Instinct
Author: Aer-Ki Jyr
Date: 2018-03-18T23:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Archon Lore

1

May 29, 4919

Alamo System (Uriti Preserve)

Stellar Orbit

Riley-038 stood looking out the virtual window onboard his flagship. He was well inside the hull, with multiple decks between him and space, but he’d added the holographic view to the mediation chamber so he could look at who he was talking with…or rather communicating with, for they still hadn’t managed to learn to speak directly to the Uriti in any form of language that could be quantified and computerized. It was a meshing of thoughts and feelings that was used, and right now Riley could see Bahamut, Sub Zero, and Sivir just outside his ship while 8 others were down inside the glowing star soaking up energy directly.

The room Riley was in was locked, with a guard outside that was mostly unnecessary. No non-Star Force personnel were onboard his ship, but it was just a little extra measure meant to give him someone watching his back, for while in contact with the Uriti his Pefbar wouldn’t function and someone could literally walk up behind him without his knowing.

Riley looked at the three Uriti outside as the chrome gauntlet he wore had the glowing jewel burning green, meaning his mind was in the correct mental alignment to access the Chixzon interface, giving him the connection to the Uriti that they would not ignore. His personal telepathy was far too small for them to notice, let alone travel the distance out from the ship to them. He’d need a booster, but even then the Uriti wouldn’t recognize him. There was one channel that made his presence ‘important’ enough to get noticed, and it was a method that was one of Star Force’s most closely guarded secrets.

Kara knew of it, but she didn’t know how it worked, which meant the Zak’de’ron didn’t have that technology. Only Star Force and the Chixzon did, and Riley had been working hard to develop a relationship with the Uriti that would be the tie-breaker if a Chixzon showed up and tried a tug of war for influence over them. And that meant he had to ask for their help now, not order it.

Our war with the V’kit’no’sat is over, Riley said, not in those words, but in a series of images and familiar emotions that they’d developed a sort of short-hand for, and often Riley had trouble trying to translate between the two. He wasn’t as good as the Wranglers, who had literally started to think like the Uriti, but he needed to be the one to ask, given the situation before them. But another threat is before us. One we must utterly destroy.

Before the V’kit’no’sat found us we were attacked and nearly defeated by a weaker enemy. We survived, and outgrew them, and were nearly to the point of destroying them when they fled towards V’kit’no’sat star systems. We could not pursue without revealing our presence, so this enemy escaped us. We are far more powerful than them now, but they have been getting help from another. We do not know who, but their strength is growing to dangerous levels. Now that we are free of the V’kit’no’sat, we must eliminate this enemy before they can grow strong enough to attack us once again.

We do not want to do so, but there are no other options. We have tried to negotiate. We have tried to teach. We have tried to capture them. They will not listen. They will destroy all around them, and if they are unable to do more damage they will destroy themselves rather than accept imprisonment. Long ago we found a way, a very difficult way, to save some of them. Those that we did now serve us as Paladin. But the method we used to reach them has now been blocked. Their minds enslaved to the orders of their leaders. We cannot rescue them. We cannot contain them. And the longer they live, the more people they will destroy. To protect others, we must eliminate them now, before they can spread further.

I have been sent to ask if you would assist us with this eradication. It is a fight we must make, but they are not your enemy. If you do not wish to fight them, we understand. This is our burden to carry.

Riley signaled that he was done, then the response from Bahamut came in without hesitation.

The pack fights as one. Where our little brothers fight, we will fight.

There is danger, Riley warned. They are not as powerful as the V’kit’no’sat, but they are far more numerous. It will be difficult to kill them all before they can inflict damage on us.

The little ones cannot stand against us.

No, they cannot. Which is why I ask your help. The challenge will be in killing them fast enough to prevent them from fleeing and rebuilding elsewhere in the galaxy. We will need your full power. Including your minions.

Did the V’kit’no’sat not deserve destruction? Sivir asked. Our full power was restrained against them.

To avoid killing our own people they had imprisoned. This new enemy does not capture. They destroy. So their worlds will be empty aside from them. If we find otherwise we will make adjustments, but I anticipate a sea of enemies with no allies or neutrals in sight. It is a type of war that we have not fought in a long time, and one we do not like, but it must be done.

Have the Hadarak been seen? Sub Zero asked, repeating a question that had almost become their mantra.

No. They are still far from here, and will be far from the fight against this new enemy.

What do you call this enemy? Bahamut asked.

They call themselves Li’vorkrachnika. We call them, lizards.

And you say they must all be destroyed.

Unfortunately yes. We can find no other way to stop them, and we have looked for a long time.

We were built to destroy the little ones and those that cannot be stopped. We will erase them with you.

Riley frowned. He had never heard that before. Who are ‘those that cannot be stopped?’

Those we are meant to delay and warn of.

Warn who?

The Hadarak. They cannot stop them, but they will slow them.

How do you recognize those who cannot be stopped? Riley asked, feeling as if he’d stumbled onto a very valuable data nugget.

They glow. We are meant to fight and slow them. The Hadarak are meant to fight and slow them. We are meant to fight together.

Riley felt a deep sadness and betrayal there, for despite their size and power, the Uriti were essentially overgrown Hadarak minions, not Hadarak themselves. Their bodies were, but their minds were a hybrid and the reproductive process that had spurned them came from the minions, so in some ways they thought as Hadarak, and in others they thought as minions. Living minions, not the lifeless biological programming that the Chixzon had modified the Uriti-produced minions to be. And the Uriti could not understand why the Hadarak did not accept them as such. It was simply beyond their ability to comprehend, but they did learn and were now very wary of the Hadarak. Still, they did not understand why they had been attacked and those wounds still burnt bright inside them, especially Bahamut.

Are the ones that glow big or little ones?

All who glow.

Have you ever encountered one that glowed?

No. Neither have the Hadarak.

They told you that?

They said we did not glow, but we had to be destroyed the same. They knew not what one that glowed was. We do not know. We will know when we know.

Are the Hadarak searching for the ones that glow?

They are waiting for the ones who glow to come. They always come. We wait.

Will you win?

We will die. We always die. We will delay and warn. We will not win.

I prefer winning.

You cannot win lizards. You not try. You say impossible. Defeat glowing ones impossible.

It is difficult because we might be able to find a way. But waiting means others are killed while we search. We must protect others. We do not have a way now. Therefore it is impossible. Must you fight the glowing ones, or can you wait?

When we find the glowing ones we cannot wait. They must be slowed. Do you know how to slow glowing ones?

I do not know what glowing ones are. I do not know where they are. Are they in the center of the galaxy?

They will appear where they appear. We must wait. We help our little brothers while we wait. Summon the fast ones and we will travel with you.

Riley knew ‘fast ones’ meant the Uriti transports that could fly between stars far faster than the Uriti could ever hope to. It was a sign that they were ready and willing to leave now and dive back into a fight after only a few years of peace…though to be accurate, they hadn’t fought very many battles, and most of the time it was just laying some precision fire down on a planet while the V’kit’no’sat ran for their lives.

This war was going to be different. The lizards would not run, despite their new marching orders that Paul had reported. He knew the Uriti could handle it, but they were going to take damage and he hated putting them into that situation.

But these ‘glowing ones’ bothered him. The Uriti had never spoken of them before, but what Riley was sensing indicated that this was one of their primary purposes for existing…and he was pretty sure this didn’t come from the Chixzon if it was a trait that the Hadarak also shared.

That fast ones are waiting. We need to take you all. Do the others agree to fight?

The pack fights as one, Bahamut repeated. Show us what little ones need deleted and we will make them gone.

Riley sent the coordinates for them to rendezvous at, then partially broke his concentration to interface with the wristband on his opposite arm that tied into the ship’s computer. He didn’t need his telepathy to do it, since he was already in physical contact and the device made the connection to his mind for him, and he used the interlink to signal the waiting transports to begin moving down into low stellar orbit to pick up the Uriti. He hadn’t wanted to bring them out before the Uriti agreed to fight, but it seemed that concern had been pointless. To the Uriti, Star Force was part of their family, or ‘pack’ as they called it. And the idea of asking for help was beyond them. They were one, and fought as one…and apparently didn’t care about how many little ones were wiped out, which was yet one more reason that Riley was glad that only Star Force had access to them, for they weren’t exactly what one would call ‘discerning’ when it came to killing.

They were living war machines, and ironically that’s exactly what Star Force needed them to be this time. Not just a threat of massive retaliation, but now they needed to actually use their full power to wipe out an entire race…if they were lucky. Riley doubted they would get them all, but they needed to break their powerbase and make them completely rebuild, and when it came to breaking things, the Uriti could do so just by their mere proximity.

Riley was still chewing on who the glowing ones might be, but another corner of his mind face-palmed itself as a course of action he hadn’t thought of before seemed obvious.

But no, the telepathic aura of the Uriti could render the lizards inert, but it couldn’t reprogram them. The genetic memories couldn’t be erased, but it did mean that the lizards couldn’t run suicide bombers up to the Uriti at close range, because they’d lose the minds before they got to physical contact. That wouldn’t do much for a kamikaze ship, but it meant if a Uriti landed on a planet, a zone around it would be free of harm from infantry, aircraft, and anything else that had a pilot in it.

And that was going to be the best way to shield minion production facilities. Riley kicked himself for not picking up on that before, but was saddened that the massive telepathic aura couldn’t somehow be used to override the lizard mental programming. Nothing they had learned of the Uriti suggested that was possible, but it was nice to know he had several large jamming devices available to him at close range.

Riley raised an eyebrow as he saw Bahamut and the other two Uriti moving off towards the rendezvous point with several more coming up from within the star on the nearby tracking screen, for they hadn’t quite reached the surface yet and even when they did you’d need a filter on the sunlight to see them, which a ‘normal’ window wouldn’t accommodate.

The passive Uriti telepathic aura was potent near the beasts, but suddenly Riley wondered how large they could push it consciously? The Yisv couldn’t be anywhere near a Uriti when it was awake. Even partway across a star system was too close. So he wondered at what range a Uriti could disable lizard minds?

That was something he was going to investigate for sure, because if it worked out to be naval range…then this was going to get even easier than the trailblazers had been expecting.

2

June 16, 4919

Ennit System (Dagran Region)

Vis

Vortison was waiting in his lab when one of the oldest Archons walked in. He’d been expecting her, but he wasn’t happy that she was here.

“This is a bad idea,” he reminded her as Lara-379 almost floated across the floor in a typical Archon stride so refined from centuries of training to be as efficient as possible. “Give me another 10 years. Please.”

“Have you many any progress the past 10?” she challenged.

The master medtech sighed. “Not really, but what’s the rush?”

Lara stopped in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders as he sat on a chair slightly lower than she stood. “You know this has to be refined with training, and you’re never going to be able to simulate that in the lab. It has to be done by one of us. Waiting another decade won’t change that.”

“You never know for sure. We’re going beyond both the V’kit’no’sat and the Chixzon. We’re flying blind here, so we don’t know that more years won’t matter.”

“There’s a difference between patience and hesitance,” she said, releasing him and taking a half step back. “Which is this?”

“It could kill you,” he warned.

“I know. Which is why I’m going to do it and not the trailblazers. We can’t risk them.”

“No Archon should do it. You all push too hard. This is the complete opposite. You have to sip at the power. Too much and you burn out. I might be able to keep you alive, but you’ll lose hundreds of years of training at the best. The stopgaps might not even work and you could end up dead, Lara.”

“Been there once, not going back,” she said firmly. “That’s why I have to be the one to do this. I learned extreme patience the hard way.”

“I want to wait.”

“I’m free now and the trailblazers are busy. Perfect timing. Let’s get this started before they can object. You know they’ll want to do this.”

“I’ve been stalling them for years. Why can’t I stall you?”

“Because this is personal for me. And I’m not going to let what happened to me happen to anyone else. You need someone to monitor and make adjustments from…that’s me. No one else. And there’s no point in waiting anymore. I’m available, so let’s get this started.”

“It will take years, you know. You won’t be able to train normally…” he added, with Lara putting up a hand for him to stop.

“This is my path forward. I’ve accepted that. No looking back. I’ll put up with the training disruption. I had to do it before. This time I’m choosing to.”

“Why?”

“We train to get more power. If I can get more power another way. A lot more power. Then this is my new training.”

“I really don’t want to do this, Lara. It’s theoretical only, loosely based on Chixzon biotech. There are too many unknowns.”

“Which will not be known until we explore them. I’m self-anointing myself trailblazer here. Someone has to go where no one has gone before, and this time it’s me. Besides, I’ve already got a head start on the total rebuild thing. And I will drop the guilt bomb on you if needed.”

Vortison smacked a datapad aside, with it falling off the tabletop onto the floor. He still blamed himself for Lara nearly dying when she experienced psionic overload. He didn’t cause it, but he should have foreseen the problem before it happened. It was a glitch in the V’kit’no’sat coding, or perhaps even the Zak’de’ron coding. They hadn’t seen it because Zen’zat never accumulated as many psionics as the Archons had, and where they had failed Vortison had to step in and make adjustments to their coding after the fact, but not before Lara’s bones literally broke from the inside as overlapping psionics caused an unexpected malfunction.

“You’re the smartest guy we have,” Lara pointed out. “I’m better off with you than someone else.”

“No one else can do this,” Vortison sneered. “Not even Nefron. He’s a databank, not a scientist.”

“It’s my life to risk, and I know you’ll feel horrible if something happened to me, but suck it up, cupcake. I’m going to be doing the hard part.”

“Cupcake?” he asked, having to snicker a bit at that.

“That’s what you’re acting like.”

“You don’t understand what is going to happen to you. I do...to a point.”

“I’ll go slow. I promise.”

“It’s your instinctual reaction that worries me, Lara. When your head swarms with confusion, will you be patient or push? Archons always push.”

“Which is why I have to be the one to do this so you can refine the process. Pushing for me is a luxury. When my body went backwards, it couldn’t keep up with my memories. I literally couldn’t push how my mind knew I was capable of. I learned to go slow. I learned why I had to. I developed a habit. I still have that habit, even if I don’t use it much. The experience is there,” she said, pointing a finger at her own head. “The others don’t have it. I do. So let me do this.”

“If I said ‘why do you need the power,’ you’d probably feel compelled to beat the stupidity out of me,” he said sarcastically.

Lara leaned forward and put her finger underneath his chin, forcing him to look her in her eyes.

“Come on. Help me become a Super Saiyan. Pretty please.”

“Why does that reference hold such importance for you? For all of you? It’s just a very unorthodox and illogical ancient cartoon.”

“If you have to ask, you’ll never understand. This is worth going after, Vortison. More so than you realize. I’ll go as slow as I need to in order to achieve it, not because I promised you I would. Count on my greed for more power to fuel my patience.”

He swiped away her finger with his hand. “You’re not going to leave, are you?”

“Nope,” she said defiantly.

“I could report you to the trailblazers.”

“Do you want to experience broken bones too?”

“Bluff,” he declared.

“I’m doing this and you’re going to help me,” she said firmly. “If I die you’re going to feel horrible, despite it being my choice. If I succeed, I open up a whole new level of Archon advancement and give you a new playground of Human genetics to explore.

“If we do this, you will no longer be Human,” he underscored.

“That’s the point,” she said firmly.

The medtech dipped his head. “I’m worried about you, not my feelings. I have no control over this. Medically speaking, we’re in the wilderness.”

“That’s why you have to trust me to find the way. You know biology from the spectator’s point of view. I know it far better from the user interface, and that’s where the training effect happens. You know that.”

“Fine,” he relented. “It is your ass on the line. And I haven’t been working on this for nothing. I just wished I could have gotten closer before hitting the wall. Someone has to break through to give me data, it’s just that you…”

“If I get screwed it’s doubly unfair because it will be the second time,” she finished for him. “I know. I’m willing to risk it because this time I’m in the pilot’s seat. Not a helpless victim. The hard work has to be done by somebody, and in this case that somebody is me and you and whatever other staff you need. Just give me the push I need, and I’ll do the rest.”

“Over there,” he said, pointing to a low pedestal set into a wall alcove. “Take off your clothes and get ready to stand still for a few hours.”

“Thank you,” she said, eagerly stripping off her uniform while walking across the lab, leaving a trail of clothing that she telekinetically pulled into a ball and floated on top of a table as she spun around and stepped back into the alcove with her bare feet feeling tingly on the material that had to be energized in some way.

“Anders,” Vortison said to another medtech across the room. “Get Carson and Neuroi in here. We’ve got work to do.”

“On it,” the man said, disappearing to round up the other medtechs that would be needed for this project. There would be too many variables to monitor on his own, even with computer assistance, and he had to give Lara every advantage possible.

He walked up beside her and tapped on a display screen that began waking up the new machine that the Archon was standing on.

“How does the clothing interfere?” she asked. “Am I going to Jumat pulse?”

“Please don’t. You’ll wreck the machinery. I don’t have a Jumat-proof shield.”

“There is no such thing. So why no clothes?”

“Because with all the stress you’re going to be putting me under these coming years, this is a tiny compensation. I am a guy, you know.”

Lara smirked. “As long as I end up with yellow hair, I’ll live naked for you if that’s what you want.”

“And there’s the small chance that you might set them on fire,” he added in a whisper.

“Killjoy. I liked your first answer better.”

“My staff and I are going to get to know your body on an extremely intimate level. You’re not going to be able to hide anything from us, physically or mentally, so why bother with pointless formality,” he said, pulling a small device out of a nearby drawer. “And then there’s this. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to attach it directly to your cranium. I’ve looked for a better way, but with the things you do during training, it’s the only way to keep it from falling off.”

