Star Force: Psionics (SF29) Read online

  May 31, 2406

  Solar System

  Earth

  David stepped over a 3-inch high ‘wall,’ barely able to make it out. It and the floor looked almost the same in his growing spherical sight, but there was just enough of a line in the scratch black/white mental image to get his attention, allowing him to avoid tripping over the tiny obstacle.

  The next one was not so small. It was a wall with several oddly shaped holes in it, through which David had to crawl. The tricky part was his mind seemed to be filling in the gaps where his senses lacked, and unless he got a good ‘feel’ for the holes his mind painted a solid wall in front of him. He knew others had been getting blocked by that trick, and was glad he’d developed to the point where he could at least spot a disturbance in the solid barrier…from there his hands did the rest, feeling out the perimeter of the hole in the pitch black training room.

  Cerebro 2, as they called it, had been developed specifically for those Archons with the spherical sight manifesting to hone their skills. The obstacle course David was walking through was a level 4, throwing different challenges at him as opposed to the level 1 he’d begun with that was simply a walking maze with predictable, straight hallways and right angled turns. That had been hard enough when he began using the new course 3 months ago, but the more challenges thrown at him, the better his mental radar got at both interpreting the data he was receiving as well as enhancing his range and accuracy.

  When David crawled out of the hole he ‘saw’ several disqualification pits in the floor, no more than a foot or so deep, but if he stepped in them he’d have to abort this run and start over again…with the arrangement of the room resetting so his memory wouldn’t help him. There were several narrow walkways through the pits, slightly wider than his body, and he slowly walked down one until he got on the other side and almost bumped his face into a protrusion, stopping himself just in time.

  As he ‘looked’ ahead, though his spherical sight was in fact looking everywhere at once, his mind began to gather more data on what was in front of him and several tubes appeared sticking out at him end on. Careful not to backtrack into the pits, David walked sideways, seeing more tubes appear as the others dissipated. He frowned, still disappointed that his range wasn’t better. He could make out walls a good 10 meters away, but smaller objects seemed to escape his detection unless they were right in front of him.

  David reversed direction and sidestepped to the right, eventually finding a patch where the tubes weren’t and squeezing through the gap in the wall that had little bendable fibers covering the opening so it wouldn’t be seen. Had he not been able to detect the tubes and see where they weren’t, there was no way he could have found the right spot, save for feeling up and down the length with his hands…which he had done before, and was legal in this challenge, but he was also on the clock and that took a whole lot of time unless you got lucky right off the bat.

  When he pushed through he came out into a small empty space with a solid wall on the far side and to his left, forcing him to turn to the right and walk a few meters…then he tripped and fell forward onto an up-ramp, catching himself with his hands.

  “Damn it,” he whispered. “Why can I never see you?”

  David ran his hands over the surface of the ramp and magically it appeared before him, like his spherical sight needed the physical stimulus to reset itself. He was beginning to think a lot of what he ‘saw’ was his mind guessing, just like now it had been guessing that the rest of the hallway was flat like the start. He knew that could be dangerous, but without better senses it was all he had to work with.

  David just wished his subconscious would guess right more often.

  The Archon climbed up the ramp and turned left at another flat wall/corner, then walked across a bridge with rails, thankfully, but there were 1-inch high strips on the floor at random points, tripping him up when he failed to spot them. 3-inches high he could handle, but 1-inch was virtually invisible…then again, him being able to navigate the room at all with no lights was impressive enough.

  After stumbling his way across he came to a nexus with three circles low to the floor which he knew from previous experience were slides. Now came the tricky part…knowing which slide to take. It was written somewhere in physical, block letters, which David couldn’t yet read. Well, he could barely make out some big ones during individual practice, but give him a sentence in front of him with 2-inch long letters and all he could see was a long block with a few pits in it…the best guess his mind could make based off his limited sense.

  But David could see where the circles were so he walked towards the rightmost one and felt around the perimeter, quickly finding the letters tattooed on the wall. Using his fingertips he felt over the first letter of what was always a different word, meaning he couldn’t just feel the first one and guess the rest.

  N…O…P…E

  David sighed and moved over to the center one, feeling around the edges until he found the word underneath the bottom of the circle.

  U…H…U…H

  David’s sigh turned into a growl as he moved over to take the third slide, then for some reason he felt around for the words anyway, wondering why he was wasting the time when it had to be the one.

  W…R…O…N…G

  “What?” he asked into the dark, feeling over the letters again. He hadn’t read them wrong.

  David stood up and soaked in the radar-like sense of the entire room, sensing the three circles in front of him and low to the ground, as well as the doorway behind him.

  He froze in place, ‘staring’ at everything around him and trying to get his sense to reset. Maybe it was ‘guessing’ away another exit.

  After maybe 10 or 15 seconds a little bit of disruption above him caught David’s attention, then a fourth circle appeared. He reached up and felt around the low ceiling, finding another set of letters that to his mind’s eye looked like a very shallow rectangle.

