Star Force: Battlemeld (SF45) Read online

  “I’ll be going with you,” Vortison said.

  Travis raised an eyebrow. “That high of a priority?”

  Vortison nodded, underscoring how much so with his silence.

  Travis glanced at Karen, then she turned to face Jaime. “When do we leave?”

  3

  July 25, 2476

  Solar System

  Earth

  Karen ducked down as Travis jumped over her and landed on an illuminated square on the floor, with the red marker going out on contact. A split second later a green one lit up along with a tone to Karen’s left, prompting her to take a short hop over to it, landing on one leg for the square was too small to fit both feet on…and stepping anywhere else would have disqualified them both from the tandem challenge.

  A red square lit up two over and one back from where she was standing, and immediately she knew it was going to be a problem. There was only a few inches between it and her leg, with Travis on the opposite side and only three seconds for him to get to it. Her brother jumped into a slow half flip and she caught him with her hands on his waist as he passed over her. The momentum threatened to tip her off balance so she knelt down on the one leg she was standing on, using it as a spring to cushion some of the force as she dumped him over to the left.

  Travis’s left hand came down on the square in time, leaving the pair forming a crude living arch that extended even further as another green square lit up in front of Karen. She reached her free leg out and tapped it, forming a tripod between the two of them. So long as she didn’t lift either foot the squares would stay safe, and at the moment she needed as much leverage as possible, for as she guessed, Travis’s next square popped up some distance away.

  Without discussing what they were going to do, her brother pushed off with his hand and she held him up over her shoulders as her legs were spread wide, with her balancing on the balls of her feet to keep them from sliding off and hitting the adjacent squares. Once she had a fairly firm posture Travis got a foot on her hip and jumped off to land awkwardly on his square, then the challenge continued on with them alternating new positions for as long as they could keep up.

  This ‘Twister’ challenge was a new one, specifically created to test and push their sibling connection further than other challenges had…and both twins admitted it was by far the hardest for them to manage, not for sheer strength, but because they had to incorporate balance, timing, and each other’s body position into an impromptu acrobatics display, creating a situation that was very frustrating, but one that they were gradually adjusting to.

  The landing squares were tiny, barely big enough for one of their feet to fit in. Both of them had opted to go barefoot to save a few centimeters, and fortunately they both had size 7 feet, because some of the other Archons that had taken a crack at it just for fun couldn’t put more than their toes down without stepping out of bounds. The challenge had been created specifically for Travis and Karen, and even though they couldn’t consciously feel it, it was triggering an increase in activity through their Ikrid link, which the coin-sized biomonitors that they were wearing were measuring and transmitting the data from to the medical team stationed nearby in the pyramid.

  The longest they’d progressed through this challenge was 7 minutes and 23 seconds, with them just now passing 4 minutes. The computer was programmed to only give them target squares within a certain radius, but the chamber itself was half the size of a basketball court, meaning they had quite a bit of room to bounce around and the computer was doing a good job of not letting them get into a rhythm. It’d throw several close squares together, then switch to a distant one that would require a jump or throw to get into position, then another long followed by a short and every conceivable combination trying to shake their coordination.

  Karen and Travis were constantly having to adjust with no time to think it through. They had to react and go on gut instinct…or failing that, remember from the last time how to attack certain maneuvers, with the more times they ran and failed to complete the challenge giving them experience in the terms of flash maneuvers. Those were what some people referred to as ‘muscle memory’ only on a higher, more coordinated scale, with Karen pulling a flip landing or Travis doing a one-handed pushup to tag a square as if they were predetermined chess moves that they could throw out at a moment’s notice.

  Such flash maneuvers had been expected by the Archons who’d developed this challenge for them, the trick of it was that flash maneuvers were individual based, and the 3 second move limit wouldn’t give the two of them time to coordinate verbally. They had to act on ‘instinct,’ which in their case meant they’d be relying on their twin link, the full dynamics of which the med techs hadn’t yet been able to deduce. The patterns didn’t match up with any tissue growths on record, suggesting that the twins’ bodies had adapted the Ikrid tissue for their own purposes, creating an entirely new ability.

  Or so some hoped. Without more data they couldn’t know for sure, and the pair of adepts now wore their biomonitors round the clock to squeeze out as much as they could, prompted by challenges like this designed to push their psionic limit to new levels of activity.

  Karen and Travis got through 5 minutes before Karen felt a wash of disorientation and tipped over, smashing an elbow onto a square that wasn’t lit and ending the challenge. She almost blacked out again, but this time managed to keep ‘standing’ on all fours, fighting off the effect after some twenty seconds and looking for Travis…whom she found lying on the ground a few meters off, unconscious again.

  “Crap,” she said, crawling over to him as the door to the chamber opened and a lower ranking med tech rushed inside.

  “You’re still awake,” he said, glancing at Travis then staring at her.

  “Wasn’t easy,” she admitted, still feeling a bit light headed. “You guys were right. I can block it out…at least partially,” the adept said, pressing a pair of fingers against her temple and trying to use the pressure to force her head to stop spinning.

