need shield generators on the fence so we can selectively block off sections we want, because they’re coming in anywhere and everywhere…and in far greater numbers than I thought the lizards could field. Basically we screwed the tactical pooch on this one.”

“Are we going to lose the city?” Rafa asked.

Kyler’s head wavered. “50/50. They’re not into the main structure yet, but they’re pounding on the doors. If we could stem the flow of their reinforcements I’d say we could hold out, but they’re continuing to pour more in and I don’t know how many more they’ve got to send our way.”

“Too small for the battleships to handle?” Paul guessed.

Kyler nodded. “And we’ve all but used up our PDM stores.”

“What about resupply from the other cities?”

“I presume that’s already happening. I’ve been in the water a lot lately.”

“Need some extra hands?” Rafa offered.

“We need a plan,” Kyler countered, “to stop the reinforcements. The lizards found our weak spot and are hammering us through it. I don’t want to concede the city as a learning process, but I’m not sure what else we can do right now other than hold out and hope their reinforcements dry up.”

“How many spare sets of aquatic armor do you have?” Sara asked.

Kyler sighed. “I know we’ve got plenty, but I don’t have a number for you.”

“Did Ariel evacuate?” Paul asked.

“I believe so,” Kyler said, uncertain. “I was told all noncombat personnel were gone.”

“You look exhausted,” Rafa mentioned.

“Just woke up from a nap, so I’m better off than I was. With the outer buildings flooded we didn’t have a chance to rest.”

“No air pockets?” Paul asked.

“There are, but the pressure is so high we didn’t want to risk taking our helmets off. So we didn’t get a chance to eat, drink, or other things for a long time.”

“The lizards are unaffected by the pressure?” Sara wondered.

“Didn’t take that close of a look, but they’re not wearing any environment gear, so I’d assume they’re built for at least this depth.”

“How many do they have in play?” Paul asked, his eyes narrowed to slits.

“Thousands, tens of thousands…it’s impossible to say. Most are staying so close to the sea floor on approach that the sensors are having a hard time picking them up unless we’ve got a craft nearby. Plus there are so many bodies in the water it’s difficult to tell what’s alive, what’s stunned, and what’s dead.”

“What’s your best weapon, hand to hand?” Rafa pressed.

“Their own plasma rods. We don’t have to worry about running out of ammo, and the stun sticks only take them out of the game temporarily. The arrowheads are only delaying their movements rather than killing them. We need a modular option that we can fit them with that will do damage on contact.”

“We’ve already been discussing this, Kyler,” Sara said, glancing at the other two holograms. “Do you concur that the only way to save the city is to take the lizards hand to hand?”

“At this point I wish I knew another way, but that’s the only option we have left. Then again I’m sleep deprived, so maybe I’m missing something. Do you see another option?”

“Send the battleships outside the fence all at once,” Paul offered. “Gang up on select portions of their fleet and destroy it. That will diminish their options for reinforcement.”

“They’ve already been doing that individually. The lizards have too many ships…plus, they are killing some of the infantry, and every one we don’t have to take hand to hand is helpful.”

“Are the battleships in danger?” Paul pressed.

“They’ve already taken some hull damage, but they have the advantage of being able to redeploy where the enemy can’t follow. So long as the Captains are smart about it, they’ll continue to pick apart the enemy until they run out of ships. Problem is, they keep getting more.”

“Staggered reinforcements or coming from a nearby staging area we can’t track?”

Kyler hesitated, his mouth half open. “Vander found something, but I never got a chance to ask him about it. He referred to it as breadcrumbs.”

“He already filed a report,” Sara offered. “He found a comm relay network, line of sight, which is why we haven’t been able to track their communications.”

“How far out?” Kyler asked, his mind working quickly as a shot of adrenaline hit him. A relay network explained a lot, but it also meant the enemy’s infrastructure was far closer than he’d guessed.

“Here,” Sara said, bringing up the schematics for him. The relay looked like some kind of sea bulb attached by a tether to the rock below. It held suspended in mid water, far enough up to be able to pass signals around the curve of the planet. The lizard tech was larger than one of their corvettes, but was totally smooth on the surface, and Kyler recognized their standard hull armor on it, meaning that it wouldn’t show up on sensors unless the probing ship was within a few kilometers of it.

“He also pulled this,” she continued, bringing up tracking data that expanded out the holographic map and included several other points around Manaan, as well as two points on four other lines headed away from the relay. Kyler knew instantly why two…it was in case the nearest link in the chain became disabled, so the relay could try and transmit double the distance to the next link, while maintaining secrecy over the location of the others in case it was discovered and accessed.

“He got into it?” Kyler wondered aloud.

“Software hack,” Rafa offered. “From what we he surmised, they’ve been communicating exclusively through these relays for some time. Meaning they’ve been setting up for this assault for more than a year, I’d guess.”

“Longer than that,” Kyler said, a glimmer of hope beginning to form in the back of his mind. “Paul, can I borrow some rail guns?”

“Way ahead of you,” he said, cracking a smile for the first time since the battle station was destroyed. “I’ve got ships standing by in low orbit. But if we take them out, we won’t have anything to study.”

