Star Force: Persistent Ravage (Wayward Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  She held to that schedule for another 5 months, at which point she was informed that she had hit the required benchmarks to qualify for the Canderian security forces, which was what they called their military, and was broken up into 5 divisions like the rest of Star Force. Commandos, Mechs, Aerial, Naval, and Aquatics, but unlike other factions Cancerous was mostly naval and had very little in the way of aquatics. The other three divisions were adequately filled out, and when Esna next saw Neela it was in a private chamber with both of them clad in the black with green trim Canderous uniforms rather than workout clothing.

  “Sit,” she said, doing likewise on a stool with a back on the other side of a low table. Esna sat in a lower and wider chair that had padding, folding her hands across her lap while her legs were stretched out partway underneath the table.

  “You’ve done very well, Esna,” she said uncharacteristically gracious. “Your training is now complete and I’m happy to bestow on you the rank of Munifex. You are now part of the security forces, and while I know what your answer will be I must ask the question as to which branch you wish to be placed.”

  “Commando,” Esna said simply, knowing that the mechs would be her best chance to get into combat with the Viks, but her Fornax wouldn’t be of much use in the battle machines and of all the V’kit’no’sat she wanted to fight, it was the Zen’zat that she felt destined to go up against, and that meant going Commando.

  “Confirmed. As for your assignment and future training, normally you would have your choice of available positions, and you can still have that if you wish, but Sen Legat Artu has opened a slot for you in a special unit if you choose to pursue it.”

  “What unit?”

  “A special operations unit that I do not know the name of. My rank isn’t high enough to know and such knowledge doesn’t affect my duties here. I’m told it is a very elite unit, but I know nothing more than that.”

  “If that’s where Artu wants me, so be it.”

  Neela nodded. “You walk away from here with several seda records. I’ve been hard on you because you needed me to be, but I want you to know you do Canderous proud and I wish you fortune in the days ahead. We need as many badasses as we can get.”

  Neela stood up and offered Esna her hand, with the newly minted Munifex almost snubbing her out of habit, but after a brief hesitation Esna stood and a accepted the gesture, with both Canderians squeezing tightly to test each other’s strength before letting go.

  “Normally I’d be going through assignment options for the next hour, but since your path from here is beyond my knowledge I have nothing else for you aside from that door,” Neela said, pushing a button on the table and opening a hidden door in the wall behind her. “Are there any personal possessions in your quarters that can’t be replaced?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Good. Then I won’t have to send someone to get them. When you leave this room you leave it as a Munifex and a member of the security forces. The door you came in is for recruits, this one is for warriors. Get moving, Phantom.”

  Esna offered Neela a small nod of respect, then looked away from her and didn’t look back as she stepped through the doorway and it closed behind her, leaving her in a dimly lit hallway with only small blue tracking lights along the base of the floor for illumination. It was just enough to navigate by, but Esna walked slowly suspecting another test of some sort as she moved through what was a labyrinth of twists and turns, but never with any offshoots. There was only one way to go, and that was ahead, until a beam of light hit her as a wall panel suddenly opened up beside her as the hallway continued on.

  “This way,” a voice said, with Esna squinting away the light as she left the dark hallway and stepped into a brightly lit one, seeing an unfamiliar face in a standard uniform. “Follow me.”

  Esna did as asked without any comment, moving through a long, straight hallway until they stepped into a lift at the end, with Esna standing shoulder to shoulder as the door closed and they were whisked off through the seda. Both of them were silent for a few minutes before the man finally spoke.

  “You don’t say much, do you? No questions about where we’re going?”

  “I figured I’d be told when I needed to know.”

  “Trusting of you.”

  “Should I not be?”

  “Depends. For your information you’re leaving the seda. I’m taking you to your unit in the field.”

  Esna raised an eyebrow. “Field work already?”

  “You’re not ready for it, but your psionic makes you valuable. You’re being integrated for that purpose and will have to work hard to catch up and keep up, but I don’t think that will be a problem for you.”

  “And you are?”

  “Just a handler taking you to your unit. My name is Darren. Do you prefer Esna or Phantom?”

  “One is my name, the other is a description. You choose.”

  “We’ll be spending several weeks together, so I’ll stick with Esna. You seem not to like the nickname.”

  “It’s tolerable. Where are we going?”

  “Far into Star Force territory,” he said, seeing her frown. “Not to fight the Viks. You’re nowhere near ready for that. Your unit is taking on lesser enemies that your Fornax will be very effective against.”

  “Who specifically?”

  “Your unit is called Pantheon 7, and the Pantheon units are our most elite Commandos deployed to vital, but small scale tasks on the rimward frontier and anywhere else needed. We’re not much good against V’kit’no’sat, at least not without taking heavy losses, but we can free up Archons and others by doing necessary work that they’d otherwise be tasked to handle.”

  “We?”

