Star Force: Excalibur (Star Force Universe Book 41) Read online

  “We turned the Veliquesh and Trinx around, not to mention the lizards. And we did it with training, not mental restriction. We can handle these guys.”

  “These have psionics, Aaron.”

  “So do we…and they have one right now. We’re not going to unlock their Lachka and Pefbar for a while.”

  “Why not?”

  “Archons don’t get those first, we learn to use our bodies, then we get upgrades. We’re doing the same here.”

  “So they’re not eating with it?”

  “No. Is that unusual?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “It’s the arms,” Jace pointed out. “They can’t really feed themselves with them, so they eat like dogs, cats, Scionate, and most quadrupeds do. They’re fine with it.”

  “The Zak’de’ron hate eating like that.”

  “Why?”

  “If they can’t direct the food into their mouths, it’s sloppy. With Lachka it goes right where they want it.”

  “They’re prisses?” Aaron asked.

  “You try eating with no hands and see how you like it.”

  “But they do have hands.”

  “Not like ours.”

  “You’re telling me they can’t use them to eat?”

  “They can, but it forces their snouts to point down, and they have to fight gravity. They can’t reach up to their faces like we can.”

  “I’d call that a challenge,” Jace scoffed.

  “They don’t. Eating without Lachka is seen as uncivilized.”

  “They are prisses…”

  “Is that why they gave all the V’kit’no’sat Lachka?” Aaron asked.

  “Might be part of the reason, but not all of it. And eating gives them plenty of free Lachka practice.”

  “I find that phrase insulting.”

  “Ditto,” Jace agreed.

  “We get practice using our hands,” Kara argued.

  “Are you a Zen’zat or an Archon?”

  Kara looked at him. “That bad?”

  “You sound like a Dragon fangirl.”

  She sighed. “Maybe I am.”

  “Aaron, think we should yank that thing off her?”

  “Might be a good idea.”

  “We lose all the Rit’ko’sor data if you do,” she pointed out.

  “So? We’d like our Kara back.”

  “I’m not brainwashed guys.”

  “Then start thinking like an Archon,” Jace said, poking her in the ribs telekinetically. “We do things our way, troubleshooting as we go, and if anyone gets out of line we have the ability to kick their ass. Stop worrying about the Raptors. We can handle this.”

  “You don’t know them like I do.”

  “I don’t care what their predecessors were like. These were just hatched and new to the galaxy. We’ll deal with them as they are, not as they’re predicted to be.”

  “We also don’t have a lot of time, fellas.”

  “She has a point there,” Aaron admitted.

  “If we’re going to go down, we’re going to go down fighting our way. Not the V’kit’no’sat way. Clear?”

  “Clear,” Kara said, glaring at Jace. “But we need to make the most out of the advantages that we have, and trying to rework everything with the Raptors isn’t smart when we’re pressed for time.”

  “Oh for crying out loud,” Jace said, hopping up on the rail and standing perched there as he looked down at Kara. “Pull your head out of your ass and look around for once. Database knowledge is just notes. It’s not reality.”

  The trailblazer hopped off and flew/floated down to the park where he landed amidst a group of several hundred little Raptors that split at the last moment to give him room. He knelt as he landed, with the little bipeds coming up to him to get petted.

  “See?” he said, looking up at Kara and Aaron while he petted two simultaneously. “You’re just being an old prune.”

  “Prune?” she asked, chin rising. “Are you willing to back that up, prick?”

  “Gladly. Get your ass down here. The younglings could use a demonstration.”

  “Fine,” Kara said, jumping up and over the railing as the herd ran off well wide of the two in response to a telepathic order.

  “No armor. Just you and me babe,” Jace said cockily.

  “It still upgrades me, you know.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “As you wish,” Kara said, running towards him the moment her foot hit the ground.