“Hold up,” Sara said, raising a ‘stop’ hand for emphasis. “These are in a grid pattern. Taking one link out won’t necessarily cut their communications. We need to get all of them, and we don’t have position data for the other side of the city.”

“If the skies stay clear I can get those the same way Vander did…however he did,” Kyler said, double checking his thought processes. “If you’ve got warships in atmosphere to cover us, I’d say this is doable.”

“You think it’ll make enough of a difference?” Rafa asked.

“If it blinds their commanders sitting back at their bases, yes, it’ll be worth it,” Kyler assured him. “They’ve been very coordinated thus far, and if we take that away from them they’ll start getting sloppy again. I’d bet 1000 credits on that.”

“That’s assuming their commanders aren’t on site.”

“All of these ships are expendable,” Kyler said assuredly. “So long as they damage or take the city, they don’t care how many die. If they’ve got a mastermind organizing all of this, it won’t be in harm’s way.”

“I agree,” Paul said, his voice icy cold. “We cut the link and see what happens. If nothing else, they won’t be able to monitor their own progress unless they use conventional comms, and I don’t see any relay points above the surface for them to transmit to, unless the mid orbital fleets have very good receivers.”

“They might,” Rafa pointed out, “but anything of theirs we can bust up is a good thing at this point. Kyler, do they have anything in the tunnels aside from infantry?”

“Infantry with det packs, but nothing else that we’ve found. The breach points are too small for sharks and the shipyard entrance is guarded. Besides, anything bigger would have trouble getting past the battleships. So no, it’s just infantry. A whole lot of infantry.”

“Time to get our feet wet then,” he pressed. “We’ve got our custom armor, but the other Archons will have to suit up when we get to the city. See if you can find out how many you have before we head down.”

“On it,” Kyler promised as the three holograms winked out in sequence.

Paul sat in the cargo bay of one of his dropships along with a hoard of other Archons pulled off duty on his warships in orbit as they descended through the atmosphere towards the section of ocean that held Manaan. Ahead of them were several drone warships, part of which were making sure the skies stayed clear of lizards while a few others were hovering over the waves and making pinpoint rail gun strikes down into the water to hit the shallow comm relays. Meanwhile the lizard fleets around the submerged city increased their depth once they realized the warships were overhead.

All the way down on the sea floor they were safe, and there they stayed, as if hiding from the sunlight above.

That wouldn’t matter to Paul’s group, because they were headed inside the fence, not outside where the battleships were taking what advantage they could from the lizards being surface shy. Still, more transports and aquatics warships were arriving in shifts, replacing those Star Force was killing, more or less. Given the practice they were getting, the battleships were getting good at making short raids over the barrier and their kill count was increasing each time they did, while taking only minimal damage themselves.

Paul didn’t focus on that, or any other part of the overall battle plan. His part was simple…swim and kill lizards the way only Archons could, and he had plenty of pent up anger to sustain him for a long engagement.

Those seated next to him on the pull out benches in the Falcon-class dropship would be doing the same, though with less reckless abandon. While aquatics armor wasn’t as varied as their normal sets were, there were still differences between the adept, acolyte, and ranger versions, making his custom set more robust than what the others had, save for Sara, Rafa, Kyler, and Emily who all had identical ranger armor, save for the fittings.

It was heavier than the others, but not by much, giving him a bit more protection while maintaining his available speed. The biggest difference came in the style of the armor, which was far less bulky than the adept armor, which was little more than flexible turtle shells. The acolyte version was in between, offering more range of movement and slightly heavier armor plating, but containing less volume of such. It was a tradeoff meant to emphasize the swimming agility of the wearer…those who had little got the bulkier sets, figuring they were going to be taking extra hits anyway.

In order to reach ranger status, Paul and the others had to achieve benchmarks in all five areas of combat, plus now psionics, meaning that even though he didn’t care for the water he’d become quite skilled in it. And in this case, where his nose was safely inside an air pocket within his helmet, he didn’t suffer from as much of a disadvantage as he did when directly in the water, making him more than deserving of the heavier, but more agile set of ranger aquatics armor.

He’d outfitted his with several mods, one of which was a stun stick built into the right forearm that he could jab with while leaving his hand free. Another was a bubble shield attached to his back, his extra insurance if they were to come across any lizards with det packs and itchy trigger fingers.

“30 seconds,” he heard over his helmet comm, prompting him and the other Archons in the bay to stand up and grab their gear, most of which was already attached to their bodies at some point, though some carried physical shields meant for land combat. Paul figured they’d work about the same as the lizards’ shield gauntlets, save for you couldn’t see through them. That, and the physical ones would probably stand up to more plasma strikes than a shield matrix.

A crack in the rear of the ship opened up, lowering into a boarding ramp that hung out over the ocean. Nothing was visible on the horizon…just more and more water, eliciting a bit of a warning tingle down Paul’s spine. That was a lot of nowhere to get lost in, had there not been a city underneath them. His brain knew there was, but his eyes didn’t agree, giving him the impression that they were about to walk out into the middle of nowhere.

The Archons ahead of him didn’t hesitate and began dropping out of view two by two. When Paul got up to the edge he saw that the dropship pilot had the ship drifting forward so they wouldn’t land on top of each other, which was smart. He gave the acolyte ahead of him a second and a half head start then he walked off the edge and dropped several meters straight down through the air until his feet hit the water and his armored form cut into the ocean like a knife.

