Star Force: Ice Queen Read online

  That was something Humans didn’t have to experience, though she knew loneliness was not exclusively an Elf thing, but for them it was far worse. Some of them had shared memories of their Isolation with her and it was a pain that she’d never experienced before…but it was a necessary pain, for they had to learn to be individuals, otherwise their telepathic unity could become a crippling weakness if an enemy knew how to exploit it.

  This was but one of many factors Project Legolas was probing, and this trial was as important for Star Force as it was for the individual Elves. The V’kit’no’sat knew how to manage populations with telepathy and telekinesis, but Star Force did not. Archons were all individuals to start with and chosen for their uniqueness. Elves were born this way, all of them, and even without them having telekinesis the differences were striking.

  Star Force had a lot to learn about this higher level of civilization, and the fact that Zen’zat had never been designed to reproduce was in stark evidence every day. The development of the Human race was now up to Star Force, without precedent from the V’kit’no’sat to follow…as far as Ter’nat and Zen’zat were concerned…but there were many other races to study and try to steal inspiration from. It was never enough though, and even if the Zen’zat could be replicated in generational form they wouldn’t have the Archon-level advancement drive.

  The Elves needed to become something new, and aside from stealing ideas from the V’kit’no’sat, troubleshooting new ideas was what made the Archons and Monarchs what they were…and the reason why she was in her own isolation here. She had to deliver answers that others couldn’t, and the interdependency that the Elves had was one of her worries with the Zezdi reproduction method.

  Individuality had to be the basic building block of all races within Star Force, but it was coming hard to the Elves and even more so the Zezdi who were not even remotely as advanced. She could either try to teach them individuality over time or force it on them initially, and the Duke still couldn’t decide which was for the best…and it wasn’t something she could experiment with a year or two to figure out. It would take centuries to discover if she was right or not, so she had to anticipate and predict this, otherwise she would delay the development or even harm the Zezdi…and the latter was totally unacceptable.

  Jessica closed the top of the pod then began to fly it back towards the Elvish city where her skiff and pilot waited. Halfway there she sent a message saying she’d be delayed a few hours and changed course, heading to a small lake north of Lake Nessi and brought her pod down directly onto the water.

  No one was immediately around, but she could sense a few Water Elves off in the distance and sent a telepathic ‘hello’ to them, with them starting to head her way immediately.

  Jessica pulled the canopy on the pod back and triggered her clothes to retract down into a thick cape that she left puddled on the deck. She dove into the water nude, thankful that Monarchs had also been given Lovo’nek and she could breathe underwater…but she still had to keep her mouth shut to keep it out of her lungs.

  She was a pathetic swimmer, but she’d learn to use her Lachka as underwater paddles on her hands and feet to help her move a bit better. That didn’t matter now, because she just wanted to spend some time in the outdoors in the water and mingle with the Water Elves a bit. They’d be happy to see her, and her lack of clothes didn’t matter. She was helpless in the water compared to them anyway, but there were no threats here to worry about so the Duke let herself get immersed in the natural landscape of Eoxion for a while, knowing that returning to her castle command center probably wasn’t going to yield any breakthroughs in the next few hours, so why not a change of pace while she was out here?

  It took only a few minutes before the first of the Elves got to her, swimming so fast through the water on their enhanced Lachka that they looked like slow moving missiles. Those that got to her were all brown haired, meaning no rangers, and they were all clad in smooth body suits with their hands and feet exposed. Jessica looked odd amongst them with her naked body, but she wasn’t an Elf anyway and always stood out.

  Without being able to talk underwater the following conversations were all telepathic and energetic, with not one of the Elves not glad to see their ‘Ice Queen’ who almost never visited from her polar stronghold. Her being a rock star amongst them was normal, but something she’d always slightly cringed at. Today, however, it was anything but as she opened up her mind and accepted as much of the telepathy flowing through them as she could. They couldn’t reach into her mind without touching her, but she could feel theirs and it was like a warm embrace that never lifted.

  Even though she was an outsider it felt like home and she let herself immerse in the sensation as more Water Elves swam towards her from afar. She could feel the unity here and the power within it, and it was an advantage that Star Force was not going to overlook…but how not to let it become a negative was the lingering question.

  Right now she didn’t worry about that, and after a half an hour or so she realized she’d been trying too hard. She’d never thought of herself as having many attributes similar to the Archons, but apparently she’d picked up some of their relentlessness. She needed a vacation to recharge, maybe then she’d be able to find a solution to the Zezdi’s problem. Sitting and staring at the walls certainly hadn’t helped her up until this point.

  And that vacation might as well start now…if she was going to spend a few weeks or months away from her normal routine who better than to spend it with than the Elves? She hadn’t done a tour of all 8 realms in forever, and she knew they’d be overly pleased if she did again.

  When she shared her thoughts with the Water Elves around her they immediately agreed, providing a lot of suggestions for where she could go or stay, offering to take her there. Jessica immediately thought of swimming back up to her pod and grabbing her clothes, but the two Elves that had hands on her immediately disagreed, urging her to come deeper in the lake and travel with them as she was.