  “I speak of Canderous. I’m not part of the Pantheons, just an admirer. You are vastly inferior to their members save for your one skill, so make good use of it and try not to slow them down too much. They want you there, but do not expect peerdom. You’ll be in over your head with teammates all at least a millennia old.”

  Esna gulped, not liking being an inferior again, but at least this time they wanted her there rather than being stuck with her out of necessity. She swore to herself then and there that she wouldn’t be a burden, and would make up for whatever inefficiency she caused them with her psionic that was unique in all of Canderous. If they wanted her as a weapon to deploy in tactical circumstances she was fine with that, and would continue to advance her skills in the field rather than in pure training.

  She belonged in the field and knew that in her heart, but now she was going to have to prove it.

  22

  Darren led Esna to a hangar bay where they immediately boarded a waiting dropship and left the moon-sized seda behind. Seeing the surface from above was a view that Esna hadn’t had in years, and as the seda shrunk behind them it became one of many with other smaller versions nearby in addition to the massive number of non-Canderian stations situated around the ‘construct’ as it was called.

  Esna knew it was based on magnetism, which was far more powerful than gravity. Stars had both, but their magnetic fields were constantly in flux and therefore unreliable to make jumps off of. Making use of them required entirely different engines, so making mag jumps was little more than fiction for most races, but The Nexus was so large and so powerful they had found a way to make use of the technology by creating specialized transit ships to surf their Grid Point system carrying other ships and cargo with them.

  Esna and Darren were headed for one of those ships now, with it being so large that it dwarfed all Star Force ships at 47 miles in length. The one in question was owned by Star Force, but many of the others waiting in a reserved section of space so they could onload and offload cargo were not. They were owned by The Nexus and many of the stations located here were built by Nexus races so they could profit from the commerce flowing through the Grid Point, making this location more than just a Star Force stronghold…it was an access point to a vast transportation system that stretched far out into
the Rim and connected thousands upon thousands of races within The Nexus and the territory they held dominance over, if not full control.

  Esna had seen many vid screens and holograms of the Grid Point infrastructure, but actually flying through it now was something different altogether. She felt very small, and not just because her dropship was barely a shred of metal compared to all the magnificent feats of construction around them. The gaps between stations were huge, giving everyone plenty of room to move around, which only enhanced the scope of this Grid Point, but there was no competing with the primary sight that dwarfed everything else.

  The construct was the launch pad and landing point for the magnetic drive ships coming and going, with two massive discs 12,000 miles in diameter that created a stable magnetic field that the ships’ engines would grip much like gravity drives gripped the so named fields that stars and planets emitted…or in this case, coming from the Tarric 3 System, the gravity field haphazardly produced by the sheer mass of the construct. But with magnetic force being so superior to gravity, this construct alone allowed ships to accelerate far faster than the nearby star could. So fast, in fact, that they were even able to travel faster than most black hole routes, whose gravity wells were stronger than even those of stars.

  It was a crazy prospect, because you had to launch from and hit a target only 12,000 miles wide from so far away. Stars were much, much wider and they were hard to hit over shorter ranges, limiting the distance of stellar jumps for fear of missing your destination star and becoming lost in space as you raced through it at great speed without coming close enough to a star to slow down on.

  The Grid Point system jumps were so much farther it boggled the mind, and they had to arrive at another construct just like this one and hit the magnetic field exactly or they’d shoot by and become hopelessly lost in space. It freaked Esna out a bit, but Star Force and especially The Nexus had been operating this transit grid for a very long time and it had become incredibly reliable. The last ship lost had been over 600 years ago in The Nexus when a ship’s engine malfunctioned and launched them off a construct at a slight angle. The ship was never heard from again, but it hadn’t been a problem with the construct. It produced steady and reliable magnetic fields, and so long as Esna’s ship didn’t malfunction she’d be alright.

  Her dropship flew all the way over to the massive mag ship and into one of its docking bays, with Esna immediately recognizing the Star Force architecture inside as they walked off and the dropship promptly left them there.

  “Did The Nexus build this ship or us?”

  “Us,” Darren said simply. “We used their ships initially, but eventually we built some of our own. These we don’t have to pay shipping fees for.”

  “I thought all outgoing jumps required a fee paid to the Grid Point?” Esna said as she followed Darren across the huge hangar towards one of the side exits.

  “They do, but if we wanted to travel on one of The Nexus’s ships we’d have to pay a fee to ride the ship, then that ship would pay a fee to the Grid Point. Since we own this ship we don’t charge ourselves, so you and I can hop a ride without paying anything.”

  “How long before this one launches?”

  “It’s scheduled to go in 4 days. We’ll stay here until then, do some maintenance workouts, but otherwise rest up. I trust you know how to do maintenance workouts without someone feeding them to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then you’re free to roam around as much as you like so long as you don’t leave the ship, but first we’re going to get checked into quarters.”

  “Are there training facilities onboard?”

  Darren eyed her skeptically. “This is a Star Force ship, you know.”

