Star Force: Persistent Ravage (Wayward Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  “Fortunate.”

  “Very, but I can’t fix her Fornax tissue. Not completely. And I can’t get to it for a while. These wounds are too bad. Get me some food cubes.”

  “Can she eat?” Hati asked as he moved to a crate and opened it.

  “She can’t chew, but I can get it in her,” he said, holding out his hand for the Kiritas to place four in…then one of them seemed to melt as it was broken down into tiny granules that flew in a stream through the air to her lips, then snuck through her teeth and down her throat to be deposited in her stomach.

  “She’s lost a lot of blood and internal tissue, not to mention skin. I can’t pull too much from the rest of her body. She was weaker than I thought, probably from the days spent here. There’s not much nutrient reserves left in her.”

  “Need water?”

  “Yes.”

  Hati got some and watched as the Archon poured it into an invisible cup, then set it between her almost nonexistent breasts as he put a single finger against her skin there and somehow got the liquid to soak straight into her body as Esna watched with her eyes but was otherwise comatose as Tyrenk kept her so numbed up she couldn’t feel the ravages occurring in her as the poison continued to do damage while the Archon used multiple psionics to hunt down the tiny globules of it.

  They came out one of her fingertips, and Hati brought a small vial over to collect it. After a several hour process Esna was clear of the poison, but there was so much internal damage that Tyrenk eventually rendered her unconscious then enacted some temporary holds within her body as he finally released contact and sat backwards blowing out a heavy breath.

  “Is she alright?” Hati asked.

  “Far from it, but the worst is past,” he said, frowning. “There are more of those things nearby. We need to remove the dead. The scent is going to draw them here.”

  “Can you provide cover while I move them?”

  “Yes. You won’t need your weapon,” the Archon said as they left Esna to her sleep on top of the sleeping sleeve but still nude save for her healing patches.

  When Hati opened the door Tyrenk felt several quadrupeds outside the cave take notice and start to make their way towards them, but when the pair got outside and they saw them, the critters sprinted for a few strides before skidding to a halt and standing still calmly.

  “It’s alright,” the Archon said. “I have them. Get to work.”

  Hati reached down and picked up two of the dead bodies, glad that his envirosuit shielded him from most of the stench as he pulled them over each tiny shoulder then carried them out as the others preceded him and the Archon. When they got outside others soon came into view, also under the Archon’s mental control.

  “Over there, 300 meters,” Tyrenk said, pointing. “There’s a small rise. Put them on the other side. I can cover you from here, but I want to keep them all in the open.”

  “Show me where,” Hati said, with the Archon mentally directing him since he didn’t have Star Force armor on to link into their battlemap and put down a waypoint. In fact the Archon wasn’t wearing any armor at the moment, for he still had the V’kit’no’sat forearm gauntlets on. Esna’s armor, now mostly wrecked, he’d brought back and had it laying in the cave, but Hati already had had a look at it and there was no way he could get it functioning again. It was locked into Tyrenk’s form with multiple damaged spots preventing the adjustment necessary to fit Esna. Tyrenk could put it back on again, but she couldn’t unless they were the same size…and Tyrenk was a good 5 inches taller. Odds are Esna’s feet wouldn’t even reach the boots.

  Hati worked quickly, carrying two dead creatures at a time until there was a large pile of them away from the cave. When he got back after the last trip the creatures were gone from the cave entrance, but Tyrenk was still standing where he had been.

  “What about the blood on the ground?” Hati asked.

  “I’ll remove it. I’m just waiting to make sure they go where I told them.”

  “Not the pile of dead?”

  “No. They’ll be back, and when they come they’ll follow the smell there, but right now they’re chasing a phantom to the edge of my Ikrid range and I’m planting an impetus to go ever further. So far they’re all taking the bait, but if one turns back it could prompt the others to, so I have to make sure they all go.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Nothing now, but we’re not staying here. Once I get Esna healed up enough, we’re heading back to the ship, salvage what we can, then I want you to have a look at theirs.”

  “Is it in better condition?”

  “Parts are, and something in them they wanted to destroy before I could get to it. They did a good job, enough that I can’t guess at what all the pieces are meant for. Hopefully you’ll have better luck.”

  “If there are still some alive…”

  “They’ll get back there, I know, but as soon as I recover my strength I have to attend to Esna.”

  “You need ambrosia?”

  “Yeah, I’m out.”

  Hati turned and went back inside the cave, coming out with a small box from which Tyrenk took a glob of dark red liquid into the air, split it apart with his telekinesis, then flew a portion into his mouth, after which he drank some water to get it all down into his stomach as the remainder went back into the containment vial.

  “How do you measure so well with liquid?”

  “A combination of practice and enduring the headaches from an overdose when I take too much. Right now I’m depleted, so I’m not worried…and better to have plenty of liquid than run out of pre-measured cookies. How much do you have left?”

  “Plenty. Do you want to put some in Esna as well?”

