Star Force: Ascension (SF27) Read online

  Morgan snapped upright and pulled her legs up underneath her, sitting cross-legged and staring up at the screen while her cuts continued to seep tendrils of blood that she was ignoring. The female medic stepped up and began pulling off the loose patches from her back and replacing them, trying to stem the blood loss the Archon was racking up.

  Morgan collected her wet hair into her left hand and pulled it forward around her neck to get it out of the medic’s way. “Highlight the nervous system,” she prompted.

  “This scanner won’t help much there,” the man said, reaching up to adjust the controls in another fashion. “Respiratory system checks out, circulatory system is obviously running low on blood, but within acceptable levels. Lose much more and we’ll need to get some artificial plasma in you.”

  He changed screens again, taking the computer-generated scan of her body and altering the highlighted regions along with scrolls of numerical data and graphs along the sides.

  “Musculature looks good, organs are functioning normally. Aside from the cuts in your skin nothing jumps out as odd.”

  The other male medic shook his head and commented from behind the others as he handed the women new patches as she needed them. “No, I felt her discharge some sort of static field. Something had to generate it.”

  “Do you have a faster scanner?” Morgan asked.

  “Faster how?”

  “Realtime.”

  “This one was recording in realtime. The computer took the disparate scans and compiled the mockup.”

  “Fine,” Morgan said, trying to be patient. “Do you have one that can scan my entire body at one time?”

  “Depends what you’re scanning for,” the medic half answered. “Between these three we hit everything, but there are some full body units downstairs for more selective scans.”

  “Archon,” the female tech asked politely. “Your legs?”

  “What…oh, sure,” she said, half standing up on the bed and then stretching out backwards like she was laying down for a day at the beach, save for the bloody splotches covering her body. “I think I can do it again, but I don’t have complete control.”

  “Don’t,” the other male suggested, “not yet. At least not until we get all the data possible. Excuse me,” he told the other medic, stepping past and syncing the palm device he was holding to the unit.

  “Do what you have to, just find the damn glitch,” Morgan said, releasing her elbows from underneath her and laying flat on her face while the man touched a soft, slick nub to her back and began to massage her spine starting at her neck and running all the way down to her pelvis and back up again. He did that three times then pulled it off.

  “Try not to flinch. I’m going to touch your leg again.”

  “Alright,” she said, spreading them apart and trying to prepare herself so as not to get spooked. The nub appeared in mind’s eye just above her knee and then walked itself up and down her inner thigh. “What is that one scanning?”

  “Nervous system through energy signatures. It also includes body heat.”

  “What’s the range?”

  “A handful of centimeters, but the scan is extremely sensitive,” he said, finishing with the leg. “I’m going to do the other now.”

  Morgan waited through the gentle massage, then he proceeded to run the little device all over her skull. Halfway through her head started tingling and she felt another discharge coming on. She tried to spread it out through her body but it didn’t want to go below her neck. It just stayed there and built.

  “Watch out,” she warned half a second before the medic’s hand jumped up in the air a few inches as an invisible forced gently knocked the device up and away from Morgan’s head.

  “Son of a bitch,” the other medic said, not having seen the first incident with the patches. “Did she just do that?”

  “I told you,” the trailblazer said, annoyed.

  “It’s dead,” the other medic said, trying to turn the device back on without success. “Whatever you did, it’s got to be an energy discharge of some type.”

  Morgan glanced at the other one, raising her eyebrows but not repeating the same words twice.

  The female tech reached up to the topmost patches and made sure they were still secure with a quick pat down, then she pointed at the screen. “I think you’ve got your anomaly, Archon.”

  Morgan pried her body up and sat back on her heels, looking at the screen and only understanding half of it, mostly related to a massive spike in biometrics.

  “Translate please.”

  “A black hole…medically speaking,” the other man said, putting a hand on her left shoulder and pointing to the screen with the other while tapping a finger on certain statistics. “Nervous system activity as a byproduct of some other activity, one that I’d guess we don’t have the equipment to analyze on this ship. Whatever it is, the electrical output increased to a level equivalent to a workout, meaning control signals going somewhere. You lying here doesn’t require much, so whatever just happened your brain definitely triggered it.”

  “That’s something,” she said, looking down at her achilles tendon and prodding the patch covering the injury, noting that they’d applied an extra heavy version. It was stinging, even though it shouldn’t have been, given the numbing medication within the pads.

  “Is something wrong?” the female medic asked, then corrected herself. “Something with the patch, I mean?”

  Morgan closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to unblock her senses. Normally whenever she was in pain she held it in check and focused her mind around it, and doing the reverse was unusual enough that she was having some difficulty. After a few seconds and several muscle clenches/releases trying to reset her balance, she confirmed that she could feel at least a little bit of pain from all her cuts.

  “I’m not totally sure, but I think whatever I did bled off the numbing effect, because I’m feeling the cuts again.”

  The female medic sighed, then reached up to peel the top one off but Morgan gently caught her hand. “Leave them, I can barely feel it.”

