Reclaimers Read online

  1

  December 1, 154965

  Pliskin System (Lovak Kingdom)

  Snake Four

  Until recently, the Lovak Kingdom had been on the outer edge of Star Force a quarter of the way around the galactic perimeter from Earth. Star Force territory there was a thin conduit of Kingdoms tracing around the Hula Hoop, with large chunks of unexplored territory beyond.

  Due to recent initiatives, a new Kingdom was forming on what had originally been the outer edge as Conquest Fleets were constantly moving into the lightly mapped areas and making contact with the locals…as well as drawing out the bad guys by various means so they could identify them and deal with the threat however necessary. The Conquest Fleets were laying claim to uninhabited systems, arranging for embassies to be built on the friendly worlds they found, and were constantly busy hunting down raiders, hijackers, slavers, meat traders, kidnappers, and all other manner of skullduggery that was virtually eliminated inside Star Force systems.

  But out here, things were a great deal more wild, even in the Lovak Kingdom, whose majority of systems were neutral or uninhabited. It was thinly populated with Star Force worlds, and Lord Byron had been tasked with growing it over time, but his efforts had been greatly hampered by the war effort, with a great deal of industrial output being shipped to the Grand Border to fuel the fleets fighting there.

  But Byron wasn’t completely shut down, and was continuing to develop his very frontier Kingdom a little bit here and a little bit there, and he was happy that his outer border was no longer going to be up against the wilds, even if it the new Kingdom in the making was only going to have a loose hold on the area once it got up and running. That, at least, would push a lot of the scum further out and leave his neighbors alone, for the Lord didn’t have many military assets left to him, and there were far too many systems not under his control for him to keep running patrols through constantly.

  Nefron had been in contact with him regularly after the first meeting on the Kingdom capitol of High Ground, named for yet another Star Wars reference. One would think the Archons had run out of them by now, but there seemed to be no end. The Chixzon wondered how many people even realized how many names they assigned came from their past fiction that they clung to so automatically it had made Nefron investigate the matter. He hadn’t been able to determine why exactly that was, but guessed it was the commonality that bound them together through the culture in which they were born…a culture that no longer existed, so it served as a sort of secret code they could speak in, but why they continued naming things as such he didn’t fully understand.

  He’d considered asking them about it, but had decided against that method. It was possible they didn’t understand their own motivation, and asking them about it might cloud the subject even more, so he’d let it go for the most part, but every new reference he saw he cataloged as one more bit of data to one day use to figure out the riddle of why they chose to make so many things from their past, and above all the rest, those of Star Wars…which he’d made himself indulge in to the point where he could quote the movies and tv series from memory, along with a few of the books.

  Nefron still didn’t see the point of it all, but at least he could now spot the references where other people missed them.

  And it was in the High Ground System that he was offered a new position in Star Force. One that he did not want at the time, but after a few years of thinking it over he finally relented and took the position that Director Davis had left on the table if he ever changed his mind.

  Now Nefron was a Reclaimer…another reference to a different Old Earth Fiction…and he had accepted the task of vetting and putting to use any of the Chixzon prisoners that had opted for surrender rather than death when Star Force had located and boarded their hidden cities floating beyond star systems where no one would know to look.

  Except Star Force had found a leak, and from that one leak they tracked down more and more until the whole Chixzon network was taken down…or so they thought. Nefron wasn’t sure they hadn’t missed something, for the encryption the Chixzon had been using seemed too weak for his satisfaction. And despite their attempts to delete all data…which they did achieve sometimes…enough willing and unwilling prisoners had been taken to search their minds for links to other Chixzon, and some 1.3 million survivors had been gathered from across the galaxy and brought to the Lovak Kingdom where a special indoctrination center had been built for them.

  That’s why Nefron had been here to begin with. To assist with those efforts. Then one day he’d been summoned to the Lord’s world where a transmission from the Director had laid out the offer to him, with Bryon able to fill in any additional details he required.

  The offer had been logical, and if Nefron had wished to return to being a Protovic he could have done so long ago…yet he’d always held that as a possibility, deciding that it just wasn’t time yet, but something that would come along later.

  But the offer and the subsequent deliberations had underscored one thing for him personally…and that he was never going back to being a Protovic.

  That saddened him when he first realized the truth…and the truth was that being Chixzon was superior. The ‘Protovic’ in him was a symbol of what Star Force was, what Nefron truly was, and he’d had to fight to get that back early on when the programming in his mind ruled him.

  But now, the programming was moot. He was in control, and had found himself again, inside this Chixzon body and this Chixzon intellect. The genetic memories of others didn’t sway him. At this point they were more of a personal library he could access whenever he needed. He was Star Force through and through once again, though he did miss his glowing skin…which was why he often opted to wear glowing clothing…but when it came to sneaking around, his Chixzon black was highly preferable to the Protovic colors, and he no longer saw the black as an endless void of the darkside. Not for him anyway.

