Star Force: Essence (Star Force Universe Book 51) Read online

  Kara was once again in command of her Clan, now that she’d figured out how to shut down the remote control of her Vorch’nas, but the interface with her genetic code could not be undone. Even the Zak’de’ron probably couldn’t undo it, based on what she’d learned over the years. It seemed it had been designed to be permanent, underscoring that the Dragons thought of the Zen’zat as slaves that didn’t need a choice. The genetic safeguards also meant Kara couldn’t become a Saiyan, for the Vorch’nas would just reset her genetic code to what it originally was. Essence skills were available to her, and she held out some hope for one day using them to fix her sabotaged genetics, but she’d made her peace with the Vorch’nas now that it no longer obeyed the Zak’de’ron.

  It was part of her now, stretching from the back of her right hand all the way up her arm to her shoulder, though at the moment the white armor was fully deployed to protect her from the vacuum. She could use her shields and free float in space with the armor retracted, but there was no point to risk it. Her Vorch’nas felt like a second skin now, and since she could reprogram it as she liked, it was now her Vorch’nas, and for better or worse she was stuck with it.

  It was a level 12, the most advanced version possible, and Kara had explored every bit of it, every function, every setting. She probably knew more about it now than most of the Zak’de’ron did, and with her help Star Force had learned everything they could about Dragon technology. Even the genetic coding had been broken, the secrets of the alternate code revealed, but knowing how the Zak’de’ron had done it did not mean Star Force could undo it. What it did mean was that there were no longer any part of Zen’zat coding unknown to Star Force. The tier 4 psionics had all been discovered and unlocked, plus the most important piece of coding possible, loosely referred to as the tier 5 psionic.

  But it wasn’t a psionic, it was a transformation mechanism designed to activate when all the psionics had been unlocked, and fortunately Star Force had discovered it before anyone had achieved that. The last of the 12 tier 4s had to be activated genetically, for no one had been able to unlock the Alchemy psionic via dream state. The knowledge to do that had been the same knowledge needed to identify the tier 5 psionic that would turn a Zen’zat into a Zak’de’ron.

  That discovery had shocked everyone, but from their point of view it made sense. Any individual so extraordinarily skilled to unlock all the psionics naturally…which seemed like an impossibility…the Zak’de’ron would wish to have added to their race. Then again, it might also be a hidden fallback in case they were all wiped out. Someday, far in the future when the V’kit’no’sat advanced further, maybe one would have found all the psionics, at which point they would begin to change races and slowly become a Zak’de’ron. How it would happen wasn’t totally known, but it was thought that some sort of chrysalis would be formed after the individual escaped to a place of safety.

  Star Force had, once realizing this, begun the process of eradicating that fifth psionic from the Human genome as well as informing Mak’to’ran so he would allow Star Force to cleanse the Zen’zat of it as well. Davis had not chosen to give the V’kit’no’sat the genetic knowledge necessary to do it themselves, and in a large part due to Kara’s Vorch’nas, Star Force had more knowledge of the Zak’de’ron technology than Mak’to’ran did.

  58,399 years ago the Zak’de’ron had found her and forced a conversation. Fortunately at that point she had already locked out their possible override of the device, and while they did not try to fight and subdue her, she knew they were not happy. To them, she was now beyond their control, but they weren’t ready to pick a fight with Star Force so they had grudgingly allowed it, but since then they had not attempted to contact her. The few discussions they had with Star Force they sent through the Voku, and none in recent history. They were quiet, very quiet, and Kara knew that was bad. They were not cohabitating the galaxy, and in time she knew they’d attack Star Force. How was the question, but she knew they hadn’t given up and that they had at least one Uriti. If they wanted to make nice they would have given it back to Star Force, but to this day it was missing in the galaxy, hidden so well that neither Star Force nor the Knights of Quenar could find it, and Kara knew that wasn’t an accident.