  “No. That won’t help in her condition. She needs a lot of food and water and me to make use of it,” he said, visibly relaxing. “They’re off. Now I have to take a crash nap. Stay alert or camp out inside the tent. Either way, I’m not going to be paying attention to the perimeter. I’ll be in a healing trance to expedite things. Esna needs me as soon as possible.”

  “Go. I will watch.”

  “In a moment,” he said as a swirl of dust collected behind them, with the blood soaked dirt being lifted up by the Archon and pulled out of the cave into a ball of sickly mud that he condensed down into the size of his fist, then he grabbed it out of the air and threw it off into the jungle.

  “Now it’s nap time,” he said with a yawn. “Night.”

  7

  August 29, 4812

  Chawik System (Devastation Zone)

  Darlek

  It was a long walk back to their own ship after collecting the surviving supplies that had been scattered in the forest, then they managed to find some more useful salvage in the crash site before the three of them relocated to the V’kit’no’sat debris. Parts of it were totally destroyed, but others were still intact and had simply been severed from the other parts of the ship and fell onto the surface. It was in one of those pieces that Esna was set down, for Tyrenk had carried her over his shoulder while pulling a travois of supplies behind him, given the fact that she was exhausted from the damage and rework he’d had to do to her.

  Thankfully he’d kept her unconscious while being hauled around, but when she woke again to see his face above her there was unfamiliar soreness across her body that made her wince.

  “Sorry about that,” the Archon apologized. “My shoulder isn’t exactly cushioned.”

  “I’ll live,” Esna said, still with a headache but a manageable one as she laid glued to the floor in the planet’s high gravity, but at least now she wasn’t surrounded by vegetation, mud, and bugs. The interior of the V’kit’no’sat ship looked strange, as if the walls and floor were made of some kind of artificial stone, but it also had a familiarity to it that she couldn’t quite place.

  “Stay here. I’m going to have another look around.”

  “You want me to set up camp inside?”

  “I don’t know how much of this is still wor
king. Just get something to eat for now. Hati, you’re with me.”

  “Alright,” Esna said, starting to dig around the pile of supplies they’d brought with them looking for one of the food cube boxes.

  “In here,” Tyrenk said, pointing Hati towards the area that still held the bodies of the Kat’vo that now reeked with the smell of decay, though parts of them had been torn out by whatever animals from the jungle had made their way in here to eat the remains.

  “It’s a mess,” the Kiritas noted.

  “I know. I’ll move them out while you work,” the Archon said, activating his stolen Zen’zat armor so it covered him head to toe and would spare him handling the gore directly.

  “I meant the machinery,” the smaller alien said, hopping over a severed limb to a smashed console that he started to pick through. “There’s no way to access system control if all the interfaces are like this…and it looks like they even got to the connection boxes and backups.”

  “I got to them before they finished, so hopefully there’s something here to be found. Work on it,” Tyrenk said, using a mix of his telekinesis and arm strength to create a pile of dead Kat’vo across his back that he slowly walked out of the ship.

  Hati continued to hop around, looking at this and that until he saw a piece of crystal-like gem that he picked up and held in the palm of his clawed hand.

  “Now what are you from?” he said to himself, not recognizing it as any piece of V’kit’no’sat tech that he was aware of.

  It took several trips for Tyrenk to clear the debris of all the dead bodies that he’d worked so hard to create in the previous days. Not wanting to go far from the others, he piled up the remains in the jungle a few hundred meters from the edge of the nearest burnt out clearing and left them there, knowing that the wildlife would take care of them soon. He waited a couple more days before he was confident enough that there were no more V’kit’no’sat around to go back and retrieve their own dead, some of which were scattered over the trail they’d fled on.

  Given that they were covered in armor, albeit hole-filled, the bodies were more or less intact but already in a state of decay and in some cases infestation with fast growing plants and parasites. Tyrenk brought them all back, including Rammak, and laid them out side by side on top of a large pyre of wood he’d spent time constructing the previous day. The logs from freshly cut trees rose some 5 feet high with smaller brush on top in almost a cushion onto which he placed the armored suits and the bodies that they contained, then he got Esna and brought her out to the location, with the girl managing to walk the half mile on her own.

  “It’s the best we can do here. I won’t bury them and have them rot,” the Archon explained as he handed her a small cylinder. “Their cores are long gone by now, to where who knows, but the bodies they worked hundreds of years to sculpt into combat shape deserve a better end than to be left to rot.”

  “So you burn them?” she asked, with Hati still off in the ship debris doing his tech stuff.

  “The armor won’t burnt much, but if we get the fire hot enough the bodies will turn to ash. A quick transition rather than leaving them to linger. It’s a matter of respect, and fire is the best option we have here.”

  “Rammak left my brother’s body lay on a holotable…but that was right after he died and we had to keep running from the V’kit’no’sat. What would you do with them if we weren’t here?”

  “We have technology to disassemble them down into base matter. It’s like a shield wall passed over them slowly turning them to dust, but only after we let them lay long enough to be sure there isn’t a core still inside. If there is, we’ll try to revive them.”

  “It’s been too long, hasn’t it?”

  “I checked. There’s no one left to revive here. Just their bodies remain.”

  “What do I do with this?”