  Jace threw a Jumat blast at her, but Kara bisected it with a bioshield so it didn’t slow her much, getting up to him and throwing a punch as a Lachka field hit her in the foot. It tripped her up before she could pulse her Rentar, and Jace used the opportunity to launch into her, half running half flying, and landed an Archon punch into her chest that she only partially deflected.

  It hit on her left shoulder and spun her around, with Jace getting behind her and grabbing her in a headlock. She tried to pry herself loose but she couldn’t. She was stronger, but he had leverage and was using his Lachka to enhance it. Kara pulsed her Rentar to cancel that then threw a Jumat blast from the center of her body to knock him off…but somehow he still held on and even wrapped his legs around her waist, lifting her off the ground and flying her up a couple meters before coming back down and smashing her underneath him into the ground.

  He held her there, with her squirming to get loose, as Aaron calmly floated to the ground beside them and reached down to pet some of the watching Raptors that stood almost as high as his knee.

  “This…isn’t…fighting,” Kara argued, still trying to get free.

  “Can’t get free, huh?” Jace said, remarkably calm. “What happened to that superior strength?”

  “Be…honest. You…just…want…to hump…me.”

  “Now there’s some spite,” he congratulated her, but still wouldn’t let go. “But I can do this all day. Get yourself free, if you can.”

  Kara flew upwards, fighting against Jace, but with gravity on his side she couldn’t get more than a few inches up. She tried to twirl, but he fought that as well and his own Yen’mer was stronger than hers…probably because she used her armor to fly a lot of the time and he didn’t have that luxury.

  “Enough,” Kara said after a few more minutes. “I…can’t.”

  “Sometimes you can’t win,” Aaron said, talking to the little Raptors. “It’s not your fault, but if you quit trying it is. She tried, but she wasn’t strong enough. Jace is an ally, so he wasn’t going to hurt her, so she could surrender. Enemies don’t give you that option, so you keep trying until you are unable to keep fighting. No quitters here. We live and learn from our mistakes so we can get strong enough to win when we fight our actual enemies.”

  “Right now we’re protecting you so you can learn and grow here safely, but there will come a day when we can’t, and it will be on you to fight to protect yourself and each other. Remember, never give up against an enemy, no matter what, but there are no enemies here. We help each other learn and grow, and we never stop learning. Quiaff?”

  “Aff,” the little Raptors said in unison, agreeing with him.

  “Back to what you were doing,” he said, taking to the air along with the other two Humans as the Raptors scurried around, most of whom were looking at the much larger leaders until they were back up on the observation platform.

  “What happened?” Jace asked when they were back amongst themselves.

  “I held back,” she admitted.

  “How?”

  “I didn’t use my armor.”

  “I didn’t have any, so we were equal. How is that holding back?”

  “My Vorch’nas is part of me. Your armor is not.”

  “Your?” Aaron said with a ‘tisk, tisk’ sound following. “You mean ‘our’ armor.”

  “You said you were stronger even without it,” Jace said, not relenting. “Why couldn’t you free yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted with a scowl.

&nbs
p; “I do. You’re not thinking like an Archon, and you’ve become addicted to that thing. You don’t know how to fight without it anymore.”

  “That’s not even remotely true.”

  “You said you got a strength boost. Why couldn’t you free yourself?”

  “You’re not that much weaker.”

  “You dumbass. Why didn’t you even try any mental psionics? If you had made me twitch for even a moment you had a chance to wiggle free. You didn’t hit me with anything other than physical attacks.”

  Kara froze, not even having considered that. “I didn’t, did I?”

  “Hold still,” Aaron said, putting a hand on her forehead.

  “And?” Jace asked.

  “It’s been a while, but her mojo is different than I remember,” he said, pulling his hand back.

  “How so?”

  “Not sure, but you don’t feel the same.”

  “I need more than that.”

  “You feel…stiff.”

  “That explains a lot,” Jace noted.

  “How…” she asked, then she caught on. She wasn’t thinking beyond a few basic tactics. “Excuse me.”

  Kara walked off the platform and through the doorway to the interior of the city, leaving the pair of trailblazers alone.