  “So that’s a yes,” Esna agreed.

  “A ship this big, if not constructed with extensive training facilities, would be thrown into a star by the Archons. You won’t have the combat courses we have on the seda, but there will be everything you need for whatever workouts you like. Rest though, because when we get to where we’re going you’re going to need your strength.”

  “How long until we get there?”

  “A couple months. Depends how much layover time we have.”

  Esna didn’t say anything, but there was no way she was going to take it easy. After the two of them found an attendant that gave them quarters next to each other, Esna disappeared into the ship and spent a few hours looking around and resting before ending up in the training areas that serviced tens of thousands of people. If Darren was here he probably wouldn’t see her in the masses, so she didn’t give it another thought as she started to hammer herself on workout variants of what Rammak had taught her long ago…only now modified with everything she’d learned since.

  The Calavari had taught her that when in transit and unable to establish a rhythm, one needed to do workouts that would overlap enough to create consistency even if they weren’t exactly identical. The body responded to consistency in order to adapt, telling it what to do with repetitiveness, and if Esna was going to have to keep up with Commandos that were far superior to her then she was probably going to be a lot slower than them. Her Fornax would give her an advantage in combat but it wouldn’t make her legs go any faster, so she devoted her transitional training to pressing that weakness.

  Esna avoided any really long runs and worked on her speed, hammering herself just enough to leave her fatigued but not so much that she couldn’t do another workout 6 hours later. She did three a day with flexibility and agility drills in between along with longer than usual sleep periods. It was easy stuff compared to what she had been doing, but after a few days she was able to narrow down her effort levels enough to press her limits, leaving her drained after very few hours spent actually training.

  That meant she had to find low energy things to do, like stretching, when she wasn’t sleeping. One part of the training area was a meditation deck where it looked like it was on the surface of the ship with holographic walls and ceiling so realistic that Esna could have swore she was walking up a staircase onto the hull, with the stars, stations, and the huge construct nearby.

  There were other people here, all sitting still or doing slow movement drills. Several were in mediation handstands, including a couple of Archons according to their uniforms. Most people were in workout clothing, so Esna fit in seamlessly as she walked several hundred meters to an open section of the soft deck ‘plates’ and sat down, contorting herself into a pose that had her right leg up and behind her neck as she stretched sore muscles. Esna worked through many poses and relaxed her mind with the gratuitously easy workout for several hours, during which the mag ship began to move out of its parking slot and away from the other gigantic ships.

  It crept closer to the construct, heading towards the ‘bottom’ disc that facilitated the outgoing traffic, though it could also deal with incoming traffic in an emergency if the top disc malfunctioned. It would require a slight navigation shift of the incoming ships and some tricky navigating, but the purpose of having two, beyond having a backup, was to avoid collisions during the acceleration and deceleration phases. Once in coast phase the ships would be sending out constant signals ahead of them so other ships would have a short window of opportunity to nudge themselves sideways to avoid hitting one another, but for the most part the ships held to their side of the road, so to speak, and didn’t require constant weaving back and forth during transit.

  Esna’s view was magnificent, and even as she continued to work on stretching out her body in an upside down arch, she watched the construct get larger and larger until the lower disc eclipsed the rear of the ship entirely. It was so insanely huge it looked like a never ending wall stretching in all directions, but just as stark was the view ahead that was totally devoid of any ships or stations. They were clustered around the flanks of the ship and out of the travel routes, which made Esna feel like they were now in the hot zone.

  The mag ship drifted into the center position on the disc, then w
aited what seemed an extremely long amount of time before Esna heard the chimes that signaled they were about to jump. Those chimes would play out across the entire ship, but seemed very loud here on the quiet training deck, and a few seconds later the massive disc behind them shrank so fast it looked like it disappeared in the blink of an eye, then everything behind them disappeared into blackness as the light no longer traveled fast enough to catch up to them.

  The view in front of them was quite different as the ship slammed into the oncoming light from the distant stars so fast it became extremely hazardous radiation and no longer within visible wavelengths. The ship’s sensors compensated for that, with the stars shifting in color slightly but becoming so much brighter…at least until you started to look sideways. They got dimmer and dimmer, shifting to dark red just before the halfway point, which was where the blackness suddenly asserted itself.

  Esna knew what that looked like, having traveled on ships with gravity drives between stars, but what took her breath away was the slight movement of the stars. At first she thought she was imagining it, then she realized they were moving so damn fast you could actually see the stars moving past the ship at a snail’s pace.

  “Wow,” Esna whispered to herself as she flipped sideways out of her arch and planted her pelvis on the ground with her legs going sideways into an almost full splits. Her body wasn’t that flexible, yet, but she was getting close and leaned forward onto her forearms and held that pose, watching the stars ahead of her and completely forgetting that she was inside the mass of the ship, feeling like she was flying through space on the hull and realizing just how big the galaxy truly was.