  “Do you want these now?” the medic in the back asked, still holding her fresh set of patient clothes.

  “Wait till she washes off first,” the female medic suggested. “Or she’ll get those bloody too.”

  Morgan eyed the man. “Tired of seeing me naked?”

  “Honestly, I could stare at you all day without blinking, but I’d feel guilty if I didn’t at least offer you clothes.”

  Morgan rolled her eyes and sighed. “Look all you want. When you get past 100 years old you won’t be so skittish about nudity. Everyone’s naked underneath their clothes anyway.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said, glancing her up and down appreciatively.

  “Pain overrides pleasure,” she said, offering a bit of advice while the other two males were busy analyzing the sensor readings and the inoperable device. “And like it or not, most pleasure turns out to be an illusion. When you can wrap your mind around that you can turn it off at will. And you definitely shouldn’t be feeling guilt over anything sexual. Count this as your lucky day and enjoy it…so long as you can still see to your duties.”

  He seemed to bristle at that. “I’ll admit you’re hot, but you’re not that hot.”

  Morgan’s eyes narrowed, and she could tell he was faking. “Liar,” she said with a smirk as she turned back around. “Alright, you’ve had 30 seconds. What’s your prognosis?”

  “You fried it,” the medic on her left said. “But maybe if you get a mechanical tech to analyze the damage they’ll be able to tell you what kind of discharge your body produced…though my guess would be other than electrical.”

  The other medic frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  “Concussion,” Morgan answered. “Electricity won’t move nonmagnetic objects.”

  “True, but there could be a combined effect, so I wouldn’t rule out electrical damage to the device.”

  “A fai
r point,” Morgan conceded, “but my gut agrees with him. This is something…new. Can you make anything out of the data we got before I fried the sensor?”

  “Well, there was a considerable amount of activity in your brain at various points just before your overload. I suppose those could be significant, if we knew more about what was actually happening.”

  “What points…and what do they control?”

  “Physical attributes,” the medic on the left answered, studying them closely. “None are the pure mental processors. It’s like whatever this was lit up multiple functions with an abundance of control signals.”

  “Or return signals,” the other countered. “There’s no way of telling which way the stimuli were flowing.”

  “Odd word choice,” Morgan noted.

  The medic on the right shook his head. “Not really. Stimuli can be sensory signals flowing to the brain, or they can be control signals ‘stimulating’ the organs to function. Action and reaction, regardless of the direction through the nervous system.”

  Morgan raised an eyebrow. “I stand corrected. So best guess, are these spikes my brain creating the effect or responding to the production of it.”

  “Hold on a moment,” the female medic said, pointing up at the screen from behind Morgan. “Take a look at her optical fibers on that pass.”

  Morgan’s head came up a hair higher at hearing that, looking for the part of the scan she was referring to as it was rewound.

  “Increased activity there,” the medic on the left said, running backwards and forwards as the scope-like vision of her head moved about, “but not the auditory.”

  “Pigment change, huh?” Morgan asked, turning around to face the man holding her clothes…and the one who had diagnosed her eye color change to be cosmetic only.

  “Did your vision alter?” the man on her right asked.

  “No, it didn’t,” Morgan confessed, confused.

  “Let’s try another scan…hopefully you won’t burn this one out,” he said, taking the other device from the female medic as she passed it over Morgan’s shoulder to him as the Archon stretched back out on the padded table. This one was neither wand nor nub, but looked for all the world like a sonic screwdriver and emitted a red tracking laser that stretched about a foot in length. The medic moved the glowing line up and down her body, covering every part as another diagram began to form on the screen from the tissue scan.

  “What the hell?” both men said in sync, glancing at each other for a moment, then back at the screen.

  “Clue me in please,” Morgan said, sitting up and looking at another computer-generated diagram of her body, zoomed in on a portion of her back.

  “Do you see these dots?” the medic on the left asked, circling an area.

  “Yes. What are they?”

  “They’re not supposed to be there,” the other medic said. “They’re tiny…growths, for lack of a better word.”

  “Oh my gosh,” the female said, and Morgan finally caught on to what they were looking at.

  “They’re spread over my entire body, aren’t they?”

  The man on the left nodded. “Not just below the surface either, they’re in the deep tissue, your bones, organs…but nowhere critical,” he noted, spinning the diagram around and around, zooming in and out at different angles to get a better lay of the thousands of tiny specs, each less than a tenth of a millimeter in width. “They don’t appear to be connected to anything.”

  “Power generators?” the Archon guessed.

  “I have no idea. You said this began after we used the alien device to repair your body?”

  “Yes…well, wait. I might have had one incidence in the high gravity, but my senses were so screwed up I can’t be sure. I was feeling all kind of strange things, but before that nothing like this has ever happened, even remotely.”

  “Have you used one of these regenerators before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then maybe the alterations were made a long time ago and your system just got boosted by the wide scale damage and repair the gravity caused. Do you know anything about the source of the healing device?”