  Y…E…P

  David reached up into the circle and felt around, finding a ladder run. He jumped up, bypassing several, then hand climbed up enough to get his feet on the bottom rung, pulling himself up inside before climbing a few meters to the peak where the entrance to the slide began. Not wanting to waste any more time he went in head first and began to slide down, twisting and turning through several corkscrews that showed little in his vision other than some weird flashes of signal and very little of the tunnel ahead of him.

  He was eventually dumped out on the ground with a waist-high object situated several meters in front that he recognized as the finish pedestal. David got to his feet and walked forward, then fell face first to the ground as another low wall tripped him up.

  Not wasting the time to curse his stupidity he got to his feet and tagged the finish button on top, stopping the clock and turning the chamber’s lights on slowly so his eyes could adjust without a bright flash.

  David released the spherical sight, feeling thoroughly drained. He no longer had to worry about it going out on him mid-course as it had done that first month, but it was still taxing him heavily. Additional ambrosia doses didn’t seem to help much, though he and the others had been trying them frequently with some minor successes. From David’s perspective his internal battery simply had to recharge over time, and at the moment it felt like he was running pretty low.

  The holographic time popped up over the finish pedestal a few seconds later, indicating that David had shaved off 4 seconds from his previous record. Progress was progress, but with the course altering every go around the time should have been coming off in large chunks, whereas 4 seconds could have just been luck with this particular setup.

  Still, the more runs he made the more training experience his mind had to adapt to, so David walked out of the nearby door mostly content and hit the reset button. He watched for a moment while the various barricades and such pulled back into the walls, eventually leaving a large, empty room behind, coated in white panels with golden lines crisscross
ing them in a grid, giving it a very holodeck-like feel.

  David wanted to have another go at it, but he knew his mental power reserves were too low so he decided to take a break. He’d already gone through three rounds, and knew it’d be at least another 2 hours before he was full of energy again. Jason had suggested keeping that energy reserve draining as often as possible to encourage better discharge capabilities and prevent blockage that could cause an overload similar to what he had initially suffered from.

  David was grateful that hadn’t happened to him, but Riona had already started having trouble with pressure headaches. Jason had her going through a variety of drills to try and alleviate the pressure while restructuring the pathways that the techs still couldn’t isolate. Right now Jason knew more than they did, and if he said there were ‘pathways’ then David trusted him on that, even if he couldn’t completely confirm what the trailblazer was saying. To be honest, David only had a rudimentary understanding of what was happening inside his own head, and that freaked him out to no end.

  “You done?” Mathis-831 asked from behind him, seeing the empty room through the viewing pane.

  “Yeah, I’m…” David said, turning around from the control board. “What the hell is that?”

  Mathis held up his bow for David to see more clearly. “Something I’ve been working on.”

  David frowned. “Seriously?”

  “Clan Croft is encouraged to think outside of the box,” the Archon said, stepping past David and activating a preset training exercise.

  “Alright, I’m outside of the box. How is a bow and arrow useful?”

  “Don’t think of them as arrows,” Mathis said, pulling one of the long shafts out of the very advanced quiver/vest he wore. “More like tiny missiles or remote mines, for you Goldeneye fans.”

  “Does that…” David said, pointing to the shaft with a very heavy end piece.

  “Anti-grav it does have,” Mathis confirmed as multiple targets began floating around the room as the lights dimmed, leaving only a narrow, lit pathway leading out to a circle of light far off in the center of the room.

  “Oh I’ve got to see this,” David said, pulling up a chair in front of the wall-sized window.

  “Turn on the night vision,” he suggested as he walked into the chamber, closing the door behind him.

  “Blind target shooting…typical,” David said, switching the window over to a mode that saw the dark areas of the room lit up in green highlights. He watched Mathis jog out to the center of the circle of light, then on cue all the illumination went out, leaving only the glowing green shapes behind.

  Mathis’s outline sprouted his bow and David could barely see him pull an arrow/missile out and sling it in. His position was well away from the window and even with the nightvision it was difficult to make out objects that small. The larger targets he could see clearly. There were dozens of floating cubes drifting in a circle around the Archon, then three of them broke formation and moved in towards him. David saw a distance counter activate on the console in front of him…which indicated that the purpose of this challenge was to keep the targets from getting all the way into the center.

  Suddenly a streak of green shot out from Mathis and imbedded itself in one of the cubes, sticking out like an ugly hair. Nothing exploded, though in retrospect David chided himself for expecting as much. Mathis was here for accuracy, not destruction, and David found himself impressed at the range he had shot the target…not because of the archery skill involved, but because it was farther away than David could currently stretch his spherical sight. Given that the lights were out, Mathis was targeting purely with the mental ability.

  The Clan Croft marksman spun around and fired at another one behind him, then spun again to hit the third as more targets began to drift in from the ring towards the center while the hit ones dropped to the floor and pulled back, letting Mathis know he’d already tagged them. David counted 24 targets in total and guessed that was about the amount of arrows he’d had in his quiver, meaning this was going to be a very short exercise.