  So now her Clan was tasked with preparing for the Zak’de’ron and whatever avenue they would use to strike at Star Force. Ghostblade wasn’t hiding, but they still didn’t own any planets. Everything they had was mobile, and far more so than Canderous. Ghostblade was based on speed, not bulk, and when they did have large constructs like these Star Forges, they had to add a lot more engine power, making them smaller than what Canderous used, and far smaller than the permanent Star Forges in other locations.

  This black hole had none, though, except the Ghost Blade mobile ones. Right now Kara had 138 of them sucking material out of it, and one of the rarified materials was what they used to build Materia weapons. It had the unique property of maintaining Essence longer than any other material…far longer, allowing it to exist for months before even starting to disappear. All Materia weapons had casings made of the Magicite, then when that material was filled with a special alteration of Essence that made it reflective to other Essence, you then had a bottle to store it in, for Essence only disappeared when it could expand out through other material, as if seeking its host body and thinning when not finding it.

  Essence in a vacuum disappeared almost instantaneously. Kara could extend hers out, but it had to have a conduit back to her Core in order to be viable. If she tried to throw Essence across to one of the Ghostblade workers, some of it would disappear before it hit them, and if the distance was far enough it would disappear entirely. On a planet pushing it through atmosphere made it last minutes, and liquids and solids lasted longer, but nothing could permanently hold it, which was why what Paul had found was so confounding. Even the Magicite had to be periodically recharged, and if it got too low the Essence contained within the bottle would breach and leach out to the surrounding environment.

  But something that could hold Essence for over a million years? That was beyond Kara’s understanding, but if black holes contained Magicite, then perhaps there were more secrets in there that had an effect on Essence, which made her searches of them all that more important, but Magicite wasn’t the only thing that had been found.

  While Solari appeared to be created within dense gravity wells, there were other things that survived them. Magicite’s origin was unknown, but black holes also served as trash dumps, collecting everything around them and some things actually survived the crushing pressure. Things that Star Force had never even thought about making on their own, but apparently some other race in the distant past did. Not in the form of technology, for nothing would survive that galactic trash compactor, but as far as base atoms and molecules were concerned, there was quite a few surprises down there.

  But the sight of it, that pure blackness, made it one of Kara’s favorite places to think. It seemed too black, and she knew that was because there was literally nothing coming out of it. When you typically slept in the dark, with your eyes closed, there was still radiation getting to them. Sometimes people would see spots from more intense radiation bursts, but here there was literally nothing coming out of the black hole, making it seem like smooth blackness that was almost hypnotic to look at with the kaleidoscope of twisted lights bracketing it.

  Her eyes saw nothing down there, and her Pefbar couldn’t reach, so it was if she was looking into infinity save for the tiny spec of ‘red’ far below, though it wasn’t actually a color.

  That spec was actually Buu Zero, one of the original Uriti, and the most flexible of them all. He was shaped like a sphere, but could compress and twist into other shapes. His Yeg’gor armor was weaker than others, but not by much, and the more time they spent in black holes or other extreme gravity wells, the stronger it became through adaptation. Buu didn’t lose flexibility in the exchange, and thankfully that allowed Kara to use him to help her fish for valuable
materials too deep for the Star Forges’ straws to reach.

  She couldn’t see him with her eyes, but he had such a huge Essence presence that she could feel him. Her Essence ‘sight’ didn’t follow any known physics, for she wasn’t brushing him with her Essence or vice versa, but large amounts of Essence were detectable at very long range by those with the ‘eyes’ to see it. So down in that sea of blackness a tiny, tiny red spec slowly moved back towards the surface with another ‘catch’ carried within a cavity that Buu had created on its surface and covered over, forming an impromptu cargo hold.

  Kara watched as his dot grew larger and larger, then eventually she started to see with her real eyes a disruption in the blackness. Eventually it became a shape, but it was heavily red shifted and required her helmet to make the adjustment. The image of the Uriti coming up to one of the warehouses near the Star Forges never fully smoothed out, for the gravity was dragging the light as it bounced off it, which wasn’t much to begin with since there was no star nearby.

