Star Force: Reignor Read online

  Plausious cut one of the pouches off at the top, jumping up on it and doing it manually to conserve energy. He fell with it to the floor, then rolled off as he grabbed the top flaps and pulled them back together with some fruit spilling out, but he didn’t pick it up. He was out the gash in the building a moment later carrying his giant sack as he headed back to the ‘soup’ station.

  He used his grapple fields to rip out several nipples, then caught the fluid goo as it ran out, redirecting it away from the ground to a position above his left hand, forming a hovering sphere that gradually grew in size as more poured out and he sent the little rivers arcing through the air to feed it.

  From previous experience he knew how much he could carry, and he grew the sphere twice as high as his own body, which looked ridiculously big and impossible to move, but the psionic power of the Reignor was now massive and well-honed for such tasks, with him using a continuous stream of Essence to reinforce his abilities where needed.

  Suddenly the nipple ports dropped their rivers and began spilling it out onto the ground as the housings started to contract around the breaches, making them smaller and smaller until they would finally seal up soon after, but Plausious was already on the run carrying his sack of fruit over his right shoulder looking like a gigantic tick on his back while hovering an even larger sphere of soup above his other hand as he deflected shots from the central tentacle at the same time.

  Had there been Hadarak units here he could not have managed the multitasking and combat at once, but the field was still clear and he couldn’t bother to search very far for new Dupla flying in as he had to race past the outer tentacles and get back into the forest carrying and protecting his cargo.

  He used so much Essence he began to feel faint, blocking shots that he otherwise could have dodged, but when the trees started doing so for him, his main concern was to keep moving while shielding his two precious cargos from the limbs themselves, all the while extending his telepathy out looking for new targets.

  He found them not long after, with several contacts flying in towards him as well as a few hunters on the ground coming around from other assignments to intercept him.

  Plausious knew he couldn’t get into a large battle without dropping his cargo, so he kept moving and tried to pick them off one at a time, using heart attack Essence attacks for the most part, because they required so little energy compared to other, more direct assaults. Fortunately none of the larger Hadarak that were more resistant to the technique were here, and there were no packs of the smaller ones, otherwise he’d have to use a blanket attack and that would drain him considerably. Targeted attacks did not, and the further he got away from the distribution center he had to use more of them, because he was moving into an area he had not cleared before.

  He angled away from the highest concentrations of the minds he could detect, but his cargo made it hard for him to actually hide from aerial monitoring. Plausious made sure to head away from the direction of the caves as he pulled another Essence ping release to see what was further away.

  The warship was not above him, thankfully, but there were a lot of units in three directions and he ran away from all of them, having to zigzag a bit but eventually he got to an area of the forest he didn’t know as well, except that it had rolling hills in it. The Neofan cleared the aerial assets again with another series of attacks, then with his large sphere of goo now not visible to anything above, he found a somewhat concealed spot underneath the trees and up alongside a hillside to stop at.

  Maintaining the sphere was taking a toll on him, but his grapple energy wasn’t overtaxed yet. He looked around at the trees and began stripping them of bark, flying it to the sphere and sticking the solid pieces onto the exterior of the liquid, making it much easier to hold as he only had to put pressure on a general area rather than every little molecule on the exterior.

  He covered the entire sphere, leaving only cracks that he had to focus more on as he monitored the minds around him and as far as he could push his non-Essence detection. Then he started moving again with the intent to avoid his pursuit and eventually lose them, after which he would start heading back to the caves.

  Before that, though, he altered the shape of the sphere into a spear wider than his chest, but long and lateral to the ground, making it look like he had a thick log trailing behind him as he carried his sack of fruit and kept the former from coming into contact with any head height branches.

  It took a long time to evade, and then circle back to his hiding spot. He came in through the waterfall entrance this time, because it was a little wider and he had very large cargos to carry. He was fairly sure he arrived there unnoticed, then held just inside the waterfall and scanned the area for some time before he squeezed himself through, then brought his cargo in past the narrow point in pieces, all the while having to keep constant focus on the bark-covered goo, else a momentary lapse would spill it on the ground, leaving most unrecoverable.

  Moving with it through the caves was painstakingly slow, but it was a slowness he would gladly trade from running through the forest with Hadarak in pursuit, and when he finally got back to his nearly empty storage devices, he refilled the living tanks with the soup, then began arranging the fruit into hasty piles as he was eager to get back to his friend.

  He pulled apart the rocks he’d covered the entrance with, then found the Ren’mak still sleeping where he’d left him. Plausious knelt down and placed a hand on him, checking his status. He was alive and, other than probably stiff, unharmed. A little telepathic nudge started the process of waking, then he left him to arouse naturally as the Neofan began removing the other rock barricades and returning the area to how the Ren’mak remembered.

  When it woke it did so with a head jerk, as it always did, then it squawked and flew into the air and over to him, seemingly afraid that, for a moment, it didn’t know where he was.