“Where are you putting it?” she teased.

“Nowhere fun,” he said deadpan, reaching up and gently affixing it above her right eyebrow. Lara felt part of her face go numb, then a few seconds later Vortison pulled his hands back and she felt a warmth return…along with what felt like a bone bump. She reached up and stroked the device, confirming it was melded to the bone with several heft jerks.

“That’s what I mean. Aggressive by instinct,” he warned. “Patience, my naked one. Patience.”

“So you’re going to try to distract my innate aggressiveness with flirtation? That won’t work, but feel free to keep trying.”

“Something to do with why Archons don’t mate?”

“We don’t like slipping out of combat mode. It weakens us.”

Vortison froze, then locked eyes with her, totally serious. “Then you might want to try it. Combat mode will kill you if you can’t shake free of it.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“And if I insist?”

“You’re cute, but no thanks. I know how to relax while in combat mode. It’s called sleeping.”

“Actually…you’ve given me an idea. Hold on a second,” he said, running off and leaving her standing there alone. She waited patiently, having committed herself to this course a long time ago. There was no going back, no regrets, no matter how this turned out. If someone had to take the hit on this, it was going to be her…not the trailblazers. She was going to shield them, with her death if need be, though she knew if this came down to her skill in controlling herself, then she’d make it through.

When Vortison came back he had a small cylinder in his hand. He touched it briefly to her new cranial piece then tossed it on a nearby table as he typed irregularly on a datapad…which was a sign of mixed input from his fingers and his telepathy.

“Stand still, I need to test a theory.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, then she clenched up in shock as a very unfamiliar sensation crept through her body and her mind flushed. “What the hell…”

“Good,” Vortison said, ignoring her and focused entirely on his data, completely missing the look of shock on her face. “Very good.”

“Did you just Lachka grab me?” she asked, not having sensed any Pefbar fields.

“No, sorry. Nothing that crude. We haven’t made the technology public, because we know a lot of people would retreat to their rooms and never come out again, but we have the ability to induce arousal and unlimited orgasms through direct mental manipulation. The fact that you’re so unused to them is a plus here.”

“Wait a second, what are you saying?” she asked, suddenly feeling naked for the first time.

“How committed are you to seeing this through?”

“Is this really necessary?”

“If it keeps you out of combat mode, then yes. It could mean the difference between you living or dying, so don’t get shy on me,” he said, cracking a smirk at the end. “I’m serious, but I do appreciate the irony here. Your instinct is combat mode. You’re going to need that later, but most of the time you gotta scale down. If arousal keeps you out of combat mode, then that’s what we will use.”

“Oh I’m so not ready for this,” she said, looking down at her naked body, the same as she had done many times, but now it looked different. Her combat mode was trying to reset itself, seeing her arms and legs and the musculature there as weapons…which they truly were…while arousal gave false sensor readings designed for one purpose and one purpose only. That being to reproduce. It was the one lie that the body told to the user, and because it wasn’t a real need the Archons avoided it, but it felt damn real now. But then again, an unconvincing mirage wouldn’t work, so of course it would feel real.

“How long?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. At least 18 hours a day, at various levels. A low level one while you sleep. Can’t have any combat dreams throwing you off.”

Lara’s mouth dropped open. “Do you have any idea what that will do to me?”

“Not really. Other than making you very, very happy.”

“It’ll made me very, very pathetic. I’ll lose my mojo.”

“And you can’t get it back later?”

“I…I don’t know. Probably. Maybe. Damn you, this isn’t what I wanted.”

“No, you wanted to fight your way through this like a typical Archon. But if this will allow you to reach your greater power, what’s stopping you?”

“You find this funny, don’t you?”

“On a personal level, yes I do. But I’m not playing games with you, Lara. We gotta make use of whatever nullifiers we can. Including this, if it will work, and my short test showed a wide range of nullification.”

“The increased heart rate isn’t a problem?”

“Compared to what it is when you’re in combat? This is nothing.”

“I hate you.”

“We can call it off then.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I just don’t see how I’m going to control this if you’ve got me in an uncontrollable state.”

“The state will make it so you don’t have to control it. You just have to sit and let it happen. That’s exactly what your instincts will not let you do.”

“And when I do need to go into combat mode? I’ll be so loopy I might not be able to.”

“Sips, Lara. Small steps. You won’t have to go into full combat mode until years down the road. By then you’ll have adapted to this and it won’t be as effective. But you’re new to arousal, at least compared to the rest of us. You haven’t used it in so long…”

“I get it,” she said, banging her head back against the wall in frustration, then sheepishly glanced back making sure she didn’t damage it. “Ok, I guess I just proved your point. I just don’t like feeling helpless like this when my life is on the line.”

“You’re putting your life in my hands anyway. And I know you’re going to try and go super saiyan inside, and that will blow you up. I did watch the cartoon, you know. That’s exactly the wrong mental state to be in, and you really don’t know much else, do you?”

“So we use the built in idiot switch,” she added. “Might as well get some beneficial use out of it, if that’s the only way?”

“It’s the best way I can find. Actually, I’m more confident now that I was before. In order for this to work, you have to stop being an Archon for a long periods of time.”

“That’s…just…not…fair,” she groaned.

“Suck it up, cupcake.”

She glared at him for a second, but it melted into a laugh. “You’re right. If I can handle pain then I can handle this. But if this is going take hours, then you’re going to need to mop the floor,” she said apologetically.

“We’re medtechs. Biological fluids are normal around here.”

“Are they? I thought the regenerator did everything unseen.”

“The inside of a Dre’mo’don rifle would be unusual to me. Would it be to you, because you normally use them intact?”

“Fine. Fine. I’m just feeling…off. Even though this thing isn’t turned on anymore.”

“Mode change. I’m surprised you haven’t developed some training for that.”

“We did. But I never got it because I was too old and I didn’t feel like it. I thought staying in combat mode was better than getting my buttons pushed. Unless someone captured me and put me somewhere,” she said, gesturing around her, “like this, it would never come up.”

“When I start the procedure, you’re going to feel resistance. You’re going to want to push back. I want you to try it your way first, and then when your levels get too high we’ll go to the backup plan. In fact, we’ll do that every day, to help you learn control. Your punishment for failure will be unending orgasms.”

“Now that is torture.”

“There’s the door if you want out,” the medtech said, pointing across the lab as a side door opened up and Anders came back in with the other two assistants.

“Lock the lab when I’m here and nobody tells anyone anything about this,” she said, staring laser beams at him. “Not until we succeed.”

“That will be years…but we’ll keep this aspect out of the reports until you say otherwise. I promise, shy one.”

“I don’t think I’m going to have the luxury of shyness much longer,” she said grumpily. “Alright, tell me what I have to do to avoid your punishment.”

“It’s calibration. Your body gets altered wide scale, but in small increments. You have to adapt to the increments. This is going to be stressful in the extreme, but a low level stress. You’re going to want to stoke your healing…don’t. You have to let the effect soak in, and that means not fighting it. Merely enduring it.”

“And then?”

“And then I don’t know. That’s where we begin. Beyond that, we’re going to have to figure things out as you transition away from being Human and further into Super Human.”

“Saiyan. We’re calling it Saiyan. And don’t forget to make my hair yellow when it works.”

“We’re a long way from that, but the change is easy to engineer. I’ve already programmed it.”

“Alright, hit me with it then.”

“We’ll need some time to set up. Just wait where you are.”

Lara sighed, then let them prep the machinery while she waited. This wasn’t what she had expected coming here, and she could sense the pleasure Vortison was getting at making her so uncomfortable. But his own discomfort was also evident, though he did feel this was a much better approach when he began connecting physical conduits form the machine to various points on her body and he made flesh to flesh contact for a second, which was enough for her to sneak a quick peak at his mind.

Ok, Lara, she told herself. You’re about to fail, and fail miserably, then turn into a drooling idiot over and over again until you learn to control this. Fun times ahead. Best to just run straight into it than dilly dallying around. And if I can do this and Vortison can get his data, maybe none of the others will have to. If I have to take the pleasure hit for them, then that’s better than dying…right?

Oh hell, why I am being such a wuss. Your body is going to be a wreck anyway. Why not have your mind one too?

“Alright, we’re ready,” Vortison said some 18 minutes later. “Are you?”

“Yes. Did you lock the door?”

Vortison glanced back at the entrance and telepathically signaled it to lock, seeing a small indicator light shift from blue to green.

“Locked. And remember, no Jumat. I can’t block it out and rework your body at the same time.”

“If I’m sane I won’t. No promises when I go all…you know.”

“Alright, stay calm and let the burn happen. Not sure what it will feel like beyond that, so just keep still, inside and out. Here we go.”

Lara let out a deep breath then clenched up in anticipation, then caught Vortison’s eye and realized that wasn’t the way to go. She relaxed her shoulders and let her legs sag just a touch, then a spike of hot lightning shot through her that felt…wrong. Very wrong. Like it was eating her alive from the inside out.

She wanted to fight it, but knew she couldn’t. So she just put her mind into Rocky mode, as if she was taking punch after punch and just shaking it off. It was almost too much for her, then it suddenly ended and a lingering burn was left behind.

“Lara?” she heard Vortison ask, though it sounded like he was miles away.

“Still sane,” she mumbled, her tongue feeling numb.

“You made it through the first one. Now stay here for a couple hours and let it ride. You need time to adapt.”

“I don’t…” she said, leaning forward and being caught by the machine arms that kept her from falling as she suddenly puked all over the front of the pedestal and out onto the floor once, then she just hung there limp still attached to the machine.

To her credit she hung in there, with her stress levels hanging just below danger zone all the way up to the next treatment. And the next one, and the next. She made it 6 days until she started fighting it too much and Vortison had to enact the backup plan, distracting her from the discomfort so she wouldn’t fight it.

It worked in keeping her from overloading, but the efficiently level of the adaptation tanked. It seemed she needed to feel it to adapt the quickest, but if slow was the only way to get there, then slow and inefficient it would be.

Vortison and the others took shifts sleeping over the next 22 days, with Lara staying attached to the machine the entire time and it handling her feeding and waste extraction internally until they reached the end of the first phase and she was released to fall into a pain stricken yet euphoric state that had made it hard to walk on top of the stiffness from her body being a scarecrow for so long.

They helped Lara into a nearby tube that she laid down in and was sealed over top of her, then they had her body transported across the facility to a special training den that she had to herself. She was so weak she couldn’t climb out without help, then her wildly conflicted mind solidified somewhat as the training course before her signaled a start chime.

She walked, still naked, one stumbling step at a time on the easiest challenge course imaginable…but it was damn hard for her to do. She tried to focus, but the low level arousal Vortison was keeping her in wouldn’t let her. It was like trying to control your own body by remote, as if she wasn’t quite in it and looking on as a spectator, but the farther she went the more control she gained. Enough, at least, to be able to walk in a straight line and stumble/fall over low walls.

Lara only made it a third of the way through the course before her legs went out, then the dedicated handlers the medtechs had assigned to her picked her up and put her back inside the tube where she would sleep for the next 13 hours, then wake and try the course again.

Another 11 days of that and she was able to complete the course with ease…which meant it was time to send her back to the lab for another series of treatments and repeat the process all over again.

3

December 2, 4922

Ennit System (Dagran Region)

Vis

Lara had changed, and not just in the physical. Her body was a wreck, but her mind was in a state she had never experienced before as he climbed up a ladder then swung her feet through an aperture that led to a slide. She twirled around and around before landing in a sand pit that she began to run across and up a nearby dune inside the training facility. Her movements were slow and awkward compared to what she had once been capable of, but she could barely remember those times.

The past 3 years felt like an eternity. The wars she had fought in the past were gone. Her training as an Archon was gone. Her memories of Star Force were gone. All she knew now was the training courses and the medbay. Everything else was such a hazy blur it was like she had never existed anywhere else.

She’d partially held out against the onslaught of the physical changes for 6 weeks before Vortison’s backup plan had to fully kick in and Lara became a quavering mass of sexual arousal around the clock. It had felt good but sickening at the same time, for it couldn’t completely obscure the damage happening to her body. But worse of all, what it had done was break her defiant mojo and sent her into a tailspin of confusion and vulnerability, for she couldn’t identify her target to fight back against.

That had been the point, so her internal conflict wouldn’t snowball into an overload, but it had hit Lara far harder than she’d expected. Right now she couldn’t remember much from then, for the period of sexual arousal had only lasted a few months. Since then she’d regained a semblance of stability and held it together enough that the backup plan wasn’t needed, but it was still there and she desperately did not want to go back into that state.

Like many younger Archons had testified too before, once inundated with unnaturally strong orgasms over and over again, the pleasure torture lost its effect on Lara as she adapted to it, but the disruption remained. She was no longer ‘shy’ in that regard, and a curious thing had happened during that transition. Despite the looseness of her mind now that she still couldn’t manage to shake, not for two seconds, she had somehow managed to transcend the arousal, disconnecting from her body in a fashion that allowed her to see it for the biomechanical function that it was.

It wasn’t her. It wasn’t a part of who she was. It was the body she was in, and once that fact had fully sunk in she had been able to smooth out her resistance to it and turn it into an advantage. That had been what had allowed her to regain enough stability to no longer need it, and while that was a valuable lesson learned it was almost meaningless compared to what was still happening to her.

The obstacle course she was running now wasn’t too hard, but it was impossible compared to what she had been going through two years ago. The more strength she gained the more Vortison changed her, but there was base improvement going on that was allowing her more and more ability. That made it look like she was recovering, but she wasn’t. In fact, the torrent inside her body was getting gradually worse.

She was in constant agony, lost in the pain and torsion that she experienced as Vortison made small changes to her biology…allowed her to adapt to them…then made more changes based on how that adaptation occurred. He wasn’t going to graft alien genetics to her, which would have been far easier. No, he needed her body to produce tissue of its own for various functions that Humans didn’t currently possess, and the process had never been done before so he was being very clunky in the modifications.

Vortison had refined the process a great deal already, meaning the next person to go through this would not have the same difficulty, but Lara was the trailblazer and taking the hits along the way to give him the data he needed, and it was her body that was telling Vortison what was and was not possible.

For Lara, riding that out was pure agony, and her determination had long ago faded. Now she was in a zombie mentality, moving through minute after minute with no hope, no drive, no goals, no nothing. There was just endurance. Holding on to the moment and trying not to lose what little self-control she had scraped together by being subjected to the arousal treatment again, because she knew if that happened she’d go back to being totally rudderless.

But right now she was in heavy defensive mode and hanging on to any small amount of progress she had, as if pulling on a giant rope through the fog, unable to see what was ahead or behind her and only the few knots in the rope near her grasp. Getting to the next knot was all that she could focus on, and this had been going on so long she had no idea how long the rope was behind her, nor ahead, leaving her lost inside the cocoon of the changes being made to her.

But she didn’t have to know, she just had to endure and keep pushing forward. Vortison was the one that had to know, and in the past 3 years he had learned more about the Human body than he’d learned in the past millennia. He had gone past the V’kit’no’sat and Chixzon files, far past now, and Lara was truly becoming superhuman as her body made what was mostly intra-cell upgrades.

That meant no new body parts, as far as organs went. She still looked the same, though gaunt from the cascade of treatments. Lara was back to eating food now, but she still visibly looked sick. Vortison had no idea how much torment she was in, but he was aware of it. He didn’t want to be doing this to her, but there was no going back now. She was in a transitional state, and if he tried to stabilize her here she’d die. Her adaptation was the only thing holding her together, along with the regenerator, and if she stopped pushing forward the adaptation would slacken and her cells would literally rip apart.

She was in a state of flux, and thankfully she hadn’t asked to quit. Saving her life would require gutting her and essentially sending her back to the state she was in before becoming an Archon. It would destroy all her years of training if he was successful. There was a decent chance that he couldn’t even achieve that small victory. The only real path for her now was forward, and he didn’t want to even think about going backward. It would destroy her, one way or another.

He was doing a great many things to her, but the biggest change that all the others fed off of was her metabolism. Humans had a variable metabolism, but not on the level that the Archons needed. Adjustments like the psionic Inas that allowed them to need less sleep were an improvement, but nothing on the level that Lara had currently become, let alone what she was headed towards.

The Chixzon had detailed several races with hyperactive metabolisms, and it was from that basic knowledge that this crazy idea had started. Those races had to constantly keep moving or they’d die, because they were built for movement. Sedation would literally kill them, and it had been argued that since the Archons trained close to that anyway, this would be a massive upgrade for them.

The trouble was, Human cells were not built to sustain constant activity. They needed recharge, hence sleep, and that down time caused the cells to be structured differently than the few hyperactive races the galaxy fielded. The build-up and discharge model that Humans were built on had to be modified to a massive extent with overlapping functions so that a piece of them could rest while the others kept up the burden of activity.

To achieve that, the Human cells had to be completely redesigned. A design that neither Vortison nor the V’kit’no’sat possessed. You couldn’t have a regenerator build the new tissue without that design, and since the body was melded with the invisible Core that science hadn’t yet been able to probe, it didn’t always function as predicted and trying to academically design new body tissue had almost always been met with failure.

The body had to upgrade itself through adaptation, and when one had done so it could be copied to others. The Zak’de’ron had upgraded the various V’kit’no’sat races by similar methods over the long haul while implementing large changes immediately based off of tissues found in other races. Melding the two together was tricky, but it was far easier than just creating something new.

And adding something to the body, like the Hjar’at’s spines, was easy. Changing the basic cell structure of the body was damn hard, and every mistake that Vortison was making, Lara was paying the price for it.