  The Queen didn’t need clothes or defenses amongst them, they said. She was welcome as is and if she really wanted to disconnect from her normal duties for a while she should leave everything behind for a while…and if she really felt she needed clothes they could provide her with some elvish ones.

  Another Elf further off had another idea, which then rippled through them all like a ping pong ball passing from mind to mind.

  Why not just disappear for a while? They’d spirit her off away from view and she could move about the Elvish realms quietly, avoiding large crowds and just soaking in the planet that she rarely saw aside from in her chambers.

  Jessica quickly realized she’d been sharing more thoughts than she’d expected, and the two Elves touching her broke contact in apology.

  No no, it’s fine, she told them. I’m just not used to having others inside my head.

  We’ll avoid physical contact then, to make your visit easier.

  No, Jessica said, reaching out her hands to the nearest two Elves. I’ll learn. Send a message to the Archons that I’m disappearing amongst you for an unspecified amount of time and have someone return my pod, then you can spirit me off to wherever you like. I haven’t had an adventure in a very long time.

  Come then, they said, grapping her gently by both wrists and bending the water around her body in order to provide her propulsion, gliding her through the cool depths smoothly as the rest of the Elves swam in formation around her in a telepathic warmness that was already beginning to loosen her clenched mind up…and far more so than she had previously realized she needed.

  The Ice Queen begins to melt…

  Jessica smiled as the current pulled her blonde hair back in a trailing streak behind her head, acknowledging that they were right and thanking them in a single thought.

  She was in bad need of a vacation, and even as she considered how much the Elves sensed her concern and dismissed it, promising that they’d make sure she opened up enough to relieve her mental oppression broug
ht on by her responsibilities…and the first thing they did was politely forbade her from wearing any clothes for the duration, citing it would help fight her natural habit of closing herself off.

  Jessica blanched at first, but with the Elves in her head via the physical contact on her wrists they saw the thought and quickly helped her correct it, teaching her as they went, all in a matter of seconds, after which she relented. She wasn’t going to be doing any mating and they accepted that, pointing out that she needed to open up not just to the Elves but to the planet itself, and serene connection was better than passion.

  Jessica thought about it and quickly decided to humor them on this. Her connection to the water did feel better naked, so why not? It was a vacation, after all, and she needed to refresh her mind…and the Elves had a lot more experience with matters of the mind than she did. And that was experience she was able to sip at through their group telepathic bond.

  Actually, she thought she probably needed to spend time amongst them just to learn more of it and how it might be pertinent to future developments and the Zezdi…but those things she kept behind a mental wall, for there were many secrets she had that a Monarch needed to keep. Jessica opened the rest of her mind up to them as much as she could, with her habit being to keep pulling back, but the Elves promised she’d get used to it in time, so Jessica decided to fully put herself into their care…with the idea of not knowing where she was going or what was going to happen being quite refreshing.

  She had led for so long, it was nice to actually be led for once. That wasn’t a luxury she could indulge in often, but this was a special occasion…and perhaps the spur she needed to break through her Zezdi problem.

  5

  February 24, 4827

  Tauriel System (Seon Region)

  Eoxion

  Neitti hop/walked along an elevated platform that ran the length of the injector assembly in fabrication center #498, one of hundreds of factories along the planet’s equator that were building parts for the shipyards in orbit. This one in particular was forging warship armor in a lengthy and extravagant process visible to his left as thousands of cubic meters of molten material was suspended in null gravity and constrained by force fields as it was bombarded with Rafna energy nonstop.

  The excess Rafna was reflected back in on the molten material, bouncing it around until saturation occurred and not exposing Neitti or any of the other Kiritak workers. If saturation wasn’t met then the armor precursor would harden and the molten material would solidify and essentially clog up the train of alterations occurring to it…the last of which was the combination with a different precursor that would cause the molten material to become immune to the Rafna energy so that a Rafna weapon could not be used to easily penetrate it in combat.

  That meant the last stage had the saturated material being mixed with another molten material very fast and very thorough as it was poured into energy molds further down the facility, but Neitti wasn’t headed that way. He was just coming back from his shift break and eager to get to work on making more Teteron cubes…a component of the visible molten slurry introduced earlier in the process.

  The Teteron cubes had a bad habit of frying the sensors used to monitor their construction, thus a live person had to be involved in the construction process or the automation would eventually make a mistake. There was a chamber ahead that contained thousands of Kiritak, each with a room-sized workstation where they painstakingly checked the automation and checked each of the fist-sized cubes with an array of equipment, tossing out the components that failed and ensuring pure produce for further down the line.

  Given that fabrication center #498 was over 20 miles long, moving up and down the length of the mostly rod-shaped building could be tedious, but there were enough service stations for the crew to take their rest/food breaks in that Neitti didn’t have more than a mile to travel to get back to his workstation…and a mile to a Kiritas was nothing when they used the full power of their legs and literally bounced ten meters at a time with each hop.

