Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) Read online

  1

  September 30, 2735

  Ma’kri Jor-El

  Mid Jump

  Jenna and Levi sat in one of the sanctum’s meditation rooms, both on nearby cushioned pedestals with their arms interlocked at the wrists. Jenna held Levi’s right in her left, with a symmetrically reversed hold on the other. Both Archons were motionless, eyes closed, but with a flurry of brain activity that would have pegged out the old neural scanners that had been used to monitor training drills such as this. Archon psionics had come so far since those early days that a whole new generation of monitoring equipment had to be created to keep up with them.

  And the more they advanced the more they realized that a hugely disproportional part of psionics was Ikrid. Originally they had dismissed the non-physical skills as secondary, but there was so much that one could do with basic Ikrid that it hadn’t become apparent until they’d leveled up that Tier 1 ability. There were literally over 500 different applications logged in the V’kit’no’sat database, some of which even the trailblazers hadn’t achieved yet due to lack of prerequisites…and that wasn’t even counting the Tier 2 upgrades.

  At the moment Levi was using Orren, a Tier 2 Ikrid modifier that gave him additional invasive power when trying to actively press into and hack another mind. It wasn’t something that could be practiced against a machine, like some of the other Ikrid applications that the techs and Archons had gotten innovative on to find ways to train in isolation, but rather had to have an active mind to access, and in this case Levi needed a strong one to probe.

  Using non-psionic volunteers didn’t offer more than a bit of exploration and light practice, and even going up against lower level Archons didn’t offer the necessary resistance to really push your abilities…but Levi had all the challenge he could ever have wanted from Jenna, whose mind was far stronger than his even without the Farchor ability upgrade, which added additional defensive mechanisms to prevent the type of tampering that he was attempting.

  Jenna wasn’t counterattacking him, rather just trying to block his intrusion. Physical contact had to be maintained for them to get around the Ikrid blocks, but with the flesh to flesh connection established her mind was open to his ‘sight’ and directly accessible. Biological as they were, each Archon’s brain was essentially just a computer with an immense amount of automated processes. Numerous programs were operating within the mage’s mind without her conscious effort, such as her breathing and heartbeat. If an opponent was strong enough, they could hack into her mind and manually shut them down…essentially killing her with a thought.

  And where the power of the mind was concerned, amount of tissue was a huge deal, just as it was with muscles. A small opponent might have stronger muscle fibers than a large one, but add up all the weak fibers and you could possess a greater strength than the more developed individual simply because of your size. That was a big disadvantage for the Zen’zat against the rest of the V’kit’no’sat, and even more so for the Archons since they didn’t use the Zen’zat physical upgrades that the Knights did. Even that bit of additional brain tissue was useful, in that it gave you more processing power and additional transmission capability.

  The Ikrid blocks had been designed to essentially give the Zen’zat an immunity to that so long as they could stay out of touching range, and with their armor blocking physical contact it wasn’t an issue so long as they weren’t captured and interrogated, but it didn’t allow for a Zen’zat to hack into the minds of the larger V’kit’no’sat races very well. That, in turn, offered the other races some comfort, but with everything V’kit’no’sat there was an upgrade to make you better, which is where Orren came in.

  It took the size issue and basically threw it aside by giving the individual specially designed tools for accessing another mind and bypassing the natural defenses with guile rather than brute force. Often an opponent wouldn’t even feel the presence of another mind when Orren was used, for it was so low in terms of pressure that only an active monitoring of one’s status would reveal the incursion.

  Only a handful of V’kit’no’sat races were permitted Orren, and none of them had it by default. Individuals had to earn it through a variety of means that were similar, but not identical between the races. It was too powerful a tool to just hand out to someone who hadn’t proven themselves, for even a sloppy attempt could succeed against an experienced opponent, and that type of vulnerability would have upset the powerbase within the V’kit’no’sat that was very delicately maintained.

  That powerbase was one of their few weaknesses, for none of the races had all of the psionics that the Zen’zat did. They didn’t trust each other that far, and the Zak’de’ron having too many was one of the reasons that they didn’t fit in with the ‘equity’ that developed over time. Zen’zat were so small and pathetic that they weren’t seen as a threat, particularly because they didn’t have a race. They were created from Ter’nat and became Zen’zat after having proven themselves to have some merit in becoming useful tools to the V’kit’no’sat rather than a member race.

  And they’d wanted their Zen’zat to be powerful enough to compensate for their small size and be of use to the other races, hence they got above and beyond what the other races possessed, with a caveat. All of their psionics after the basic 7 had to be ascended to, whereas most of the other V’kit’no’sat psionics were a default from birth. Orren was one of the few that was not, due to the unique power it gave an individual over others.

  But where Orren was the mental sword of psionics, Farchor was the shield. About a third of the V’kit’no’sat races had it as default, with the others all having the trigger woven into their genetic makeup to allow them to gain the defense if they were skilled enough. It wasn’t an immunity to Orren, but rather a counter-intrusion program that ran constantly. In addition to throwing up red flags for the conscious mind to see, it essentially worked like a drone army in the battle against the intrusion, able to fight the hacking on its own without conscious effort.

