Star Force: Sav (SF51) Page 5

  “How small can you go?” Greg asked.

  The filling collapsed in on itself, returning to a single glob that Bo sent the rest of its way to Jason’s face.

  “That small.”

  Greg laughed, but Paul just shook his head. “No, look,” he told Greg, pointing to what appeared to be an empty spot of air in between him and Bo.

  Greg focused, then his jaw dropped again when he flicked on his Pefbar and saw a tiny little speck…no, four tiny little specs so small that they were all but invisible with normal eyesight.

  “How in the galaxy are you doing that?”

  “Not sure,” Bo admitted. “I just have a finer control of my Lachka.”

  “When did this kick in?”

  “A couple days ago when I started messing around with stuff.”

  “Jealous yet?” Paul asked.

  Greg stared at the tiny little pieces, not believing what he thought he was seeing. They were so small it was hard to be sure. “Combat applications? I could see how this would help a tech but…”

  “We’re working on it,” Jason said. “Right now it’s about mass coordination. We’re not sure if the microscopic angle is intentional or just a side effect.”

  “I don’t think the database mentioned anything about it,” Emily said, thinking back to what she’d read a few weeks ago.

  “It doesn’t,” Bo answered between bites, for he was really shoveling it in trying to make up for lost time. “I’ve been through those files more than these two, and there’s nothing there. All they’ve got is some notes from the few Zen’zat that achieved it, and they cited use in either remote control or particle deflection with Lachka…including a huge power savings versus the wall technique.”

  “If you can individually track and catch every piece,” Greg said, following the line of thought.

  “Exactly.”

  “But you don’t have time for than in the case of an explosion.”

  “Actually…he does,” Jason said, glancing over at Greg after a sip from a bottle of blue. “His reaction speeds have increased. Not his physical skills, but his mental processing. Eye hand coordination has gone up as a result, but now it’s his body that’s holding back further upgrades.”

  “I can see things before they happen,” Bo said, taking another swig. “Sort of. It feels that way because my senses are a step ahead of my body. They’ve got me running through drills to test that theory and so far my reaction speed is upwards of Mage 73.”

  “Holy crap,” Emily said, looking at him again. “And I thought you were just becoming a better chess player.”

  “Haven’t actually tried that,” he admitted. “Head is still fried enough that I don’t want to plug into an interface just yet. Need to clean out the debris with drills first.”

  Emily raised an eyebrow at Paul. “Can’t believe you’re holding him back on that one.”

  “I just want him at full strength before I kick his ass,” he said with a smirk.

  “I think we’re going to sell tickets for that one,” Jason commented as he finished his tray.

  “What’s up first today?” Bo asked his two volunteer trainers, starting on another pastry.

  “Light sparring drills then a 5k before we hit the obstacle course.”

  “We?”

  “I’m doing it to. Jason needs someone to compare you with.”

  Jason stood up. “I’ll meet you guys there. Got some sword practice to do first.”

  Bo nodded and Jason walked off with his empty tray…while his was still half full.

  “Em, what are you up to?” Greg asked.

  “Swimming, swimming, and more swimming,” she said, sipping out the last of her bottle of blue. “Endurance day, then I’ll catch a nap with Bo and probably go back for some flexibility drills or sparring afterwards. Depends how dead I am. Wish we’d get the stupid triggers figured out so we can start sharing. I’m really envying those bioshields.”

  “Speaking of which, where’s Riona?” Greg asked Paul.

  “An early start today. I won’t join her for training until the afternoon.”

  “I thought you two were joined at the hip?”

  “We are, but had to make room for this guy. Besides, we can’t train bioshield all day every day.”

  “I thought you were going for the whole Master and Apprentice thing,” Emily added.

  “About that,” Paul said, taking the opportunity while the three of them were here. “I don’t like suggesting this after the fact, but I think we should rework the Mage levels.”

  “How?” Greg asked, curious. Paul was top ranked at level 8 now, with Morgan none too happy about it, but she still preferred field work to training on Earth so for her it was kind of like letting Paul get out ahead of her so she’d have a challenge to reel him back in. At least that’s what it appeared to everyone else. Her thoughts on it were less…cheerful.

  “The time I’ve spent with Riona has opened my eyes to a lot of things.”

  “I’ll bet it has,” Emily said sarcastically.

  Paul threw her a very familiar annoyed look but continued on without comment. “I think we need to keep previous Archon levels as they are. We might not need a lot of the stuff in them now, but the newbs do…like the heavy armor and no psionics up till acolyte.”

  “Agreed,” Greg said, not sure where he was going with this.

  “I think we need to rework Mage and make it into a much larger category…and one that has an automatic pairing with a higher ranking Archon.”

  “Except there are no higher ranking Archons,” Greg pointed out.

  “Our problem, which we’ll work through, but when the second gen get to this point I think it just has to happen and we have to start working and traveling in pairs…for all assignments.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Emily said. “There are too few of us as it is.”

  “If the V’kit’no’sat didn’t exist I’d agree, but we’ve got to take it to the next level and having, at minimum, a sparring partner with you at all times will help us advance quicker. Me pulling ahead of Morgan should be proof enough of that.”

