Star Force: Scorpion (Star Force Universe Book 42) Read online

  1

  March 25, 4853

  Axalon System (Pavana Region)

  Turok

  Kara sat in her quarters, a few drops of blood dripping off the cauterized stump of her left arm as she began to feel sick. She wanted to use her Haemra to speed the healing of her arm and stop the blood loss, but she couldn’t with the numbing effect interfering, so she tried in vain to slip into a Sesspik trance, failing for the same reason. Her head was awash with the lingering stun effect and she didn’t dare try to use her Haemra to try and flush it out. The pain was already creeping its way into her mind, and she didn’t want to take the brunt of it before the medtechs arrived with a regenerator.

  She could afford to lose some more blood, so she just sat and waited as the sickening feeling continued to creep up on her. Kara had never had a limb severed before and was wondering if this was part of it. She almost shot herself again to keep from throwing up, but at least the bleeding was stopping. Her Uzti boosted her natural healing rate, and it was still active without her mentally being involved. It was successfully accelerating the clotting of her blood and boosting the regeneration of a thin layer of tissue at the point of the cut, but would not regenerate her missing arm.

  Kara would need a regenerator for that, because her natural healing would just seal over the wound and lock it down. Her Haemra could regenerate her arm a little bit at a time over the course of weeks, but the regenerator was the best way to deal with this. It would heal over the wound immediately, then they could get her to a medical station where additional biomatter would be available to give the regenerator enough mass to replace her arm…or maybe they could just reattach this one.

  Kara looked at the severed limb bleeding out on the floor and telekinetically reached out to it, floating the dying limb over to her with a creepy sensation. She no longer had any control over it, and seeing it disconnected was eerie. Now that the Vorch’nas was disconnected from it she should be able to reattach it, assuming there wasn’t any bits left inside.

  Kara floated her arm over to a nearby table and left it there, not wanting to take the risk. Better to just grow a new one to be safe…

  She slid off her chair and took a knee on the floor, suddenly throwing up as her stomach couldn’t take the sick feeling anymore. She retched and recoiled three times before the first of the crew arrived at her door. Kara didn’t even feel them outside, that was how bad her wound was affecting her, with the pain continuing to leech forward into her mind.

  “Do not touch that,” she said, pointing with her remaining arm at the clear shards of what looked like glass spread over a meter or two of carpet. “Put it in containment,” she said, clenching her stomach and managing to keep what was left of her fuel load inside her.

  “What happened?” a medtech said as he came over and knelt beside down, pressing a Star Force regenerator against her upper arm over the injury.

  “I had to take it off. This was the only way…” she said, yelling the last word as she fell to the ground.

  “Kara!” another Archon yelled, rushing past the medtechs as she began convulsing. The mage placed a hand on her neck, using his Haemra to help heal her along with the Vorch’nas…or at least figure out what was happening…but the medtech beat him to it.

  “Shit!” he yelled, reaching down to the regenerator and pressing his thumb against it. He mentally ordered it to deactivate, with the internal tendrils withdrawing and it popping off. The medtech grabbed it and pulled it away from her while she still twitched violently on the floor.

  “What the hell just happened?” the mage asked, his hand still on her.

  “Poison,” the medtech said, looking at a scanner that had been linked to the regenerator so they could know what exactly it was repairing.

  “Why didn’t the regenerator…” he said, stopping short as he figured it out too. He was goosing her healing using his Haemra, but as he did so the cells he triggered to hyper regrow began oozing new poison.

  The mage recoiled, then looked down at Kara and forced his voice through his telepathy to make sure she heard him.

  “Kara, your body is producing a poison every time we heal you. What is going on?”

  “Something the regenerator isn’t programed for,” the medtech answered. “It’s triggering a malfunction that’s creating a toxin.”

  “Stop,” Kara moaned, pointing to another Archon that was telekinetically lifting the Vorch’nas shards into a canister that a tech was holding while more people rushed into the room. “Give…it…to…me.”

  The other Archon didn’t waste time, grabbing the open canister and pulling it over next to her as Kara stood up on her hands and knees and puked again…this time half of which was blood.

  Kara telekinetically reached in and pulled out several pieces of the dead Vorch’nas, then flew them to her right arm and pressed them against her skin.

  “All of…them,” she said, puking again after the third word.

  Both Archons picked up the pieces and flew them near her, with her grabbing them all and pushing them against her arm as she fell to the ground, staring at it as her Uzti continued to try to heal her, unwittingly triggering the poison that was killing her.

  “Please,” she whispered, staring at the broken pieces that did nothing. “Please…”

  “What can we do?” the mage asked the medtech.

  “If it’s something the regenerator isn’t programmed for we need to get her to a medbay and treat her with healing patches and other conventional…”

  “No!” the mage said sternly. “My Haemra is triggering the poison. That means any healing on her part is creating more poison. How can we get it out of her? We have to draw it off,” he said, ignoring the medtech even as he answered the question and putting a hand on Kara’s neck. He hacked into her nervous system and got a good look at what was happening inside her, then tried to use his Haemra, not to heal her, but to direct the poison through her body to specific points on her skin.