His battlemap shifted automatically to an underwater view, but his eyes were ahead of it, picking up the myriad of lights visible in the otherwise dark beneath them. To their northwest was the greatest concentration, which he knew was the main city structure. They weren’t headed there, but rather down to one of the lizard breach points in a nearby building.

To that end he fell into line and followed the others as they inverted and started swiftly jetting down to the sea floor more than a mile below.

9

All the incoming Archons met up at the same location on the sea floor, with Paul’s group arriving in about the middle. Sara and Kyler were both already in position, fighting off the scattering of lizards heading to the breach point they’d chosen to insert from. Paul let them continue, dropping down inside their circular perimeter on the edge of the bioharvest facility’s armored dome where the lizards’ det packs had broken through.

Unlike the blast doors currently holding the lizards back from the main building, the armor covering the surface buildings was lower grade, mass produced bulk armor, designed to take all sorts of nicks and dings without compromising the interior…but it wasn’t designed to stand up to significant weapons fire. That said, it was chemically designed to resist fracture, meaning that the blast point hadn’t translated up through the rest of the structure. Only the small area nearby Paul had been pulverized, absorbing the blast and letting Star Force have only a small repair job ahead of them rather than replacing football field long cracks throughout the entire dome.

Paul’s feet hit the angled surface, but the tread on his aquatic boots caught enough to support his almost neutral body weight. There he watched the other Archons assembling around him, most on the flat seafloor, while keeping their suit lights off. He could see their ID tags, however, given they were all transmitting into the battlemap and the holographic overlay set on the inside of his faceplate.

There he and the others waited as 338 handpicked Archons from the naval fleets gathered, then Kyler eventually swam over to his location with the other trailblazers following a few minutes later.

“Welcome to Atlantica,” he said over the comm to the naval expert, both of whom were wearing green armor as opposed to the silvers and reds around them.

“It’s a lot bigger from this perspective,” Paul said, referencing his normal orbital view.

“You ready for this?”

“Are you?” Paul quipped.

“I can sleep later. I want these guys off our doorstep.”

“Let’s start sweeping then.”

Kyler pulled up a special version of the battlemap that allowed him to share it with Paul, then using his forearm controls he began drawing routes on it.

“Six routes. These will hit the major staging areas in this hemisphere. We play venators, starting by heading here,” he said, pointing to a small building that had three different tunnels connecting to it. “Then we play it by ear and go where we find the most targets.”

“Weapons?”

“There will be plenty just inside. We’ve hit this location before.”

“Assuming the lizards haven’t cleaned up.”

“They were littering the floor last I was here, so don’t worry. Save those needlers for the det packs.”

“You picked up any outside?”

“A few, we’re…” he paused as a ripple ran through the water and shifted them aside slightly, “detonating now.”

Another set of green armor swam up next to them with dozens of other Archons trailing in her wake.

“What are we waiting on?” Emily asked.

Kyler shot her the battlemap with the routes tagged. “The five of us are going out on our own, so we need to split the others into assault groups headed up by my guys. As soon as we get them divvied up equally we’re going in.”

“Odd play,” she commented.

“We’re staying on the move,” Kyler explained, and Emily knew instantly what he meant based on their prior experience, dating all the way back to when they were trainees.

“I’m down with that,” Rafa said, swimming up to the group.

“One to go,” Paul commented.

“I’m here,” Sara said from afar. “Get going.”

Kyler didn’t hesitate, flipping head for heels and jetting straight down into the breach and ‘crawling’ through. Paul went in right on his heels, stun stick extended, and was met with resistance immediately on the other side of the small broken tunnel he came out of.

Kyler fended off two jabs from lizards flanking the entrance, but given he’d sensed their positions he’d scooted out of the breach at speed and made them miss behind him. The plasma nubs nearly hit each other directly in front of Paul, who reached out and grabbed the right one, tugging it and the lizard that held it in towards him where he jabbed him with the stun stick in his forearm.

A quick Fornax blast to the other’s mind kept him from getting hit, and he knocked the tip of its weapon aside with his stun stick before reaching his arm up and poking it in the ribs, then he jetted forward and cleared the breach for the others to come through.

Meanwhile Kyler was engaging a handful of others who’d been hanging around the entry point, but he soon plowed through them, coming out into the next room with plasma rod in hand and another five kills to his credit.

“Form on me,” Kyler said on his private comm channel to the other trailblazers, then he switched to another he’d reserved for his assault team leaders. “Entry point secure, we’re heading out. Proceed at best speed.”

With that last order he jetted off at half speed, knowing the others would catch up with him, and picked almost random directions to travel, getting off the routes the others would be taking and ‘into the weeds’ so to speak. If the lizards were going to coordinate their defenses against them, he wanted them tracking his group and not fully prepping for the main kill squads.

Two and a half hours later the five trailblazers were halfway around the perimeter of the city, having kept moving and killing constantly, now more than 3 miles away from the closest of the assault groups. There were more than enough lizards in play for all the Archons to have their fill, and the rangers were focused on killing as many of them as they could rather than clearing out sections of the city.

