Star Force: Ascension (SF27) Read online

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  March 1, 2405

  Brokal System

  Sri’ka

  Morgan ducked to the right, letting a dodgeball-sized projectile shoot by over her shoulder and impact the back wall of the training chamber. It dented on contact with no rebound, absorbing the momentum, and dropped down into a retrieval trough that ringed the chamber as it slowly reformed into a perfect sphere. A tone sounded, indicating that the ball had in fact nicked her shoulder and subtracted a point from her accumulating score that was tallied on the upper wall in front of her.

  Morgan would have frowned, but two more balls were coming her way, one from front left and the other from back left. She spun coming up and caught one on the outside of her right wrist with it deforming around her hand and barely catching on the sensor gloves she wore that counted it as a stop rather than a hit. As she flicked it off to the side and outside of the small circle she had to remain within she knelt down and caught the other, palming it, and throwing it towards a target on the wall. It hit and fell inside the holographic wall panel, adding 3 points to her score as another came in and hit her in the back…subtracting 2 more.

  Normally she didn’t have this much trouble on the agility drill, but ever since her gravity crush and subsequent repair her body hadn’t felt right. Most of the oddness had dissipated, but she was left feeling ‘hollow’ and it was taking a lot of physical activity to chip away at that feeling. To top it off she was weaker than before, probably due to the new tissue being grown, but given that she hadn’t had any major injuries…such as a missing piece of muscle like Sam had endured a few decades ago…she’d figured the catch-up time would be minimal.

  Honestly she didn’t know what was going on with her body, but in the past training had always straightened her out and it was training that she fell back on now, frustrating as it was.

  She took several more hits, all nicks that impacted the walls, but was getting enough dodges in to keep a positive score…plus the occasional captures that added bonus points. Her score sucked compared to previous runs, but at the least she was staying in the positive through the first few rounds of the ascending challenge she was running. Morgan fought hard to stay in the positive as long as she could, twisting, turning, and occasionally jumping to avoid the balls and stay alive, but eventually the level difficulty came up to the point where she was getting hit more than evading and her score went negative.

  When that happened the challenge ended and her level reached was emblazoned on the wall…

  Level 18

  Morgan felt like cussing but didn’t have the energy. She’d doubled up her ambrosia doses and was carrying a sugar high-like headache as a result, but her body wasn’t soaking it up like it used to. She was constantly tired, but wasn’t backing off her workouts, planning to fight her way through it because the idea of just sitting and thinking was unbearable right now. With everything that had just happened and her body being out of wack, calm was the last thing she wanted. She needed to act, and at the moment naval combat was all that was available.

  Her fleet had been bombarding one of the Nestafar jumpships for nearly a day now but it still hadn’t surrendered. Captain Wilkinson had reported they’d disabled its gravity drives, so it was no longer a flight risk, but pick at it as they may the crew wasn’t giving up…and all Morgan had to do was sit/stand on the bridge and watch the plasma bombardment as they beat the crap out of the giant ship’s hull.

  There was only so much of that she could take, so Morgan had banished herself to the Red Ranger’s sanctum and had been training in one form or another ever since, catching only a pair of half hour long catnaps along the way. After that she couldn’t sleep, another little side effect of her recent brush with death.

  She’d had the medics do another scan to confirm that the regenerator had put her back together correctly, which it had, and they had no explanation for her eye color change. They had told her that it was a pigment change only, so no latent superpowers there, but they also couldn’t detect any variations that resulted in her airbending skills either, so other than making sure all her organs were intact the medics were of little use.

  Morgan felt like having another go at the challenge but opted to stop now after 20 tries, reminding herself that she needed to take breaks if for nothing else to clear her head and get some water. To that end she walked over to the all but invisible door and flipped up a cover panel, pressing the button underneath.

  The door pulled open, revealing the outside hallway while a table rotated down on her right. There she stripped off the sensor gloves she’d been wearing and laid them back in the tray next to several others before walking outside and reaching down to the floor where she had left a small satchel. She pulled out a water bottle, undid the lid, and began sucking it down faster than anticipated…meaning she’d gotten more dehydrated than expected, though she wasn’t sweating much.

  She refused to sit down, so she just stood in the empty hallway sipping the second half of her water bottle and trying to wrap her head around what was happening to her. After a few minutes and no new revelations she sucked down the last of the water and put the bottle back in her satchel, noticing her earpiece had a message light lit, so she pulled it out, put it in her ear, and triggered the playback.

  “I assume you’re still in training,” Wilkinson’s voice said, “so I didn’t want to interrupt you directly, but the jumpship has just signaled its surrender. I’ve got a few Calavari transports standing by to board and begin taking on prisoners, with more heading up from the surface. We left them with one intact hangar bay, but the rest of the ship’s exterior is pretty much trashed. There are also depressurized areas that have probably killed a fair number of their crew that we’ll have to deal with if we’re going to claim it.”

