Star Force: Battlemeld (SF45) Read online

  “They’re identical twins.”

  The medic frowned and looked at the Archon like he’d lost his mind.

  “They both have identical DNA and XY chromosomes, but Karen’s male genetics never activated.”

  “Oh, Androgen Insensitivity. That is curious, but I don’t see how it could be a factor…then again, with us being unable to determine a cause I suppose it’s possible,” he said, referencing a condition found in some Humans where they are immune to the effects of certain bio-chemicals. In the case of Karen and others, one of those chemicals was the developmental trigger to activate the male portion of her genetic code.

  All Humans contain female genetics, with approximately half also containing male genetics. During pre-birth growth a ‘fork in the road’ moment occurs where one is chosen. For XX chromosome females there is no male genetics to activate, thus they develop the only genetic characteristics they have. Those Humans with XY chromosomes have the option to go either way, and a trigger chemical is surged through the individual during development at the moment of differentiation.

  That chemical activates the male genetics and they develop. In a few cases something goes wrong with the chemical trigger and the male genetics don’t activate, leaving the default female genetics as the blueprint for development. In this way a handful of females carry inactive male genetics, whereas all males carry inactive female genetics.

  Karen was one such case, leaving her with the same DNA as Travis, despite the fact that they had developed into different genders.

  “Scan me,” Nathan insisted.

  “For what purpose?”

  “Just in case my psionics are operating incorrectly. Them both going down simultaneously can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Have a seat,” the medic said, pointing to an open bed/table beside Travis. Nathan walked over and hopped up, then laid back as several pieces of scanning equipment were extruded from the wall and brought out over his head.

  “I have something,” the medic continuing to scan Travis said. “Looks like malformed Ikrid tissue.”

  Nathan waved off his own medic and sat up, careful not to bump the hanging equipment. “He has Ikrid tissue?”

  “A very small amount, but it’s not developed correctly…at least, it’s not developed according to the base pattern we have on file.”

  “He shouldn’t have any at all,” the head medic said, walking up and viewing the scan results. He glared at the datapad then glanced at Karen. “Check her.”

  It took a moment to set up the proper scan, for the wealth of their equipment operated in different ways without there being one ‘check all’ function. Her medic did the scan, then handed the results to the head medic.

  “She has one too,” he told Nathan, then stared at the ceiling for a moment trying to piece it all together. “We’ve seen others have similar spontaneous psionic tissue growths, and the fact that they’re operating off of an identical genetic code can explain why they both have them, but I can’t theorize a link between this and their current condition. Ikrid acts as a biological comm relay. It doesn’t control any bodily functions, let alone anything critical enough to knock them unconscious. Am I wrong in that?” he asked Nathan.

  “I didn’t use any Ikrid abilities on them, but it is possible to overwhelm them in various ways, none of which I’m capable of doing even if I tri…” Nathan cut off, flinching suddenly as Karen jerked awake, sitting up so fast that she banged her head on the scanning equipment and reflexively hit back at it with a right forearm swing, breaking it off and throwing it into the medic at her side.

  He took the equipment to the face, breaking his nose and knocking him off his feet.

  “Easy,” Nathan said unnecessarily as Karen fully woke up and got her bearings.

  “What?” she asked groggily, seeing that she was in a med bay and Travis was lying beside her unconscious.

  The head medic raced around the end of the bed and got to the injured one, with Karen belatedly noticing…then feeling the dull spot on her arm where it had hit the now broken equipment.

  “Did I do that?” she asked apologetically.

  “He’ll live,” Nathan said, walking up beside her and placing a hand on her shoulder. “What happened to you?”

  Karen looked down at the medic and the river of blood oozing out between his fingers as he grasped his nose lightly, wincing against the pain.

  “Sorry,” she offered.

  The medic lazily waved off her comment with his free hand as the head medic pulled him to his feet, then motioned for one of the others to take him over to another station for treatment while he got back to their patients.

  “How do you feel?” he asked her.

  “Sucky,” she answered, then looked at Nathan. “Last thing I remember was getting tangled up with your legs. What’s wrong with Travis?”

  “You both blacked out at the same moment,” the acolyte told her. “I used a Fornax field on you, but I have no idea how it knocked you out.”

  “I thought Fornax was white noise,” she said, staring hard at Travis. “It loses effect when you stop transmitting.”

  “As far as I know that’s the case…but something happened to you two.”

  “Did you wake me up?”

  “No. You just came out of it on your own. I tried waking you up on the mat, but your mind was locked down. Both of yours were. I don’t know how to do that with mine if I tried. Have you two ever blacked out at the same time before?”

  “A couple times,” Karen admitted, “but that was because we both got hit at the same time. You didn’t hit us with any stun weapon?”

  “No.”

  “Then this is new,” she said, swinging her legs off the side of the bed and looking directly at Travis.

  The head medic pushed between her and Nathan and got to the head of Travis’s bed, where he rotated the scanning equipment around to reach over to Karen, given that she’d just trashed her own.

  “Hold still,” he said, running the equipment around her head with Karen accommodating him.