The assault groups were proceeding in that regard, though they couldn’t lock down any of the buildings given the explosives damage, not only on the hull but inside where security doors had been shut to try and stall the lizards advance…and had been subsequently destroyed to allow them to progress. That said, they were proceeding building by building and killing all they came across, attempting to provoke a counterattack or at minimum kill all the lizards in a given area and eliminate the field bases they were setting up inside.

“Kyler, the lizard ships are breaking off,” Linda’s voice broke in suddenly to the trailblazer’s helmet.

“Say again?”

“I don’t know what’s happening, but every ship within sensor range is turning about and leaving. Their infantry on the fence line are also turning around for pick up. Those inside are still advancing, but it looks like you’ve got a finite number to work with now.”

“What the hell happened?” he asked, following Sara’s feet as she led the ranger group through a zigzag course around the inner edge of an industrial building.

“It wasn’t the battleships, they’re all currently inside the fence, and the lizards just got a group of reinforcements 10 minutes ago. I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Keep me updated,” he said, switching over to his teamcomm. “Guys, the lizard fleet is bugging out. Their infantry inside the perimeter is still coming, but the flow has dried up. I don’t know how many we’ve got left to deal with, but we can finish this.”

“Good news,” Sara commented, raising her plasma rod up as all five of the rangers sensed lizard minds gathered ahead around the next corner. “How close are they to breaking through the doors?”

“A few inches, as of 20 minutes ago. I haven’t gotten an updated report, so I don’t think they’re through yet. They can hold if we can thin the reinforcements further. The doors aren’t going to come down when they poke a hole in them, so they’ll have a shooting spree for a while until the lizards widen the gap. If we can keep up our kill rate we’ve got this.”

“Why are they pulling back?” Paul asked, swimming fourth in their staggered line.

“Control is working on it, but right now I don’t care so long as they’re not dropping off more infantry.”

“Maybe they ran out,” Rafa suggested.

“Had to happen sometime,” Emily added.

“Heads up,” Sara warned unnecessarily as she got to the corner. As was their standard operating procedure, she came up and veered off, engaging the closest lizard while making room for the others to come through. Individualized Fornax blasts were the name of the game, with each trailblazer choosing, then disabling their targets as they swam up and jabbed them with the enemy’s own weapons, burning into their scaly flesh with the plasma nubs.

They worked their way through the group of 20 or so in a flurry of steam bubbles, leaving behind a trail of bodies as they swapped out plasma rods on the go, swimming out the backside of the engagement, barely losing 15 seconds from where they would have been had it been a clear hallway.

Once they were clear Paul accessed his battlemap, seeing for himself the lizard aquatics warships pulling back and retreating in a number of groups out to where they disappeared from Star Force’s limited sensor range. Some of their ships were holding position, which he saw were comprised mostly of their infantry carriers, picking up nearby lizards before bugging out.

He frowned, knowing this wasn’t their standard operating procedure. Star Force was getting hammered, and while the battleships were holding the lizards’ ships to the perimeter their infantry were near to penetrating the main city…why would they give up now when they were so close?

It couldn’t have been them, for while they were killing the lizards left and right, there were thousands more out there operating with impunity that they just didn’t have time to get to. No, something else was going on, and part of Paul’s mind said this might be part of a larger gambit.

“Wondering what they’re up to?” Sara asked on a private comm.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said, knowing she was well aware of their naval habits in orbit. The lizards didn’t give an inch, unless it was beneficial to them in some way. And when you gave them an inch, they’d take the proverbial mile.

“I agree, but it gives us a finish line for the moment. Control estimates 10,000 to 15,000 left in play.”

“Oh, that’s all?” Paul asked sarcastically.

“They’re going to run out of det packs.”

“True,” Paul said, glad for that. The only trouble they’d had with the infantry so far had come from their suicide squads, of which they’d dealt with five, all at range with their needlers. One pack had detonated anyway, and even though it was at distance, they still got a bit shell shocked from the blast as the concussion wave knocked them around the narrow hallway they were in at the time.

 “Ok guys,” Kyler broke in over the teamcomm, “time to ramp it up. We need to work our way here,” he said, giving everyone a new waypoint that was kilometers away from their current position, marking the location of one of the tunnel entrances into the city that was under assault.

“Just us?” Emily asked.

“Hit and run,” Kyler explained as he felt more lizard minds nearby. “I don’t expect we’ll be able to take the doors back, but if we can thin them down it’ll help the defending teams if/when they get through.”

“I think we can do a bit more than that, Kyler,” Rafa argued.

“Well I could,” he came back, “but I wasn’t sure about you space monkeys.”

“Ha,” Emily laughed. “You’re going to pay for that when this is over.”

“How do you plan on that?” Kyler asked.

“Paul knows.”

“Knows what?” Kyler asked him.

“Sorry, it’s a 2s thing. I’m sworn to secrecy,” he said, not having a clue what Emily was talking about, and fairly certain she didn’t either…but Kyler didn’t know that.

“At least you have something to look forward to,” Rafa said with a laugh. “Sara, my lead,” he said, jetting ahead in line just before they came up on another small group of lizards.

