Star Force: Reignor Read online

  In his own Construction, his young self had learned what it meant to be Neofan, which was more than just developing skills. Those who failed to measure up were either terminated or given the chance of exile, the latter of which was seen as torturous, for without proper Construction a Neofan would surely end up insane. But if they did truly master their own minds, they were then taught to master their bodies and taught various tricks they could use, and crafting simple compounds out of basic molecules was one of them, which would then be a precursor to the more advanced alchemy abilities that Plausious had not acquired.

  The Neofan never needed those skills with all their technology, but the practice of it allowed them to hone their focus and become one with the passive mental state that all Neofan society operated off of. Rage was the greatest enemy one had, and Neofan were inclined by their enlightened state to be continually disgusted with how primitive the rest of the galaxies were, and this naturally angered them. One had to overcome this anger in order to truly be Neofan, and accept that not all would be enlightened. If Plausious could not have held his nerve amongst the inferior, he did not deserve his physical superiority.

  And yet now, standing here with an inferior Hadarak, he peeled back another layer of lies from his former civilization. That had become a side quest for him during his exile, as he was ironically finding out more about himself here than he had in his Construction.

  He was superior…attested to by the fact that he had survived all this time alone in enemy territory. But there was something about the Ren’mak that was of equal superiority to him. He was a peer with it on some level that he didn’t fully understand yet, but he was certain of that fact now. And when it brought him the little worm he realized that it was trying to help him as he had helped it.

  Not to serve him, but to help him. As a friend.

  Neofan culture did not have a concept of ‘friendship.’ He had only encountered it in Star Force, but had not truly experienced it until he had come across this Ren’mak.

  Plausious sat down and put the various components he had gathered between his legs as he crossed them before him. “I guess you outdid me,” he admitted. “You rejected the lies of your own race long before I even suspected mine.”

  The Neofan stripped down the bark further, analyzing and isolating a certain type of molecule from it, then holding the refined material up for the Ren’mak to see.

  “Go on, lick it.”

  The little beak hesitated, sniffing it at first, then a small tongue snuck out and made contact with the powder. His head jerked as if it was tart, but then he came back and continued to lick up more of the powder onto his now dry tongue.

  “Good. You know the smell now? You know the taste?” he said, translating telepathically. “Find me more plants that have this. The bigger the taste the better. Find it and I will pull it out.”

  The Ren’mak’s mood brightened, now having a task and a chance to do something for Plausious correctly. It flew off into the mist, with him keeping a mental eye on it and every other mind out there. He didn’t sense anything large enough to harm it above the water, but those in the water could potentially be hazardous.

  “And stay away from the lake,” he added before turning back to his pile of plants and started to strip out various components to see what was in them and how much he could use. Most of it was junk, as far as his and the Ren’mak’s digestive systems were concerned, and if it required too much energy on his part, the process would become counterproductive. But as long as there was potential here, he needed to explore it.

  Plausious got more and more hungry as he worked, realizing he needed to head back out so they could get back to the Hadarak food, but he didn’t want to leave. He nibbled on some of his refined material, but the calories it gave him were less than what he had used to refine it. He needed something easy to split that would give him ample calories, then he could use them to pull out the minerals and vitamins he required, but in far less amounts.

  What he had wasn’t going to work, and he didn’t have enough time to go exploring here more, so he was going to have to go back and return here later. He was about to call the Ren’mak back to him when the flier returned early, landed in front of him on the moss-covered rock Plausious sat on, then coughed up a lot of little white tubes that it had held inside its beak. It looked up at him warily, as if asking if he had done something wrong again or if this is what he wanted.

  Plausious didn’t sense a mind inside, meaning it wasn’t a person like the worm was, but he didn’t know what it was beyond that as he picked it up and licked it.

  His eyes went wide as his analysis sense registered food-grade concentrations of 5 major compounds.

  “Where did you find this?”

  He got a few mental images from the Ren’mak, then asked him to guide him there. Both of them took off through the mist, with it never slackening enough to see more than a few strides ahead, but when they traveled along the edge of the lake and came to an arch-like ‘pinch’ in the massive cavern walls that created a wide choke point that the lake almost completely covered, he found a grove of odd trees that did not appear to belong here.

  These trees, he was certain, were light-gathering trees…perhaps also heat gathering, but they had leaves that were very similar to what would be found on the surface. And the seemingly native plants here were giving off enough light that a slow growth might have been possible, considering there was no ‘night’ stage down here for them to go without a constant energy input.

  And on those trees were growing bundles of the little white tubes inside of paper-thin fruit shells.

  Plausious pulled one off its tiny stem hanging down from a branch and pulled it open, seeing hundreds of them inside.

  “This was engineered,” he said, sure of it. “Someone put this here, perhaps long, long ago and forgotten by time.”

  He looked around, seeing others laying on the ground that had fallen…and not been opened or eaten at all. Meaning it was most likely being wasted and not the food of any of the lifeforms here.