  How it fought was customizable, which had to be tailored with time and training, but even the default basics made it very difficult for an opponent to be able to take remote control over the individual. More than likely a disruption or a few memories gleaned would be the result, and the ‘kill thought’ ability was shut out entirely, for the basic life functions were so armored with redundancies that there was no way an outside ‘signal’ could override them.

  A mind was like a dart board, with a bullseye in the center that was the conscious ‘core’ of the individual, then there were rings expanding outward, with those closest to the core being the most fundamental and hardest to access. Surface thoughts were in the outermost ring, with a whole host of other functions in between. When an individual gained Farchor it pretty much blocked out the inner two or three rings by default, leaving the outer rings accessible but with increased resistance.

  That resistance what was Levi was probing within Jenna’s mind, with his master making a conscious choice not to press back into his, but to try and block her apprentice’s attacks like they were tennis balls being flung her way. His power level was too low for him to get very far with a brute force attempt, but Orren made things tricky and offered her a decent challenge when she opted not to respond. If she did she could shut down his attempts quite quickly with a little disruptive pulse into his mind.

  Levi was a level 23 padawan and hadn’t gotten Farchor from Jenna yet. It was up to her which Tier 2 psionics she shared with him first, and she’d wanted him to get used to Orren so he’d be able to understand how an opponent was operating before he got Farchor. Jenna was far better at defending because she had that perspective and ability to counterattack, so to her it made sens
e to give him the offensive capability first.

  That, and she wanted practice defending.

  Outside the advanced training group there were literally no opportunities to work on these type of psionics, and she was very glad the trailblazers had come up with the ‘Jedi’ program of pairing a mage with a padawan…or in some other rare cases that were beginning to pop up, having two mages working together as a field unit pair. Most of the trailblazers were too busy for that sort of thing, but Jason and Paul were known to link up for a mission here and there. Then again, they’d always been a pair since basic training.

  Jenna was a level 107 mage and had moved through the padawan ranks mostly in the advanced training group, never having a master of her own. Some others were doing the same thing now, simply for the lack of available mages. Some didn’t want an apprentice, but even if all of them did there were so many Archons reaching padawan level that there simply weren’t enough pairings. Down the road that would hopefully change, but for now they were still in a transitional period headed into what Paul referred to as the ‘Jedi Order,’ which was their long term goal for restructuring the Archons.

  The padawan levels 80-99 had been reworked to accommodate each Tier 2 psionic that was unlocked, with several more to go that hadn’t been discovered yet. As it was, Jenna felt it would take another 10-15 years before she got Levi to where he needed to be before transferring all of her own psionics to him. There were four that she’d been holding off on, while he currently possessed 16. She’d fed him each one individually rather than having him unlock them all in the first year as some other masters did. It was her prerogative how she had him progress, and he’d been open to doing it her way in exchange for the ability to have a permanent training partner/teacher while they moved about the Star Force empire doing field work.

  Not all Archons preferred staying in the advanced training group, which had grown to several levels. The inner circle was inaccessible to even Jenna, with Vermaire and a few handpicked others pushing the limits even further and trying to find the missing psionic triggers…as well as working on a lot of other things that she and the others would only find out about after the fact.

  Currently the top Archon was, once again, Morgan-063. She’d bounced in and out of that title a number of times, but she’d eeked out an 8 level lead at the moment and currently stood at mage level 398 out of a total of 500 levels in what the trailblazers were referring to as the first ‘adult’ rank. After all the centuries of training and advancement that Jenna had gone through that almost seemed like an insult, but after hearing their reasons and the continuous comparisons to the V’kit’no’sat Zen’zat she reluctantly agreed that they were only now really on par when reaching mage.

  They weren’t inferior anymore, but they were far from dominant. The mages could hold their own with the rank and file Zen’zat, and probably defeat them given the extra psionics that they now possessed, but go up the ability ladder above ‘average’ within the V’kit’no’sat and even the trailblazers were quickly outclassed. Jenna didn’t know what the next Archon rank would be after mage, but she had a long way to go to get there. Drills like this with Levi were helping her level up her Ikrid skills, despite the fact that the levels themselves couldn’t measure all of it.

  That didn’t matter to her, for she wasn’t training just to achieve a higher rank. Jenna was training for higher ability, in every way, shape, and form regardless of whether or not it could be outwardly measured. Many aspects of the mind couldn’t be, or at least not yet. That was one of the projects going on in the advanced training group that she knew about, with the techs trying to find more ways of measurement and the Archons taking those and creating new challenges out of them.

  Jenna figured they’d eventually get around to finding a way to add more requirements to the levels, and she definitely wanted to defend her ranking when they did, but in truth she just wanted to be as prepared as possible to defend her mind if/when it ever came under attack. The Ikrid block was a great comfort, but that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to be able to resist a strong mind enough not to become a living thrall, and according to Kara that was a distinct possibility with the higher level V’kit’no’sat…and especially with the dragons.