  “It took an awful lot of pounding to get them to capitulate, and the surrender came from the vessel under attack…NOT the others. We haven’t heard a peep from them, and I’m not certain whether they’re going to follow suit or force us to put them into the same level of hurt before they’ll give up. I’m coordinating with the Calavari on the prisoner collection, but am waiting for your order to begin attacking the second jumpship.”

  Morgan sighed. At least something was going right…assuming the Nestafar didn’t have some other trick up their sleeve.

  The trailblazer switched to active mode and contacted the bridge.

  “What’s the status on the prisoners?”

  “Progressing smoothly. I think we finally got the message across,” Wilkinson answered.

  “And the other two?”

  “Still nothing.”

  “Do you have an ETA on the prisoner transfer?”

  “The Calavari estimate 10 hours, and we’re already 2 hours in. What do you want done with the jumpship?”

  “We don’t have the people to sweep it, so tell the Calavari that if they can secure it they can keep it.”

  “And the other jumpships?”

  “Hold off until the Calavari get the unloading completed. That will give the Nestafar plenty of time to think, and make sure we keep a tight noose around them so they don’t come to the conclusion that they’re better off risking a collision than by staying put.”

  “I still get the feeling like they’re waiting for reinforcements,” the Captain said.

  “Me too. Focus on securing our small victory, then we’ll worry about other things.”

  “Copy that,” Wilkinson said. “Anything else?”

  “Any news I need to know about?”

  “The Kvash have a probable location for the enemy command ship. I assume our captured jumpships take priority?”

  “They do. Where is it?”

  “Middle orbit around
the 4th planet. It’s staying separate from their fleet, but right now that’s the strongest enemy formation in the system. The missing jumpships haven’t turned up yet.”

  “They’re not damaged,” Morgan reminded him. “They might have bugged out if their cargo had already been dropped off on the planet.”

  “My intelligence says some of it was. The Calavari believe they still contain troops and equipment that they’d like to not see on the surface.”

  “Any more requests for surface strikes?”

  “I have a list of requests from the Calavari and Kvash for assistance at various locations across the system.”

  “Busy busy. Tell them that we’ll do what we can after we deal with the jumpships.”

  “That’s the general sentiment I’ve been expressing. There are several locations I believe we can have an immediate impact with low risk to our ships. I’ve filed recommendations in the log if you want to have a look later.”

  “Jump cradle secure?”

  “It is.”

  “Carry on, Captain.”

  “Yes, Archon,” he said, ending the conversation.

  Morgan put the earpiece in her satchel and was about to go back into the agility chamber when she hesitated. There was another chamber not too far down the hall that she’d been avoiding, and she figured she might as well face it now…before she lost her nerve again.

  Picking up the satchel and carrying the short backpack across one shoulder, the Archon headed across the Sanctum until she stood facing the doors to the gravity chamber, where she reluctantly pressed the entry button, setting her gear down outside as the double doors pulled open. Gritting her teeth she walked inside and let them reseal.

  The room looked like the inside of a giant Rubik’s cube, with the lines glowing aqua and the panels a dark black. The floor was polished like glass, but the glossy material sunk down beneath her feet for about an inch before bottoming out, providing a crash mat for acrobatic maneuvers. The lines on the floor glowed as well, giving Morgan’s eyes visual reference marks if and when she should start tumbling about. They were the only illumination in the chamber, though there were so many lines that it was actually quite bright inside.

  One of the squares held the control panel, which Morgan walked over to and selected a basic program, setting the timer for a 30 second delay…then she walked back over to the center and stood ready, with a host of thoughts and emotions flowing through her mind.

  The gravity began to inch up, .05g every 5 seconds until it topped out at 1.5g. Morgan held still while it amped up, then began walking around, making little movements and trying to lock down the sensation. She was surprised, though she knew she shouldn’t be, for the odd feeling that had been eluding her mental lock now manifested itself in all its icky glory, causing a slight tremble in her arms as every inch of her body ached in a way that made it feel like she was about to come apart into a thousand tiny pieces.

  Her stomach also turned over a bit, with the nausea rooted in the feeling that something was just plain wrong with her body. Morgan didn’t have a lot of experience with such things, being in superhuman shape for nearly all of her life, but there were a few childhood experiences that she could draw on and was able to link this to the source of all her trouble.

  Her structural integrity, as she thought of it, had not repaired along with the rest of the damage to her body…at least not all the way. Jason had mentioned a similar experience after his bout with a regenerator, and had in fact lost several fitness levels as a result of his concussion damage. While gravity compression wasn’t exactly the same Morgan thought it would be at least vaguely similar, and that gave her mind a point of reference to start analyzing the changes from.

  She’d done gravity training before and this was not the way her body had responded, even all the way back to her first experience. She was weak in places she couldn’t identify, but the feeling persisted throughout her body. That meant systemic damage, and the only way to heal it was to back off and work through lower level training in a sort of callisthenic massage that would loosen up any lockdowns as well as provide enough activity to begin adapting back into a stronger persona.