  “Did you eat any?” he asked, getting an affirmative chirp.

  “Good,” the Neofan said, cupping half of the fruit’s contents in his hand and throwing them into his mouth. After getting used to eating Hadarak food he knew the new taste here would not be hard to get used to…but more important than that, they had a high energy and protein count, with his stomach thanking him immediately as it gave its own approval.

  “Very good,” he said, grateful to the Ren’mak, who had just saved them an unnecessary return trip. He stroked its head and explained this was real food, and it would help them both immensely, but they needed to find out how many of these trees were down here. If only a few they couldn’t stay long, but what was here now would last them many days. Enough to do a lot more exploring, for Plausious was sensing this maksack was the size of a modest city, and the oxygen levels from the plants’ byproducts were high. Enough to make the air feel alive despite the lack of movement and the thick moisture floating around in it.

  “My friend, I think this will be our home…”

  6

  The Ren’mak rattled off a series of chirps, squawks, and ulus as Plausious lifted another heavy beam that he’d painstakingly crafted into the hole he’d dug, setting it vertically so it that it matched the slot in the beam above him as he worked to build the elevated foundation for his newest extension to their dwelling in the maksack. They weren’t Star Force words just yet, but an intermediary, limited language he’d coaxed him into learning, though his vocal chords weren’t yet up to the task of more refined data transmission.

  “How is it askew?” he responded, looking up and seeing the beams match up as expected and not having to use telepathy, for while the Ren’mak couldn’t speak fully, it could understand most of what he said, including his short reply.

  Plausious stepped back to look from another angle. “No, the ground is not level. That is what makes it appear tilted. I can feel the vertical alignment against the gravity well. It is as it should be. Insert the bolt.”

  The Ren’mak didn’t agree, but he did as he was told and flew up to the intersection of the two beams while clasping an oddly shaped rock in its feet. It hovered over the holes that now lined up, then slid the rock in part way, feeling it jamb. He let go then kicked it twice as Plausious jigged the beam.

  A third kick sent it in until the wider top section caught, then Plausious telekinetically lifted another smaller shaped rock into the visible hole in the exposed side of the other, putting the lock pin in place as the Ren’mak landed on the mostly organic horizontal beam and looked down at it, squawking his approval as it glanced back at the rest of the dwelling that contained 8 rooms, all large enough for the Neofan to walk around in without ducking, along with a lower two on ground level that were only accessible from above to keep the roaming creatures out.

  They’d appeared not long after Plausious had started crafting a variety of foods for himself and the Ren’mak, with the crawling quadrupeds coming from somewhere far off, perhaps in another maksack, but they were now inhabiting this one whenever they didn’t move too close to the lake. The Neofan tried to protect them when he could, but the predator eels were quite fast and he hadn’t yet found a way to keep them in the depths and feeding off the plant life there.

  The Ren’mak was forbidden to fly low over the water or land on the edge for just that reason, but the quadrupeds did not obey him, searching out food wherever they could and always coming up short. Even with some being taken by the eels, they were always overpopulated and starving, making him wonder exactly where they had been before coming here.

  He gave them some of the leftover byproducts that neither he nor the Ren’mak wanted to eat, and they gobbled up most of them, even when not all of it was digestible material. And if he didn’t protect his stored food, they would raid it when he wasn’t here to shoo them off. Hence the storage rooms had to have no entrances that they could get in through, and gratefully they were half full of prepared food, enough that if he created more now it would spoil.

  And what they had would last them a very long time, so he let the trees and other plants grow freely so they could feed the other creatures as well as multiply for his own needs, with him reworking the ecology of this maksack to his advantage. He now had multiple groves of the noodle-producing trees where there had been none before, as well as grooming other plants not just for his food, but also to try and get something that the eels would like better than the quadrupeds.

  That was an ongoing experiment, with some of his recent attempts sitting on one of the upper rooms along with other pieces of crude technology he had been trying to craft. Enough of them that he needed to expand their dwelling to offer him more workspace that he could shut off from the locals when needed.

  He hadn’t fought the Hadarak in a very long time, and he hadn’t ventured to the surface in almost as long. The Reignor no longer needed to, for he was growing and harvesting all the food components he and the Ren’mak needed down here, with the local plant life thriving even more now that they had another source of carbon dioxide to consume other than what leeched up with the water from deeper in the planet.

  This place, hidden on a planet of horrors above, was not without its pockets of anti-code. The eels were the primary source of it, and Plausious had taken it as a personal challenge to rid them of it…or at least diminish it. If the anti-code was truly in all lifeforms from their birth, it might be impossible to remove it entirely. But from what he had learned from Director Davis was that when the darkside was allowed to fester it multiplied, not so much in numbers but in depth, and some races were highly ensnared by it.