  The Uriti eventually passed within the IDF field of the warehouse and the cameras there were able to finally see a clear picture, but Kara could not from her position. She could see the spew of pressurized material coming out of the pouch as Buu opened it up a bit and a large net-shield shield array caught it. The Uriti unloaded over the next half hour, then began moving back down into the black hole in search of more compounds useful to Star Force.

  The Uriti could sense gravity in a very fine sense, so the density of various materials stood out, allowing them a little ranged radar, but most of Buu’s hunting involved feeling the atoms and molecules on its surface and in essence ‘breathing’ them in to figure out what they were. When he found a concentration he collected it by absorbing it if it was small, but if it was large he just took a huge bite out of the surrounding area and carried it back up here to blow out.

  The small Buu’s weren’t well suited for this yet, and only Buu Zero was truly effective. The other Uriti could absorb material, but they couldn’t scoop it out, which was why Kara took up as much of Buu Zero’s time as she could get. The others would absorb and then secrete the various materials, giving her access to a lot of very important material, but not as much as a properly set up Star Forge could if the material was at the proper depth. It was the deep deposits that the Uriti needed to reach for them, and she wondered if the Zak’de’ron weren’t using theirs for mining as well.

  But the biggest question of all on her mind, and the reason she was taking this time out to think about it, was these ‘Super Hadarak’ that could mine Essence…or so Paul thought. How they could have gone unnoticed all this time was troubling, and she wondered if the Hadarak hadn’t managed to kill them and they were all gone now. That was probably wishful thinking, and as much as Kara was worried about this like the others, she knew the trailblazers would deal with this. Her mission was to deal with the Zak’de’ron, figure out what they were doing and find a way to stop it before they did. Ghostblade was now the tip of the spear in that regard, while others focused on the Chixzon and pushing out into the frontier.

  Star Force was so big it had a bazillion things on its plate, but the Zak’de’ron were the one that worried Kara the most. And with this new revelation of Super Hadarak, it underscored how much of the galaxy they still did not know about, and Kara was very concerned that the Zak’de’ron might know something about this, or Essence for that matter. There was nothing in her Vorch’nas to suggest that, but they only gave her the information they wanted, and the Knights of Quenar had been very secretive about their Essence knowledge. If the Zak’de’ron also had it, it wasn’t something they would likely reveal.

  It was literally the magic of the galaxy, and if a type of Hadarak, or something like it, could not only use it, but harvest it, then maybe the Zak’de’ron had been grooming the V’kit’no’sat for more than just the war in the galactic Core. Maybe they had even found and destroyed one of these new monsters long ago…or maybe they were completely clueless as well and Star Force had found something new to them as well.

  Regardless, there was a lot to think about and too few facts to work with. Hopefully either Paul or Dina’s research team would find out more. Until then she had some thinking to do, and one thing she’d already figure out was that at least the Neos would be able to see these things coming, when technology wouldn’t, for Kara had a deep suspicion that if these things were still out there, they were very good at hiding. Maybe cloaking good.

  Hopefully there was no way to cloak an Essence signature, but who knew? Kara wasn’t sure of anything since she’d gotten Paul’s message. And the thought of Essence harvesting still chilled her to the bone despite her armor’s ample heating units.

  6

  March 19, 128440

  Hlek System (Dengor Region, V’kit’no’sat domain)

  Larsu

  Mon’ren piloted the small Bo’ja ship down through the sea of craft clogging Larsu’s skies. Orbit wasn’t much better, and the traffic control grids were virtually non-existent, but this wasn’t his first trip in and out of the world. Mon’ren was been in the service of the Zak’de’ron for over 60,000 years and was just returning from another of the missions they’d tasked for him and a small team of other Bo’ja, all of which had formerly been Voku, but that fact had ceased to be the moment they entered Zak’de’ron service.