And he was making lots of mistakes because he was essentially fumbling around in the dark until he found something that worked. When he did he latched onto it and then began prompting smaller changes to it, using that success as a baseline for further adaptation. In essence, he was walking into a room filled with buttons and had to learn how they worked by going around and pressing each one, only to figure out what it did by watching what happened. And that included a lot of bad things.

But he had a map now. Where Lara had gone he had charted it out and now knew how to avoid the pitfalls she’d dragged herself through. That would help others cross the same gap, but it did nothing for the new ground Lara was exploring with each step forward. A more apt analogy was walking through a mine field and setting one off with every few steps. It cleared a path for the others to follow later, but Lara had to take and survive each explosion along the way.

Without the regenerator she would have died a long time ago. Having it rebuild her diminished her adaptation, for the new tissue was weaker, but some of the bigger mistakes Vortison made would have killed her if he hadn’t been able to quickly rebuild the damage and change direction. He never would have done this to an unwilling person, but even with that said, he would have refused entirely if he had known it would be this bad.

But he wasn’t about to bail on her now. As long as she was making progress, he was going to do everything he could to help her get to a sustainable state. And the thing was, she wasn’t anywhere close to one yet. At least he didn’t think so. This was all so new he couldn’t say for sure, but he had a feeling she had just dipped her toe into the necessary changes, while from her perspective it probably felt like she’d dove into the pool in cannonball fashion.

Somehow she was not only surviving, but managing to get a handle on the unpredictable changes occurring to her. Right now she was running another challenge course, with her realtime biomed data being relayed via her eye piece to the computer systems. Vortison was monitoring them now even as he planned the next treatment, trying to figure out the puzzle before he saw all the pieces.

Failing constantly and seeing Lara take the punishment for it was something Vortison hadn’t been prepared for, but he too had adapted, because he had to. No one else in Star Force had his genetics knowledge. He couldn’t turn it over to them, for he was already getting their assistance constantly. Some were here, others were afar and he was bouncing ideas off them over the relay grid, but he was the point man and the one Lara had entrusted her life with. No matter how much this bothered him, he had to see it through for her, but he’d already promised himself that he would never sanction something so damaging as this again. This wasn’t science, it was bordering on barbarism.

A chime alerted him to an incoming message from outside his sphere of thought, and he almost ignored it before bringing up the text. He didn’t want to waste 30 seconds that he could be spending on Lara, but then he realized it was about her. She was having to consume so much ambrosia to feed the metabolism upgrades that had already been made that Vortison had had to include a feed on the machine to deliver it to her directly. Her digestive systems couldn’t handle the full amount she needed, and he’d decided to ask for a redesign to try and match the mixture to her growing needs.

He’d been waiting for months, but it appeared that Neandry had finally found a solution and Vortison was now looking at the extremely complex formula for Ambrosia 2.0 that, if the expectations held up, would contain 317% of the energy release per equal mass of regular ambrosia. It also was packaged differently so it could more easily enter the bloodstream through the digestive tract. The stated delay rate had decreased 23% when tested on other Archons, but how Lara’s new digestive tract would hold up was unknown. He’d already made a lot of adjustments trying to make it use regular ambrosia more effectively.

But there was a catch, with that being that the new formula was so potent that if accidentally taken by someone in large enough doses, it would kill them. Regular ambrosia had been theorized to potentially kill with a sufficient overdose, but no one had ever been stupid enough to take that much of it. But this new formula wouldn’t take too much to send someone’s metabolism to such high levels that it would literally tear the body apart.

Lara’s developing changes wouldn’t be affected, for her body would just gobble it up. Eventually she wouldn’t be damaged at all, in theory, if this experiment actually succeeded, for the other races the Chixzon had discovered could not overload on fuel. But Humans, as they were now, could. Hence the little Ambrosia 2.0 that had been produced was under heavy security to make sure none of it accidentally got mixed in with the regular supply, for it tasted nearly the same to those with sufficiently high metabolisms to drink it straight up.

“Finally some good news,” Vortison mumbled, filing the message away and getting back to the settings for Lara’s next upgrade. He had another 7 minutes to work before she walked in with her handler staying right behind her in case she fell. Right now she looked alright, not too wobbly, but she stumbled a couple times when she slowly took off her clothes, dropping them in her wake and not caring to pick them up into a pile, physically or telekinetically. She ignored them as soon as they were off and walked straight into the alteration chamber.

Her hair was now only two inches long, for she’d burnt the rest off multiple times and had eventually decided to just leave it short. She’d also burnt off her clothes more than 20 times during challenge course runs as her Rensiek malfunctioned and turned her into a glow rod. Right now her temperature was normal, but he could visibly see stress marks on her body where her blood vessels were surging harder than they should and swelling up on the surface.

Despite the sickly look to her, Lara was still strikingly attractive and that was never lost on Vortison. Somehow her inner strength affected her body, literally screaming superiority in a way that other attractive women did not. And it wasn’t just her pheromones either, which had a considerable effect on all men, for the more fit a person became the more desirable their rating as a mating partner became on a genetic level, which was then transmitted via the pheromones.

Her pheromones, along with all the other high level Archons, literally made her glow as far as scent was concerned. It wasn’t quite palpable, but there was always a buzz around her and the others. The male pheromones he couldn’t pick up in the same way, for they registered for women and not him, but there was something else about Lara that he couldn’t quite quantify. It didn’t distract him from his work, but it was there none the less and until today he could never put it to any scientifically verifiable source.

But when she connected to the machine…or rather its mandibles reached down and connected to her…something happened. The calibration programs he’d built to monitor even the slightest variables in her state were off. Not much, just a tiny amount, but they shouldn’t have been.

“Wait a minute, Lara. I’ve got to check on something,” he told her, but she didn’t respond. She rarely responded anymore, just going about her daily routing as a mute zombie and only speaking when absolutely necessary.

“Anders?” he asked, with his assistant already having seen the disparity.

“I don’t know. I can’t trace it.”

“Something is there,” he said, pouring through the massive amount of monitoring stats that Lara was providing beyond the eyepiece now that she was in the much more advanced monitoring machine. He never could have gotten through them all without the mental interfaces, but even they were not enough to immediately give him the information he required. It took almost ten minutes before they finally got their first clue.

“Ikrid tissue,” he noted for the sake of his assistants as the four of them in the room began looking at that particular part of her body, one that hadn’t undergone any changes during these treatments. “It’s registering at 138% maximum charge.”

“How?” Baker asked.

“I have no idea. Her cells are still reading level 17 and 18. Even with all 18s Aaron has never registered this high. Have we altered anything in her Ikrid?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“No, nothing,” Anders confirmed as he reviewed her current cell structure there. “It hasn’t been touched.”

“Then what has changed?”

“No clue.”

“Something has. Find it,” he said urgently.

“Lachka and Pefbar are also over 100%,” Baker noted.

“What the hell,” Vortison said as an epiphany hit him. “Verify equipment status.”

“Checking…all in the green. Computer analysis is not flawed. This is real data.”

“Back check when this started,” he said absent mindedly as he began analyzing something else.

“Scaling began 9 months ago,” one of them said, cursing under his breath for missing this. They hadn’t looked because they hadn’t been changing the structure of those cells because the psionic tissue was basically add-ons to the body rather than the default hardware and they didn’t want to damage them with the experiments and undo the training effect in them until they mastered the changes on the rest of her body. “Peak occurred 3 days ago after the last treatment.”

That clinched it for Vortison, though he double checked a few other things anyway before slowly backing away from the interface equipment.

“People, I want you to take a moment and burn this day into your permanent memory. I believe this is the first verifiable proof of an Essence effect.”

Everyone was dead silent, enough that it even got Lara’s attention through her permanent haze.

“What is that?” she croaked with a voice that had barely been used over the past 3 years.

“A Chixzon legend,” Vortison said, walking around the elaborate diagnostic setup and coming up directly in front of Lara where he looked her in her pained eyes. “Nefron said they could never confirm it, but there were reports of biology functioning beyond molecular capacity in rare cases. They could never locate a source, and they theorized that there may be a connection to the Core. That your life force, invisible as it always has been to our tools, was having an effect on the body in a way that defied science. They called the idea Essence, and had a number of encounters with individuals that displayed it. They tried to harness the power boost but failed, for they could not find the source.”

“Do you know how you triggered it?” she asked meekly.

“A rough theory at this point, but maybe. Either way, you’ve just gone where probably no Human has ever gone before. Can you feel it?”

“I feel like shit,” she reminded him. “You could punch me in the face and I wouldn’t notice.”

“This is more significant than you realize” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder and nearly getting burnt by her heat level. It wasn’t enough to catch things on fire, but her body temperature was running an average of 132 degrees Fahrenheit nowadays. He’d never touched her before, and his mind had been so distracted he completely forgot. “This could be a huge discovery, Lara. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you now, but for us this is…or could be, the greatest scientific discovery ever.”

“Noted,” she said, making it clear she didn’t really care. Not that she should, in her current state.

“Are you strong enough to use your psionics?”

“Tell me what you need.”

“Use all of them.”

“Stand back.”

Vortison retreated away from the chamber and back to his equipment, seeing new data flowing in as Lara activated her psionics one at a time, eventually finishing with a small Jumat blast that blew a hole in the far wall away from any vital equipment.

“Sorry,” she apologized. “That was bigger than I thought.”

“No, no…that was just what we needed. You can stop now.”

“I need my treatment,” she said, her face scrunching up. “I can feel it slipping.”

“Stand by,” Vortison said, knowing what she meant by slipping. The active state she needed to remain in was satiated briefly by workouts, but if she didn’t at least start walking again soon her cells would begin to damage themselves with the lack of effort, and her psionic tissue didn’t count because those cells hadn’t been altered yet. To the rest of her body they were little more than mundane lumps of tissue that didn’t match the rest.

“Here we go,” he warned, numbing her body as much as he could, but it was never enough. She had to feel the changes in order for the adaptation to really kick in, and that meant at best he could only partially numb the lightning streaks of pain that were about to shoot through her.

She flinched when it began, but otherwise there was no visible indicator of anything happening inside her. Lara was so used to this now that she had it all bottled up inside, but as the changes continued her containment slipped and her body was shaking by the time it was finished. When the equipment released her she fell. In the past there had been someone there to catch her, but her bones were so hard from the Mebvat that she couldn’t really hurt herself.

Lara laid there for a minute or two, then pulled herself up when she was ready. In the past, picking her up had ticked her off even more, and Vortison knew now it was more than ego. She needed to be still for a few moments to collect herself, then she walked with a hand steadying her on various tables and equipment as she went past her clothing pile that the trainer had picked up for her and she laid down straight into the transit tube.

It auto-sealed over her, then the trainer pushed it out of the lab and back to the training courses where she would start all over again with little more than a crawl as she slowly adapted to the changes and got her strength back over the following days.

“We have to keep her going,” Vortison said once she was out the door. “We can’t get distracted with this. We need to bring in another team to help.”

“Get all the Master Medtechs,” Anders suggested. “This is entirely new territory. We don’t have any experts, and we need to make the most of it while it lasts.”

Vortison nodded. “I think you’re right. Monitor her closely while I send the messages. If this is just a fluke that goes away, I want every bit of data we can get.”

4

May 3, 4926

Astargari System (lizard territory)

Stellar Orbit

Six years ago Star Force had resumed their war against the lizards, not counting the perpetual combat in defense of the Wass’mat annex and three other V’kit’no’sat systems that, knowing they were going to be transferred to Star Force eventually and were facing imminent destruction, had requested immediate inclusion. Star Force had sent out expeditions to rescue them, but the main assault against the lizards had begun six years ago in their rimward border that had once belonged to the Skarron Empire.

The lizards had curiously held to it there while expanding in other directions. Paul figured that was to avoid drawing Star Force’s attention, as well as the V’kit’no’sat, since they were also at war with them and seemingly overlooked when the rogue Human splinter race was discovered. Attracting attention from other side would have been foolish, but it still surprised Paul that they had resisted taking on smaller races rimward during that time.

What the lizards had been doing was heavily fortifying Skarron territory after they had taken out the huge empire. Full scouting reports had not returned yet, but the incomplete ones indicated there wasn’t a single Skarron, Aronsic, or Jenipar discovered on any world. It was possible that some were still holding out further anti-spinward, but Paul had the sinking feeling that the lizards had completely annihilated their empire down to the last individual…meaning that the Aronsic in Star Force were the only remaining survivors.

That wasn’t unusual for the lizards. They rarely took on slaves, and total elimination of enemies was commonplace, but the Skarron empire had included 72,912 star systems according to captured navigation systems pre-crusade. How many more they took after that was guesswork, but it was looking more and more like the lizards had methodically conquered all of it and then stopped.

That stopping was not like them, but Paul was seeing the benefit of it in the layered system defenses they had built up…along with an alarming number of industrial facilities, many of which appeared to be mobile, but now that Star Force was pushing into the interior of Skarron territory like a knife blade on the starmap rather than nibbling around the edges, he was encountering the first shipyard ring thus far.

Right now Paul was involved in a pitched fight at the jumppoint, thankful he had gone the long way around, for the most direct jumppoint into the system had so many lizard ships stationed there that his fleet would have ran into them upon exit. They had placed themselves as a living minefield, but Paul’s redirect had caught them out of place and the fewer ships located on this jumpline had been unable to prevent a decent foothold from forming.

But now that they were here, the lizards were swarming to the foothold as Paul’s fleet gradually arrived a few ships at a time…and like before, there were millions of cruisers in the system around the shipyard ring and at least half a million near the other jumppoint, with most of those already enroute if not already here and engaged in the fighting.

Paul had seen the scouting report on this system, but being here and getting the live sensor data sent a chill up his spine. The power of the lizards had increased greatly, and with their ability to spam production to this level he was beginning to understand why they thought they could take on a severely weakened and distracted V’kit’no’sat empire on its outskirts. Their patience had paid off, and now more than ever Paul was beginning to realize the horrific potential in their enemy and why they had to be destroyed now before they could grow any larger.

The big question was who was feeding them. The Zak’de’ron or the Chixzon were the two main possibilities, but the galaxy was so large it could have been an unknown third. Whoever it was, they were turning the lizards into a weapon…no, more like a plague they could unleash against their enemies. Paul just wondered how they figured to control them as they grew larger and larger.

As he kept his growing fleet in a conical formation and fought off the lizards as they tried to backdoor and interpose themselves into the jumplane and kamikaze against the incoming ships, Paul had to kamikaze some of his own drones to keep them away. As it was, he wasn’t going to be able to hold this jumppoint much longer when the enemy was willing to use themselves as mobile mines, but he had to hold it long enough to get the transport here. After that he could divert the others into arcing deceleration curves around the star, which he was already plotting and ready to transmit once Bahamut arrived.

That would mean his reinforcements would dry up for more than an hour, but the lizards wouldn’t be able to block the varied jumplines as they splintered off the main line in and his ships utilized their V’kit’no’sat legacy engines that were tuned for just such curved maneuvering at high speeds.

Most races couldn’t handle that. Their sensors were not precise enough, but the V’kit’no’sat had mastered the art of moving past star systems rather than stopping in them, and using the star’s gravity to slingshot a course redirect. The destination system had to line up properly, so it wasn’t always doable, but maneuvering into long braking maneuvers around the perimeter of a star was easy by comparison given the ‘slower’ speeds involved.

The lizards weren’t cutting him any brakes, but it looked like he was going to be able to hold out just long enough to get the transport here, though he was losing a lot of drones in the process of blocking the blockers. He knew where in the line of incoming ships the Uriti transport was, and when it came within the window of receiving signals from the system, he began to update the jumpline splinters to the ships behind it, with them then relaying the signals back down the line to the ships behind them.

And that was all Paul had to do. As soon as the Uriti transport made its braking jump and arrived behind the spherical wall of drones, the other incoming Warship-class jumpships disappeared, leaving Paul a traditional battlefield to operate in so long as he didn’t veer too wide into one of the splinter lines. He knew where they were, the lizards did not, so he was the king of the jumppoint now as the rest of his ships began zipping by and braking far closer to the star, all of which appeared as nothing more than brief streaks of sensor echo that didn’t always make it through the cloud of cruisers surrounding Paul’s position.

“Wake him up,” Paul told Kacie-2512, who was standing beside him in the Excalibur’s command nexus in a small cupola built specifically for her and her gauntlet that allowed the Wrangler to communicate directly with the Uriti. Paul was too busy to do it himself, as were many other Archons spread throughout the fleet, leaving her responsible for coordinating between Bahamut and Paul for maximum efficiency.

“Waking,” she said, ordering the transport drone ship to begin cracking open. Bahamut contacted her as soon as he saw the crack opening, for from his point of view nothing had changed during the deceleration, for he couldn’t feel it inside. Kacie was getting tactical directions from Paul at the same time, which she then passed on in the unusual communication that occurred between Wranglers and Uriti, but one that was quite comfortable to her now.

Go, she said, giving him a heading on which the drones would peel away from and let the 53 mile wide juggernaut move through to engage the enemy directly.

The yellow-ish Uriti moved out of the opening jaws of the transport as soon as a gap large enough opened up and accelerated forward, pulling on the massive star that filled half the view ahead, and moving at his fastest possible speed, one that had been gradually enhanced with extensive training. It was slow compared to what the drones were capable of moving, but giving the more or less fixed positions of the battling ships the approach rate was clearly becoming ballistic.

As promised, the drones pulled back and a swarm of lizard cruisers pushed through in the gap, with Bahamut extending his telepathic aura out to maximum and firing his ‘head’ beam into the enemy. The Varot cannon punched through all those it hit, but it was tiny in width compared to what was coming at him. Had they been larger ships the damage would have been much more widespread, but the strength of the lizards in this engagement was their smallness and flexibility in numbers, even as those closest to the Uriti lost operational control and just became ballistic asteroids when their crews were suddenly mind locked.