  “Can you hang on another 30 seconds?”

  “More data?”

  “As much as we can get,” the tech prompted.

  “I’m good for now,” she said, tipping over a few inches and sitting down. The bump of her butt against the floor sent her head spinning again, but it leveled out after a few seconds of stillness that stretched out into more than a minute before the medic got around to reviving Travis.

  Using a bit of the V’kit’no’sat genetic engineering they understood, he placed a rectangular strip across his forehead that acted like a crude regenerator, save for it made only a handful of mental alterations…in this case shutting down the ascension trigger that had activated once again. Both adepts now had their Rensiek, Lachka, Sesspik, Pefbar, Fornax, and Ensek abilities activated with fully developed growths…but whatever this trigger needed to go along with it had to be located within the Ikrid tissue that had never developed, leaving Travis in this endless cycle of flipping the genetic switch and having nothing happen.

  The device took away the impetus to flip the switch, breaking the mental lockout like unfreezing a computer, with him waking up almost instantly.

  “Not again,” he said, looking up at the ceiling as the medic removed the device from his head, though the small biomonitor button still remained.

  Karen, whose head had cleared along with Travis’s, stood up and offered him a hand, pulling him to his feet as the medic looked him over.

  “All is well, I hope?”

  “Yeah, I’m good,” Travis answered, “but I’m beginning to wonder if keeping this link is worth the trouble. We can’t have this happen in the field…or a hot tub,” he added as the thought of blacking out and drowning to death crossed his mind.

  “Does that sound like a Sangheili to you?” a voice asked from behind them.

  “Sounds like quitter talk to me,” someone else said as Karen and Travis turned around to look at the doorway, with their draws dropping when they saw who it was.
/>   “Definitely quitter talk,” Paul confirmed.

  “What are you two doing here?” Karen asked as the medic quietly slipped out past the two trailblazers.

  “Arriving just in time, it seems,” Jason answered. “Sounds like you were going to throw away your advantage to get rid of a temporary weakness.”

  “I’m starting to be glad I lost that coin toss,” Paul mentioned, his eyes on the pair of adepts.

  “We’re here,” Jason continued, “to help you solve this problem.”

  “What can you do that the techs haven’t?” Travis asked.

  Paul smiled. “Training.”

  “Meaning what?” Karen asked.

  Paul glanced at Jason. “Are all Sangheili this dense?”

  His blonde counterpart poked him in the ribs as he walked forward and came up within two feet of his fellow Clansmen. “You need fully formed Ikrid tissue, but to get it the normal way you’ll lose the adaptation you already have. If you treat this like a wound, you’d heal it through activity, gradually reestablishing full strength and range of motion, and you’re going to do the same with your Ikrid…helped along by a lot of trips to the V’kit’no’sat medical station.”

  “I don’t understand,” Karen said, with Travis thinking the same.

  “We’re going to build each of you a custom Ikrid through training. The tissue you already have will be added to, bit by bit, with your bodies adapting to the demands and the medics feeding you tiny changes. The link you two have is too valuable to waste, meaning we can’t adapt it to regular Ikrid tissue…so we’re going to adapt regular tissue to it through customization.”

  “Do the medics even know how to do that?” Travis asked.

  Jason shook his head. “Not yet. Your bodies are going to teach them.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Karen said.

  “You’re going to get a treatment, then you’re going to train your asses off. You’ll get scanned, the medics will determine what you need next, then you’ll get another treatment, followed by more training. Long term, you’ll grow a fully functional Ikrid that will retain your special ability rather than having it wiped out in the Zen’zat car wash.”

  “To be more precise,” Paul added, walking up behind Jason, “the treatments will undo the unwanted parts of the previous treatment, with the training flushing out what works and what doesn’t.”

  “Why do you need to be here for that?” Karen asked.

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “I thought that would be obvious.”

  Jason didn’t say anything, and both of them just let that comment hang in the air until one of the twins decided to say something.

  “You want to study our link,” Travis finally guessed.

  “More than that,” Jason answered. “We want to teach you to make the most of it.”

  “As well as unlocking this new trigger you’ve discovered,” Paul added. “There’s a lot of new stuff going on with you two, psionic wise, and we want to probe it.”

  “Probe all you want,” Karen said with a smirk.

  Jason held up a warning finger. “Hush youngling. You do through instinct what Paul and I learned to do through training. You have a psionic link, we never did…and what we have now is different from yours. You’re going to learn from us to consciously enhance your coordination, meanwhile we’re going to try and figure out your trigger problem,” he said, looking at Travis, “from an Archon perspective. You’re wholly inferior to us, so the question is what benchmark have you reached that we haven’t?”

  “I’ve been asking myself that quite a lot, and I don’t have an answer,” Travis admitted. “I also don’t know why she hasn’t got it. She’s a level above me.”

  “Another valid point,” Jason agreed. “You focus on the training we give you, and we’ll figure out the rest.”

  “Is that really worth pulling both of you off the front lines?” Karen asked.