  If they could access her flesh and worm their way inside her head, they could essentially rewrite part of her programming and control her from afar even after breaking physical contact. She needed to be able to resist that programming and even flush it out after the fact if it happened, hence the need for practice defending, which was why she didn’t balk at giving Levi ample opportunity to probe her mind.

  Others, she knew, found it intrusive and kept their efforts restricted to certain outer ‘rings’ but she did not. The type of sparring she and Levi were doing was very intimate, given that he was able to probe her thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. More often than not he even tweaked her sexuality program in order to throw her off balance, and that alone was enough to make some people recoil.

  But not her, and it wasn’t because she liked him either. He was attractive, and that was one of the big reasons she’d chosen him out of the pool of available candidates, for if you were going to be traveling and living together for multiple decades you might as well have someone you wouldn’t mind getting locked in a closet with. Not that that would ever happen, but it was a mental test she used when picking training partners and such, and Levi had fit the bill there even though there was nothing romantic between them. Casual flirting and sarcasm, sure. But the idea of ‘coupling’ was a totally foreign concept for the Archon now.

  And by that she and the others weren’t referring to sex, which was now no longer an issue for the mages. They’d figured out how to deactivate her menstrual cycle genetically, rather than using surgery or chemicals that could be undone with a regenerator treatment. Jenna and the other females, she assumed anyway, were now sterile by choice and she didn’t miss the occasional bleeding, but for her it wasn’t an opportunity to reengage in sexual activity without the risk of producing offspring.

  It was the opposite for her and the other Archons, a sign of total commitment and saying that reproduction had 0% to do with their priorities. The sterilization could be undone with another genetic alteration if needed, so it wasn’t permanent permanent, but it was something that set her apart from the rest of Humanity and made her feel a little more badass than the rest.

  As for her sex drive, that remained intact. They hadn’t messed with it, and amongst the Archons it was seen as kind of a test. It was said that sexuality had a strong influence on the weak minded, which was basically saying that any Archon who had sex was admitting to being a loser. That wasn’t necessarily true, but that’s how she and the others decided to view it.

  Which was why she didn’t tell Levi to keep his distance from those thoughts and feelings within her mind. It was very exposing for him to go there, let alone prod around, activate, or even amplify that part of her, but Jenna didn’t like the idea of having a no-go zone. She was an Archon, she had nothing to hide, no shame, no embarrassment, and if she did that would have been a sign that she had something to work on.

  Jenna also knew that an enemy wouldn’t hold to a no-go zone anyway, so if she was really serious about learning how to defend herself she had to get hit in every which way during training, holding nothing back.

  It was awkward at first, because since becoming an Archon she hadn’t really dealt with that part of her in any significant way. It was always riding in the background, but it was things like that that could be used against you, so she welcomed the challenge…and that fact that Levi’s mental prodding felt really good.

  But therein was the trick of it, because if she let herself enjoy it her defenses would lapse and he could gain further access to her mind and circumvent her blocks. The Farchor especially could be partially disabled if she went into ‘pleasure’ mode, which was why Levi hit her with that attack often, because it had offered him the most success in the past.

&nbs
p; And that was the way it worked with Archons. Sexual pleasure wasn’t a bad thing, but pleasure for pleasure sake without a purpose was the sign of a junkie-style loser. If you wanted to reproduce it served a purpose. Archons didn’t and therefore sex had no purpose. The rest of the Human population still didn’t seem to understand that simple principle, thinking that the Archons were emotionless monks or just downright crazy. After all, what would it hurt to have a little fun during downtime?

  Except that Archons never had downtime in that way. Everything they did, including sleep, had a purpose, as did this mental training. Orgasm for the sake of fun was stupid. Orgasm for the sake of training…just an added bonus.

  Jenna knew that was sound thinking, and prided herself on being a step ahead of a lot of the others in that regard, for her mind would be a bit more shielded in the aftermath of the training than theirs would be. The ironic thing, in this case, was that she was resisting the pleasure rather than embracing it, and only when she failed royally did she end up in a state of euphoria.

  At which point Levi would just stare at her with a ‘you are weak’ look of victory on his face. She hated that smirk, but even more so the fact that he was right. She shouldn’t have a part of herself that she couldn’t control, and it goaded her into working even harder to put some armor over that vulnerability.

  Which was why now when Levi tried that tactic he didn’t get far. Resisting pain was a unique skill, but resisting pleasure was wholly different…and it was a skill that Jenna was proud to have learned, for now Levi couldn’t get her awash with that type of distraction anymore, but he could still throw it her way for a momentary quiver, during which he’d try and penetrate somewhere else before she could fully react.

  Like her Tier 2 Snu ability, which offered an immunity to Fornax, an opponent could no longer disable her with it…with the difference being that this wasn’t a skill she’d unlocked, but rather one she’d constructed herself. And the more little advantages like this that she could create, measureable or not, the more powerful she’d become.