  Finally with a plan of action, Morgan walked over to the gravity controls and dialed it down to 1.1g. From there she began a familiar stretching/agility/gymnastics routine, just going through the paces of easy backbends and layouts, morphing into yoga holds and exploding up into leaping twists. It all felt bad at first, but the odd toxic feeling began to bleed out after a couple of hours. Morgan realized a part of her had been clenched up inside, fighting the gravity that was no longer killing her. Now that a little of it had returned she was able to activity fight against it…seeing that it was within her ability to defeat and control. When that got through to her subconscious mind she began to relax and the poisonous pill inside of her slowly started to disintegrate.

  When she was eventually finished with her ‘cleansing’ routine she left the gravity chamber drenched in sweat after getting lost in the movements and burning 5 hours in what felt like 45 minutes. She quickly sucked down two more water bottles out of her satchel, as well as downing a couple of ambrosia-laced cookies before heading over to one of the spare quarters in the sanctum and flopping down on the bed face first. The ranger curled her shoulder under and drew up her legs slightly into a familiar crash position and let the lingering fatigue drag her into a semi-conscious state that she was glad to be able to access after so many unsuccessful attempts over the previous day.

  Now that her mind had unclenched, the rest that had been denied to her flooded into her mind like a cool wave and she began feeling the mental fragmentation start to undo in a flurry, typical of her experience with training-induced power naps. After that, where her mind went she didn’t recall, but she didn’t wake up for another 6 hours.

  Swiping a bit of drool out of the side of her mouth, her body broke the stiff nap-lock and she walked over to the quarters’ computer console and logged into her account. She was going to check the Captain’s priority target list, but as she accessed the system she decided to divert to her personal log and activated the console’s camera to record another entry.

  “Successful gravity workout, resulting in a nap crash,” she said, stretching her neck distractedly and not wanting to look directly into the camera. “The odd feeling is mostly gone, but I can’t say for sure because I’m afraid I’m numb and not realizing it. Jason, now I know what you meant. The regenerator doesn’t repair everything the same way it was before, and I’m not even talking about my eyes,” she said, pointing a pair of fingers up towards her face.

  “Freaky, huh? No idea why they changed. Thought it might be gravity damage or something, but neither I nor the medics have a clue.”

  Morgan paused while in thought, as she typically did. These logs were meant for the other trailblazers and would be dispatched through the computer systems of various jumpships, passing through the star systems until they eventually found their way to the other 99. Morgan had been gone so long she’d run out of entries from the others to read/view, but she still kept logging her own, making her feel a little closer to them, especially now, when she really needed someone to help her sort all this out.

  “Still angry about losing the Archons. We pounded one of their jumpships into submission and the Calavari are offloading the prisoners now…or they were last I checked. I’ve been camped out in the sanctum for a while. This is the only place I can seem to get half a clear head. I could really use a sparring partner right now to key off of, but there are no other Archons in the system and we won’t be rejoining the others until…actually I don’t know. This system is critical and there’s a lot my four warships can do if we stick around, so our return to the armada is up in the air.”

  “Damn these comm delays, I don’t even know if I have an armada left. We have got to get the V’kit’no’sat transmitters figured out. We’re way too blind like this.”

  Another pause. Morgan knew she was rambling but h
eld up the urge to stop, because she’d been encouraged by the others to just ‘think out loud’ since they weren’t around to pry her with questions and they all needed to keep up with each other’s progress as much as possible in between actual meetings.

  “This war, I mean the Nestafar/Calavari part, is nuts. It’s so chaotic. It’s like they don’t know how to fight on a large scale. They’re throwing troops here and there and fighting the small battles, but there doesn’t appear to be any overall strategy…just losses. Way too many losses. It’s like they don’t know what they’re fighting for, just taking swings at the enemy. I can sympathize with that, but when you’re taking, losing, and retaking the same territory over and over again you’ve got to ask yourself what the hell you’re doing.”

  “We can’t follow the Alliance’s lead. They may be better organized when working with each other, but it’s not up to our standards. If we’re going to fight with them, then let them fight with us…we incorporate them into our strategies, not the other way around. I’ve had the chance to study Sri’ka and the rest of this system in detail and it’s a mess. No large scale planning. Paul would have a fit if he saw it.”

  “I hope you’re doing better than this, brother. If we were assaulting this planet we’d break it easily. The Calavari may be fighter strong, but they’re not builders…then again, other than us who is? The Bsidd aren’t bad, from what I’ve heard, but I haven’t seen any war strategy in any race’s designs other than ours and the lizards. No wonder the V’kit’no’sat dominated this part of the galaxy. Even their simplest stratagems are high thinking for our allies.”

  “We can do better. We have to do better. And you’d better be doing better, otherwise when I get back I’ll kick your ass for wasting so much time. This is a blood feud out here, and I don’t expect the main lizard invasion to be any less intense when it eventually comes. We have to be ready, otherwise these idiots will roll over us with sheer numbers.”

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