The rangers worked their way through the buildings and connecting tunnels in an erratic path, but one that kept them heading more or less towards the city entrance that Kyler had tagged. Meanwhile, what was left of the lizard reinforcements had reached their breach points and entered the subterranean structures, leaving the stragglers outside exposed for the arrowheads and other Star Force craft to pick them off.

When the all clear was sounded for the seafloor some time later, the remaining arrowheads diverted for the shipyard and dove down into the tunnels, coordinating with the assault teams so they could ‘plow the road’ of the larger lizard formations while the Archon teams scouted out the locations of the remaining det packs. With that coordination established the arrowhead pilots ran their craft through the lizard groups until they became disabled from plasma nub impacts, then they evacuated them and took their place fighting hand to hand with the infantry.

It was a calculated strategy, sacrificing the arrowheads in exchange for disrupting the lizard strongpoints that otherwise would have taken hours to work through. The Archons knew better than to charge into overwhelming numbers, for they didn’t consider even so much as one of their own to be expendable. That meant nibbling away with raids and feints to break down the lizard lines into workable groups…which the arrowheads accomplished much quicker.

That was, unless you were rangers.

When the trailblazers finally came out into the main tunnel that led up to the city entrance they were more than 2 kilometers away, but the entire length of the none too narrow shaft was full of lizards waiting to go into battle, not only in the direction of the city, but out to their left as well for who knew how far down the tunnel.

Normally that would have meant turning tail and trying to draw them back into the adjacent building where they could work through them piecemeal, but not today. Whether it be an overabundance of confidence or just plain fatigue, the rangers didn’t hesitate to jump into the fray. They swam out and gave each other some gaps, allowing the lizards to surround each one of them and attack from multiple angles like tiny piranhas going after a larger fish…not the best strategy in the world.

Unless you had psionics, and you needed the extra gaps to keep from disabling your own teammates.

The five trailblazers swam out like fingers extending from the side entrance in the tunnel, and once they’d accumulated enough lizards around them jabbing in at them with their glowing green plasma rods the Archons began unleashing Fornax disruption fields…not blasts. These extended out a few meters in all directions and held their intensity, essentially blinding the lizards’ nervous systems with white noise, allowing each of the rangers a few moments of impunity to swim up and kill the enemy without them even knowing what was happening.

Each of the Archons could hold the Fornax for varying lengths of time, with Kyler being the weakest given how much mental energy he’d depleted earlier. They had a finite amount that gradually regenerated, but he’d never had time to fully recharge and had been operating off of the bottom half of the barrel while the others had come into this fight on full.

That said, he still had enough to work his way through the center of their formation, giving him the cleanup work in the middle of the tunnel while the others spread out in either direction, meaning he’d have to use less than them. Within two minutes the section of tunnel directly outside the entrance to the building they’d come through was littered with lizard corpses, with Kyler swimming about the middle of it all hunting the few that had survived in the chaos.

He used Fornax blasts to target them individually, conserving his energy and keeping them off the others, who were even now spreading out in either direction. Once he caught the last lizards and disposed of them he floated stationary for a moment, doing a quick mental perimeter check to make sure he hadn’t missed any, then he started putting waypoints in the tunnel for the others to work off of, essentially splitting up the lizard hoard and navigating a path through to the next building entrance, knowing they couldn’t fight in a corpse field that would get progressively more and more dense.

Paul and Emily, doing their well practiced 2s tag team, reversed course and came back towards Kyler through the corpses as he headed out behind Rafa and Sara as they pushed into the lizards on the city side. Those were accumulating so thick you had trouble seeing past them down the tunnel. Hundreds of little glowing green orbs were spread amongst them like berries on a tree, making for a formidable wall of plasma and flesh, but the Archons didn’t hesitate.

The wall suddenly buckled in two places as Rafa went low and Sara high, ‘detonating’ Fornax fields that caused the lizards within a few meters of them to go all twitchy, with half of them dropping their weapons when they could no longer control their fingers.

From behind Paul and Emily reached out and touched some of the lizards’ minds in another manner, using their Ikrid to implant the image of an enemy on their flanks, causing some of the lizards to flinch or even jab at their fellow troops from the feint. Two of the hits succeeded, injuring one and killing another, but also resulting in spreading chaos as the lizards behind them saw what they thought were ‘traitors’ attacking each other.

To their credit they didn’t swarm over each other in a killing frenzy, but the once solid line of bodies was now a mash of confusion with two Archon prongs digging deeper and deeper inside.

Kyler followed them up by punching into the middle, then Paul and Emily jumped in on the flanks following the waypoints Kyler had set down earlier, all of which kept them spaced out from each other enough not to worry about interfering with each other’s psionics, for as good as they’d gotten with generating Fornax, they weren’t very good at defending against it, especially when they didn’t know it was incoming.

Formation spacing was an old tactic, and not one that even the chaos of an underwater battle was going to shake them from, so, doing the seemingly impossible, the five trailblazers fought their way through the tunnel thick with living lizards leaving a trail of dead in their wake that the living from the opposite side were maneuvering their way through to try and catch up and cut off the Humans from behind…which they did.