  Plausious extended an arm and the Ren’mak landed on it, with him stroking its head with his other hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said without telepathic translation. “I’ll try not to do that again, but it’s getting crowded out there. I’m not sure what we’re going to, but for now we can hide for a long time.”

  The Ren’mak stretched its wings, and Plausious understood the unpleasant movement. He was an avian, and hovering in these caves was not true flight. He needed to get out and move.

  “Let things settle down for a while, then we’ll go scouting,” he promised, this time translating so it understood, with the Ren’mak uttering an excited chirp. “After that I want to keep going down.”

  Its elation diminished immediately, for they’d gone far enough before to get into a hotter zone, with the air dry and hard to breathe.

  “I know,” he said, stroking it again. “It’s hard. But I think there’s something down there. Maybe something we can use. No, I’m not going to tell you what I think it is. We’ll have to find out for real. I may be wrong…yes. After we go outside. I need to recharge first,” Plausious added, having forgotten to add more Essence to his well before coming down here.

  Oh well. He’d do it when they were scouting and far away from the entrances. He shouldn’t have made that mistake.

  “Guess I was eager to get back here,” he said, tossing the little Hadarak into the air where it hovered and flew around a bit, though it couldn’t go far, as Plausious retreated back to his newly acquired cargo to inventory the fruit properly. Store them in the wrong way and they’d rot faster, and stacking was key, for the net-like pouch he’d brought them here in would wither quickly and fall apart now that it wasn’t connected to the nutrient lines in the building he’d taken it out of.

  Fortunately the liquid containers did not have that problem, and they actually fed off the soup itself, making them portable, but ambushing one of the transports was actually more problematic than hitting the distribution centers, for that combat would take place during flight, and he had to hit them in areas he couldn’t get to now with the Ren’mak.

  Everything was harder now that he had him to protect, and he feared the day when he couldn’t do so. Plausious was comfortable with the concept of his own pending death, but not the Ren’mak’s. It was so young, and totally helpless against its betrayal. It was relying on him for anything, and the thought of it being killed affected him more than he’d expected.

  It wasn’t expendable. Despite the fact that it had been born to be expendable.

  In many ways the lightside was harder than the darkside. Davis had told him that too, but now that he was faced with a real life scenario, he understood it intimately and the threats it had to his sanity. For this was more than just following the natural code. This was personal, because he cared for this one a great deal, and it felt even more strongly for him.

  It was illogical, but now that he was experiencing it he acknowledged his logic was not sufficiently advanced to analyze the bond for what it was. It was powerful, but dangerous…yet it made life worth living in the face of an inescapable doom that hadn’t been able to find him yet.

  Plausious sighed as he continued to stack fruits. He had another window of refuge with these supplies, but it wouldn’t last forever. He was going to have to get clever, or the Hadarak were going to win by populating this forest…and there wasn’t a better place on the planet that he knew of that they could go.

  And he couldn’t go on the warpath and thin the Hadarak out like he normally did. Not with the Ren’mak to protect.

  He needed another strategy, and the sooner the better.

  5

  After several deeper trips into the cave system, a bit of moisture was the giveaway. Everything down here was painfully dry and warm as the internal heat of the planet made its way out through the rock layers and was eventually radia
ted off into space. Day/night cycle didn’t matter this far down, and the heat levels were nearly constant aside from various conduits that had more heat than others depending on the type of materials and how well they transferred the heat.

  But when the air turned moist, Plausious suspected he had found what he was looking for. He and the Ren’mak continued to work down narrow cracks and crevices that led into larger chambers, some big enough to put a landing craft in, but this moisture was coming out of a narrow one, and required a bit of ‘sanding’ for the Neofan to get down.

  He didn’t use his Essence to do it, but rather his molecular deconstruction. It was energy intense, and the rock began to glow as he used it, but his hands were able to rub against and carve out whatever he touched, turning it into a mix of sand and gas that billowed out and made it hard to breathe until he also used his grapple energy to direct it where he wanted.

  Plausious only did as much as necessary for him to slide through as he descended a vertical shaft with the Ren’mak flying short hops from perch to perch on the stone walls or riding on his shoulders when there was none available, now feeling better with the moisture in the air rising to the point where the walls began to shine with reflected light from his beak.

  The Reignor was thankful Neofan biology had so many non-Essence abilities built into their genome. It was said early on in his Construction that to use Essence well, you needed a base to work off of, for pure Essence abilities were the hardest and most costly to produce. The deconstruction ability was designed to allow disintegration attacks to be produced far more efficiently and effectively, for the Essence would form around his tissues designed for such a task and then only have to be modified slightly. Those without the base ability would have to take their raw Essence and completely transform it to the desired state…which was possible…but something only a master could truly attempt with efficiency.

  Plausious was considered a master in many areas before being marooned here, but he had never truly thought about non-Essence applications for his deconstruction ability. Now that he had to hide his location by not using Essence, he was discovering a great many advantages in his Neofan biology that had been overlooked by time and culture.