  A moment later she began to bleed out a sickly brown goo, but it wasn’t enough, for every bit of her body that touched the stuff was literally disintegrating…and he couldn’t heal the pathways, for that would just create more poison.

  He didn’t have a choice, causing limited healing along the routes he was using to transport the poison away from other areas in order to keep them from literally exploding from tissue degeneration as the medtech came up and took a sample of the poison.

  “Clean it off her and don’t touch it,” the mage warned as Kara puked again, this time almost all blood as her body was being torn apart at a rapid pace now that the regenerator and the Archon had triggered the onslaught.

  “Please…” Kara said, so low nobody could hear her as she just stared at the pieces of the Vorch’nas while her vision began to go dark as her eyes were succumbing to the poison and beginning to bleed internally.

  The medtechs, which were growing in number as more arrived, and the Archons worked as fast as they could to siphon off the poison inside Kara, but she was dying and she knew it. The only hope she had was her Vorch’nas, which she thought she’d destroyed, but maybe the Zak’de’ron tech was more resilient than it looked. It was her only chance now, for she knew what was happening. Zeno’dor has told her never to take it off, and she knew this was punishment for doing so. Somehow they’d sabotaged her body, and if a regenerator wouldn’t fix it, then her Vorch’nas was the only thing that could.

  Kara’s eyes went brown and even her Pefbar was getting looping as brain tissue was being liquefied. She was a gonner and she knew it, feeling like such a sucker. The Zak’de’ron had been playing her all along. They’d on
ly enhanced her while she was useful to them. Their ‘honor’ was nothing more than a tactic they used to endear their servants to them…but now she saw the full horror of what they were, and how if she wasn’t going to be their servant they’d eliminate her.

  She hadn’t chosen to have the Vorch’nas attached to her arm so long ago. They’d forced it on her. And if she didn’t have the option to remove it then she was their slave…and it seemed they didn’t want their slaves being freed.

  It was the same stupid ego that the V’kit’no’sat had. You had to be part of the group or you were killed. No one could leave. And damn her for ever thinking the Zak’de’ron were different.

  Kara kept what was left of her vision on her good arm, willing the pieces to reform, but she didn’t get what she hoped for before she lost consciousness, quickly followed by her heart stopping.

  “Damn it, Kara, hang on,” the mage said, manually restarting her heart and causing it to produce poison even as he healed it into a zombified functionality. “Try something!” he yelled at the medtechs. “We’re losing her.”

  “Almost there!” another one of them yelled back, working feverishly to reprogram the regenerator via a small datapad. “Move!”

  The mage pulled back as the medtech slapped the regenerator on the side of her face, with it sinking into her skin and diving its tendrils down into her body. The mage could see it internally as he still was linked into her nervous system, with the tiny tendrils reaching out and sucking the poison out of her body wherever they could…but more was being produced along the tiny tunnels it had to carve through her body.

  The overall amount dropped though, which was something, but the damage to her body was so extensive that she was still losing the war.

  “How is the poison being produced?” the mage demanded.

  “Her cells have been reprogrammed. There’s a tiny production module inside them now, pumping out the poison…but only the new cells. Her old cells are fine.”

  “So anything we heal gets converted? How?”

  “I don’t know how. The regenerator should tear them apart if they’re not a part of her genetic code…”

  “Shit,” the mage said as he and the medtech had the same though. “It altered her genetics.”

  “That’s why she tried to put it back on.”

  In the back of the crowd that had gathered Captain Zeddi pushed his way through the sea of Human elbows until he was in view of the bloodbath that was around Kara and continually spilling forth from her body. Her skin looked like it was covered with tiny rivers that were oozing out from everywhere and soaking into the thick carpet. He also saw her severed arm nearby and the mage kneeling with his hand on her neck and a regenerator attached to her face.

  “Report,” he demanded.

  “She removed her arm to remove her jewel,” another medtech said. “But her body’s been sabotaged and any healing creates a poison that’s killing her.”

  “We’re losing her,” the mage said, tears in his eyes. “I can’t keep her going much longer. Her body is tearing itself apart.”

  A piccolo had entered just after the Kiritas Captain and he pushed his way forward, shoving the medtech out of the way as he got down on the other side of Kara’s prone body. He pressed his hand against the other side of her neck while offering a battlemeld prompt to the mage.

  “Together,” he said, then their minds were linked and their hands suddenly burned with pain as they used their battlemeld psionic Nevat to increase their healing ability and actually bored holes in their own hands so they could link their blood vessels to Kara’s. Through them they gave her their blood and shoved bits of tissue into her body…that they then caused to grow, finding that the poison wasn’t being generated from it.

  That meant they had a chance, despite the fact that she was going to be gone within a few minutes. They prioritized her vital systems, heart, lungs, and brain, sending tiny bits of their own cells to where they needed to be and caused them to ‘heal’ and grow more tissue, absorbing surrounding nutrients and providing a little bit of structure even as the nearby poison damaged it.