But that didn’t shake the rangers either, for they were intent on fighting mobile and didn’t care what was more than a few meters away from them. Block, punch, kick, Fornax, jab, and repeat was the trend, though not always in that order, with the waypoints their only other concern. Fighting their way from one to the other they pushed through the schools of lizards until they got to another building entrance on the length of the tunnel, but still far short of the main building. There they ducked inside, fighting through still more lizards on the interior but far thinner in numbers than outside.

The Archons fled through several rooms, drawing pursuit their way and encountering others enroute as they caught their collective breath, knowing that there was no way they’d have the strength to go all the way up the tunnel to the main entrance…at least not all at once.

“What I wouldn’t give for a streak right now,” Rafa commented as they ducked into a storage area that was currently empty, with Sara and Paul floating out of sight beside the door to ambush any lizards that followed them in.

“Tell me about it,” Kyler said, breathing hard inside his armor. That many lizards all lined up in a row. Even if the craft didn’t fire any weapons, it’d literally squish the lizards against the walls given how many of them there were, but there was no way to get one into these tunnels, and an arrowhead would get overwhelmed within meters, clogged up with bodies and pinned in place long enough to get skewered with plasma nubs.

“Thank you,” Paul said as a lizard swam in and he leveraged the plasma rod out of its hand, replacing the one he’d been carrying that must have been low on power by now. Sara jabbed the lizard with hers and kicked the body aside, waiting for the next one to come through. “Where now, Kyler?”

“Working on it,” the trailblazer said, setting new waypoints on the battlemap.

10

Weston Pratt stood on the inside of the blast doors along with dozens of other Regulars, all in aquatics armor more bulky than what the Archons wore. It was colored deep blue and had the same jet thruster system, but at the moment it was cumbersome to wear because Pratt and the others were waiting in atmosphere, not water, as the lizards continued to pound on the doors with occasional blasts.

Two weak spots were visible, both of which had dime-sized holes in them that were leaking water. A containment shield set just inside the doors was holding it back, and by now an inch think wall had risen up to the level of the holes, with the atmosphere above it contained and compressed. Each subsequent det pack blast would vaporize the water, but so far the shield had held up, given that only a tiny bit of the compression wave was getting through, but each time more of the sturdy door material would be chipped away, enlarging the holes.

Pratt and the other Regulars knew it would take a lot of time for them to chew out a hole big enough to come through, and then they’d be bottlenecked enough to turn the area into a shooting gallery. He and the other aquatics Regulars were armed with plasma rifles, stun sticks, and needlers as backup, hoping that since the shield generators were set on this side of the doors that they’d remain active, whereas the lizards had been destroying the others out in the tunnels by blasting into the hardware set into the walls.

They couldn’t do that here, because there was no way they were going to be able to set up det packs on this side unless they could get through the defenders first. That meant that the shields, even when breached, would regenerate and keep most of the water out. That was the hope, anyway, for so long as their weapons stayed dry they could shoot the lizards from range with plasma and hold this position indefinitely…or at least until the number of bodies offered the lizards cover and they smuggled through a det pack.

Which was why Pratt and several others had been tagged as ‘cleaning teams’ who would retrieve and remove the lizard corpses when there were lulls in the fighting, hoping to keep the firing lines clear. He figured as long as they kept to the walls they’d be relatively safe, but with what was said to be thousands of lizards on the other side, who knew what was about to happen, though he was confident they would be able to mow down a great number of them before they could overwhelm this position.

Several fallback points had already been arranged within the city, and they were determined to bleed the lizards of infantry at all moments of opportunity. He didn’t know if he’d prefer to fight in the air or the water, but they were all wearing the aquatics armor just in case the city became flooded, otherwise they would have donned the standard security armor.

Two more blasts occurred over the next 10 minutes, opening up one of the holes to the size of his fist, then there was a long lull during which the Regulars waited…and waited. They’d been stationed here for hours, with some rotating out occasionally to try and stay fresh. They didn’t know when the doors would go down, or which doors would go down first, but they knew they needed to be on site when it happened to take maximum advantage of the partial breaks when they occurred.

“Wake up guys, time to get wet,” his commander said over their teamcomm just before the doors began to retract into the walls. “Archons are moving up from the outside, we’re going to hit their rear. Squads 1, 4, and 7 stay put on this side of the shield, everyone else leave your plasmas behind. Empty your needlers then grab the enemy’s weapons. Let’s get to it.”

Pratt was squad 6, so that meant he was going through. As the doors opened up a meter he set his plasma rifle down and pulled out his needler, then took another from one of the defense squad members who offered it to him. Dual wielding, he hopped over the barricades they’d set up and walked forward as the crack between the damaged doors widened.

The commander jogged up to the shield holding back the water as the first of the lizards pushed their way through and were hit by plasma snipers in the back who’d stood up on the crates to get a better angle. Those lizards fell dead just before the commander got to the shield and stuck his needler through into the water. There he fired off a pointblank shot that detonated a meter ahead, killing a lizard and knocking back several more.

One up high on the doors came through the shield, apparently not realizing it wasn’t flooded on the other side, and popped out 4 meters up only to fall down on top of the Regulars…but after receiving a plasma hit on the way down. Another of the Regulars got to it before Pratt could and stunned it unconscious, then the commander and several others spread out along the growing gap between the doors and fired off PDM after PDM into the water side of the shield, annihilating the lizards on the other side in a cascade of explosions that rippled the shield matrix with waves of static.