  “A great deal, actually. It’s never been known to change a person, and they’ve been used thousands of times.”

  “When was the last time she was scanned?” the medic on her right asked, glancing at the others.

  “Last file is over 100 years old,” the one in the back answered. “I checked when she came in earlier.”

  “That’s something, at least. Let’s run a comparison and see if we can narrow down some variables,” he said, finally looked back down at Morgan. “How about you hop in the shower next door, then let us run you through every scan we can manage before you go back to duty. Hopefully without frying the rest of our equipment. We’ll get a team analyzing it, but I have a feeling you’re going to need higher grade medtechs with a lot more toys to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Alright,” Morgan said, sliding off the table. “Find out what you can, and copy the scans to my files. I want to have a look in my spare time. Bring those,” she said, pointing to the stack of clothes as she walked across the room a bandaged, bloody, nude mess, feeling a bit tipsy from either the loss of blood or low ambrosia…maybe even a bit of both.

  7

  March 25, 2405

  Brokal System

  Sri’ka

  Morgan studied her medical sensor data for several hours the next day, but neither her nor the medics could make anything of the tiny growths, the surge in her nervous system, or the change in her eye color…let alone the energy fields she was producing. The cuts on her back, butt, and legs had healed over within 24 hours, leaving her with just the nasty gash on her achilles tendon, but even that was fading quickly with the combination of a healing patch and the ambrosia coursing through her system.

  That was one discovery she’d made that Morgan had kept to herself. Ever since she started having these episodes her body started craving more ambrosia, as if the creation of the energy was being fueled by it…or, probably more accurately, it was a new type of workout for her body that it was painfully inefficient at. Her dosage level had increased 40% and she was keeping it just nipping at headache threshold, the Archon version of a full dose, as she got half a day’s workout in.

  There were no incidents during her training, and only a couple of little tingles afterward that she managed to suppress…proud that she was making a least some progress in being able to control whatever this was. She would have preferred to stay in the sanctum, away from everyone else and focus on centering herself and flushing out these instabilities…as well as seeing if she could harness them to her advantage. If it came from the Zen’zat then it had to have combat applications, and those interested her greatly.

  But time wasn’t on her side. The Kvash representative had finally arrived at Sri’ka, meaning it was time for her to head down to the surface for their little summit meeting to discuss strategy in the wake of what looked to be a major Nestafar offensive, so she found herself stuffed into a generic set of ranger armor, with the size adjustments calibrated as closely to her body shape as possible. It felt like wearing a bag of rocks compared to her custom armor that fit like a glove, but it was either this or wear one of her damaged sets.

  She was riding down to the planet with no pack, only a rifle and pistol on her rack and a small ammo pouch attached above the small of her back and just below a stun stick she’d thrown in for good measure…light armament as far as she was used to carrying. Her escort sat across the personnel bay in the dropship in full white Knight armor, carrying a long stun sword and huge shield with him, though both warriors had their helmets off and lying on the seats beside them, waiting for the ship to land at the Calavari capitol city of Helmshirr.

  The Nestafar hadn’t been so bold to even send a single fighter its way yet, preferring to engage the Calavari over smaller targets. Morgan had studied the defensive arrangements for the city previously, but as they approached she was g
etting some good visuals via the datapad relay of the defense towers ringing the perimeter. Originally designed to defend against lizard cruisers, they held naval-grade plasma cannons and had an individual power station attached to each one, along with individual shield generators making each a mini fort, complete with subsurface levels that held ground troops and fighters.

  Inside that impressive defensive perimeter were buildings even more massive. Some were residential while others were shield generators…huge shield generators, capable of catching a starship falling from orbit. They didn’t extend all the way to the ground, rather they formed a massive umbrella high above the city that covered everything out to the defense towers, doubling up on their protection and making orbital bombardment or kamikaze runs difficult for an enemy to execute.

  Beneath the primary shield there were smaller ones covering select sections of the city or individual buildings, but they were low to the cityscape, leaving an open air corridor between the two layers for their trademark fighters to be able to engage the enemy within. The entire design almost enticed the enemy to assault them with fighters, given that even a Nestafar ground assault would be laughable with the defense towers online. One of them could fry a super dragon with a few shots of its medium batteries.

  Gone were the tulip-shaped buildings, replaced by much larger artworks…or at least that’s the best as Morgan could describe them. They had wide bases that narrowed to a thin waist, then bulged back out again numerous times up until they capped off with a ridged rooftop that held multiple landing pads, parks, and whatnot. She did notice that all of the bulges were aligned between the buildings, meaning there were levels where there was little building and a lot of airspace…which she guessed was also built for their fighters to zip around within.

  As they came closer Morgan saw that it wasn’t just fighters moving around through those gaps, but enough flying vehicles to make Coruscant blush. They were jam packed into the various levels in a chaotic formation that saw curving lines of traffic going this way and that on a flat plain. She couldn’t pinpoint the flow patterns in the brief glimpse she got, but it was far more intricate than the typical grid layout of most Star Force cities.