  Neitti wasn’t going quite that fast, having started back a little early, when he heard a massive screech that curled his ears. It lasted a couple of seconds, then everything seemed to be back to normal.

  He stopped hopping, instead standing and looking around at the other Kiritak and a scattering of Humans on the wide pedestrian platform, with no one seeming to know what had caused the noise, then as people began moving again the first boom sounded.

  A chain of them followed, and before Neitti could see anything to coincide with the sound the force fields around the molten slurry up and to his left deactivated.

  Dread ran through him, along with the realization that the Rafna generators were also offline, because as soon as the long tether of material began to fall the outer shell hardened. Neitti expected it to hit he backup shields just below…but they never materialized. The huge length of now semi-molten material fell to the emergency trench below, cracking the exterior case and spewing bright green interior material out like the bursting of a water balloon.

  The trench caught most of it, but the splashes went everywhere, melting through the equipment they touched and causing further malfunctions. Neitti dove to the side as a glob arced up over the side of the platform and came falling towards him, changing from bright green to black as it bled off the Rafna energy in droves, burning Neitti from range like a bad sunburn even before the glob hit the deck.

  Thankfully the platform’s emergency shields were still active and caught the physical material over the railing. It splashed open into green brilliance again then hardened quickly over top the shield, forming an impromptu tunnel as more splashes hit and stuck on the physical shield, blocking out partial vision of the catastrophe occurring beyond.

  The Rafna energy from the cooling globs was still burning through wherever you could see green, and by the time he had a partial roof over his head Neitti’s skin was beginning to peel off in places…but not the underside of his feet, for the Rafna was coming from above, and his shoes had only burned away on the top.

  Or rather partly, for they were still attached to his feet, but his clothing had melted rather than caught on fire, as it was supposed to, leaving him wearing nothing but tatters along with the others who had been spared from the falling material but cooked by its proximity.

  His eyes hurt, but thankfully he could still see as he followed the emergency holograms depicting the best evacuation route. He didn’t get far before he saw a Human lying on the ground, her skin black and red in places where it had been burnt. Another Kiritak got to her before Neitti did, and together they pried her up off the ground and, painful as it was, put her over their shoulders and carried her…leaving behind patches of her skin stuck to the floor.

  She was dripping her red blood on them, but that didn’t matter…nor did the pain of her body on their wounds. They had to get everyone out, and across the fabrication center the rest of the crew was doing the same. No one was being left behind, and before the pair of Kiritak could even make it halfway out of the facility a squad of armored Kiritak medics rushed up to them and took the Human, carrying her on an anti-grav shield bed that cradled her body far more gently than they had been.

  “Stand still,” one of the medics said, coming up in front of Neitti and stopping his zombie-like progress as he continued to follow the evac holograms, “before you lose your foot.”

  Neitti finally stopped, not wanting to touch the aqua-colored armor and hurt himself further, and looked down at his feet. His left one was missing one of his toes and what looked like a third of his flesh. He could see bone in a few places between shards of shoe…then the pain suddenly diminished as the medic pressed something to his forehead.

  “Temporary hold,” the medtech said as his skin stopped what bleeding it had, regrowing slightly while most of his body went so numb he couldn’t even stand. The armored Kiritak caught him, then a few moments later had him floating on his back.

  “Get the others out first
,” Neitti complained, but didn’t have the bodily control to physically object.

  “You first. You won’t make it another hundred meters with half that foot, and the less we have to repair the better. Off you go,” the medtech said as Neitti stared at the ceiling that was now moving…or rather he was, but the medtech wasn’t with him.

  He lifted his head up and looked, squeezing his eyes open and shut a few times to fight the sudden blurriness, then he saw other Kiritak hobbling beside him plus a few more floaters that were being carried on tiny, hand-sized machines that were emitting energy fields to cradle them above in an invisible grip that glowed ever so slightly the same aqua color as the medtechs’ uniforms.

  Neitti had to be in one as well, and it was auto-piloting him along the line of evac holograms as he heard even louder bangs and screeches from the direction he’d come, now obscured by ceiling and tunnel as they headed perpendicular to the main construction train through the support chambers to the nearest exterior entrance.

  Alarms were sounding everywhere, but they were almost muted by the noise of further destruction. Was the planet under attack? They’d received no warnings of an invasion, and Star Force industrial machinery was too well stacked with redundancies for this to have been an accident.

  In fact this should not have been occurring at all save for a warship or mech firing on the fabrication facility directly…and even then the number of backup failures made no sense. What in Helinat’s Grasp was going on?

  Neitti thought about it for a moment, then as the shock began to wear off a severe heaviness dragged his head back down and he decided to lay still and let the medical drone carry him off to a medbay or wherever it was taking him. His eyes didn’t hurt so much now, but they were blurry and his lids were now heavy. He knew there was nothing else he could do to help now, so he eventually surrendered to the fatigue and half passed out as he floated on amongst the sea of Kiritas and Humans fleeing fabrication center #498.