  Star Force sought to free those races from it, and now here in his tranquil little pocket of refuge on this Hadarak planet, he had come to try and do the same. The eels already ate plants, so that was a huge advantage to start with, but no matter how much telepathic training he tried to give them, he could not discourage their instinct to strike at the shoreline…nor could he teach the quadrupeds to stay away, for they didn’t live long enough to carry their lessons forward even when they were not killed. Attrition and badly constructed bodies saw them die not long after reproducing, as was typical of primitive races.

  It didn’t seem to fit with this place’s longevity, and Plausious was trying to do what he could to alter that…despite the food shortage for the little creatures. Thankfully a lot of what he grew for himself was not edible for them until he altered it, or not reachable where it grew until it dropped from the trees.

  Plausious had explored the entirety of this maksack, but had not yet ventured through the nearby fissures to look for others. He could not feel more minds out there, though he didn’t have the range without using his Essence to search further. With the arrival of the quadrupeds he guessed there was at least one more not too distant, but he hadn’t figured out where it was yet, and didn’t feel the need as his time was better spent upgrading this maksack for both him and his neighbors.

  But as he moved the dirt in around the base of the beam he had just set and smashed it down with his feet, he saw Essence reflections all around him…as well as far off into the nearby rock, where not one but several maksacks were briefly visible.

  But he hadn’t created the Essence wave. Someone else had. Someone up on the surface, not too far away based on the reflection angles.

  That wave also hit him, and bounced back what would have been a very bright signature.

  Meaning that he had just been located.

  The tranquility and hopefulness for the future that this place had gifted him disappeared in a heartbeat, replaced by unwanted thoughts of where to run, how to run, and how soon.

  He didn’t want to let go of what he had here, and he fought for another option as he waited to see if another pulse came…which it did, from a slightly different location, meaning the individual was trying to ascertain his depth.

  “My friend,” he said to the Ren’mak that unknowingly continued to perch on the overhead beam exuding content emotions. “We are not alone. Someone with powers like mine is up there, and they know where we are now. We need to run again, but we can’t while that person is alive, for he will always be able to find me.”

  He felt the emotional shift in the Ren’mak make his own miniscule in comparison, and he didn’t dare tell him that he needed to leave him here and seek out this opponent on the surface if there was any hope of keeping this home intact.

  The Ren’mak finally chirped mournfully, asking how soon they had to leave.

  “Not right now,” he said, knowing it would take time for the Hadarak to find a way down here. But if he waited that long they could have all the entrances blocked and pin them down here. “But soon. I’ll gather some food to take with us, then we’re going to have to fly out of here. Out across the desert. I do not know where to. But I have to destroy one of them first. And when I fight him, you have to stay near but not too near,” he said, refusing to tell him to go away, which Plausious knew would get an automatic refusal. “I don’t want to accidentally hurt you, and he could kill you with a single attack. You have to stay alive long enough for me to kill him. I won’t be able to protect you and fight him both. If you can hide somewhere, that would be best.”

  The Ren’mak asked about fighting him here, making Plausious reconsider.

  “If he comes, perhaps we could. But if they send the Hadarak first, I will have to use my strength on them, and that will weaken me against him. I need to take the fight to him, and soon. Will you stay here while I do that?”

  The crestfallen Ren’mak became even more depressed, to the point of panic, at the idea of being separated from the Reignor.

  “I don’t want to risk you dying, my friend. I can’t protect you when I fight him. I don’t know what else to do,” he said as a light tremor shook a few small rocks off the ceiling of the maksack, with them falling down into a few trees, but with most hitting the central lake, though invisible in the mist except to the Neofan, who looked upward and through the rock as far as he could, for the tremor wasn’t originating below them.

  He couldn’t see it, but he had a very bad feeling about this. Since his location was already betrayed, he used his Essence to look further…seeing a massive explosion tearing into the surface above them, and slowly descending as it ate its way through the rock.

  “We have to move, now,” he said, jumping up to the deck and rushing inside their dwelling that was about to be destroyed. He grabbed as much food as he could, especially the types meant for the Ren’mak, then he flew off through the mist with his friend trailing just off his feet and flapping hard in panic that he might be left behind.

  “Stay close,” Plausious said, trying to reassure him even as dread filled him. The Hadarak were bombarding his location to drill down to him, which could collapse the maksack on them even before the beam hit, so he had to get the fissures and start working their way out…but those same fissures could collapse just as easily, pinning or crushing them with nowhere else to go.

  Carrying several containers in front of him without touching them, Plausious took them to the quickest route up to the surface, then slid the containers into the wide crack ahead of them as he squeezed his larger body through, with the Ren’mak following much easier as the shaking increased.

  He pushed as quickly as he could, almost abandoning the food as the vibrations got more and more intense…but then they stopped entirely, causing him to pause and look backward through the rock. He didn’t use his Essence, for they weren’t that far away, and the nearest edge of the maksack appeared to be intact, though with a lot of dust mixing with the mist.