  “Did we help?” Jace asked.

  “I’m not sure what’s wrong with her, but she suspects something now. Give her time.”

  “You think they did something to her?”

  “She got a load of new Vik knowledge in her head. That’s going to take some time to assimilate. If we keep pressing her, she’ll probably work through it and get her mojo back. She also unwittingly gave away all our secrets. I’d be kicking myself for a long time if I did that…”

  “She should have been able to get free. I didn’t have to try that hard.”

  “I noticed. She’s not herself right now, and I think it’s partly because she feels like she let us down.”

  “She’s not wrong about the Raptors. The group think is gonna stay unless we come up with an epiphany.”

  “They’re not the Archons, we are, so the herd can be useful so long as we provide a pathway for individuals to emerge. It’s clear the Zak’de’ron didn’t want that happening.”

  “So…wanna play with the kiddos?”

  “The more contact we have with them the better. I’ve got another half hour, so why not?”

  “I’ll match that,” Jace said, with both trailblazers hopping over the railing again to spend some time with the little dinosaurs that would eventually grow into a major asset for Star Force if the 1s came through on this, and after the success of the 2s with the lizards, there was no way in hell they were going to do anything less.

  The next three days were unpleasant ones for Kara as she dug into her own psyche for the majority of that time, doing very few workouts and just trying to get a handle on what was going on. She should have been able to beat Jace even without her armor, but she couldn’t even get out of a headlock. And what made it worse was she hadn’t even tried everything. For whatever reason she hadn’t even considered using her mental psionics, and that bothered her more than anything. She’d given up without trying everything, and to be honest, at the time, she was focused on her Vorch’nas as the key to getting out and her not using it was her holding back.

  She was seeing it as the answer to everything and hadn’t even bothered to use her wide array of psionics…and that wasn’t her. Aaron was right, her mojo was gone, and she couldn’t even remember when she’d lost it.

  Kara was sitting in her quarters on her bed in a cross-legged pose, digging into her mind further when her comm unit beeped, pulling her out of her introspection. She unfurled her legs and walked over to it, knowing only a handful of individuals had been set to ping her upon receipt of a message, and she was pleased to see it was from Paul.

  “I figured it out, Kara,” his holo said when she flicked it on as she stood in front of the console. “There was a key phase needed to activate it, and an obscure one at that. I was just messing around when I found it. It’s ‘Excalibur, be my strength,’ which comes from a very old and obscure cartoon. I don’t know why they expected me to know that, or if they expected me to figure it out this quickly…and I’m guessing not on the latter.”

  “Kara, it’s a database. It contains the Zak’de’ron notes on the Rit’ko’sor, probably the same that you got on your Vorch’nas, but it also contains similar notes for every race in the V’kit’no’sat. Every damn one Kara, and only I can use it. I can’t remember much when I’m not touching the sword, but when in physical contact I can access it like a second part of my brain. It’s a wealth of knowledge, and I’ve got it secured in a special chamber onboard the Excalibur, just in case it can transmit and is a Trojan horse to get information out of me.”

  “My read on this is simple. If we can find a way to survive the V’kit’no’sat, and actually start beating them, this is the Dragons’ way of saying we can annex whatever we can from them. They’re done with the V’kit’no’sat and are going to wipe them out one day, but we’re free to collect and reuse as much of them as we want. It doesn’t say that directly, but the implications are pretty clear. The only reason we’d need that level of information from the past is if we are going to assimilate them like we’re doing with the Rit’ko’sor…”

  Kara listened as Paul went on, detailing some of what he’d discovered and wanting her take on it, but she only half listened as a different conversation was taking place inside her.

  She looked down at her Vorch’nas, realizing that the valuable Rit’ko’sor data wasn’t unique to her anymore. The Zak’de’ron had probably given her that sword for Paul to use some day down the road, long after the truce ended and the war resumed. They probably thought it was a long shot…an investment for the future, just in case Star Force prevailed.