As Bahamut pushed through the line of Star Force drones, plowing into many cruisers that couldn’t maneuver out of the way, he tilted his wings up and emitted a one-directional blast forward…with the golden energy wave taking some time to build up, then it moved out in an area of effect attack that swatted away thousands upon thousands of cruisers like they were nothing more than mosquitos.

“Turtle,” Paul said casually as he had his drones that were guarding the backdoor already repositioning to follow Bahamut through. When they got to the Uriti they began to form defensive wedges around him as he began recharging his primary attack while using his ‘lesser’ weaponry to savage a handful of ships at a time, but that was not going to be enough to deal with the swarm as they attacked both the drones and the Uriti, doing nothing more than scratching his hull with their insignificant weapons.

But those tiny hits, from millions of ships over the following weeks, could hurt him, and hurt him badly if they didn’t run away to save themselves…which the lizards never did. And the previous 38 assaults Paul and Bahamut had already made to get to this point had seen the Uriti take enough damage that he had to take some time sun bathing and eating ‘monster cubes’ that Star Force had shipped in for the Uriti to eat rather than having them planet dive to try and gather up enough scraps for what they needed.

The monster cubes were far more efficient, and Bahamut had fully healed his most recent wounds, but the number of lizard cruisers in this system was far beyond anything he had encountered previously, and Paul knew he had to shield the Uriti from some of the damage coming his way. He couldn’t let Bahamut get wore down and potentially killed in future assaults, and he couldn’t let the attack rate of all 74 Uriti deployed for this war be slowed, thus the damage to them had to be mitigated as Star Force drove straight towards the most densely populated lizard worlds…or at least what they suspected were, for their reconnaissance of the lizard empire was woefully incomplete.

Paul had shield ships flying in close to Bahamut and soaking up some damage while drones were blocking kamikaze runs of bomb ships that had started to pop up in alarming number the past 2 years once the lizards had started to try new ways to get through the aura jamming. The auto-piloted bomb ships didn’t do much more to the Uriti than smudge their hulls, but the energy saturation that they absorbed would eventually build up and make subsequent hits do more damage. Not much more, but the lizards were specifically attacking the same spots on Bahamut, and whenever they could get a kamikaze through at other locations, their ships would immediately target the location and try to chip away a little of the Uriti’s exterior hull/skin.

Beneath it was also weapon-resistant tissue, but not as good as the exterior. Fighting the Uriti was a numbers game, with attrition being the only way to take them down…and if they could flee to a star whenever they felt like it, killing one became virtually impossible.

Paul wasn’t going to let it go that far, and Davis was already committing a lot of industry to producing more drones that he had planned for other empire-building activities. He understood how badly they needed to take the lizards out now, along with a lot of other priorities, but this was a problem that would only grow with time, and while they weren’t going to abandon other races in need to their deaths, the top priority in the empire at the moment was this war.

Or rather, a shared top priority. Taking possession of the V’kit’no’sat Hula Hoop worlds and consolidating what was left of The Nexus were also top priorities, and the Director was definitely capable of multi-tasking, but he knew the loss of drones in this war would be massive, and keeping the Uriti intact was essential. And added to that the fact that the trailblazers intended this to be a ZERO casualty war, and you were going to have to devote a lot of resources to both ship replacement and feeding the Uriti…for they needed a good amount of mass in order to spawn spore colonies.

And those colonies were being put down in every system taken, after the surface was thoroughly bombarded, and tasked with hunting down and destroying any lizards remaining. A few ships would be left in orbit along with an Archon trained to interface and give orders to the minions. Fortunately that didn’t require as much experience as a Wrangler had, but it did require Wrangler gauntlets.

Star Force troops were not being used, except in some very rare circumstances, and the minions were also reproducing to the point where they could defend the planets taken against squatters. For Star Force wasn’t just taking out the lizards, they were laying claim to their territory as well…which was going to be a larger annex than the entirety of The Nexus, part of which was still operating under Sety control.

It was a huge undertaking, and Paul knew the long term outcomes would be a function of these battles and how much attrition his forces took. The more time that was spent, the more time there was for the lizards to produce more ships and lizards of their own. They needed to move quickly, and the shipyard ring waiting beyond was going to be the first big hit Paul had landed. The others he wasn’t aware of more than from very belated reports relayed via couriers. There were 74 different assault paths and there wasn’t much coordination needed between them yet, but the density of this star system was almost calling for two Uriti to be deployed simultaneously.

But not yet. Doing so would delay their conquest rate considerably, and Paul thought he could manage this one on his own. Bahamut was one of the best Uriti with regards to fleet coordination, and coupled with the best naval Archon they were a tough combo to beat, though millions of upgraded lizard cruisers was pushing it if they could gathered together at once.

Fortunately they weren’t, and if they did Paul would just reposition. Fleets of larger and larger size had movement issues, and Star Force engine technology could still run rings around the lizards. Bahamut couldn’t, but Paul had options other than just standing in place and slugging it out…though at the moment that’s exactly what he was doing with the ‘mismatch’ he was being presented.

For all the ship swarms currently attacking him and those nearby and coming to reinforce, they were going to need a lot more to wear down Bahamut, and as they tried with insufficient numbers he was going to lay waste to their swarms. If they spread out and tried to fight in smaller groups, their firepower would diminish to a level that it wouldn’t even tickle the Uriti…and Paul could use his superior technology to dance around and cut apart smaller lizard battle groups.

Their greatest advantage was the swarm, and luckily enough, that’s exactly what the Chixzon had designed the Uriti to counter.

Bahamut was a fleet killer, and the lizards were going to throw fleet after fleet against him, hoping to wear him down over time. That was the game they were playing, and it wasn’t hard to predict, though Paul was keeping his eyes open for any trickery, either of lizard cunning or from their sponsor, whoever that might be.

Star Force had to preserve the Uriti at all costs, even if it meant turning around and leaving the war behind. They were too valuable to lose, but in order to fight this war they had to dive head on into the enemy. That’s what they were built for, and Paul didn’t have a problem with that so long as Bahamut didn’t…and he was more aggressive than Paul was, with Kacie constantly having to tell him to hold back and not shoot the first enemy ship he saw.

The strategy The Admiral offered wasn’t lost on Bahamut, for he saw he was able to do more damage by picking his shots better. The synergy between the two of them was growing, and Paul expected to be spending many decades together with the Uriti, as other trailblazers were with their own. Relationships were forming that had never been expected, for they’d never planned on using the Uriti in this fashion. But now here they were, engaged in Chixzon-like warfare, and the more time that went on both the trailblazers and the Uriti gained a greater respect for each other.

But as they did the galaxy watched, through various scout ships trailing and sometimes preceding the Uriti fleets. Paul knew they were there, and had authorized some of them, but there was no keeping them away. The many races who had come to the Uriti Preserve were not happy with Star Force seeming to break their word and use the Uriti offensively, but this was the continuation of a defensive war and Star Force wasn’t dancing around that point. It wasn’t a violation of their promise, and many races had to grudgingly agree…as well as realize they had no leverage if Star Force ever did decide to break their promise.

And then there were others, from the Rim Consortium and beyond, that were here watching from the shadows for other reasons. They never got involved, and kept so far away that the pictures couldn’t be great, but Paul had noted a few echoes from ships he believed to be V’kit’no’sat. The others probably couldn’t pick them up, but he’d been looking for them. He was sure they wanted to know the full capability of the Uriti, and if there were some in this system, they were going to get a hell of a show, for Bahamut was going to have to really whoop ass to get anywhere near that shipyard ring.

5

June 19, 4926

Itaru System (V’kit’no’sat capitol)

Wendigama

Mak’to’ran was running on one of the planet’s many subterranean training paths when another Era’tran came up behind him. He said nothing, verbally or telepathic, but Mak’to’ran knew it was Sar’to’san and he had something to tell him. His attendant did not want to disrupt his workout, and as he had done previous times, he came out onto the course and ran up behind the V’kit’no’sat leader, then carefully moved into sync beside him before delivering his news.

What is it? Mak’to’ran asked telepathically.

We’ve received additional reports from the Star Force warfront. The Li’vorkrachnika have abandoned their attacks against us entirely and are turning their full power against the incursion into their territory.

And? he pressed, knowing that there was something more urgent than that tidbit of good news.

We also received more battle data from our scouts following the Uriti campaigns. Disturbing would be an understatement.

They are more powerful than you expected, Mak’to’ran said definitively.

We’ve received images of the Uriti Hammer engaged in an intra-atmosphere surface attack. Somehow it tapped into the magnetic field of the planet and unleashed an electric storm of a magnitude we have never before recorded. It decimated the Li’vorkrachnika cities in a matter of hours over 1/18th of the planet, including shielded facilities.

That was not a weapon I was familiar with.

It gets worse. They used the Uriti Sivir to destroy an entire moon from the inside out.

Destroyed? Mak’to’ran asked, finally surprised. How?

It penetrated the crush and disappeared inside. Afterwards the moon ripped itself apart into fragments.

What was on the moon?

A defense matrix more dense than most planets. It’s as if it was built as a hard point against invasion, but with very little self-sustaining industry on it. There were also long range weaponry of a type unfamiliar to us. They were effective at nearly three quarters the range of a Tar’vem’jic and carried considerable knockdown power, though they were slow and globular.

And Star Force chose to take out the entire moon rather than defeat and capture it? That is alarming. Perhaps the threat of the Li’vorkrachnika is greater than we calculated.

They destroyed a moon, Sar’to’san reiterated.

How large?

Level 6.

Mak’to’ran slid to a halt, his foot claws dragging on the semi-soft floor as he leaned back far enough that even his small 4th toes touched the ground. Sar’to’san kept running a few steps before he realized that Mak’to’ran had stopped, then had to slow and turn around to get back to him.

They destroyed a level 6 planetoid? Mak’to’ran asked, referencing a mass slightly larger than Mercury.

Yes, and we do not know how or what their limit is. Nor do we know if this is only the capacity of one, or some Uriti, or if they can all do it.

Mak’to’ran ticked his 4thk toes against the floor in an irritated gesture, but also a pensive one. Era’tran had 4 digits on their feet, while only two on their hands, making it easier for them pre-Lachka to pick up objects with their feet. Both hands were required for most arm grasping, and Mak’to’ran really had to stretch his neck down to get something large into his mouth. It was much easier to side feed with one arm, which was why Era’tran cups were made with a triangular middle grasp indent that matched the angular splay between fingers.

Most Era’tran ate and drank using Lachka now, with some preferring to use their muscles as a novelty. As it was, Era’tran feet were more ambidextrous than their hands, which was why most of their computer interfaces had floor buttons when not using Ikrid links.

Mak’to’ran continued to tick his small, 4thk toes for several seconds, then stopped and turned his wayward gaze back on his attendant.

There are complaints? he guessed.

Many, and they are spreading. Despite the threat of the remaining Rim races, there is great concern that our rimward guards have more power than us, and the ability to destroy our planets if they can manage to poke a single hole through our planetary shields.

They will not attack us, Mak’to’ran assured him.

How can you be so sure?

I have met their supreme leader and taken the measure of the Human. They still behave as Zen’zat should, their duty to the galaxy is still imbued in their genetic code. They do not wish to fight us, Sar’to’san. They only did so because we tried to destroy them.

They should have accepted their punishment as a Zen’zat would.

Do they? Mak’to’ran challenged. Or do they realize they cannot win and simply accept their fate? If they had a chance of survival, would they fight back? Some have, but perhaps you are too young to remember. Zen’zat have not always gone to their punitive deaths willingly. Nor have we. When faced with execution, all instinctively resist. Give them a way to survive and they will take it. I have given it to Star Force and they are not only taking it, they are embracing it because I am relying on their instinctive duty to corral their power. They believe it is freedom.

Is it truly not freedom if there is no safeguard?

A matter of perspective, then. Star Force will not attack us because it is not in their best interest. They are like Dulu’thar ants scurrying to repair their nests after a storm, only their nest is the galaxy. Rather than consolidate their holdings they are even now pressing further rimward to rescue small and unimportant races because they are in need. Those are not the actions of an empire that is a threat to us. Those are the actions of an empire that is useful to us. They are a stabilizing force, one that the galaxy badly needs right now.

And if you are wrong, and they grow strong enough to protect their Uriti, they could destroy our planets at will.

As you said, they still have to penetrate the planetary shields.

The Hadarak have done so with ease, Mak’to’ran.

The Uriti are nowhere near as large. Tell me, did they break through the Li’vorkrachnika shields with physical contact or orbital bombardment?

Orbital bombardment, the other Era’tran said cautiously.

They are not strong enough to push through otherwise, or they will take too much damage that Star Force doesn’t want them to incur. If ramming was the most efficient option, Star Force would use it to avoid wasting their drone warships. That is why they destroyed the moon. To spare their naval losses.

This does not concern you at all? Sar’to’san asked in disbelief.

It concerns me a great deal, but not in the way you suggest. I fear others might see this power and try to take it from Star Force, or at least deny it to them. And either outcome would be bad for us.

How can you say that?

Because they are V’kit’no’sat, and not in formality only. Their methodology differs, and differs greatly, but the core mission is the same. Protect the galaxy.

And what if protecting the galaxy means destroying us one day?

We fight the Hadarak. And have done so for millions of years. The Uriti should not scare you so much.

The Uriti do not behave as Hadarak. They take orders from Star Force.

An important distinction, which makes me worry even less about them.

Others are not so trusting. They are adamant that we cannot let this power exist outside our control.

Mak’to’ran stomped his left foot against the ground, hard, and Sar’to’san promptly shut up.

I am fatigued with the stupidity of others. I am fatigued with having to remain here to constantly suppress moves against the empire from within. We should be fighting the Hadarak, where our primary duty lies, but everyone appears to find something else to occupy their effort. We must build a stronger fleet, Sar’to’san. We must build stronger planets. We must build a stronger empire. Yet I hear nothing but calls for more destruction. Star Force is my responsibility, and no one else’s. And the more powerful they become, the better it is for us.

They will take their vengeance someday. That is what the others say. Can you be sure they will not?

I can.

How?

Mercy is a luxury of the dominant. It is a quote they are fond of. They become savage when faced with no other options. But the more dominant they become, the more forgiving they are. Where we would kill one for a violation, they punish and offer a path back to significance. A hard path, but when one exists they are not disregarding the individual as we do. It is a strength that will manifest itself in the long run, and unless the rim turns against them because of this new revelation, they will live to see it become their backbone.

I do not understand what you say, but I trust your path for us. What will you do with the others?

The same as before. Bring them before me now and I will educate them. If they will not listen, they will be moved aside. If they will not move, they will be killed. But see how I learn? I offer them a path and let them choose rather than deciding their path for them. This tactic was lost on the empire, for in our vast numbers we saw the individual as expendable. I will not continue to make that mistake, and you and others must learn to not only obey, but to understand.

I am trying, Mak’to’ran. But sometimes your words seem to defy reason.

The galaxy is complex, Sar’to’san. The more you learn, the more you see the untapped potential for future learning. Only the naïve think they understand everything.

Then I am not naïve, for I am thoroughly confused.

Good. Admitting confusion rather than holding to doctrine is a necessary step forward. Who specifically is complaining this time?

The Oso’lon and J’gar have remained silent, as usual, though our J’gar here are adamant that we have some form of defense against such an attack. Beyond them, the Hjar’at and Les’i’kron are incensed, while others have deep concerns with less emotion attached.

Emotion is the key factor here. A calm mind would realize that Star Force is so busy destroying the Li’vorkrachnika that they cannot use this power against us anytime in the near future, so there is no reason for haste. And if we were to do something about it, we would first need to gage the full scope of this power…which means waiting and watching to see if they use it again. And taking measurements. Many measurements.

Then the threat is not immanent, Sar’to’san said, with some of his anxiety dispersing.

The threat is non-existent. If they truly wished to use this power against us, they would have done so before now.

They were not strong enough to attack our territory. But they could become so in the future.

Again, that means there is no need for haste, especially when they are engaged in another costly war.

Even we do not have the power to destroy planetoids.

But the Hadarak do. Perhaps not in the same fashion, or perhaps they see no reason to blow apart their feeding grounds. But this power is not as unfamiliar as others would have us believe.

You knew?

No, I did not, but I had my suspicions when they went to great effort to safeguard Terrax when they used a Uriti beneath the planet’s surface to destroy the planetary defense station. I knew then that Star Force had the ability to use them for more than naval combat, however I did not anticipate their destroying planetoids. But so much the better. The threat of their doing so will keep many races from challenging them. I just hope they do not behave as the others wish I would and turn against them now.

And if that happens?

We are not in a position to help them. They will have to stand alone, but that is a position they are well acquainted with and why I have no doubt that given enough time they will pacify the entirety of the outer Rim, leaving us free to confront the Hadarak directly.

I do not believe the others are thinking that far ahead.

Of course not. They are concerned with pettiness and driven by fear. They have forgotten that true dominance must be earned, and do not know how to respond when they are suddenly no longer dominant. Not that we ever were. Not against the Hadarak, Mak’to’ran said, glancing back down the path they’d come and determining that going back would be quicker than moving ahead to the next exit.

Let us go now, before this stupidity builds further, he said, taking off at a faster run than before that Sar’to’san had a difficult time matching and maintaining, but his attendant managed to stay with him all the way back to the exit, where the junior Era’tran was thankful that they returned to normal pedestrian speeds and boarded a Satu that carried them out across Wendigama’s surface to one of the grand chambers where Mak’to’ran and his subordinates were constantly having to deal with malcontents as they slowly began to rebuild the tattered bonds within the empire.