  The other Chixzon were an entirely different story.

  He’d been in contact with them since the beginning of their indoctrination, and had remained to monitor and catch the cheating he knew they would pull. They had intended on playing the Star Force game only to keep their true motivations hidden until they could escape into the Star Force Empire and quietly start their scheming all over again.

  Nefron had shut that down quickly, though they didn’t know it was him doing it. He was able to sift through those who were legitimately willing to change and those who were pretending, and it was the few that were truly trying to learn that had ultimately made the decision for him. They would do well enough with other Star Force personnel guiding them, but nobody could do what Nefron could do, for nobody understood what it meant to be Chixzon except another Chixzon.

  And now that he had some additional information on what the Chixzon had been before their ‘fall’ he understood his own mind better. They had been a great race once, at least in largess. They’d been spread across 4 galaxies, not dominating any of them, but having a strong presence in all. They’d been primarily scientists and data analysts, trading their skills for raw materials that others would bring them, and in doing so became almost a parasite on other races, but apparently in a less intrusive manner than the Chixzon of the present would have been.

  Something had happened and their civilization was destroyed in short order, with the scattered remnants morphing into the Chixzon and embracing the darkside to ensure their survival. And survival was the most important instinct within a Chixzon. Even now Nefron could feel it in himself. The urge to run and hide rather than fight and die. The urge to cunningly outwit your opponents, or nature itself, and find a way to escape the certain doom of others. It had been encoded into the Chixzon genome either by design or by adaptation, and it seemed to have originated from wh
atever happened to their previous civilization, known only as the Ni’o’zon’chi.

  The name was similar to Chixzon, but Nefron’s genetic memories didn’t contain it or the history of his race prior to their current incarnation. But something massive had happened, and they were now the fallen remnants of something greater…and that meant something. He hadn’t been able to piece it together yet, but it was significant. He could feel it. And the more he interacted with the other Chixzon the more the sensation grew that they were meant for something. Something that had been lost and shrouded in the darkside of their rebirth.

  Nefron knew it had to do with outside this galaxy, and that the Chixzon could either wither here and die off completely, or they could try to reclaim their past legacy and use it to enhance Star Force. And for that simple reason Nefron had accepted Davis’s offer and became the fourth ‘Reclaimer’ in the empire, though the total number had now risen to 6 the last he’d heard. And like the others, he was uniquely suited to reclaim the lost and see it return to its potential, and the Chixzon were no exception.

  Most of their 1.3 million population was still in the indoctrination program after more than 30 years, but 132,932 had made it through, and each was personally cleared by Nefron…with the help of the Archons whose Ikrid was far more powerful than his own telepathy. Together they were sure these Chixzon wanted to climb towards greatness, and had seen the failings of the darkside in person, and then further illuminated by Star Force’s teachings which was all they had to entertain themselves with while in indoctrination. That, or physical training, but the boredom that drove many to explore for the sake of doing something didn’t work on the Chixzon, for they were extremely patient and cunning, and could lay in wait indefinitely in order to accomplish their mission…or catch their prey…and those predator instincts were one major problem Nefron was having to deal with.

  He’d conquered his long ago, but these other Chixzon had never fought their instincts. They’d just gone along with them and accepted them as normal until something occurred to make them question who and what they were. Indoctrination left a lot of time for thinking, and those that had come through were on the right path, but the accumulated darkside knowledge and habits that they were born with, regardless of whether they had been Protovic converts or spawnings, were a heavy lift to overcome, and if one didn’t have reason to try they’d never have the courage to press back on what seemed to be the natural way.

  Nefron was having to deconstruct the Chixzon and then rebuild them, but he couldn’t do it like he had with himself, for a small piece of him had not been converted, and that piece was still Protovic. It was tiny, a small set of memories that hadn’t been rewritten, but it was the point of contact the Archons had used to free him from the transformation…and afterwards he’d conscripted the transformation and turned it to his own lightside purposes.

  But every Chixzon to be spawned would start with those darkside habits, so Nefron had a huge problem to deal with, and he wasn’t going to start genetically rewriting huge chunks of their coding. Even making small alterations was dangerous, due to unseen complications. Nefron knew this from his memories, as the Chixzon would experiment on others and simply discard the failures rather than try and fix them. Over and over, millions upon millions, they would alter into an abominable state until they finally had a success…and they’d usually kill the success anyway so long as they had the genetic sample they required.

  Such ‘experimentation’ was darkside, no matter what the cause for it, and no matter how intelligent, or lack thereof, the one being experimented on was. Star Force was anti-darkside and everyone knew it, but there were some activities that they responded to with extra vigor, often lethally, and one of those was the meat industry. The other that Nefron had noted was such ‘scientific research’ that involved the torture and/or death of those unwillingly experimented upon. And the Conquest Fleets were encountering many such instances, which ended with the immediate termination of whatever civilization was responsible.