  Kara had never heard that phrase before, and if it was really obscure it wasn’t meant to be something accessed immediately, but a puzzle the Zak’de’ron knew that Paul wouldn’t let go.

  But they’d underestimated him and he’d figured it out in only a few months. That meant Kara no longer needed to be the Rit’ko’sor expert and she could disappear into the galaxy with her Clan and not be a continuing security threat to Star Force anymore.

  But there was also this mojo problem, and for the first time in a long time, Kara looked down at her left arm and seriously considered why she was keeping it.

  She sat down on the edge of her bed, questioning her sanity for not having had this discussion with herself earlier. Before the security breach the Vorch’nas had been an asset, but now it was also a liability, so why keep it? She hadn’t even been able to take Jace without deploying the armor, and at the very minimum she should have been able to get out of that headlock.

  “Kara you fool,” she said to herself while looking at her arm. “This has to end, and if Paul has the Rit’ko’sor knowledge then…hell, even that doesn’t matter. Aaron and Jace were right. We can deal with the Raptors our way and learn as we go. Why the hell haven’t I…”

  Kara looked down at the clear jewel running the length of her forearm. “Damn you. You’ve been helpful, but you’re not worth this,” she said, getting up and leaving her quarters on the planet to head up to her command ship that was sitting quietly in orbit.

  When she got up there she went straight to the armory, getting a death saber and strapping the pack on her back before grabbing a stun pistol and heading off to her personal quarters onboard the ship, drawing a few odd looks from the crew in the corridors.

  Kara closed and locked her door, then stood in the center of her room as grim determination took hold of her. This was stupid, but the most direct solution to the problem. And to be honest, she deserved this for the security breach. There was no way the secrets she’d let slip could ever be taken back, and Star Force was going to be the weaker for it.

  Nefron was exposed, as was Shangri-La and dozens of other secrets that had
to be kept, and she had unwittingly let them get stolen. No more. She had to be an Archon, not a lackey for the Zak’de’ron.

  Kara had the death saber strapped to her right arm, with the power line connected to the backpack, but the left one was still tethered on the pack. It wasn’t going to be needed, and Kara pointed the stun pistol in her right hand towards her left arm, making sure one last time that she was really going to do this.

  “Now or never, Kara,” she said, then shot her arm multiple times until it fell limp, hanging off her shoulder. Her head felt the wash of stun energy, making her a little loopy, but the rest of her body was still functioning more or less and she used her telekinesis to lift her arm back up in front of her and gave it one more shot for good measure.

  Kara dropped the stun pistol and ignited the death saber, with the glowing white blade leaping off the back of her hand where the gauntlet was attached. The perfectly flat blade was so narrow you could barely see it from the edge, but was better than an inch wide, and would cut virtually anything on contact.

  Kara, keeping her numb arm level telekinetically, slipped the blade underneath her elbow, then flicked it up with such a casual gesture it seemed inconsequential…as did her severed arm with the Vorch’nas attached dropping to the floor with a gentle thud.

  Even though her arm was numb, she felt the effect somehow, not to mention smelling the cauterized tissue that was now seeping blood. She saw the drops falling on the floor as she deactivated the death saber and shrugged off the backpack…then recoiled in horror as the Vorch’nas began to transform, leaving her severed arm and crawling on little spindly legs it spawned towards Kara’s foot.

  She stepped back, but it jumped towards her upper leg. Thankfully she got her bioshields on in time and it bounced off, but it tried to come after her again, maybe programmed to attach itself to the main part of her body and begin repair, knowing it couldn’t regenerate a new body from her severed arm, but it didn’t matter. There was no way it was going to get back on her again.

  Kara telekinetically grabbed the death saber pack, half pulling it over her shoulder as she slid the gauntlet back on her hand while pushing the Vorch’nas away with her bioshields each time it jumped at her…then she ignited and swiped the glowing blade across it…which knocked it into her bed with a glowing red gash in it, but it hadn’t been cut in two as she expected.