6

April 2, 4931

Ennit System (Dagran Region)

Vis

Lara’s previous life was a blur, almost as if it had been a dream rather than reality. The last time she’d had a real workout was so far gone her body didn’t want to remember it. All that there was for her now was alterations, pain, adjustment, partial normalization, then another alteration. The training she was doing wasn’t to increase her ability level, it was to recover some semblance of normalcy.

However, something that was lost on her and not on Vortison’s team was the fact that her ‘normalcy’ was increasing exponentially fast. She might feel like hell, but she was walking and running easier than before. Lara couldn’t see it, because inside it felt like a cascade of grenades were going off with regularity, and in the torrent of constant adjustments one’s mental image of ‘normal’ adjusted to what was most recent so long as it wasn’t a drastic change.

During Lara’s up and down swings, her middle point had gradually shifted, so now her ‘normal’ was far beyond what the rest of the Archons’ normal was. She wasn’t running as fast, lifting as much, or hitting as hard, but that was only because of how screwed up her body was right now. In essence, she was training with the ‘weight’ of the alterations on her, making her appear weaker than she actually was. Her new tissues, her ‘saiyan’ tissues, were base stronger than before, but she couldn’t feel her base within the torrent of changes taking place within her. It was the equivalent of trying to see a mile away in a snowstorm that reduced your vision down to a couple of meters.

And yet, even that torrent had changed. Lara was no longer puking. Or bleeding. Or spontaneously burning off her clothes. The sexual arousal backup plan was a distant memory, for it was no longer needed. She’d learned when to press and when not to, and despite the constant changes the Archon was ever so slowly dialing herself in to greater control. Add to that the fact that Vortison was refining her biology at the same time, learning from mistakes and concentrating beneficial gains while weeding out alterations that were detrimental, and Lara was making grinding progress upwards.

Her days were mostly activity now, but not a lot. A few workouts here and there involving running, light hand to hand combat, swimming, flying, and no skill work occurred at random intervals whenever Lara felt her strength return while the rest of the time she was walking…and walking…and walking. Her body now required activity, and she could only sleep for 20-40 minutes after an exhausting workout. After that she had to be busy doing something, even if on a low level, which left her having no need for chairs. Even when she played video games she was standing up.

And those video games were not leisure activities. Lara had forgotten what a leisure activity was, and these video games were designed to give certain aspects of her brain various types of training that Vortison was using to keep her mental processing power ahead of what her body required. If he let that invert Lara’s body was literally going to fly apart. The problem was the mind needed sleep as much as the body did to recharge and repair, and the changes made to her had it running wildly as well. If she didn’t use it enough she couldn’t sleep, even if she laid down. Her body could rest in that state, somewhat, but not to the level needed. So she had to be physically and mentally tired enough just to dip into a useful sleep state for a few minutes.

Without a regenerator her sleeplessness would have burnt her up, and Vortison knew that he had to get her stabilized before she could leave the lab permanently. Fortunately Lara wasn’t going anywhere, for the amount of changes her body was going to require had not even begun to reach halfway yet. There were years of constant changes left to go, and Vortison was just as dedicated to this as Lara was, though the more progress she made the more bits and pieces of time off Vortison had. A few hours here and there where he could pursue other work or just take some down time, but he couldn’t take a vacation. He wouldn’t. He didn’t trust his team to be able to keep leveling up Lara in the most efficient way without him, and with everything she was going through he wasn’t going to make it harder on her because he needed a break.

And he did need one. A big one. The rest of his staff cycled in and out, keeping them fresh, but Vortison was, in his own way, as fatigued as Lara. That wasn’t a fair comparison given when she was going through, but he was feeling the effects of this never ending adjustment, calibration, and study while he was constantly trying to learn things that had never been explored before…at least not as far as V’kit’no’sat and Chixzon knowledge was concerned. What the Zak’de’ron knew and what the Chixzon knew that they didn’t include in Nefron’s memories was a question mark, but without those very beneficial clues here, Vortison was having to trailblaze his own way forward and figure out how Lara’s body was responding to various changes when they didn’t add up.

A lot of the time he saw it instantly, but others he would get stuck on and would be forced to make alterations just to see what happened. He couldn’t tell Lara to take a week off, so he had to keep modifying her constantly even when he didn’t know what to do next. So a lot of her hardship was him randomly making changes and seeing what happened.

Every time he figured things out, sometimes enough to write a book on, he had to keep pressing forward with her pace, for her metabolism was not stable yet. It kept wanting to burn her up or self-frag if she went too slow, and every treatment was preceded by a regeneration sequence to essentially reset her body from the damage it was incurring.

Bottom line was, Lara was doing her part and not causing an overload, but Vortison was constantly trying to keep up with her pace and figure out things as fast as she could adapt to them…and he couldn’t. He feared getting brain fried more than anything, for it meant he would have to make more random changes to Lara, some of which may take her backward, and after all this time, the only thing holding both of them together was Lara’s gradual movement forward.

Then one day during a nap he woke up to a Raptor snout staring him in his groggy face.

He recoiled instinctively, not sure what was going on as his mind came back to focus. “Who are you?”

“Your relief. You are exhausted.”

Vortison glanced around, seeing no one else in the lab. Normally there should have been a few staff, at least one, in case Lara needed help with something. “Where is everyone else?”

“On the other side of the wall. You shouldn’t have to ask. You do have Pefbar, correct?”

Vortison stood up and looked around, trying to figure out what was going on. “Who are you and how did you get in here?”

“My name is Veer’na, and Director Davis sent me.”

“Davis?” Vortison asked, recognizing the other name vaguely. “Why?”

“He has been monitoring your progress beyond the periodic updates. He now has a direct link through encryption code for her status, fed through the relay network constantly. He has also been informed of your refusal to take a break while insisting that your servants do. He knows this is not sustainable.”

“I’ve been managing all these years,” the master medtech countered. “Why now?”

“Lara’s rate of advancement has slowed. The alterations are more harmful than beneficial. To be blunt, your team is causing the Archon far more problems than she deserves. So Davis sent me to assist.”

“Your name is familiar, but I do not know your credentials.”

“Nor should you. Most of my work was never made public knowledge, even amongst the Rit’ko’sor. And while I now understand how what I did was dishonorable, the knowledge I gained from it remains. Knowledge that the Director wants me to assist you with.”

“What knowledge?” Vortison asked, his curiosity and need to help Lara overriding his misgivings about this abrupt intrusion.

“During our rebellion against the V’kit’no’sat, we attacked them in many ways. Some of which were dishonorable, but we felt we could not hold back. We must hit them in every way possible, and we did so. Including the use of genetic weaponry.”

Vortison’s eyes grew dark. “How so?”

“We have been engineered to resist disease and create a very robust healing effect, even without a regenerator, Sesspik, or Haemra. You do not have this, for even with the advancements made in Zen’zat, your race was never at our level because you were not allowed to reproduce. All Zen’zat were made from the same template, and while that template was occasionally updated, there was no natural growth. In order to overcome our natural healing, we had to develop robust genetic weapons. Adaptive ones that would counteract, at least through a few permutations, exterior healing effects and immunities the V’kit’no’sat would create. I too have had to explore into the unknown depths of biology, whereas most V’kit’no’sat merely learn what others before have provided them.”

“What kind of weapons?”

“Death, confusion, slowness, overdrive,” he emphasized. “Something that you are continually fighting now, correct?”

“I am fighting to stabilize it, not stop it. We want the overdrive to normalize.”

“It never will. You must make it oscillate.”

“Why wasn’t I informed of you coming here?”

“There was no point in throwing an untouchable variable into your present confusion. Now that I am here, you can address it. It would have been a distraction had my arrival been announced. I informed your servants while you slept. I did not want to wake you when you desperately needed sleep, but now I do because of a blip in Lara’s status.”

“What blip?” Vortison said, racing past the Raptor to get at his equipment. He scanned the very familiar displays and tapped into the telepathic interlink for additional data, seeing nothing out of the ‘normal’ in the chaos that had become familiar, though never repeating. “She’s within predicted levels.”

“Her cellular cohesion has slipped. It is a precursor to dispersion when an overdrive ramps up.”

“She’s not in overload and knows how to avoid it. If it gets bad enough she’ll come straight here and I’ll reset her.”

“Wasteful. You need to alter the cellular membrane to create a lateral drift conduit. For that you will require Niterium.”

“Niterium?” Vortison asked, knowing it was a rare beta isotope of Sodium, meaning it had corovon added to the nucleus in addition to neutrons.

“For the localized magnetic field. It will create a conduit that will resist expulsion while facilitating sliding. I had to create Niterium-eating microbes to counteract the defense mechanism the V’kit’no’sat created to counteract my overdrive weapons.”

“I’ve seen no research on that.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. The V’kit’no’sat ego is quite large. They did not want to admit that we could hurt them so badly, so they hid the attacks under various guises as they fought to counter them. With us simultaneously assaulting worlds through conventional means, the naval bombardments firmly held the empire’s attention.”

“You have access to secret medical files?”

“In my mind only. And the clues hidden within their, and our, genetic codes. The Rit’ko’sor did not hold to genetic medical attacks, so our small group operated in secret. I am the only one to survive, and I have 1.3 million years of experience to offer, though to be blunt, the majority of that experience comes from the war when we were pressed to go beyond V’kit’no’sat medical knowledge, and part of how we did so was to examine what remained of the Zak’de’ron weapons they used against us during the V’kit’no’sat rebellion. Not much remained, but there was enough to get us started.”

“They fought with genetic weapons?”

“They fought with everything they had. For those of us who were there to witness it, it was terrifying. They were far stronger than we assumed, some of which were in the most devious of ways, but we had numbers and enough strength to defeat them with an unending wave of our own blood. I was one of the few who survived a genetic attack, and it was from the remains in my own body that I started part of our research.”

“Why have I not been told any of this?”

“Because I have not discussed it with anyone other than Davis, and until recently I had never gone into the details. The more I learned of how Star Force operates, the more I learned that death is preferable to dishonor, and that what I had done, while right in wanting to strike back, was wrong in the method chosen. I had decided to keep my knowledge buried, for I would not be using it again to create such weapons, but the Director’s wisdom showed me another path. I can use what I wrongly gained to help shield Star Force against the Chixzon when they return. I have been working with Nefron for some time now, though no one knows it. Davis decided your project now has need of my shameful knowledge. And you are in need of a peer that can allow you to periodically rest and reset your mind. You do Lara little good without inspiration, for inspiration is the key to probing the unknown.”

“I’m not abandoning her, but if you can help nudge me forward I welcome your help. Lara’s persistence is staggering, but I am not assuming it is eternal. She is past the worst of it, but she is not near the level she needs to be to finish the transformation…and there is no going back.”

“There is no going back for any of us. Life is always forward, even if we turn around and head the opposite way, for we approach the same location from a different angle. Repetitiveness can only be accomplished when one individual treads another’s former path.”

“The blip you mentioned. Can you correct for it now?”

“We did not target Zen’zat genetics, for some of them remained loyal to us during the war. But customizing it to your cells should not be complicated.”

“Alright, let’s get to work on it and anything else that jumps out at you. A fresh set of eyes is what I need right now.”

“And when you become comfortable with my skills, you will then take some time away to get your mojo back.”

“Not yet,” Vortison cautioned. “But if you’re right, I will eventually. So show me where I’ve gone wrong so far.”

“You have not. It is a matter of seeing your way ahead. Even your mistakes provide data that further illuminates the state of the Zen’zat body, and are thus useful. I have studied them in depth during my trip here, but I did not have your research notes. When is she due for another adjustment?”

Vortison glanced at the nearest clock. “Six hours.”

“Go. Shower. Then return. We will have enough time.”

“Shower?” Vortison asked, sniffing his left arm.

“You reek. A sign you spend too much time here trying to solve problems overthinking. Inspiration cannot be forced. I insist.”

Vortison wiped a bit of drool off his face as he took stock of his present condition, which required his mind to come back from theoretical mode.

“No. I need to get a brief run in first. Then I’ll shower. When I’m gone, start putting together the cellular membrane alteration. I want it as complete as possible for my review.”

“A proper delegation. Go now. I am fresh.”

“Thank you,” Vortison said, suddenly feeling a large weight lift off him and realizing just how much pressure he’d been under. “But next time, don’t wake me up with your dino breath in my face,” he said as he walked off

“There is no need to be insulting…” Veer’na mildly objected, for the notion of brainless ‘dinosaurs’ had not sat well with the Raptors once they started digging into Star Force historical records. “Ter’nat.”

7

When Vortison had sent out his call for all the Master Medtechs, Marco Borelli had responded with the others and they all traveled to Vis to study this new discovery…which left every one of them stumped. No one could find any cause for it, nor was it stable. Sometimes Lara would read normally, other times she would exceed what was thought to be her physical capabilities with regard to the psionics. Her musculature was in such a state of disrepair that testing it at a high level was impossible, and it had been deemed necessary to figure out what was going on…thus the others had left, finding nothing they could do here, but Borelli had stayed.

He didn’t bother Vortison, for the other Human had far too much on his plate to deal with. Instead, he worked in parallel from another medbay trying to piece together what was happening with Lara. He could monitor her biomed stats from her eyepiece the same as Vortison, as well as the more direct measures from the array of equipment in the lab when they were in use. He had the same data, just not the ability to experiment with Lara herself, and he should have been able to find some correlation, but so far he couldn’t predict her future states at all.

What was happening to her was inexplicable…yet it was there. That meant his understanding of science was wrong, and that was fascinating to him. For if he had something wrong, when he got it right it could open up a vast array of new technologies or lead to additional discoveries like a domino wave. The trick was figuring out what was wrong, and in this case it was a simple fact of her psionic tissue producing more effect than they biomechanically could.

So he’d been hammering research into the tissue structure to determine if they’d been wrong about its potential output. Again and again he was coming up with the same answers, making him wonder if he was stuck in a rut and just not seeing the error, or if he was being confronted with the fact that there was no error and this effect was external to the tissue. He couldn’t align any of the changes to molecular or energy changes in her body or around it, and the more he studied the more it appeared that there was an external energy source.

But it was more than that, for her Pefbar fields were extending beyond her controlling function. Typically there was a power curve that diminished with range, meaning one could see further with more power, but to a point. You couldn’t just double up distance with power, and the ranges that, say, an Era’tran could see were greater than a Human simply because of the larger tissue size and raw power behind it. Lara wasn’t up to Era’tran range, but she was seeing farther than even Aaron had managed. Same too with the larger Arc Knights who had more tissue.

Her Pefbar fields were holding together at range more than her power allowed. It was as if she was using a different type of power with different rules, but he couldn’t detect it. He could see the extended range, so something was happening, but not what was causing it.

If this was a Core-related phenomenon then he had to find a way to measure it…and in order to measure an invisible force he had to measure something it moved. He could do that now, but since it was piggybacking on other things Morelli couldn’t get a clear reading. This was a very sneaky phenomenon, and it dawned on him that the Chixzon may have never been able to figure it out for just this reason. So how was Star Force going to?

If and when Lara stabilized he was going to ask her to help him probe this further, but as long as these anomalies were actively occurring he wasn’t going to waste them. Especially if he might hit on something that could assist Vortison in his work. What Lara was going through was extreme, and he didn’t feel like letting this wait until later.

But the question still remained, how was he going to tackle this? If he couldn’t directly measure it he had to find a way around the problem, and so far this mystery still had him thoroughly stumped.

“How many more planetoids do you intend to destroy?” the Knight of Quenar asked Davis across a table with a few hand-picked ambassadors from the Rim Consortium who were both influential and reasonable, for the Director wasn’t going to waste his limited time on people’s temper tantrums.

“As many as needed. We’re taking possession of lizard territory, so what we do with it is our prerogative.”

“Planets may be abundant, but they are not replaceable,” the Zeeross ambassador objected. “The eradication of the Li’vorkrachnika may be necessary…I am not arguing it is not…but the destruction of planets is not something that can be undone.”

“It can be,” Davis countered. “We intend to mine those planets we are destroying, but we can reform them if we wish to devote the resources to it.”

“You have that technological ability?” the Haf ambassador asked.

“As do all of you. It is simply a matter of time and pushing the necessary matter into a descending orbit. Gravity will do the rest.”

“That would result in hellish worlds, unstable and uninhabitable.”

“How you push matters,” Davis said ambiguously.

“What of the wildlife?” the Zeeross asked.

Davis’s face went grim. “If you note, we’re only striking at worlds that are heavily industrialized and configured to be battlefields. What wildlife is there would mostly be destroyed during orbital bombardment during a conventional assault. If we choose not to assault the world the lizards will kill them anyway as they expand their infrastructure. They do not use living shields like the V’kit’no’sat did. They destroy everything that is not of use to them. Fortunately these worlds do not have slave populations, or we would not be destroying them, but rodents and insects get caught in the crossfire regardless of how careful we are. They die on a regular basis on Star Force worlds despite measures meant to protect them.”

“I understand,” the Yioj ambassador said firmly. “If you do not take out the Li’vorkrachnika quickly, the delay could see other worlds invaded by them. You are trading damage for a net smaller effect.”

“Partially. But we do not make sacrifices for net totals. The planetoids we are destroying are carefully chosen. If you bothered to examine them you would see a pattern.”

“All are airless save two,” the Zeeross replied, indicating that someone was examining them closely. “And those two had no native populations or wildlife. It is the planets themselves that I am concerned with. Destroying them is reckless and shortsighted.”