  Not in terms of the people being killed, but their sovereignty was immediately revoked and Star Force would come in and take the whole place over…often with the death of the researchers who didn’t surrender. Star Force had never, as far as he knew, killed a prisoner. But Star Force was the one who decided who they did and did not take prisoner, and when they saw cages full of mutilated, disease infected, suffering ‘animals’ as the so-called ‘scientists’ casually went around inflicting damage all in the name of scientific discovery or medical advances…Nefron knew many of them were shot dead where they stood if they so much as drew a weapon in self-defense, despite the fact that Star Force had stun weaponry and could take them prisoner if they wanted to.

  But there were some things that were so darkside that Star Force wouldn’t be that nice about it, yet in Nefron’s memories such things were just ‘normal,’ and that darkside apathy was something he had to fight to remove from the Chixzon if they were ever going to be able to reproduce. If Davis knew the Chixzon like Nefron knew them, he would have ordered them shot on sight rather than taken prisoner. And those that surrendered of their own accord, he would have permanently exiled to a prison planet with drones calibrated to shoot anything that left the surface.

  That’s the level of wrongness within the Chixzon that Nefron had to contend with a second time. The first time he’d had the Archons’ help and his own Protovic past to help him, but he was finding it was infinitely harder to help someone else change than to change yourself, because he controlled his choices and the ultimate outcome of his own internal battles. But those of others he could only influence, and that meant he had to be very cunning in his approach.

  Right now Nefron was inside the only Chixzon city in existence, in a system named for another Old Earth Fiction, and one almost criminally hilarious in its aptness. The Chixzon were sneaks, and the fact that the Archons weren’t denying that, or even inferring it was a bad thing, gave Nefron his primary direction for his new wards.

  They were sneaks, and sneaks they needed to continue to be, just with different motives.

  And to truly know one’s motive you had to see them in action, which was why Nefron had decided to implement virtual training using the system that the first Reclaimer Cal-com had devised to weed out those Vargemma who were worthy and those who weren’t. Now Nefron had to use it to teach through action, and to nudge the Chixzon in the direction they needed to be while constantly monitoring their progress and making alterations to the programming on an individual level for each of them.

  And they didn’t know it. Each time they entered the Verasitium their memories would be blocked on the inside, and when they exited the memories of what had occurred inside would be wiped permanently. So from their point of view, they entered the door and immediately exited, not knowing any time had passed, but the adaptation that occurred inside was not a thing of memory, and Nefron was able to track the changes far better than Cal-com’s system ever could.

  He was, of course, sharing his advancements and results with the other Reclaimers, but the Chixzon’s situation was so much darker that it almost didn’t count as peerdom. Nefron was having to wring the darkside out of them to the point it was really him versus the darkside himself, and that’s why he knew he had to be the one to do this. No one else could, for they didn’t see the depths of it. The Chixzon were choking in it from spawning, and that wasn’t their choice. He had originally thought it would be best to forbid spawning and just let the Chixzon race die out if they didn’t achieve self-sufficiency…and that was probably the more prudent choice, but the Director was stubborn when it came to such things. He didn’t like to surrender anything to the darkside, so he’d tasked Nefron with taking the Chixzon back from it…and he’d used those exact words in his original message.

  So that’s what Nefron was doing, and each day for several hours each Chixzon in their new city would report to the Verasitium at different times of day to do something they would never remember. That
required trust, which he had from them, and with that trust he and he alone was responsible for reshaping them…and it was working. New habits were forming, old ones withering away…but the problem was, in order to get that new stuff encoded into their genome to pass on to another generation, it couldn’t be a light or quick change. It had to be ground in so far and so hard that it had to be passed on the for the sake of survival.

  And that meant Nefron had to be relentless in the training. Which meant he wasn’t going to be able to let any of them spawn new offspring for several thousand years at the minimum, and neither could he without an adequate pairing.

  The road ahead was long, hard, and uncertain, but small progress was being made and he was committed to this for as long as it would take. The Director didn’t want the Chixzon for the war against the Hadarak, which was a good thing, for they’d never be ready in time. He wanted them brought out of the darkside in order to spite it, or as some famous people from many different races had said..

  Why climb the mountain? Because it is there.

  The Chixzon were here, the challenge was here, and Reclaimer Nefron was going to tackle it, though he had no illusions of victory. This fight was about fighting and seeing where it led, for he honestly didn’t know. To use a metaphor, he was walking through the fog and couldn’t see more than one meter ahead of him, but he could see one meter of ground, and that was all he needed to figure out where to take his next step.

  He didn’t know if the other million Chixzon would come out of indoctrination or not. He hoped some would, but that future was up to them, not him. He was in charge of those that were out, while Star Force personnel far more experienced with the indoctrination methods used to free people’s minds that had been devised and codified long ago could handle this process better than him. It was where the newly freed minds went afterward that was uncharted. And for that, a Reclaimer was needed.