  “Did you know you have some psionic tissue?” Nathan asked.

  Karen glanced at him. “I do?”

  “Both of you do.”

  Her eyes moved to Travis, who was lying perfectly still. “No we didn’t. What type?”

  “Ikrid.”

  “A very small anomalous growth,” the medic corrected. “I’m not even sure if it’s active. Have you any conscious control over it?”

  “I didn’t know I had any,” she reminded him. “How did I…did we get it?”

  “It’s very rare, but some people have them without going through the upgrade process.”

  Karen looked at Nathan and saw the acolyte shake his head, indicating that the medic didn’t have clearance to know what the ‘upgrade process’ truly was, though all medical personnel involved with Archons had to be given some knowledge of psionics in order to treat them.

  “They’re usually nonfunctional or malfunctioning without the designer genetic modifications. I’m not sure how it works, but we’ve got documented cases of many civilians being treated by Star Force to correct the growths. How you guys were missed I don’t know.”

  “They were never scanned,” Nathan said, a few puzzle pieces falling into place. “Any bad headaches in the past?”

  “Nothing like what you’re talking about,” she said, looking at Travis again. “And he’s been with me since basic training. He hasn’t had anything either.”

  “How’s she look now?” Nathan asked.

  “The anomalous brain activity has ceased, and now that she’s awake she appears fully normal. Am I right in assuming that there’s some information that you’re withholding that would require passing this on to a higher level tech?” he asked, looking directly at Nathan. “Psionics seem to be a touchy subject with you guys and I don’t want to pry.”

  Nathan was silent for a moment, glancing down at Travis.

  “Is he going to wake up anytime soon?” Karen a
sked the medic.

  “I have no idea what’s keeping him unconscious, so I can’t answer that, though the fact that you woke up on your own is encouraging.”

  “Give me 10 minutes,” Nathan said, lightly punching Karen in the shoulder as a friendly gesture before he hurried out of the med bay.

  “Is he just asleep or something worse?”

  “His mental state is erratic, so I can’t really say,” the medic answered as one of the others came back over, though the one with the broken nose was no longer in the bay, having been sent back to his quarters while he recovered. “But it’s more than just being asleep, otherwise you two would have woke up with some chemical persuasion. The source of the lockdown is mental, I can tell you that much. And if it is psionic related then I’m not going to be of much help to you.”

  “But we do have psionic tissue?”

  “Yes,” he said, pulling the datapad over and showing her the scans from both adepts, along with a bit of translation for the images. Before they finished Nathan came back in and pointed to Travis.

  “Get him mobile. You two are going to Earth.”

  “How soon?” the medic asked as Karen took a step over to Travis and lightly lifted him up into a sitting position.

  “As soon as we can get to the spaceport. Anything you can do for him in transit?”

  “Other than run additional scans and stand by to act if something changes, no.”

  “Go ahead and transmit the data you’ve gathered to Atlantis. You’re relieved,” the acolyte said, looking to Karen. “Let’s go.”

  She slid an arm underneath Travis’s knees and lifted him up across her chest, carrying him out the door and all the way down to the waiting puddle jumper, with the insystem transport carrying them up to orbit and onto a jumpline directly to Earth that got them to Atlantis within 3 hours.

  Travis woke in the same manner as Karen, bolting upright still in combat mode, that having been the last waking memory he had. When he blinked away his grogginess he found that his head hurt…along with the rest of his body.

  “What the…”

  “You’ve been out for four days,” Karen said, walking up beside him in a small med bay with half a dozen medics around him, plus one Archon that he recognized as Jaime-532, the highest ranking Sangheili currently stationed in the Solar System. “We’re in Atlantis.”

  “Why, what, and how?” Travis asked, picking up on Karen’s serious mood.

  “That’s rather complicated,” one of the medics said, hopping up on the foot of Travis’s bed as the Archon sat up. “I’m Chandler Vortison. Me and my team,” he said, thumbing towards the other medics, “are tasked with trying to understand the V’kit’no’sat genetic engineering. We haven’t learned much, as pathetic as that admission is, but we have learned what happened to you.”

  “I’m all ears,” Travis said after throwing Karen a glance.

  “Well, first off you blacked out during a sparring session. Somehow you transmitted this to your sister and knocked her out too.”

  “Thanks, bro,” Karen said sarcastically.

  He glared at her then turned his attention back to Vortison. “Transmitted?”

  “Both you and your sister have malformed Ikrid growths. How this occurred is not known, but it’s not unheard of either. We have 834 documented cases of psionic tissue developing in non-Archons, all but 3 of which were dysfunctional in some way. The three that weren’t were lucky, because the genetic degradation should have messed them up. You see, Zen’zat were never meant to reproduce. As such, the V’kit’no’sat never took into account translational problems when they genetically engineered the psionic abilities into the Ter’nat.”

  “Wait…you’re saying I knocked both of us out because of faulty Ikrid?”