“There are some wildlife, in small amounts scratching out an existence on those worlds. If we attack via orbital bombardment they are going to die from it. We do not like this, but the galaxy is a messy place. If you walk through a forest you may be killing dozens of critters in the dirt you step on. That’s why we build sidewalks, but still ants will crawl on top and be crushed. We will never intentionally target them, but if they get in the way, sometimes you just have to keep going. How much do you tolerate? That’s a question I constantly ask myself, and not just when destroying planets. When we bombard one deaths occur beyond just the lizards. The ants get killed then too.”

“For someone concerned about insignificant ants, I find your logic puzzling,” the Yioj noted.

“Because the logic is calculated along the lines of doing the right thing, and you do not have the math skills for it. But since you and everyone else here do not care about the fate of ants, let’s get to the crux of the matter. You don’t like us erasing geography.”

“That is the main point of the issue,” the Zeeross confirmed.

“If the situation was reversed, I’d be concerned as well,” Davis admitted. “But I’m not you. I’m better than you. And my judgement can be relied on. We will continue to eliminate select planets rather than suffer the naval losses to capture them. Either way, the lizards will die, but we are able to move on quicker to the next target and that can, as noted earlier, spare other planets about to fall into the grasp of the lizards.”

“You are better?” the Knight of Quenar asked, visibly offended.

“Yes, and I’m not shy about saying so. I have long record of evidence available for study, so I’m not making this claim blindly. You know I am, though your egos might not let you admit it. The reason I am talking to you now is because you are reasonable, but none of you are on my level. You would kill a small race to save a large one, because it would be a net gain. I would not, because it is the wrong thing to do. You do not understand why, and I could explain the intricacies of such applications in detail, but if you cannot grasp the concept of ‘the right thing’ the explanations would be pointless.”

“My experience,” Davis continued, “with various races has showed me that everyone…even the tiny ants…have an internal mechanism designed to point them in the direction of the right thing. They might not always end up there, but there is a subtle guidance that occasionally hammers you on the head. Some seek this out, others don’t care, and still others spite it. But it is there and I am in tune with it far more than any of you, and those around me are brought into alignment because of me and the effects spreads throughout our empire. It’s like a resonance that tells observers the status of your civilization. And your civilizations are not of such high resonance. In fact, they’re not even close.”

“Which is why we trust you with the Uriti,” the Knight of Quenar reminded the Director. “Your survival of the V’kit’no’sat and ability to turn their war of eradication into an armistice proves your cunning and wisdom. But you do not see everything, and in trying to do the right thing on a small scale you end up inviting devastation on a large one.”

“That has been my fear on many occasions,” the Human said. “But at the end of the day, death is preferable to dishonor.”

“I do not agree,” the Yioj said, “but however you run your empire internally, it is successful. The issue here is the removal of planets rather than removing their inhabitants. I do not believe you would ever do so against us, but when an empire can destroy the ground on which hundreds of empires existed over the ages, it is a crime against the galaxy itself. Natural formation of planets is slow, and we have never detected the emergence of life itself, so without an apparent source of replacement, what currently is must be preserved, for we do not know how they factor into the fabric of the galaxy.”

“Your caution is noted, but the truth is you just don’t like us having this power when you do not.”

“No, I don’t,” the Zeeross said bluntly. “How large of a planet can you destroy?”

“And how exactly are you doing it?” the Haf asked.

“The latter question I will not answer,” Davis said with an apologetic look. “I wouldn’t want any of you to have this ability, so I’m not giving you any hints. As to the first, it depends on the structure of the planet, but in some cases planetoids up to 2.4 gravity.”

The revelation silenced the room until the Knight of Quenar finally responded. “And what of stars?”

“No. Not that we’re aware of.”

“This is an abomination,” the Yioj swore, adding a few non-english words in the mix. “You can destroy any world you wish merely by getting the Uriti inside it? This cannot be tolerated. Once you finish destroying the Li’vorkrachnika, the Uriti must be killed…”

“No,” Davis said firmly, echoing the word telepathically like a hammer. “We do not fear power, and we will not kill those with it simply because they are powerful. And if you should attempt to do so, you will incur our wrath, so don’t try it.”

“The Hadarak also probably have this ability,” the Knight of Quenar speculated. “We’ve seen evidence of them tearing up planets, though they usually keep them intact while feeding on them. But if the Uriti can choose to completely destroy one, I would wager the Hadarak can too. Do you suggest we aid the V’kit’no’sat in destroying them as well? Or are they too far away to be an abomination?”

“How can you tolerate this power in their control?”

“It is more than we expected, but the Uriti are far more powerful than you ever guessed. We knew much of their power, so this new revelation isn’t so shocking. We have determined that Star Force is a neutral force that can be used to contain the Uriti. We have found no other, and any attempt to destroy the Uriti would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. I would greatly prefer them dead, but second to that we are content with them being in Star Force’s possession. Their choice to use them to destroy Li’vorkrachnika worlds we are not in agreement with.”

“Why not?” Davis asked.

“We are pragmatic, so the loss of a few worlds is of no consequence to us…but to them it is,” the Knight of Quenar said, pointing to the others. “The fear you strike in them will be shared by the rest of the galaxy. The ability to destroy planets is something they cannot tolerate, for it is even greater than what the Uriti were used for previously. Even the Chixzon did not make this mistake. They wanted to use fear as coercion. This…is something far more terrifying. They can remake the landscape of the galaxy, and that is something not seen before. As this spreads, and more people witness what you are doing, there will be a growing backlash.”

“And you think we should promise not to do so anymore and let this slowly fade away into legend?”

“You never should have done so, but now that you have, it is the only hope you have.”

“Hope to avoid what?” Davis asked as the others’ body language indicated they had become spectators in this spat between the normally two homogenous allies.

“Fear warps minds, and can induce stupidity. You could see it turning them all against you, despite the benefits you grant them and the galaxy. The Rim Consortium could even ally with the V’kit’no’sat against you.”

Davis glanced at the others carefully. “Is that your read…or your worry?”

“We have seen the effects of fear before. It turned a galaxy against the Uriti once. This could do so again.”

“The Chixzon were killing people with them,” Davis pointed out.

“So are you,” the Yioj added.

“People that did not attack them first,” the Director amended. “Our war against the lizards is defensive, despite a lull in the fighting.”

“You are not seeing the full implications,” the Knight of Quenar warned out of concern rather than threat. “They used the leverage of force, as you now do. For different reasons, but to those who only see power and dominion, there is little difference, and those differences will be washed away by the destruction of worlds themselves, rather than merely their inhabitants. It is a level of outrage we have never seen before, and it could be your undoing.”

“Your counsel is noted, and welcome,” Davis said, crossing his fingers in front of him as he rested his elbows on the table near the force field lines that separated him from his guests. “But this is my play to make, and there is one factor you’re not considering.”

“What is it?”

“The influence of the lightside. As you said, you are pragmatic. Your grasp of doing the right thing is limited, and because of that you underestimate its power. I will be able to control this, and I’m not referring to the Uriti, but to the backlash you’re predicting once word spreads around the galaxy. It will not become the quest you once fought in. There may be some bumps along the way, but I will stabilize it.”

“You speak as if we are not in the room with you,” the Zeeross said indignantly.

“If you wish to declare war on us, then do so and leave,” Davis said firmly. “If not, do not waste my time with threats you are unwilling to back up. The Uriti are not our possession, they are our allies. They have agreed to fight with us, and we are doing the galaxy a great service as an intermediary. They are so large and foreign to our type of life that they care nothing of it…until now. They care a little, because of us, and the relationship we have forged. None of you did, none of you could, but we did and we are growing that relationship. We are what allows the Uriti and the ‘little people’ to coexist. That’s what they refer to us as, little people. And if the Hadarak ever get this far out into the galaxy, you’re going to be damned welcome we bothered to keep the Uriti around.”

“Is that a legitimate threat?” the Haf asked.

“The Hadarak stay in the Core because they choose to do so. The V’kit’no’sat have compressed them in further, but the Hadarak mostly ignore them. The power they possess is clustered in the deep Core like a ticking time bomb. I do not know what it will take to bring them out, but their ability to do so worries me,” he emphasized. “And in a potential battle between little people and big ones, I want some big ones on our side. Don’t you?”

“Is there something you know that we do not?” the Yioj asked.

“A great many things, but more than anything, I think far, far ahead of the present. Farther than any of you do. Star Force does not fear power, but we are wary of it, and the greatest power known in this galaxy is not the V’kit’no’sat. It is the Hadarak. And they cannot be negotiated with.”

“In the meantime, you will face a more imminent threat from those that fear the Uriti,” the Knight of Quenar warned.

“I know. But while dominance has its perks, it also has its responsibilities. This one is mine, and I will attend to it in a fashion of my choosing…and that fashion is not to hide away the power of the Uriti when that power can be used to eliminate a scourge on the galaxy. And beyond that there is nothing more to say. I know what I’m doing and will not veer from the course because of complaints or fear. I will only alter it if there is something concrete to justify it. Is there anything else that any of you wish to inform me of?”

“Your disrespect is insulting,” the Yioj all but spat.

“Your lack of wisdom is annoying,” Davis countered. “Leave.”

The Yioj climbed up off its chair on its tentacles and slithered out of the room, leaving the other four ambassadors behind.

“Is there a threat of this ability to destroy worlds being stolen from you?” the Haf asked.

“Replicating it via technology is extremely unlikely,” Davis said, glad to have an intelligent question asked. “And taking the Uriti away from us is equally as unlikely.”

“You are confident of that?”

“I am.”

“Unless you destroy a world beyond Li’vorkrachnika territory, you will continue to have our support. Fear of power is a sign of inferiority, and the Haf are not inferior, but we are wary. While Star Force may not be a threat to us, others are, and we do not want them to obtain even a fraction of this power. That is our concern.”

“Noted.”

“This will change the balance in the galaxy,” the Lovipe ambassador said, finally breaking its silence. “How I do not know, but things will no longer be the same.”

“I agree,” Davis added. “And I intend to make it a beneficial change.”

“How so?”

“Those that know me and my empire well will not fear us, but outsiders who consider attacking Star Force will see the destruction of the lizards and fear us doing the same to them. And rather than that prompting them to attack, they will cower. That cowering will allow us more flexibility and the ability to shield others with a simple, unspoken threat. That is leverage I can use to great effect in areas where response times are slow. Fear covers all places, whereas fleets cannot.”

“Spoken like a Chixzon,” the Knight of Quenar pointed out.

“No, not like a Chixzon. A Chixzon would have already poisoned you to death and left the room to start working on their next target.”

8

June 29, 4936

Ennit System (Dagran Region)

Vis

Lara stopped swimming when she felt it again, floating with a small drift forward as she lay face-down in the water. Oxygen wasn’t an issue, for she had both Hanme, which was a backup supply of oxygen nodules throughout her body, and Lovo’nek, a tier 4 psionic that allowed her to breathe oxygen from the water directly through her skin. It wasn’t as good as getting it directly from the air, but it meant she couldn’t drown even if she got water into her lugs.

So Lara held still as the cool sensation hit her. This had happened 8 times before, and each time she’d reached for the sensation inside her it had disappeared. She wasn’t reaching this time, just trying to let whatever it was happen and soak in a little more before it disappeared again…except this time it didn’t.

It seemed to pool in the back of her mind, enough that she risked moving as she sank down to the bottom of the shallow swimming pool and knelt on both knees, sitting on her ankles and getting her head upright as she went into a Qui-gon-esk meditative pose. That didn’t shake the feeling free, so she held there and just let the sensation sit there.

It was hard, because it felt like an itch that demanded scratching, but every time she instinctively acted on it the Archon overrode the urge and forced herself to remain still, physically and mentally. It kept fighting her, but the more time she had to override it the easier it got, and the longer the sensation remained the more it seemed to be bleeding out into the rest of her.

Lara wasn’t sure what it was, and neither did Vortison, for none of the equipment had been able to identify what it was, but each time it happened her hyperactive state appeared to improve momentarily. She was still a long way away from getting it stabilized enough for her not to need treatments, but she was no longer Human, in that she couldn’t sit in a chair and do nothing without it damaging her. She was very high strung now, and the basic activity required to feed her need was mild compared to what Archons normally did on a daily basis, but it was totally alien to the basic Human civilian.

Laziness had always been an option for the Archons, one that they would never use. But now Lara didn’t have that choice. It had been stripped away from her biologically, which she was fine with. That was the entire point of this transition, but this moment of mediation was needed and thankfully Lara had been doing enough in the way of workouts to buy her a little quiet time before her body began screaming at her.

And in her moment of calmness the unidentified sensation continued to creep outward, taunting her to try and control it, but she knew it would disappear if she did, and the more she waited the more it eeked its way out into her appendages. It had been in the nothingness of her mental state, but now it was having a physical affect as her arms, legs, and torso burned…but it was a soothing burn, equivalent to someone pulling a thorn out of your leg. It hurt, but it was a vast improvement to leaving it in.

And Lara didn’t only ‘burn’ inside, but the water around her began to produce little bubbles off her skin as it literally started to boil in small streams…but she held still, forcing calmness and being rewarded by the sensation continuing to creep out further.

She held that constant tug of war with her instinct to reach for it over the following minutes that gradually crept into half an hour. Lara could sense others nearby, including Vortison, for they had apparently seen the changes on her stats and had come to see what was going on. Thankfully they knew better than to interrupt her, let alone stop her, for she was finally getting a feel for this.

She waited a long time, then when it felt like her entire body was aglow with an internal fire she very gently indulged her instinct and reached for it. Like dipping your toe into a pool when your inner badass told you to do a cannonball. That little effort was much harder to accomplish, for it required abandoning her calm trance and that almost vaulted her into a much larger effort, but she caught it and calibrated herself down as she felt the sensation try to flee again.

But it was too far out, and she got her first tentative hold on it. Fixing it in place inside her body with a huge swoon of heat pouring fourth that turned the water around her into a torrent of vaporizing steam that made it harder to breath, but she had her Hanme to draw on and did so, for there was no way she was letting this go.

Lara didn’t push. She knew that would lead to something very bad, for she had a feeling that it wouldn’t diminish now, but overload her. She had to go very, very slow, but she felt the intense heat inside her solidify in a tiny point, and from that the cool sensation ran parallel with the heat and expanded. It wasn’t actually cold temperature, but something in her biofeedback that was positive and the sensation came through as ‘coolness’ while the heat was a byproduct of damage correcting itself in an explosive fashion.

Slow down, she heard Vortison tell her telepathically. You’re nearing overload and I can’t heal you here.

Don’t worry, I’ve got this, she said, then ignored him and the others completely as the Archon slowly nudged the process forward, feeling like she was holding onto the end of a long rope that wanted to yank itself out of her hands. Lara fed that rope one inch at a time, and soon the pain began in earnest.

It felt like her body was going to fly apart, but even as it did something else inside her was realigning. One part of her wanted to stop it, another told her to make it blow up, but a third instinct said to be patient and let it creep on, and that’s the one she chose to go with. After all this time, there was no point in being hasty.

Two more hours passed, and when her Hanme ran out she had to split her focus and create a bioshield conduit up to the air to breathe through…but when she did the water level began to drop rapidly around her. It leveled out just below her chin, and she realized that was Vortison’s doing. The water was bleeding off her excess heat, which was why he didn’t want it all gone, but she needed to breath and really didn’t want to try moving, for she was sure it would knock her out of alignment if she tried.

Lara continued to burn up for another 3 hours with a cloud of steam surrounding her as she occasionally felt cold water being added to the pool to keep her from evaporating all of it off, though her clothes didn’t hold up that long. They melted into strands and even some of her hair burnt off when her Rensiek slipped off the edges, leaving it unprotected from the heat pooling on her skin and then being released. When she didn’t regulate it properly the buildup could poor back on her body and burn her, but so far only a bit of her hair had suffered that lapse.

The cool sensation continued to fight against the heat, and eventually it won out, completely consuming the pain and instability and leaving her calmer than she ever knew possible…while her head was pounding from a very intense heartbeat. Lara took a moment to collect herself and make sure it she was stable, then she slowly stood up above the water level and looked at Vortison.

“Well?” she asked, seeing a wide-eyed look on his and the others’ faces.

“Your hair,” he said, but she couldn’t see it. It was too short now to pull in front of her face and Pefbar couldn’t see colors, so she held up her left hand and pulsed a Jumat energy field around it…and saw that it was yellow/gold.

That confirmed what she felt inside, for the color change of her hair had been preprogrammed into her genetic code along with her Jumat to change when she reached the finished state Vortison had been gradually changing her toward…and that meant she had finally reached it.

Lara smiled, not wanting to do anything that might kick her out of it and having no idea what this actually was or how to use it, but eventually when nothing happened…no changes, no fluctuations…she started laughing and couldn’t stop. After everything she’d been through, she was finally here. She’d ascended up to superhuman level, or as far as she was concerned, a Saiyan level.

“Lara, we need to get you into the medbay,” Vortison said as the boiling water around Lara slowly cooled and new bubbles stopped forming. “There may be some small changes needed to lock it in.”

“I need ambrosia…and food,” she said, realizing how famished she was. “A lot of it.”

“Done. Now come with me. We don’t want to lose this.”

“I’m stable,” she said, floating up into the air above the water and hanging there as she pulsed her Jumat until she was aglow with golden energy that almost matched her short, yellow hair that was sticking out with what looked like static electricity, but that too had been preprogrammed into the follicles at Lara’s request, though it made her look like a spike ball right now.

“Please,” Vortison insisted. “You can play later.”