“Go,” Pratt heard over the teamcomm, then as one four of the Regulars pushed through the shield, firing off more PDMs as they went. Once inside, they jetted up a couple of meters in the water, clearing room for another four to come through beneath them.

Pratt didn’t get wet until several more groups went through, fanning out to five wide, then six. When he did get in he had a clear shot at hoards of lizards ahead of him, but he only got off a few needler shots before the commander ordered them to change tactics.

“Cease fire with the needlers. We have Archons on the other side. Engage hand to hand.”

Pratt hooked both needlers onto the hooks on the back of his armor and picked up one of the lizards’ weapons near his feet while the Regulars above him jetted forward with stun sticks. He followed underneath their feet and traded jabs with a lizard. His blue armor bubbled and burnt, but the plasma nub didn’t get through, whereas the lizard had no armor and suffered a plasma blast directly to its scaly chest.

Pratt kicked it back and jabbed at the shoulder of another that was engaging the Regular beside him. Their plasma rods were crossed, giving him a good opportunity to break the stalemate. With its shoulder charred, the other Regular was able to get the leverage he needed and finished it off with a touch to the head.

That sort of close quarters combat went on for several minutes before Pratt finally saw one of the Archons. He almost got caught off guard when he saw that there were not one, but five trailblazers on the other side, based on their ID tags, and took a partial hit to his left arm before he wrestled the lizard around enough to expose its back to another Regular that jabbed it for him.

Then the pressure from the lizards subsided. In front of him Paul was knocking them down left and right and Pratt had to start looking for more targets to attack. Two minutes later and the commander ordered them into hunting mode for stunned or injured lizards to make sure there wouldn’t be any surprises later, given how many bodies were clogging the tunnel. Pratt was shocked when he literally couldn’t see more than 70-80 meters down the tunnel. There was that many corpses floating from top to bottom, most of which were due to the Archons’ handiwork.

Kyler worked his way up to the shield and down to the floor, then walked through the barrier to the air side and gratefully pulled his helmet off and sucked in a fresh breath. Paul and Rafa came through next, followed by Emily and Sara, all of whom likewise removed their helmets as they walked forward awkwardly, both from fatigue and being in neutral buoyancy for hours on end.

“That was fun,” Emily said, hopping over the barricades and getting behind the defense squads in case a lizard popped through and they needed to shoot it.

“Is it over?” one of the Regulars asked as the trailblazers worked their way through the defenders.

“Stay sharp,” Kyler warned. “There are so many bodies out there some live ones could ambush you, but the heavy fighting is done…here. The other entrances are still under assault.”

“Should we redeploy there?” the regular asked.

“Clean up here for now,” Kyler said as the trailblazers quietly walked past and headed towards the second line of barricades and began hopping over them.

“Holy shit,” one of the Regulars whispered once they were gone. “Did the five of them just clear out that?” he asked, pointing through the now completely open blast doors at the junkyard of lizard bodies clogging the tunnel.

“That’s why they’re wearing green,” another said, throwing one last glance at their retreating forms before turning his attention back to the shield and their now considerably easier job of holding this position.

8 hours later…

Paul brought a tray of warm, sugar-filled pastries out of the kitchen and set them down on the table the other four trailblazers had claimed in the otherwise empty cafeteria. The cooks, along with all other noncombat personnel, had been evacuated from the facility, leaving the Archons with prepackaged foodstuffs to gnaw on unless they wanted to cook for themselves. Fortunately there wasn’t much ‘cooking’ involved with Star Force food, and warming up the already baked pastries wasn’t something that required an excessive amount of intelligence.

The others had all brought out trays of their own. Rafa’s had plain pasta. Emily had brought out a stack of various cookies. Sara had a tray of breadsticks. And Kyler had a much smaller tray filled with ambrosia wafers, cookies, and all the other forms of laced foodstuffs they’d invented over the years to help them measure their intake without having to actually measure anything out.

Dozens of water bottles littered the table, some of which were already empty. One problem of fighting in pressurized water was the inability to remove your helmet and ingest anything, food or liquid, even if you found an air pocket, so the Archons had gotten thoroughly dehydrated during their fighting, something that Kyler intended to fix with an upgrade to the armor to carry a small water reserve inside, possibly one that could draw from the exterior like the oxygen generation system did.

When Paul’s tray hit the table the pastries began to vanish in a flurry of hands as each of the trailblazers added at least one to their individual plates. He sat down and bit one open himself, finding chocolate inside. He sat back in his seat and nibbled on it for a while, then worked his way up to larger mouthfuls until it disappeared from his fingers. He reached out and grabbed another one, not bothering to try his Lachka, given his state of mental fatigue and the size of the pastry.

The telekinesis might have drawn on a different pool of energy than his Fornax, but overall his head felt fried, as if he’d overworked his mental trigger to the point where it had pulverized and he had nothing but a stub left to work with.

“Anyone else fried?” he asked in between mouthfuls.

“Very,” Sara said, glancing at Kyler. “You’ve got to be dead.”

“I admit I’m feeling it, but I’m more used to the water than you guys are.”

“Liar,” Emily said with a smirk. “You’re barely staying awake.”