  “No, it’s more than that. Let me explain in full before you ask further questions…it’ll save time. When our ancestors were left on this world and began to reproduce, their Zen’zat abilities transferred to their offspring, but over the millennia they degraded. They’re still fully intact within our genetic code, but they’re no longer active, just something we carry around with us like a lot of additional coding. For some reason these dormant abilities wake up in a few people, but they don’t fully wake up and you get all kind of problems as tissue develops incorrectly, sometimes resulting in death, but most of the time in partial abilities. Then again, a lot of the cases we’ve seen have tissue that doesn’t do anything because it’s not fully formed. We imagine there are more people like that out there, but we don’t scan everyone, so it’s usually the ones experiencing problems, headaches and such, that we find.”

  “Your Ikrid growth is malformed. It is smaller, incomplete, and the tissue that is present is very different from what it’s designed to be…trick is, yours is actually working, but in a new way. Somehow your body adapted it to serve a specific function, which in this case is providing a low Ikrid link to your sister and only her. It took some time to identify, but you’re both continuously transmitting to one another. That’s probably why you never noticed it before, but your tandem skills, I’m told, are top notch, which suggests that you’re both using this connection in a positive way, so it’s not just random transmissions.”

  “Basically you cheated,” Jaime interrupted, “but it’s a very useful cheat. One that I’d prefer you didn’t waste.”

  “Waste how?” Travis asked.

  “Well, normal procedure in these cases is to correct the malformation by fully unlocking your psionic abilities and allowing you to grow proper tissue. Problem is, that will destroy your current Ikrid growths, severing this connection you two have.”

  Travis looked at Karen. “What connection?”

  “I said the same thing, but the computers say there’s a link, and I’m not interested in finding out what it will feel like to not have it.”

  “What’s the range of this link?” Travis asked Vortison.

  “We’re not sure, but we’re guessing about 20 meters based on Karen’s transmission strength. You’ve been in lockdown so we couldn’t measure yours.”

  “I’ve been further than 20 meters away from her before and I didn’t notice any negative effects.”

  “It may not work that way. It could be that you just get tidbits of information from time to time that are useful, like knowing where she is during close range training drills without having to look.”

  “Not that it’s perfect,” Karen noted, given the number of injuries they’d given each other over the years, all of which were light.

  “You two hold the tandem trainee record and are one of the better team pairs regardless of rank,” Jaime pointed out. “It might be natural for you, but you’ve definitely got an advantage. Don’t waste it.”

  “Wait, what happened to make us…me, black out in the first place? You said I was in lockdown?”

  Vortison exchanged a glance with Jaime, then swallowed hard before he spoke.

  “The trailblazers have been breaking through into tier 2 psionics, and we’ve been fortunate enough to get some of them under observation when it happens. We’ve learned there are triggers that have to be satisfied before the flash growth of tissue occurs. You hit a trigger and your body tried to grow new tissue that your genetics didn’t appear to have, because it’s dormant. When that happened you blacked out, and stayed out because your body kept trying to access what wasn’t there in an endless cycle that we only just now broke.”

  “How the hell did I try to skip to tier 2 psionics?”

  “We’re not sure, but we think it might have to do with your link to your sister. If the trigger somehow was reading you both at the same time it might have thought you were more developed than you are, but that’s just a theory at this point. I don’t have a firm answer for you.”

  “What’s to stop it from happening again?”

  “We’re going to give you the other 6 basic psionic abilities,” Jaime told him. “Adept or not, you’re a special case.”

  “What if what I ne
ed is in the 7th?”

  “That’s the problem,” Karen agreed. “If we reset our Ikrid, we lose our link. If we don’t, you could be blacking us both out at any time now.”

  “It probably won’t occur unless you’re in training or combat,” Vortison added, “but we don’t know for sure what the actual trigger is. We’ve partially mapped out some of the others, but this one is new to us.”

  “Mapped out?” Travis asked.

  “We know what we need to do in training to trigger them,” Jaime answered.

  “More or less,” Vortison added. “We still don’t have specifics, nor are we close to finding a way to medically trigger the upgrades.”

  Travis frowned. “Is that even possible?”

  “If you’re a V’kit’no’sat, sure,” Vortison explained. “We, however, are not.”

  “And good thing too,” Jaime chimed in. “Because we’d probably be killed for even suggesting it.”

  “Point,” Travis admitted, knowing that the V’kit’no’sat wanted the Zen’zat to earn everything, even though the other races got their bio upgrades at birth where Ter’nat did not.

  “Ultimately it’s your choice,” Jaime told him, “but for the time being I want both of you down to the pyramid for upgrades and a permanent training assignment. The techs are going to study you in detail, and you’re going to explore this link you two have got. If you lock up again they know how to end it, so for now we’re in information gathering mode. Later on, if you want, we can erase this, but I strongly suggest that you keep your link. It’s the only one we know of to exist.”

  Travis looked over at Karen. “Just when I was starting to get tired of you.”

  “Shut up…this is all your fault anyway. I didn’t knock you out.”

  “You’re just sore that I advanced sooner than you did.”

  “Tried to advance,” she reminded him, “and failed.”

  “Whatever,” Travis said, brushing off her accurate comment and looking at Jaime. “How long do you expect we’ll be down there?”

  “I don’t know. This is new territory for us.”