Lara sighed and her aura disappeared as she floated down next to the medtechs completely naked and with a red tint to her skin that was probably a result of the heat that had been passing through it, though the pounding veins visible everywhere on her musculature were a worrying sign even if Vortison didn’t have a datapad giving him more accurate warnings.

Lara walked through the assembled staff to the nearby door, but stumbled when she got there as her hair changed back to dark brown.

“Lara?”

“I’m ok. I think I just ran out of fuel. I can still feel the change.”

“Medbay, now,” Vortison insisted as the posse of medtechs escorted Lara out of the training area and back to the alteration chamber.

8,310 lightyears away…

Megan-026 flew in a skeet over the charred surface of Attatori, a world that once housed more than 3 billion of a race called the Sortia. They were an ally of the Skarrons and hadn’t been sparred when the lizards took them out on this world or any of their others. Recently there had been a large number of lizards here, but their numbers had just been drastically reduced along with their infrastructure. The planet and system were now Megan’s, but there were still pockets of lizards everywhere that had to be hunted down and destroyed.

She offered to let them surrender, as the Archons always did, but none had taken the offer and she knew the remaining ones wouldn’t either, which was why she had ordered Starkiller down into the atmosphere. Right now the Uriti was above her and to the right, with its four long spikey appendages reaching out from a very small midsection to caste a ‘+’ shaped shadow on the ruined surface.

As Megan flew she saw it slowly land, and from a pouch on each appendages a piece of it was pushed out and buried into the dirt and rock below. Once all four were deposited, Starkiller returned to space leaving the minion factories behind as a few already grown ones spread out like ants and began collecting bits of rock and other debris that they then carried back to the organic factories that digested them in a very Zerg-ish manner.

New minions would be produced within a day if the necessary resources were nearby, and Megan had made sure Starkiller had a full belly of the necessary monster cubes to stock the minion factories full before deploying them. That would allow many more minions to be grown without addition resources, but the growth pods required space and those minions could not all be grown prior to landing. That meant the resources being collected now would go to the development of minions weeks away from now, and Megan knew the process would quickly snowball far faster than the Paladin ever could.

But these minions weren’t alive. They were biological machines, but with no one inside, much like a tree, except these ‘trees’ were extremely advanced and capable of carrying out orders given to them by the Uriti or an Archon with a Wrangler gauntlet. Megan wouldn’t be staying here more than a couple of days, nor would Starkiller, but the minions would along with an Archon to finish cleansing the planet of lizards no matter how long it took.

And after that they would hold and defend the planet against squatters, but right now Megan was just having a closer look around than her command ship’s sensors would allow. Sometimes she needed to be physically here, and today was one of those days. Also, the sight of a Uriti landing and depositing biological factories wasn’t something the galaxy saw very often.

She could feel the Uriti’s telepathic aura, but her Ikrid block kept her safe from it despite a mild headache. Others couldn’t get this close without having serious problems, including the lizards, but from the looks of things there weren’t enough of them left to attack the factories when Starkiller left. None the less, Megan and others were going to remain on station in the air and on the ground until they got a decent foothold and perimeter established, just to be safe.

“Another down, a bazillion more to go,” the trailblazer whispered to herself as she sat on the pommel seat in the cockpit and looked out through the ‘window’ at the surface below as she lazily flew over top. “But not fast enough...”

9

July 3, 4941

Ennit System (Dagran Region)

Vis

Lara was in the middle of a sparring match with a machine when Aaron-010 walked up behind her and crossed his arms over his chest in a perturbed gestured.

“You guys were busy,” she said, not looking at him as she kept dodging and counter punching a series of robotic arms swiping at her.

Aaron telepathically interfaced with the sparring equipment and shut it down, prompting Lara to turn around and scowl at him…but his own expression was much more pissed.

“You nearly got yourself killed, youngling.”

“I made it,” she said defiantly. “And you’re welcome, by the way. You won’t have to go through that hell hole now that Vortison has a roadmap to follow. Don’t you have more lizards to kill?”

“I wasn’t in lizard territory. I was out in The Nexus cleaning things up. I’m done now.”

“Already? That was fast.”

“There wasn’t much left by the time we got to them.”

“And the Sety?”

“On my personal black list, but they’re still intact along with a few other races that stuck together at the expense of the others. We have loose control over most of what used to be The Nexus, and the follow-up work doesn’t require a trailblazer. I was heading to help the others with the lizards, then I found a report on an Ikrid breakthrough. Took some backtracking, but I eventually found your little program you hid from us.”

“As I said, you guys were busy and you weren’t going to let me do it, so I did it myself.”

“Davis says you really went through the grinder. How are you now?”

“Superhuman, which was the point. But a weak one. My body is trash, but my base attributes are so high it makes up for it somewhat. I had to rebuild myself once before. If someone was going to have to do this the hard way, it made sense for it to be me.”

“It’s the not telling us part that really has me steamed.”

“For your own good. Just because you guys came first doesn’t mean you’re the only ones that get to take risks.”

“You should have told us after you started.”

“You were all busy and didn’t need the distraction. And for the record, I was going to tell you guys once Vortison got everything smoothed out. We’re not quite there yet, hence the omission. The only person at risk here was me, and I don’t need your permission to do something stupid with my own ass.”

“You stole my medtech,” Aaron pointed out.

“Ok, you got me there,” she admitted.

Aaron sighed. “How far did you get?”

“All the way,” Lara said with a smile. “My efficiency is crap and I’m having a hard time slowing down, but the more control I get the more I can sleep. The hyperactivity is so high that I can only stretch it so far in the opposite way. Most of my rest is spent walking, and my workouts are getting so intense at the top end that I literally have bottles of ambrosia mixed with water and carbs to suck down. Vortison had to make a new ambrosia variant just for me, because the regular wasn’t intense enough.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow. “Why the purple eyes?”

“I’ve gone beyond the V’kit’no’sat, so why keep their mark?”

“But why purple?”

“It’s not a natural color.”

“A lot of people have purple eyes by choice. It won’t completely stand out.”

“It makes a good contrast to the gold.”

Aaron glanced at her dark brown hair. “You can turn it on and off?”

She nodded. “My natural state is accelerated whether I like it or not, but when I choose to ramp up the effect coalesces and my efficiency skyrockets. It also drains the crap out of me, so Vortison has created a secondary psionic that has nodules that soak up ambrosia and store them for when my bloodstream saturation drops too low. Before that I couldn’t last more than 12 minutes.”

“And now?”

“Several hours before I’m completely out, but I have to eat snacks during. The ambrosia isn’t enough on its own. I’ve got my eye color set to change to blue when I start drawing on my reserves. I wanted that for Super Saiyan 2, but I’m nowhere close to that. I can feel it though, on the periphery. A hyper, hyper mode, but my body is going to need a lot of work before I can move that fast.”

“How fast are you now?”

“I was going slow,” she said, referencing the equipment behind her. “Defend yourself.”

Aaron uncrossed his arms but remained still as she dove at him with a single straight punch…that he caught in the palm of his hand. But Lara recoiled and punched with her other hand and began to machine gun punches at him that he blocked all with the same hand. She gradually sped up and made him use both to defend him, but there was no power behind her punches.

Then suddenly her hair turned gold and her speed blurred…with her landing a stiffened palm into Aaron’s chest, knocking him back two stumbling steps, but Lara didn’t relent. She moved with him and landed several more hits over the next two seconds, eventually sending him to the ground as she stepped over him and walked in a pacing circle, looking annoyed that she had to slow down.

“What the hell?” he asked, laughing. “That is insane speed, but your knockdown power is pathetic.”

“Damage effect. I’m slowly getting my strength back, but I have to rebuild what was lost in the transition. You will too, but Vortison thinks he’s found a way to reduce the trauma. Might want to let some more of us go first so you guys get the refined transformation.”

“What else you got?” he asked, rolling backwards through a somersault and up onto his feet.

“My Sav is off the charts. I have a lot of trouble slowing my brain down. I’m starting to learn how to sync my brain and body, but I’m so high strung I’m surprised the walls don’t start vibrating.”

“Are you on top of it?”

“It’s rough, but easy compared to what I went through to get here. So yeah, I’m on top of it, but I have a long learning curve to get through. The potential is worth it though.”

“Would you go through it again?”

“Don’t have to, I’m already here.”

“But would you?”

“No. I’d do it differently. Have Vortison change things more slowly. I really got messed up, Aaron. Which is why I wanted to spare you guys that.”

“You’re forgiven,” he said, dropping into a combat stance. “Now try and work me over just above my speed limits. I can’t learn much when I’m on the floor.”

“Happy to, but there’s one question you’re not asking me.”

“Ikrid?”

“I got a boost and no one knows how. Vortison thinks it’s something the Chixzon called ‘Essence’ but who knows. I have no control of it. No awareness of it. But I’m getting a power boost somehow.”

“Consistent?”

“Varied, with no detectable pattern, but now that I’ve gone Saiyan…and we are calling it Saiyan…I’m maintaining at least a few percent above maximum at all times, with peaks up to 42%.”

“Over physics as we know it?”

“Yeah. Pretty exciting, huh?”

“For those of us cranially challenged, we salute you.”

“It’s not just the mental psionics, Aaron,” she said with a smirk, then her Jumat aura formed, now golden/transparent.

“Seriously?” he asked.

A new target dropped down from the ceiling at her mental command, then Lara released a two-handed Kamehameha that hit the round target board…and ripped it off its bracing. It fell, then hung swinging back and forth by a power cord that was meant to supply the absorption shield that Lara had just over loaded.

“Show off,” he commented, seeing her eyes shift from purple to blue. “That was more than Essence. Your Saiyan state added power to it too, didn’t it?”

Lara nodded, breathing a little heavy. “My energy pathways are boosted so much its affected my Jumat cells. It started naturally, then Vortison spurred it on. They can take more power than I can give them right now, meaning I’ve got a very big, but very draining cannon shot when I want it.”

“Easy, blue eyes. Don’t want you passing out on me.”

“Not going to happen. I can sense my energy level extremely well. I know where I’m at and how much more I’ve got.”

“How about muscle strength?”

“I’ve got good recharge in Super Saiyan mode, but no power boost. Only speed.”

“So that’s why you hit like a girl,” he said, raising a hand and taunting her with two fingers gesturing towards him.

“Try and make me break a sweat…please,” Lara said, then dove at him with a flurry of almost invisible blows.

Borelli watched Lara’s stats while she was sparring with Aaron, seeing her Essence spike and diminish in an erratic pattern, but this was far more swings than she had ever displayed before. It was like the presence of the trailblazer was provoking a unique reaction, and he almost kicked himself for not having tried this sooner. Lara had insisted on sparing only with machines, because other Archons couldn’t keep up with her anymore, but the machines were predictable because they were set to complete basic moves at high speed with zero fatigue. They didn’t offer unpredictability the way a live opponent did.

The master medtech watched eagerly, trying to isolate when the spikes were occurring and why…then it hit him. It clear as could be once the thought occurred, and he immediately realized why it hadn’t before. He was a medtech, and biology was what he lived and breathed. He knew the Core existed and it drove the body and mind like a pilot in a dropship, but until this recent research he’d never dealt with the Core having any other effects, for it was irritatingly invisible as far as science was concerned.

Which was why he had missed this all along. Mostly because Lara was doing rudimentary, frankly boring training that didn’t require adaptation from her, just repetition. Now she had to adapt to Aaron as he adapted to her, and the reason for her Essence spikes was now obvious, for it was occurring when she was caught off guard and reacted…but only when she reacted. When she just balled up and took the hit nothing happened, but when she found a way to counteract him in the blink of an eye her stats surged for a brief moment, then diminished back into the ‘normal’ erraticness.

Instinct. It wasn’t something that was scientifically calculable, but it was something that Borelli was familiar with from his own training. A momentary spark of knowledge that seemingly comes out of nowhere when one has to react with no time to think. Most people simply fail, but every now and then one has a spark of instinct and does something seemingly magical before they even realize what they’re doing.

It had happened to him a few times during his life, and it had happened so fast it felt like it was just his imagination, but there had been one time when a friend had thrown a sensor rod across a medbay to another person. Maybe he’d signaled for it with a hand gesture, because nobody had said anything, and it had passed so close to Borelli that he had flinched…but instead of flinching away, his hand had shot up and he’d caught it before he realized what he was doing. The others had seen it and made quite a big deal out of his reflexes from that day on, so he knew that time it wasn’t his imagination.

It had been instinct, whatever that was. It didn’t calculate biologically, but Borelli was seeing it play out here and now, and each time Lara successfully reacted in an unanticipated way to something Aaron did, her stats would spike for a few seconds.

“So dumb. So dumb,” he said, referencing himself. “It’s the Core. Of course it’s not going to be linked to biology. Focus on personality and mentality. Not biology.”

“No. Focus on badass. That’s what Lara had to be to get here, and that’s probably why it’s spiking. I just wish I had a way to define ‘badass’ in a scientific sense. But if this is a training effect, then I’m not the one to handle it. The Archons are…or not. They’re on the inside, so maybe they’re not as well suited to this as the one who trained them. I don’t need more medtechs, I need a Head Trainer. The Head Trainer, if he’s willing,” Borelli said, abandoning his active monitoring of Lara and knowing that the computer would record everything for him to nitpick later. Right now he had to send a message to Davis and ask him if he would reassign the reclusive Wilson to the project, for if he asked himself the legend would probably turn him down.

Maybe not, if it involved the Archons, but better to have it come from the Director regardless. Borelli was now sure that he was in over his head here, and while he would assist as needed, he got the feeling that the answer to this riddle wasn’t going to be solved by science, but rather by ‘piloting’ experience, of which he had very little compared to the Archons and the other upper echelons in the lifeblood of Star Force…it’s training.

10

October 12, 4941

Jepiker System (Deu Region)

Forge

When Lara left the medbay training facility on Vis it had been uncomfortable, for the Saiyan Archon had essentially been reborn there. Her life before that medical gauntlet she’d had to run was a hazy memory, but once she had started to travel through space enroute to the new Archon planet things changed. Her ‘home’ on Vis, she realized, wasn’t that. She had just been hammered so hard she’d forgotten a lot about her life and now she was getting a wakeup call as the dropship took her off the Warship-class starship that had been her ride to get to Forge.

Lara hadn’t been paying attention to updates from outside during her transformation, and even when she could have been later she’d never bothered. It wasn’t until Vortison told her that she would have to leave to continue her tuning did Lara start to get curious as to what was going on out here…and the first thing that she discovered was that Davis had given Wilson an entire star system to renovate as an Archon/Maverick training center. And not just for the recruits, but for all of them at the varying levels of development they currently were, including her.

Morelli had already come here and talked to Wilson before Lara had got the summons from him ordering her here. And that’s how he had put it too. It was strange how she automatically did what he said, despite the fact that she outranked him and almost everyone else in the empire, but did she really? Wilson was the one who had made her an Archon, and ever since basic training she and the others had held him in the highest esteem.

And now he was going to help her master her new powers. It was going to be like back in basic all over again, except without peers. Yeah, that part was going to be weird, but with Wilson she wouldn’t have to worry about crafting her own workouts. Only surviving his.

But this place, as it turned out, was a lot more than a training center. There were five Clans here…Sangheili, Rwby, Apex, Croft, and Neon Squirrel…that served as system defense and resource manufacturing, then there was an army of Wilson’s training staff that were still busy adding new challenge courses, overseeing quartary construction, developing equipment for new races, and a million other things.

But there was no one else here, in the entire star system. The inhabitants of the third planet had been moved out entirely and relocated to one that better suited the Viroli. They preferred a dry climate and only small patches of that world had qualified. Now they had one big dust ball some 839 lightyears away where a Monarch was shaping them into what would one day be a sub-faction focusing on aerial combat that was natural for the winged Viroli.

Now though, there wasn’t a single one left on any of the 9 worlds or 14 moons. All those here were the elite of the elite of the elite, for the Clans had competed for the 5 guardian slots quite fiercely, and being posted here had quickly become almost a sacred duty as they helped to build the centralized birthplace of the Archons and Mavericks and expand it into what they truly needed.

All the Adepts and Acolytes were here now, going through their war games trials until they earned their Ranger status and were sent out on assignments across Star Force territory. Previously they had been scattered into small groups, and with the V’kit’no’sat gradually taking more and more territory away from Star Force, there hadn’t been a permanent home since Earth. Lara had wondered why Davis hadn’t moved them back there until she arrived and saw this place for the first time.

There was so much more room. Far beyond what Earth alone could offer even if it was uninhabited. Two of the rocky planets were massive. You wouldn’t need artificial gravity for training unless you were truly beastly, and one of those pair was a water world at that, with the pressures at the depths being the highest Star Force had ever seen. It was perfect for aquatics training, and the same could be said of the other worlds for the 5 divisions of the Star Force military that the Archons had to master.

And with the growth of the empire, there were more and more individuals being found that qualified for Maverick status. They had to go through the same training, but tailored for their race’s physical attributes. That was what occupied most of Wilson’s time now, and he hadn’t been on site for most of the Archon basic training for some time, though he always seemed to show up when one of the trainees wasn’t cutting it. They’d get the personal touch, for he hated to have anyone wash out, and few ever did, but the screening test wasn’t perfect and sometimes a lazy ass made their way through by accident.

Lara knew from personal experience that Wilson also blamed himself for every Archon that gave up the life after basic. Even those hundreds of years after. There had only been 129 of them, but they were all failures in his mind, and while she didn’t blame him, she didn’t understand how any Archon could stop being who and what they were. She really couldn’t. And those few that had were never honest about it. All they would offer was excuse after excuse, usually a ‘I’m too tired to do this’ or a ‘I didn’t sign up for all this’ line that didn’t explain anything. Endurance was the name of the game for Archons, and she was both sorry for and angry with those few that had cracked under the pressure.