  The regenerator was sucking it out of her fast, but there was still so much coming from her body as it instinctively tried to heal that this probably wasn’t going to work, but they’d be damned if they didn’t try, and her heart was stabilizing as more and more of it became their tissue and not Kara’s.

  “Nanites,” the piccolo told the medtechs. “We need to cyborg her out. Go!”

  Two of the techs bolted from the room, knowing they couldn’t carry her while the Archons were linked in, and raced to get the necessary equipment that they hadn’t bothered to carry with them, for usually a regenerator fixed everything.

  They weren’t going to be able to save her, and they knew it, but facing challenges had taught them to never give up, for they never knew when circumstances would change beyond their prediction, so if they could keep Kara alive another hour, then they would, though both of them doubted they had that much time.

  As more and more of Kara’s body was destroyed and little bits of it were replaced with parts of the other two Archons’ bodies, nobody noticed the clump of her broken jewel that was still sticking to her arm despite the fact that she was unconscious and unable to telekinetically hold it in place. In fact they didn’t even notice as two of the larger pieces began to slowly melt into one another, creeping painfully slow as they physically linked up and began to rewrite their internal code from redundant backup programming.

  It wasn’t until a regenerator shoot from the reforming lump dove into Kara’s arm did the two Archons realize it was still active. That shoot immediately went after and attacked the tendrils coming from the regenerator on Kara’s face that had extended throughout her entire body, sucking poison as fast as it could without attempting to heal her.

  The Vorch’nas tendril intercepted the nearest copies of its counterpart and began to hijack them, first taking control then liquefying the solid regenerator on Kara’s face as it drew tiny bits of the machine through the tendrils and back to the Vorch’nas, which accelerated the melting process even as other tendrils shot out and began to heal the poison damage in the area of her right arm nearest the jewel shards.

  Buy time, the piccolo said telepathically as they both saw what was happening.

  “What the hell?” the medtech asked when his datapad suddenly lost connection to the regenerator.

  “It’s fine,” the mage said. “It’s cannibalizing it for spare parts.”

  “What is…” the medtech said, then looked at her arm where the previously jagged shards had melted like ice cubes and were now linked by little conduits to each other. “It’s still active!”

  “It’s starting to heal her, but it’s not working very fast. I think we can keep her going, but the regenerator isn’t sucking poison anymore. She’s falling apart.”

  A few seconds after he said that a new tendril shot out from the Vorch’nas that extended through her arm and up into her chest and head, attacking the poison and the bits of new construction that the Archons had implanted while initiating new healing in the most vulnerable of areas. The pair saw that no new poison was being generated in those places, then stopped their own repair work and focused only on pulling out more of the poison.

  That didn’t last long, with the two Archons needing to disconnect entirely as the Vorch’nas tendrils grew like a tree that soon covered her entire body and began to fight even their light interference, forcing the mage and piccolo to disconnect from their biological hacking.

  They both stood up, releasing their touch on her as the others looked on.

  “What happened?” Zeddi demanded.

  “She’s coming back, I think,” the piccolo said. “It’s taking control of her, but I don’t know if it’s late. She’s broken inside.”

  “How long before we know?” he asked, but no one answered as they saw the little blood rivers across her skin suddenly dry up and get reabsorbed into her body. Th
e cracks in her skin did not, but they weren’t seeping blood anymore and the pale white coloration of her skin began to redden up again.

  “I think we’ll have our answer soon,” the mage said, with the medtechs returning soon with boxes of equipment that they rarely used.

  “No need,” the Captain said, waving them off. “Her jewel is active and repairing her.”

  Both of them sighed in relief, dropping the boxes on the table near her severed arm as they bent over and sucked air, having sprinted all the way to and from the medbay to try and save precious seconds.

  Kara didn’t regain consciousness for several more minutes, and when she did it was an unpleasant sight. She jerked violently, then began thrashing around on the floor in obvious pain. The piccolo reached down to restrain her and try to help numb the pain, but he got hit so hard by her arm that it knocked him up and onto her nearby bed as she yelled.

  She yelled many times, and with her mental defenses down everyone could hear her telepathic screams as well. Those without telepathy didn’t understand what they were hearing, but the Archons did. The Vorch’nas was healing her without pain numbing, and it was literally tearing her apart inside in order to put her back together.

  All the Archons responded in sync, diving on her as they linked up in battlemeld and held her down while hacking into her body and numbing it as much as they could. The Vorch’nas fought them, but it couldn’t keep them all out and didn’t have the resources to try. It had too much to repair to even bother with numbing, so it was up to the Archons to make Kara as immune to it as possible.

  Holding her down wasn’t easy, especially when she blew out a random Jumat blast. They knew she wasn’t trying to, but she couldn’t help it. It was like she was being attacked from all angles and Kara had to push back against something.

  Captain Zeddi ordered the room evacuated after getting thrown into a wall from one of the energy blasts, leaving only the Archons to try and restrain and help her through this on their own. He dismissed all but two of the medtechs, then waited with the pair outside for nearly an hour before the door to Kara’s quarters opened and the Archons walked out with the piccolo carrying Kara’s body over his right shoulder.