  “That holds the datachips from their armor. I took them all out. If we get back the battlemap records can be downloaded and our analysts can study what happened here. Maybe learn something from it. Sometimes friends want to see how they died rather than being told. Rammak’s chip is in there, so I thought you’d like to hold onto it.”

  “Thank you,” she said softly, then her eyes rose to his set of armor on the right hand side of the long cubical rectangle of wood. “He saved me so many times, it doesn’t feel right that he’s gone now.”

  “Usually it doesn’t feel right. What the V’kit’no’sat do is wrong. They have their reasons, not all of them bad, but when you hold to an ideology over doing the right thing you end up doing bad things eventually…and a good person won’t stand for that. Unfortunately the galaxy is not full of good people. Good is rare in life, and Star Force seeks it out and cultivates it. Go somewhere beyond the empire and the universe gets very, very grim. Most people are not good or evil, they’re followers who go along with the people around them. In Star Force that means they are drawn into the light. In the V’kit’no’sat, they are drawn into something honorable yet twisted.”

  “They’re evil.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “No?” Esna asked, not quite understanding after what she’d experienced with them on Forso, Tauntaun, and then here on Darlek. “How are they not evil?”

  “Their aim isn’t to be evil. Their aim is something else that sometimes leads them to do good, and other times to do evil. They don’t care either way so long as their mission is a success. There are some people out there that want to do evil, and relish in the pain and suffering of others. The V’kit’no’sat care about dominance above all else, seeing this as their galaxy and they can do with it what they want.”

  “And what do they want to do with it?” she asked, her eyes still on Rammak.

  “Protect it from a far greater threat at the center of the galaxy.”

  Esna blinked and looked over at Tyrenk. “Protect it?”

  “The V’kit’no’sat are not good, and never let yourself think they are, but they’re not totally evil. What they are is totally apathetic. They’re blind to good and evil, and to them we are a heresy that must be destroyed. They have chosen to be enemies, blood enemies, for the genetics that both you and I have are forbidden and they will not rest until we are all destroyed.”

  “Why though?”

  “Because we are the violation of a rule. Nothing more than that.”

  “A rule? How is all this worth a rule?”

  “Dominance. They have to be dominant, and anything that threatens that dominance must be destroyed. Splinter races are not allowed to exist. The Kat’vo have to be V’kit’no’sat. They can’t choose to go their own way. If a planet leaves it will not be allowed to stay that way, either destroyed or reabsorbed. Zen’zat serve the V’kit’no’sat and are forbidden to reproduce, and any deviation is a threat to their empire. There is no discussion on the matter. Because they decreed it, it must be true and they will not question it. You and I did not get permission to exist, thus we must die.”

  “And that’s not evil?”

  “It is, but they’re not doing to be evil. They’re doing it to enforce their rule. That’s why Star Force doesn’t exist based on rules. A wise man once said, ‘Good men don’t need rules. Rules are for the young, the inexperienced, and the untrustworthy.’ Good men lead Star Force, so they don’t need rules. They do what is right, and you can’t determine what is right from a rule book. You have to feel it out in each and every situation. If you follow rules sooner or later you will come across a scenario that doesn’t fit. For rookies rules can be of help, but once you get wiser and more experienced they become a hindrance. The V’kit’no’sat live and breathe rules, which tells you they’re not truly good people. Good people can’t stomach rules when they require you to do something that your gut tells you is wrong.”

  “Then I guess that rules me out. I did some bad stuff without realizing it at the time.”

  “What changed?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you didn’t realize it a
t the time, how do you know it was wrong now?”

  “Rammak opened my eyes.”

  “Not all good people start out good. Some of us do. All Archons are. We have to be. But there are some good people that weren’t that way by default. They started out neutral and became good over time. Some people, it seems, just need to be shown the path and they can take it from there.”

  “Can an evil person turn good?”

  “I don’t think so. A neutral that has been drawn to do bad things could be saved, theoretically, but good and evil are polar opposites. They can’t coexist.”

  “So Archons can’t be evil…ever?”

  “No, we can’t. But we can suffer from illusions, distractions, and other tricks to get us to do things we don’t realize we’re doing. That rarely happens, but theoretically it could. If we are of clear mind, then no, we can’t be evil.”

  “That must be nice.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, but it’s not ‘nice’ as you suggest when you are surrounded with injustice. It pounds on your senses and drives you mad. The apathetic don’t suffer.”

  “What does that word mean?”

  “Apathy? It means you don’t feel. You don’t care. You are numb to it.”

  “So good people hurt and apathetic people don’t?”

  “Good people care what happens to others. That’s why I’m an Archon. I can’t stand by and do nothing while bad things are happening to others. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed I need a break, need to run away for a while to rest, because I can never stop caring. I can block it out and focus on something, I’ve learned to do that, but there’s a part of me that can’t not care. I can’t be apathetic, and in a messed up universe the good guys hurt an awful lot.”

  “How do you become an Archon?”

  “There are tests to determine who has potential. Then those who pass are put through basic training. If they make it they become Archons.”

  “You have a test for good people?”

  “Yes.”