  His body looked like a Voku, deep black skin, biped, with a trio of tiny eyes held behind an artificial visor that appeared as a red crystal, but Mon’ren and the others were far more advanced than their former race, who also served the ‘Elders’ without knowing who and what they truly were.

  The Bo’ja knew, and with that trust bestowed upon them also came the realization that they could never return to the Voku. Their elevation came at a price of exclusivity, and it was a decision that none of them regretted. The work of the Zak’de’ron was of the highest order, and Mon’ren had long since stopped thinking of it as an honor, but rather now it was his everyday purpose, as had been the capture mission he’d just completed.

  The pair of Dengari were currently stored in stasis in the rear cargo hold of the ship, which on the outside looked like a native vessel of this world, made by the Chestarimo, but that was just camouflage. Inside there was more advanced technology that allowed the Bo’ja to roam the galaxy quietly, moving through the cracks of commerce and geography to carry out their missions inside either V’kit’no’sat or Star Force domain without either one knowing about it. Both were enemies of the Zak’de’ron, but the Bo’ja knew the time to move against them was not close, and these missions were laying the groundwork for the new order to come. It would do no good to defeat the current rulers of the galaxy if one did not have something to replace them with, and as far as Mon’ren could tell, the Zak’de’ron’s forces, while ample, were not up to the task of galactic dominance.

  What these two prisoners had to do with it he didn’t know, nor did he need to. His mission had been to locate and quietly retrieve them, and once they got back to the Bo’ja colony in Larsu they’d be handing them over to others who would deal with them as the Zak’de’ron directed, though he was pretty sure none of the Elders were on the planet.

  Or to be more exact, within the planet, for as Mon’ren drew his ship down to a surface city he approached not a hangar, but a cleverly hidden access port that would allow his vessel to move more than 400 miles underground and down into the molten layers of the planet where the natives could not go or even look, giving the Bo’ja a planet of their own with the perfect cover above them.

  The entrance shaft would only open once the hangar was sealed, and then a holographic image of their ship would remain on the deck while the real ship traveled below, just in case some interloper got into the hangar or used a flying probe to catch a peak at what was inside. It was unlikely to occur, given the fact that the Bo’ja operated the hangar and had good security at the site, but a extra measure was a small price to pay for their anonymity, not to mention it had b
een done on the order of the Zak’de’ron that had created this colony.

  But now there were only Bo’ja here, upwards of 12 million, and every one of them had originally been a Voku birthed in cloning chambers, though their genetic codes were not identical. They were all tweaked in the manner the Zak’de’ron had instructed them, but now Mon’ren’s genetics had been altered first when he became a Bo’ja and then multiples times afterward as his new race was continually redefined and modified as they proved themselves.

  He now possessed 9 psionics…Ikrid, Lachka, Pefbar, Sesspik, Fornax, Rensiek, Ensek, Nakane, and Pa’no’semak…and each one of them put him in an altogether different league than the Voku. The power that had been entrusted to him could not be passed on to another, but that wasn’t an issue for the Bo’ja because they could not reproduce and had no instinctive drive to do so, as other races did. Nor could they leave Zak’de’ron service, not that any of them ever would want to. They’d been elevated so far, now none wished to return to what they once had been, for being Voku again would be virtually unbearable.

  When Mon’ren finally landed their ship in the huge subterranean hangar filled with hundreds of vessels, his teammates took the prisoners out before he had finished powering down the vessel. He exited last, and seeing how they were already well ahead of him and capable of finishing the handover themselves, he headed off in a different direction, eventually finding his way to the training grounds where he immediately jumped in with the Bo’ja doing various drills, course runs, and other training designed to increase their skill and abilities.

  When finished with that some 39 hours later, he would hibernate in a sleep pod for another 12, then be good to go for the next 238 hours. That was a typical Bo’ja day, as opposed to the 79 hours Voku operated off of, and it was yet another tangible difference between their races…yet his could not exist without theirs, for each Bo’ja had to prove themselves worthy first as a Voku, for the Zak’de’ron had forbid Bo’ja birthing chambers.