There were a lot of others that just needed a vacation, and they took it. Got themselves recharged, patched up, whatever they needed, then they’d be back. Sometimes it took years of recovery after some of the things they’d been through, but Archons never quit. So how 129 of them could blew her mind to this day, and apparently it did Wilson’s as well, because the biggest thing to do to get his attention was fail as an Archon. Lara and the others were all his children, in some respects, and the Head Trainer didn’t like losing any of his children to death. But even more so he didn’t like losing them to laziness, for that, after a fashion, was treason.

And now he had called her here. Lara didn’t think it was because he was worried about her failing, but rather because there was new training to be trailblazed and he was the one person in the empire more able to do that than the Archons themselves. So as she descended down through the thick atmosphere of Forge to the huge pyramid rising 18 miles into the sky, Lara oddly felt like she was returning home despite the fact that she’d never been in this system before.

The pyramid though…that did it all. It was stair stepped like the one on Earth had been, and made of the same Yeg’gor armor. It was the only place in the empire that had it, and she could tell from her vantage point that it wasn’t completely covered yet. There was a huge swath on the western side still missing the cover stones, and perhaps more on the north, but she couldn’t see there for the dropship was landing on the third tier up on the southwestern tip that allowed her to see both the southern and western sides in their perfect geometry.

Lara stepped off the dropship and it departed immediately, leaving her to soak in the breeze and warm air from the jungle below despite the altitude. It should have been quite cold up this high, at nearly 2 miles above ground level, but then again the pyramid soaked up heat readily and released it at a standard 78.2 degrees Fahrenheit. So it must have been the heat plume around the pyramid that she was feeling, but the humidity was obviously coming from the lake to the south.

It wasn’t wide, but it stretched out past the horizon with multiple fingers running in different directions like a blue lightning bolt…and the trees were amazing. Some of them rose 3 miles high on their own, leaving her looking up underneath their top branches from a distance. Those nearest the pyramid were tiny in comparison, and that was no doubt due to the construction zone. But the others were awe inspiring, and she knew at a glance they were of V’kit’no’sat manufacture, for similar ones had once been on Earth before the Raptors razed the planet and took them all down along with the buildings.

They took a long time to grow this large too, which made her wonder how long Davis had been working on this location. It couldn’t have just been since the war ended, unless these trees were native here as well. She’d have to ask Wilson about that later.

Lara stood near the corner with the higher levels of the pyramid behind her, seeming to stretch into the northeastern sky as the pyramid sloped hard in that direction. The nearest stair-step wall was more than a mile away, then rose at least a half mile straight up to get to the next level, but she wouldn’t have to run that far, for there was a dip in the flat architecture only a couple hundred meters away that was a recessed entrance.

Lara could feel his presence before she saw Wilson walk up out of that stairway and into the light from the pair of binary stars setting in the eastern sky. He stood as tall and trim as ever, with far more muscles than Lara could ever hope for without losing her ability to walk. He waved at her to come over, despite the fact that he possessed Ikrid. In fact he had all the psionics now, after years of resistance and insisting that he learn to do things the way his body was originally intended, and the habit not to use the psionics unless absolutely necessary still apparently clung to him like a warm blanket, but it didn’t matter. When he waved her over, she would have jogged towards him even if her body wasn’t craving movement.

“Hello, Lara,” he said warmly, but firmly. “Take a lap.”

“What?” she asked, getting the feeling like she’d just done something wrong.

“One lap around the pyramid, this level. And make it quick. I need you sufficiently drained so we can talk without you getting jittery.”

“Same old, same old,” she said, sprinting off instantly along the southern edge and mentally calculating how long it would take her to run the perimeter at this level. Even with her advanced speed it was going to take a few hours…

I didn’t say you had to run, Wilson’s voice shot into her head before she was out of his telepathic range.

Lara cringed, realizing he was right. He just said take a lap, so she leaned forward and picked up her fleet, using her Yen’mer to levitate and then accelerate her movement into a bullet-like flight that required her to also use her bioshields to block the wind.

22 minutes later she streaked down the western side of the pyramid and braked heavily, stopping a few meters away from Wilson and dropped back to her feet.

“Better?” he asked.

“Much,” she said, a bit breathless, for she’d been pushing her pace hard.

“How do you like the new digs?” he asked, gesturing up at the pyramid.

“Perfect. How did you get Davis to do it?”

“It was his idea. He’s got some crazy plans for the future, as usual, but this time its galaxy-spanning stuff, and he needed a solid Archon and Maverick core to hold it all together. So he’s given us a permanent home where we can train away from the civies. Even civilian traffic is banned from the system. That’s why you had to take a warship to get her, though you probably travel on one anyway.”

“Wilson, I’m not the same as before. Everything seemed to get wiped away and I’m remembering things for the first time.”

“You should have consulted me before you tried it. I could have made the process smoother for you.”

“How?” she asked, wondering if a streak of stupidity had hit her.

“I could have modified your training to flush the toxins out of you better than running simple obstacle courses. You probably didn’t know what Vortison was doing to you, but I could have helped. I’ve been going over the records and the next person to try this is going to have a list a workouts to pull from.”

“I don’t think it would help in the beginning, but anything that minimizes would be much welcome.”

“You took the hit for the others,” he said matter-of-factly.

“The trailblazers didn’t need to deal with that. And I had to rebuild myself once before. That experience helped get me through it.”

“But you’re not through it yet.”

“My mind is still half missing, it seems.”

“Your body is crap too. I can tell that just standing here. You lost a lot.”

“I gained even more in the tradeoff, but yeah, I’ve got a lot to rebuild. What do you know about this Essence Morelli keeps talking about?”

“A little, but without any way to mechanically monitor it we’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way,” he said with a smirk. “Methods these medtechs will never understand. Science can’t tell you about curiosity or willpower, and I’m guessing this Essence falls into the same category.”

“I can’t even sense it.”

“Your mind is so muddled at this point I’m not surprised, but if it’s not a V’kit’no’sat or Zak’de’ron psionic, you might be searching for the wrong thing. Stay here long enough and we’ll get this figured out and you back into Archon shape.”

“I have nowhere else to go, so I’m all yours until you tell me I’m done.”

“I’ve got a load of new training courses for you. A lot of big ones we didn’t have room for in the past, and even more planned for construction. This is the Archon home you’ve always deserved, but we never had the time or resources to build. So, to the first of the old school to arrive, welcome home,” Wilson said, walking up and wrapping Lara in a big hug.

She leaned into him as she felt him in her mind, bypassing the Ikrid blocks with the skin to skin contact, then physically melted entirely as he worked his way into her memories and saw what she’d been through…and what she was still holding back. It didn’t take long for all her walls to come down in an avalanche with his reassuring presence in her head, and then the tears started to flow.

“Let it out,” he whispered. “You’re safe here. No need to tuck it away. You’ve been through hell, little one. And now you’re going to get the reward for surviving it. But first you need to let go and do what you couldn’t do before. Just stop and cry. There is no tomorrow, there is no yesterday, there is only today. There is only this moment. You don’t have to do anything, just stand here and open up all the pain canisters you’ve been tucking away. And I’m not going to let you go until you do.”

She felt his arms tighten just a bit further, enough to reinforce him as point without making it uncomfortable, but oddly enough she didn’t even feel like fighting him. She needed the help, and was truly tired of fighting this alone.

It was good to have family. And what she’d done had been as much for them as it had been for her, but now it was her turn to get some help, and there wasn’t anyone in the galaxy better able to help the Archons than Wilson.

And true to form, he’d had her exhaust herself with that lap around the pyramid so she had no time limit on this moment. That let Lara go limp and turn into the mushy ball of pain she’d been fighting against for so many years, and by the time her advanced metabolism started clawing at her again the cathartic release would be over and she’d be well on her way into the future, but for right now she just let herself relish the immensely strong arms holding her up and the reassurance they offered.

As always, Wilson knew ways to approach training that no one else did, which was why the most advanced training required a trainer. You had to have someone to push you, to torment you, and to tell you when to back off and just…cry. You had to fully live in the moment, and you couldn’t do that when you were worried about what workout to do tomorrow or a month from now. You needed to take it one minute at a time while someone else took care of the planning.

And that was a luxury worth more than all the solari in the galaxy to an Archon.

When the Star Force warship entered the Itaru System it was met with the patrol fleet but not fired upon. They had known it was coming for some time, tracking its progress across V’kit’no’sat territory though it had not answered any questions about why it was here other than to say it was heading to Itaru. Per the terms of the agreement ending the war, Star Force had free movement throughout the V’kit’no’sat empire for their warrior class, but not their civilians, and this ship was definitely a warship, but now that it was here they were going to find out why.

Mak’to’ran got word as soon as it arrived that it was here to deliver a messenger to him in person, and he immediately granted approval. He had an Ari’tat delegation within Star Force territory to operate as a standing Ambassador, and the interlink between the Urrtren and the Star Force communications grid had been completed a few years ago, so there was no need for a messenger unless the subject matter couldn’t be trusted to the Urrtren…which meant it had something to do with the Zak’de’ron, or something that they couldn’t allow them to know about.

Mak’to’ran met the Archon when he arrived in a private chamber, finding it was one of their lesser ones. The Frieza-ranked Human he did not know, which suggested that this was indeed a message being transmitted in the most secure way possible rather than a discussion or negotiation, otherwise they would have sent one of their senior Archons.

“Why are you here, small one?” Mak’to’ran asked when the Archon slowly walked up to him.

“Is the chamber secure?”

“Only you and I will know what takes place here.”

“Good,” Hatron-1288333 said from his helmetless purple/white armor. “I’ve been instructed to tell you that we’ve analyzed the lizard genetics and technology compared to what they once were. We’ve confirmed they have been enhanced by a sponsor, though no record of that sponsor exists in any of their captured databases. However, we have spotted a subtle fingerprint on the enhancements they’ve been given.”

“The Zak’de’ron?” Mak’to’ran asked, almost seething with the confirmation that they had begun their war against the V’kit’no’sat, even if by proxy.

“No,” Hatron said coldly. “It’s not the Zak’de’ron. It’s the Chixzon. We don’t have thousands of years to prepare. They’ve already returned.”

Mak’to’ran took a step back, not having expected that, but finding it somehow worse. The Zak’de’ron were bad enough, but having two massively superior races working against you simultaneously was a nightmare beyond nightmares…not to mention the growing Hadarak threat. The V’kit’no’sat were soon to be in a 3-way vice grip that there was no way they could survive.

The Archon pulled a small datachip out of a hidden pouch and held it up to get Mak’to’ran’s attention.

“This is also for you. It’s the immunities for all the popular Chixzon bioweapons. You’ll have to adjust it to your races’ biologies, but we’ve already quietly inoculated our populations. It should make it more difficult to blindside you, but be warned that they are ingenious enough to find new ways of killing us. This should at least buy you some time against a biological threat.”

Mak’to’ran gripped the tiny device, built of V’kit’no’sat design, with his Lachka and brought it up in front of his face for closer inspection.

“Why are you giving us this?”

“Call it professional courtesy. You may be our enemy, but we’ve fought each other enough that some respect has been earned.”

“Is that your assessment or that of your masters’?”

“Mine, but the decision to give this and the warning to you is theirs.”

“And what else did they instruct you to give me?”

“Nothing more than the opportunity to send them a secure message. It was a long trip. No point in wasting it when I can carry it back.”

“Remain here,” Mak’to’ran said, then he walked off out of sight and eventually left the large chamber for many minutes before returning and floating down a much larger datachip that looked like a blue crystal. “Guard this with your life, and if your ship is compromised, destroy it before it can be captured.”

“What’s on it?”

“Everything I have been able to collect on the Zak’de’ron. Things that were not in your planetary defense station database, and some not kept even here in Itaru. In exchange, I ask that your masters learn from it and compare with the Chixzon knowledge that we lack. Perhaps it will offer some insights that will save both our empires.”

“I’ll make sure they get it,” Hatron said, melding it into his armor in a fashion that the pocket was completely hidden.

“Go now. The longer you wait the more chance there is of someone intercepting you.”

“Any personal message?”

“Tell them that they have done more for the empire than all other Zen’zat combined, and make sure they know I mean no insult. I no longer wish Star Force destroyed, by my hand or others. I hope you prosper long into the future, and if both the Zak’de’ron and Chixzon are in play for dominion of the galaxy, we are going to need each other, I think, simply to survive one of them. How we counter both is beyond my reckoning.”

“By growing too large for them to stop with hidden armies,” the Archon said as if it were common knowledge. “There’s only so much they can build without doing it in the open.”

“The galaxy is vast enough to hide empires, Archon.”

“Not when we both routinely search it. Give them less places to hide, and we force their hand early or keep them suppressed and using intermediaries while we grow larger and larger.”

“An overly simplistic approach.”

“But one hard to overcome. Numbers matter.”

“Numbers may be the only advantage we have at the moment, and they are continuously being whittled down.”

“Well, you’re not losing ships to us anymore, and vice versa. Do your thing and kick the crap out of everyone else attacking you. Aren’t you supposed to be the terrors of the galaxy or something like that?”

Mak’to’ran huffed, what little of his pride that remained momentarily sparked. “You believe we can win the coming war?”

“Remember who you’re talking to. Did we have a chance against you in the beginning? We survived because we decided to fight to the death, if nothing else out of spite. There is no surrender in our blood, and our persistence paid off.”

“It was more than persistence, though with a great deal of incompetence on our part included. Still, you have a point. You had no chance, yet here you remain and more powerful than ever. Your knowledge of the Chixzon may put you in a more advantageous position than we are in. Make use of it wisely. Once they know you have it…”

“We already think they know. Our ability to control the Uriti speaks pretty loudly.”

“Do they know how much you know?”

Hatron scrunched his face up in a hesitant gesture, deciding how to answer without giving away a secret. “There’s really only one way to get Chixzon knowledge, and it’s pretty much all or nothing, so we expect they know.”

“Interesting. Guard it well, or the Zak’de’ron may take it from you. If they manage to possess both knowledge bases, we are surely doomed.”

“Never give up, never surrender,” the Archon quoted. “But we know what we’ve got, and it’s well secured. Even I don’t have access to it.”

“You shouldn’t. As a messenger you’re extremely vulnerable.”

“A fast ship makes up for a lot of things. And as you said, time is precious for safety. Is there anything else before I leave?”

“There is not. Go now.”

“Going,” Hatron echoed, turning about and walking away.

Mak’to’ran watched him go, but didn’t move. He stood frozen in place thinking. The Chixzon were little more than a legend to him, while the Zak’de’ron he knew from experience, but he wondered which was the more powerful if the Chixzon had been able to harness the strength of the Hadarak to craft the Uriti for their own purposes. Two such massive powers arrayed against the V’kit’no’sat was ironic, and yet somehow deserved for the wasteful years they’d spent after the Zak’de’ron defeat. They should have been halfway through Hadarak territory by now, instead they had stagnated and fought each other to the point where the empire had nearly broken…and in truth it was now broken in secret. The J’gar and Oso’lon were gone, for the most part, and the few shreds that remained with Mak’to’ran wouldn’t grow large enough to replace them for a very long time.

He doubted they had that much time, but if the Li’vorkrachnika were not operating under the orders of the Zak’de’ron, then perhaps their old nemesis wasn’t as ready to strike them as he had assumed. Perhaps some of the other races they were currently engaged with were also operating on the orders of the Chixzon?

In some way that put him more at ease, despite the fact that the threat against him had now doubled. He needed time to retool the V’kit’no’sat and had been assuming the Zak’de’ron were already launching the first stages of their war of vengeance against him…but maybe that had been a miscalculation. Maybe he had more time.

Growth. That was what the young Archon had said. Growth would protect them both, and maybe, just maybe, they would have enough time to play that long game if all the Chixzon could do was throw lesser races at them.

And if they had planned on using a biological weapon to weaken the V’kit’no’sat further, Star Force might have just bought him the time he needed. Maybe there was a chance to survive this. One that he couldn’t currently see, but a pathway before him none the less.

And as the Archon had pointed out, if you’re doomed to die anyway, you might as well fight out of spite and take that impossible chance with full vigor. After all, what else did you have to lose by trying?

The answer was nothing, and for the first time in recent memory he felt a surge of resolve flow through him. If he was going to die, he would go down fighting as a V’kit’no’sat, not a broken warrior in a broken empire. So yes, growth it would be. He would wrangle what was left of the empire into form, even if he had to further reduce its size, then they would face the Hadarak and whatever else came at them with honor and either prevail or die trying, but they would not crumble. They would not self-destruct. They would not cave to the pressure and almost certain doom before them.

If either the Zak’de’ron or Chixzon were going to take dominion over the galaxy from the V’kit’no’sat, they were going to have to pay the price of blood to earn it. If the J’gar and Oso’lon wanted to forsake their pride, then the Era’tran would carry the empire in their stead. They would remain true V’kit’no’sat or die. There were no other options, for he would not let there be any other options.

And if they did fall, then perhaps Star Force would have a chance to carry on the work of the V’kit’no’sat under a different name. And they did not have the Hadarak border on their doorstep to guard, as he did, but the J’gar were right in one regard. If the V’kit’no’sat couldn’t survive the Zak’de’ron, then fighting the Hadarak was pointless. And if one of the two empires could survive what was coming, it might very well end up being Star Force, for they had one less enemy to fight than Mak’to’ran did.

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