  “Generous of you,” Emily pointed out.

  “I like beating her, you know that, but if she were here training the same amount I was we’d be even…at best. That’s a challenge I like tackling and going back and forth with her on, but since she’s out fighting and doing other stuff her training isn’t at such a high level. Don’t tell her I said that, because it’s not a dis, just a fact that she has no peers to work with. Now, we all learned how to train solo and the newbs should as well, which is why I’m not suggesting we pair them up until they hit Mage, or as I like to think of it, the ‘Apprentice’ stage.”

  “Enter the automatic Jedi metaphor,” Emily declared.

  “Actually I think he might be onto something,” Greg said, thinking hard. “We’ve already been seeking each other out, those of us with the same psionics, to train for them. A more formal structure that has it happening automatically would make sense…though I really don’t want to lose the freedom we have right now.”

  “We can do whatever we want,” Paul reminded him. “I’m thinking mainly about the second gen coming up.”

  “We’re the masters and can take on an Apprentice by choice?” Bo asked, finally working to the end of his plate.

  Paul waved a hand side to side in an unsure gesture. “Numbers game, but eventually yes. If we want to go solo we can, but if we’re in the field I think we need a partner. The combat applications should be obvious, but even if just for training purposes.”

  “I can agree with that,” Bo added. “6 years out on Lothlorien without any of you guys around sucked.”

  “My point exactly,” Paul agreed.

  “So we split up…how? By psionics?” Greg asked.

  “What Riona and I have going works well, but I’m thinking further ahead to when we learn how to share. I think the sharing should be done Master to Apprentice.”

  Greg leaned
back in his chair, rubbing his smooth chin. “They get whatever psionics they can break through to on their own up until they hit ‘Apprentice’ then they get the full load, along with the personalized training of how to make use of them.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Emily added. “Except we can’t share and don’t know how to use them yet.”

  “Work in progress, like always,” Paul said, going a step further. “We’ve also got to make this level more than 100…or make each more difficult. A hundred years on average seems like a long time, but from the Zen’zat’s point of view we’re still young. We need to structure our levels thinking far ahead of now.”

  “That had crossed my mind,” Greg admitted. “But we can’t design levels that far ahead of our current abilities.”

  “I know, but I meant between status changes. I also think it’s time we diversified the armor. I’m liking the heavier version, but some are wanting to go in Kara’s direction to maximize agility. I think we should have two options available at Apprentice while us Masters get more choices…after we design them.”

  “We’re going to run into the problem of getting too big of a skill gap,” Bo warned. “Right now the second gen isn’t that far behind us. But 1000 years from now it’s going to be like bringing your kid brother along and I for one am not going to be too into that. Well, maybe once or twice but not as a regular thing.”

  Greg nodded. “We also need elite pairings.”

  Paul raised and pointed a finger at Greg. “Good idea.”

  “Are we going to give them the telepathic armor too?” Emily asked. “Or save that for the ‘Masters?’”

  “I don’t know,” Paul said, knowing that it was in prototype stage at the moment. “What we give ourselves isn’t the same, and we can’t overload the others with a lot of changes all on the same level.”

  “They’re going to have their hands full with the psionics if we can learn to share them,” Greg pointed out. “That and a choice in armor should be all we throw at them.”

  “Agreed,” Bo said, now with a clean plate, “but are we renaming it?”

  “Mage fits with the psionics being added, in theory,” Greg said. “Not sure exactly how that will work. The requirements might need to be easy just to get them all up and going.”

  Emily nodded, thinking along the same lines. “Mage should be the hard hitting psionic requirements. We can keep the current level progression we’ve mapped out, that way you and Morgan don’t get in a hissy fit by resetting them, then add the new ones when we get access to them.”

  Bo shook his head. “We really need them all unlocked first, otherwise we’re going to have people marked ahead of where they should be.”

  “Can’t be helped at the moment,” Greg said, “but we can get the armor mod going.”

  “Work on it, guys,” Paul said as he stood up and Bo followed suit. “Right now it’s time for training.”

  “Isn’t it always,” Emily said, getting up as well.

  “I’ll get back to you later today,” Greg told Paul. “Already starting to get some ideas.”

  “I thought you might,” he said as the four of them abandoned the table and returned their trays before splitting up and heading off to various training facilities within Atlantis. Paul and Bo went together, but he made a mental note to stop by and have a chat with Wilson later in the day and see if he could offer any insights as to how they might progress forward. Even though he wasn’t an Archon he had always been the training master, more often than not cluing them in to new ways to approach problems that they then expanded upon.

  If you were ever stuck he was the go to guy for help with training issues or all around advice.

  6

  “Ready?” Paul asked.

  “Whenever you are,” Bo answered, toeing the starting line next to Paul while Jason watched from behind.

  With the slap of the starting pedestal Paul took off with Bo matching him stride for stride up to the first barrier and both of them jumping up on top of it and walking across three narrow beams only 2 inches wide. Paul took the middle lane and Bo the right, with numerous thud launchers activating and targeting the two of them from above, ahead, behind, and from underneath. As per the rules of the course Paul couldn’t use his bioshield and neither of the Archons could create a telekinetic field to deflect the thuds with. They had to intercept each one individually, catching, bouncing, or deflecting them in order to keep their balance.