  “Our work there is mostly done,” Paul told her. “Others can handle the rest, and it was time we rotated out anyway.”

  “Yes, this is that important,” Jason answered her more directly. “You’ve developed an ability that normal Zen’zat do not possess. I shouldn’t have to explain why that’s important.”

  “You don’t,” Travis said, understanding his meaning. “But from our point of view we’re completely unaware of this ‘ability.’ I don’t feel any different when she’s standing beside me or miles away. If it wasn’t from the scans I wouldn’t believe there was anything psionic involved.”

  “That just means you’ve fully assimilated it, probably as a child,” Paul pointed out. “When we teach you how to do it old school you’ll start to see the difference.”

  “If you say so,” Karen said, not fully convinced.

  “Walk,” Jason said, turning around and heading to the exit with Paul.

  The twins glanced at each other, sharing a perplexed expression at the sudden end to the conversation, then they jogged a couple of steps over to pick up their shoes then caught up with the trailblazers and followed them out and over to another training chamber, with them each picking up a sword and sunglasses in the antechamber on their way in. Paul input several instructions into the control panel, with two large circles illuminating on the floor spaced 8 meters apart.

  Jason walked over to one of them, with Paul joining him a few seconds later, swinging his training sword up into a guard position while standing back to back with his friend.

  “Time to show off,” Jason prompted.

  “Are we working together?” Karen asked, stepping into the other 3 meter wide circle with Travis.

  “Nope,” Jason said, flicking his sword into a reverse grip with the tip pointed towards his toes.

  “Hold on…our laces,” Travis said as they both quickly got to retying their shoes that they’d only slipped on.

  Paul telekinetically hit the start button, with a series of countdown tones descending and Karen and Travis quickly trying to finish tying their shoes before the tiny projectiles began shooting out from the walls.

  Travis ducked one, then got pelted with two more before he got to his feet and his sword up into guard position and began intercepting the little thuds, swinging around in a twirl a split second before Karen’s head came up to hit one coming in at his back. The limited Pefbar he had didn’t help, but somehow his situational awareness knew it was coming in, allowing him to make the block and reposition for another.

  Meanwhile Paul and Jason were both moving about inside their circle, alternating positions and moving around each other’s bodies with a fluid precision, seeing the incoming thuds with their Pefbar and moving to intercept them before they could get hit while avoiding the temptation to telekinetically stop them midair…which would have been cheating as far as this challenge was concerned.

  The computer was scoring both pairings, with impacts measuring as negative points and deflections as positives. The program Paul had chosen worked them through a few easy rounds then began escalating through the harder settings remarkably quick, with the twins having a hard time keeping up with the faster moving thuds as they also came in greater numbers.

  Within 6 minutes Karen and Travis were doubling over from hits more than they were swinging to block, but the challenge didn’t end. It continued well past the -100 points that usually deactivated it, with the pair getting pelted regularly until Paul finally turned it off.

  “What happened? I thought you guys were good,” the trailblazer taunted.

  Karen rubbed a sore spot on her leg just above the knee and glared at him. “Is this payback for breaking your record?”

  “Yes,” Paul said deadpan.

  Karen blew out an exasperated laugh.

  “We need to know what your current capabilities are,” Jason explained, “in order to start giving you specific workouts. Best way to do that is to overload you and see where you break.”

  “And you guys went through it for what, fun?” Travis asked.

  “So you’d have
something to compare with on the replay later.”

  “Remember,” Paul added. “Useful as your link is, it only coordinates your individual abilities, and if those are lacking you still lose. You two should train together, but not all the time. I hear you’re both holding yourselves back in that department, with several marks already in acolyte range?”

  “Is that uncommon?” Karen asked.

  “It is when they’re not in your specialty. You two are drawing off of each other and advancing far faster than most Archons, but you’re neglecting certain skill areas and have more than a 50 level spread. Archons face their weak areas, not hide from them.”

  “We haven’t been hiding,” Travis objected. “Our weak areas are well above the strengths of our classmates.”

  “So we’ve noticed,” Jason said, stretching his neck a bit in a disinterested manner. “But the spread says you’re sandbagging. We want you to press this psionic link for all its worth, both for your sakes and so we can learn from it, but you can’t let yourself rely on it or it’ll become a weakness. Already you’re knocking your sister out, or close to it, because of the feedback through your link. You both have to work on becoming individuals, as hard as that may be.”

  “We already are,” Travis argued. “We don’t even feel the link.”

  Paul sighed. “That’s the problem.”

  “If we’re leveling up, in all areas,” Karen asked, “faster than the others…then where’s the problem?”

  “It’s a problem in attitude,” Jason said simply. “None of us would let a weak area persist to such depths. We’d hammer it until it was more on par with the rest of our skills.”

  “You’re slacking…even as you’re succeeding,” Paul added. “And nobody has called you on it because of your impressive advancement rate.”

  “So…you want us to focus on our individual skills,” Karen said slowly, “while we focus on honing our link? How can we do both at the same time?”

  Paul smirked. “That’s why we’re here to show you how…along with a great many other things.”