  David kept count of his hits mentally before he noticed another counter on the console. With fluid rhythm Mathis found and tagged each of the cubes as they came in, then the counter passed 24 hits on its way up to 30, making David wonder exactly how many arrows he’d stuffed in that quiver. The targets, he saw, were cycling back to the outer circle to be reused, but Mathis kept firing arrow after arrow, causing David to have a mental fit…where was he getting them all from?

  Using the control board in front of him, David pulled up the info on the current challenge. He scrolled down through the basics and into the physical dynamics of the setup, finding his answer…somehow the room was pulling the arrows off the cubes and moving them back to a recycling post at the center of the room.

  David took a closer look at Mathis’s green form, not noticing anything for a long time as the man spun about, targeting cubes behind him almost as if he could see them there…which he could, thanks to the spherical sight. After getting used to watching the nightvision David finally saw the difference…instead of pulling new arrows out of the quiver, he was reaching down towards the floor slightly, not enough to drop to a knee, but low enough to pull out a new arrow from what the schematics indicated was an open-air quiver, meaning no sidewalls, from which the recycled arrows would sprout from.

  Ingenious system, and typical Star Force. This way Mathis could train for hours without ever running out of ammunition, though he expected the arrow tips had been altered to accommodate the cube impacts. The one Mathis had shown him hadn’t been pointy, but rather blunt and thick like the end of a firecracker. David wasn’t sure if that was standard or not, because in order to have a decently sized explosive he’d need to have a significant amount of volume on the arrow…not to mention room for the anti-grav tech inside.

  As he watched more and more arrows being fired off David visually confirmed that they were flying straight-line trajectories…meaning no arc from gravity. That would also give Mathis insane range, though David knew the capacitor on the anti-grav had to be extremely limited. Probably no more than a few seconds worth…which this challenge had to be recharging with each cycle.

  David shook his head in silent appreciation. He didn’t know how useful the weapon would be on the battlefield, but its design was certainly impressive, as was Mathis’s ability to shoot in the dark and track objects at such a range. He wondered if he could do the same with a pistol at short range and scrolled down through the chamber’s options…finding such a program already created.

  He’d have to give that one a go later, but for now he needed to move on. With an unlimited supply of arrows, Mathis could be at this for a very long time.

  David tossed his fellow Archon an unseen two-fingered salute and left the chamber, heading over to the more traditional parts of the sanctum to get some agility course work in while his mutant powers recharged, then he’d be back here or in one of the other Cerebro rooms to keep adding up mental training experience points and hoping that through it all he and the others would learn enough to hone their abilities to the point where they wouldn’t only be useful in combat, but wouldn’t be a danger to themselves.

  Even though he’d dodged the bullet so far, David wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t going to start seeing the same headaches as Jason and Riona start to manifest. And the idea of not knowing how to fight the unknown unnerved him considerably, as well as causing him to give the trailblazer more credit than he’d done in the past, for he’d had to work through it alone, and at least David and the others had him around to nudge them down the right path…even if Jason didn’t fully know what was going on either.

  4

  July 13, 2406

  Solar System

  Earth

  David came back to his quarters within the sanctum after a long run around the pyramid and slid into the shower tube straight off, getting the drenching sweat off him. For some reason the V’kit’no’sat had preferred a bit mo
re humidity in the air than Humans liked, and thus far the techs hadn’t discovered the primary environmental controls. The ones for the Zen’zat levels had been available straight off, with those in the other dino-chambers discovered and accessed gradually over time, but the ones for the communal areas had always been thought to be located within the restricted core access…but now that they had it, they hadn’t been able to find the damn settings to readjust.

  As a result, any workout done within the air of the pyramid and not in one of the Star Force structures left one drenched in sweat, which David actually preferred, given that it added another element of difficulty to the runs aside from climbing/descending the gigantic stairs/ramps that connected one level to another. He’d gotten in a good 2 hour run and had been blissfully soaked in sweaty clothes, but now that he was done he wanted/needed to get cleaned up before he continued on with additional workouts.

  After he dried off and pulled on a new training uniform he slipped into the computer console’s seat for a quick check of his account, looking for any new messages or alerts…and finding two. One was from Jason, passing on yet another bit of advice for dealing with the spherical sight development. David had gotten to the point where the strain was causing him headaches, but with a few training tweaks those had gone away and Jason was continuing to update him and the others showing the same ability with whatever information he could…which David was grateful for.

  The second message was from Davis, which gave David pause. He’d been waiting a long time for an update on The Word’s activities, and he wondered if this was the first sign of their promised unconventional war beginning to develop. So far they’d been all but silent. A month ago Davis had passed on some intel that David had assigned Jet-612 to run down…or more accurately, the Russian convoy on Mars that had been hauling illicit cargo.

  Jet had intercepted, boarded, and inspected the overland train’s haul before it reached terminus, whereupon he alerted Russian security and assisted them with confiscating the handful of plasma rifles stuffed in alongside spare parts canisters holding items of similar construction and making it almost impossible to spot the rifles on inspection scans.