  As he walked, Paul sensed the incoming thuds with his Pefbar extended out nearly to its limits, giving him a split second warning for each which was just enough time to create a hand-sized Lachka field that he placed in their path, knocking down each one individually as he cycled about mentally from point to point. There were dozens coming in at once, forcing him to have to create multiple fields simultaneously and each on their own timing, but he managed well enough. Only a few thuds made it through to hit him and it wasn’t enough to throw off his balance and dump him into the disqualification pit below.

  He made steady progress across, one step at a time and wobbling here and there when he did get hit…but Bo had already made it across. He’d never stopped to walk, and though Paul couldn’t pay attention to what he was doing he noticed a hail of deflections coming off him as he got pelted repeatedly.

  Jason had a better view from the starting area, in which he saw Paul slow up and work his way across the rail gradually while Bo didn’t slow at all. He ran right across, with all the thuds just bouncing off his Lachka fields as if it was no trouble at all. That was the first sign that something was considerably different between the two, but it was only the start of the course and arguably the easiest section.

  When Bo finished getting across he had to climb a ladder, still under thud assault that would last through the entire course. He scurried up the ladder like he had gone across the beam, almost as if the thuds being stopped a few inches from his body were nothing more than holograms and couldn’t touch him. In fact Jason hadn’t seen a single one hit him, while several had gotten through to Paul.

  At the top of the ladders were three circles, into which Bo stepped and activated the timer. He held position as 5 times as many thuds shot at him, literally throwing about 30 per second from multiple angles, but the trailblazer just settled in and blocked them all. First he caught and dropped them, then he began deflecting them back towards various targets near the turrets and racking up some bonus points. He could have grabbed one and threw it back, but Jason noticed he wasn’t doing that. He was actually bouncing them in the direction he wanted…which was when Jason finally realized he was just showing off.

  When the timer expired and Paul was just getting to the base of the ladder the floor opened up beneath Bo and dropped him down through a short tunnel and rounded a curve, sliding him out to a lower section of the course that had two different sizes of thuds…one tiny and one large, both of which were being first at him at different speeds and with different kinetic loads. Trick of this section was to probe his differentiation skills and see just how aware he was of what he was doing.

  Again, Bo surprised Jason. He traced a line on the floor that had a holographic beacon through a complicated series of twists and turns around an otherwise open square area the size of a basketball court, getting hammered the entire time he had to stay inside a two meter perimeter of the glowing ‘mist’ that was guiding him erratically. Adjusting to it and maneuvering as he was should have been a problem, but Bo handled it with ease and continued to rack up bonus points by deflecting thuds towards nearby targets…and doing so individually, because Jason could see his Lachka fields thanks to his Rentar ability, and he was in fact creating tiny fields to intercept each…and much smaller fields than Paul was using.

  The smaller the field the more accurate the trajectory trace you had to pull, and given that this was all happening in a split second you had to create wider fields the less sure you were of their exact position. With Bo’s fields being so tiny it was almost as if he
could see them coming with ease…which shouldn’t have been possible with so many being fired at him nonstop.

  Jason was already impressed, but it only got better the further Bo worked around the course. Eventually the thuds increased speed, size, and diversity…setting up a final gauntlet run down a meter wide elevated ‘sidewalk’ with disqualification pits on either side and a hailstorm of thuds. The ceiling and nearby walls were literally covered with launchers, some of which were sending out baseball sized projectiles while others were spraying him with pebbles in shotgun sprays.

  Those Bo did take with single fields, which Jason wasn’t sure was within the rules or not, but it was how he also would have reacted had he been running it. The normal-sized thuds and larger he kept deflecting singly, then he started grabbing them in the air and holding them up in a halo around him to use as a shield as he ran down the long hallway.

  Jason couldn’t see most of him for the rain was too heavy, but some 18 seconds later he emerged past the line that deactivated the launchers and walked up next to the starting platform as he dropped the 200+ thuds he had suspended around his body at once, with them bouncing and rolling off as he casually reached out and pressed the finish button.

  Some of the thuds rolled over to Jason and hit him in the feet, with the trailblazer just looking at his peer and shaking his head.

  “I want one,” he said pithily, drawing a smirk from Bo.

  “How’s Paul been doing?” he said, looking back.

  Jason had forgotten to look when Bo was going through the final gauntlet, and as he scanned the course for Paul he couldn’t find him. He reached out with is Ikrid and found his mind’s location…in the bottom of a disqualification pit.

  “Not good,” Jason summed up. “You were ahead of him right from the start.”

  “I’d hope so. I want to go again. Now that I’ve got a handle on what I can do I think I can manage more speed and I know I can rack up more bonus points.”

  Jason looked at the score floating in the air nearby, seeing a mark of 132 bonus points that added to his time score for a total of 1032. “Somehow I think that basic mark is going to be virtually unobtainable for the rest of us.”