“Am I?” he asked honestly. “Maybe I’m still numb to it.”

“Probably,” Rafa said, grabbing a breadstick. “As soon as we get done here I’m grabbing a bunk and getting some long hours in.”

“Same here,” Emily agreed, then looked at Paul. “Did you find anything?”

“It was the relays,” he said, referring to his recent dive through the battlemap records while the others helped with various things around the city. The enemy infantry had been taken care of, they thought, but they were only beginning to clear out the nearest of the submerged buildings with the help of the recently arrived engineering crews from Ackbar. A team of Archons and Regulars were there now, pulling the bodies out and securing the exits as the breach in the hull was patched over and the damaged shield generators were repaired/replaced. Pretty soon they’d start pumping out the water in that section, then down the chain one building after another.

“I don’t get it,” Rafa said, frowning. “They’ve fought without coordination before. Why turn tail and run when we cut them off this time?”

“Two ideas,” Paul said, snagging another quick bite. “One, these aren’t their expeditionary troops. Two, this is a larger scale assault than we’re used to dealing with.”

“Not a raid,” Emily clarified.

“But they left almost exactly when the last of the relays were cut?” Rafa asked.

“There was a two minute delay,” Paul noted.

“I’m glad they did, but that doesn’t feel right,” Sara chimed in. “It’s like they let us off easy.”

Both Emily and Rafa glared at her.

“Ok, not easy, but why not at least let the rest of their infantry get to target. You said they recalled some of them that were already in the water.”

“Those closest to the fence,” Paul said, washing down his second pastry with a swig of water. “I agree with Sara that something is different here, and we’ve been seeing it in orbit too. They’re fighting smarter than they used to. Not more experienced, but more clever. And now with this bit of data, I’m betting it has to do with Thrawn.”

“Thrawn?” Rafa asked.

“He thinks they have a mastermind calling the shots,” Sara offered, explaining the Star Wars reference.

“Big man gets cut off,” Kyler said, thinking aloud, “little ones run away. Almost makes sense, save for it doesn’t fit their MO.”

“I know,” Paul admitted. “But I’m almost certain of it now.”

“One of the variants?” Emily floated.

“Could be, but I’m starting to think not. We recovered 11 lizard sets of genetics, but that was from an expeditionary group. Their main forces may have more than that…or we might be seeing a ruling faction and a lizard that wasn’t grown here, but shipped out from their core worlds.”

“Big man on campus?” Rafa asked.

“I don’t know if it’s an individual, group, or caste, but we’re facing more strategic and tactical wizardry than we have anywhere else. Agreed?”

The other four trailblazers nodded, all of whom continued to chew food.

“So the question is…where is Thrawn?”

Sara swallowed. “Not with their fleet, obviously. The relays kept them in contact.”

“How much water can they punch through anyway?” Rafa wondered. “Wouldn’t it be easier to link to orbit than through miles of water?”

“We’ve got control of low orbit,” Paul reminded him. “And we can hack part of their communications, which they obviously know by now. I suspect they’ve got several surface to orbit relays set up, or maybe they’re using cruisers in that regard, but I’d bet you the water relays operate differently than their normal comms, if for no other reason than to keep us from hacking into them.”

“Still, if they’ve got an attacking fleet here, why not just link directly to orbit for coordination. If a mile of water interferes with the signal too much, just send a couple ships up in a chain to transmit from.”

“If they’re using line of sight,” Emily suggested, “and we know the locations of their warships in orbit, then we could interfere with the signal.”

“That or they’re a binary operation,” Sara added. “One water, one space.”

“No,” Kyler said emphatically. “They’re integrated. The cruisers pull double duty.”

“It might be as simple a fact as Paul suggested,” Emily added. “They’re used to having control of orbit. Without that, they’re going to plan B and setting up the underwater relays.”

“So is Thrawn down here or up there?” Sara reiterated.

“Or both,” Paul added.

“I have to say down here,” Kyler offered. “Setting up the relays is too elaborate if you were leading this from space.”

“Too little data to speculate,” Rafa said, pulling the conversation back a bit. “All we know right now is that they are using underwater relays and that we’ve got at least one mastermind lizard in the system. So, next move?”

“Find and follow the relays,” Kyler said without hesitation. “To field the kind of fleet they just hit us with, they’ve got to have some massive infrastructure in play. Now that we’ve got a thread to follow we need to pursue it before they get a chance to cut ties. If I were them I’d remove the relay links closest by and set up new ones in their place.”

“What do you need to start?” Emily asked.

“Given the ranges involved, no less than a battleship.”

“What are you waiting for then?” Rafa asked.

Kyler’s eyes glazed over. “Good point,” he said, reaching for his ear and finding he had no earpiece in.

Paul reached up to give him his, only to discover that he hadn’t put one in either. He looked at the other three trailblazers and laughed when he saw they didn’t have any.

“How the hell did we all forget them?”

“Hungry I guess,” Kyler said, standing up to leave. “Don’t touch my tray. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

As he walked out Emily reached over and poked her index finger into one of his pastries, then pulled it back without taking anything. She licked a bit of vanilla icing off her fingernail as Rafa raised an eyebrow.

She smirked, then turned her attention back to her own plate as she deviously whispered, “Space monkeys.”

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