  But this one also made him hungry, and they had no food with them. He’d have to wait until they returned to their closest base camp where he’d left a few days worth of supplies.

  He continued to climb down, finding his handholds getting slick, but his ability to fly gave him ease as he continued to move down the passage that few others could manage, ending at a deep pool of liquid water that was lightly steaming.

  Plausious dipped the end of his foot into it, finding it hot but not scalding…and also flowing gently in one direction. Meaning it was going downhill to somewhere, not rising up from below as most water would.

  “We follow this,” he told the Ren’mak as they both flew down a comfortable cavern that was higher than it was wide, and with the Neofan having to tuck his wings on many occasions.

  He didn’t have to carve out any more rock, and after a short distance he saw what looked like a mirror surface ahead of them reflecting the Ren’mak’s light…except on closer inspection he found it to be bioluminescent itself.

  What ‘it’ was ended up being a wall bouncing light from another chamber…and in that chamber there were plants growing. Covering the walls was a type of moss that produced light, and Plausious suspected it was a heat absorber designed to photosynthesize off of infrared light rather than the visible spectrum. With the constant warmth here it wasn’t bright in infrared, but it was lit. He didn’t have the ability to see in it, for he’d never pursued that genetic upgrade, but he understood basic physics.

  He managed to get his feet on some solid platforms and began walking from one to another as the side passage meandered away from the flow of water. He knew to follow it, but the light-generating plants beckoned him to check them out first. As he did, he noticed water seeping through cracks in the rock, providing them with some little trickles that were traveling down to the bottom and joining the watershed going back the other way.

  But the light ahead was getting brighter, and after going through a few more turns it got bright enough that the Ren’mak turned off its own green light, leaving everything else in bioluminescent blues and purples, with a strong burst of light reflecting off the trickles of water on the walls ahead and coming from the right.

  When Plausious got there he sighed gratuitously, looking through a gap in the rock to an expanse on the other side. He walked through and the claustrophobic cave network disappeared entirely. He couldn’t even see the roof, for everything was full of plants and mist, with the light refracting through it so you could not see where it ended.

  His energy fields could, and he knew he had found a Maksack. Sometimes when rock layers formed, escaping gasses from the gravitational squeezing process in the core would get trapped under a thin enough layer that they could actually bulge that layer up, then when it cooled it would create high pressure caverns that, once breached and released of their extremely high pressure gasses, would remain as bubble worlds if the weight above was not too great. And into and through those maksacks other gasses and liquids being formed in the core would collect and pass through.

  And in this case, that included a great deal of water.

  Nearby there was a small creek flowing out of what had to be the endpoint of the other passageway he had diverged off from, abandoning its sharp v-shaped conduit as it spread out into a paper thin sheet over a huge, nearly flat boulder with little plants that had found some foothold in the rock where they could soak up all the water they wanted.

  The water that got passed pooled into a lake, and inside that lake he could sense large lifeforms…the same ones he had sensed from the surface previously.

  Plausious wanted to use an Essence bounce to see everything here, but he wasn’t going to risk it. They weren’t so far down orbital bombardment couldn’t affect them, and they couldn’t run fast through the tight caves if discovered. In here, at least, they could move around normally…and the Ren’mak took to the air and began to fly loops in excitement as it was able to stretch its wings as if they were back on the surface.

  Everything looked to be in fog that glowed from within, and as Plausious telepathically searched for even the smallest of minds he found many in the forest full of varied plants, some a few inches tall while others were twice his height. None were very rigid, nor did they need to be with no wind or weather down here. Everything appeared to be soft to the touch, which was a vast contrast from the rock all around them.

  The smells that came to him were reassuring, and one ‘tree’ in particular he reached out and ran his hand over, breaking off a small branch that he bit into, taste analyzing it’s compounds and finding it was edible for him. The question was, could he find enough edible stuff for his friend.

  If he could, they could hide down here indefinitely. If not, he’d have to make raids out to collect more food on the surface. But either way, the Hadarak were not here and most likely never would be until they got to the point of carving up the planet for resources. This planet was far from getting even close to that stage, and staying down here would give him time to truly rest, train, and think.

  The Ren’mak screeched in a way Plausious had not seen before as it dove into one of the trees, then came back up with something in its beak that was wriggling. He thought he was going to swallow it, but his friend instead flew it back over to the Neofan and dropped it at his feet excitedly.

  “We can’t eat that,” he said, reaching down and picking up the little worm-like creature. “This is alive. I know you don’t understand, but this is off limits. Let’s find some real food, and if I have to I’ll recombine some compounds so you can eat them. It’s very slow work, but I think we have plenty of time to figure it out. These creatures,” he said, putting the worm back on one of the trees, “are our neighbors. Do not touch them again.”

  The Ren’mak was disappointed, having thought he had retrieved a prize for his master, and Plausious knew he needed to do better at explaining. So instead of trying to create new vocabulary on the spot, he pulled off some of the soft, spongy bark of one of the trees and collected some tube-like grass along with scraping some veins of stone with his deconstructing ability.