Star Force: Captains Mint (Star Force Universe Book 70) Read online

  Her hair and nails were back to white again, and her body glowed with V’kit’no’sat tattoos, but the expression on her face was not good. It was barely a grimace from the exterior, but for this Archon that meant something was seriously wrong inside.

  Kara wasn’t in pain, but she was searching inside herself for something elusive and troubling, with the closer she got to it making her the more worried. Her Archon mojo was slipping, and she couldn’t find the reason. It was beginning to get maddening, as if something was sucking away her life force and she was helpless to do anything about it.

  But her Essence was fine. Her biostatistics were fine. Everything that could be monitored was fine, yet there was something seriously off with her and the more she dug at it the worse it became. Kara got the feeling that it would numb up if she stopped pushing for it, but now that she knew something was here she wouldn’t let it go.

  She ran her mech for more than a day straight before contacting Nuomo and telling him to tell Harry, the only other Archon on the planet, to replace her earlier than expected, citing she had some unexpected and classified activities to perform out here alone that posed no danger to the outpost or the Captains Mint, but that she would need to conduct them in isolation.

  Kara ordered a dead drop of supplies to be left at a waypoint ahead of her, and when she got there she loaded up the cargo container onto her mech’s back and continued off across the ice in her mobile little cocoon trying to dig out what was wrong with her.

  She didn’t put clothes back on at all, trying to resensitize her senses as much as possible. The more exposed one was, the more heightened your senses became…which was why you needed to armor over yourself and numb up in situations when the environment was not so friendly. If she was going to find out what was wrong with her, she needed to dial up her senses as far as possible, and that meant finding or creating an environment where she could lower her shields completely and wear her emotions on her skin, pun intended.

  That wasn’t something an Archon did easily, and even the slightest hint of danger would make her recoil into combat mode and flick up her defenses, even if just a little bit. Kara knew that wasn’t going to be good enough. She had to dial her defenses back all the way, and she couldn’t remember the last time that had happened…if it had ever happened.

  The sex training kinda counted, but the emotions involved were blinding in their own way and wouldn’t be useful here. She needed to open up calmly and become a tranquil ocean where even the slightest disturbance would cause a ripple that would otherwise be missed in even mildly choppy waters.

  She was sensing a disturbance in the Force, and in order to find the source she had to get the rest of her completely in balance and completely open to attack…which was why she programmed her mech to keep running without her and quietly snuck out of it near one of the many ice mountains on the planetary shard in shadow mode during a snowstorm so thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face.

  In shadow mode all light and sensor signals got absorbed into the energy field produced by her Vorch’nas, and with the snow flying all over you couldn’t even notice the black spot amongst the whiteness. Kara kept it active for nearly half an hour as she sat naked inside one of the deep mech tracks as it slowly began to refill with snow.

  She had no food, no clothes, no armor other than her Vorch’nas…which she couldn’t take off anyway…and anyone tracking her position would assume she was still in the mech. The cargo ship had already left, meaning there were no more orbital scans, and the ice mountain was at the right angle to block scans from the base this low to the ground, so unless someone sent out a dropship for some reason, she was effectively lost in the snow and completely alone for the first time in far too long.

  Kara just sat on the packed ice with her arms wrapped around her knees as she tried to release her smallest combat reflexes. The cold wasn’t a danger to her as long as she had Rensiek and enough calories in her body to fuel it, which she did for a few days at least, for she’d eaten right before she’d bailed out of the mech.

  The adoptive trailblazer held position and didn’t move a muscle for hours as the snow piled up around her ankles and butt, then began to rise higher and higher until it was all the way up to her bellybutton. Still she didn’t move, trying to become part of the ice on this planet and absorb the anonymity it had that was currently so precious to her. She had to disconnect from the Empire, from the Captains Mint, from the Archons, from every living being in the universe and just become part of the inanimate backdrop.

  It wasn’t easy, and if she’d been a Saiyan it would have been impossible for her to slow down this much, but little by little the very useful walls she’d put up inside her over the course of her life to survive battle after battle…and the walls that were necessary to fight a never-ending war against the Hadarak…began to grudgingly lower when they could find no threats nearby. They kept flicking back on at every flake of snow that seemed too heavy or moved too fast, but over time that too became normal and Kara was able to fully let go and become nothing more than a mildly glowing statue on the frozen landscape plastered with snow on her left side.

  She stared straight ahead and down to where here feet had been, but were now buried in the white precipitation as the storm finally passed. And when it did and the landscape calmed down completely, so did Kara with it, and finally she had deconstructed herself to the point where she was nothing and everything at the same time.

  And within that perfect balance was a pulsing anomaly so loud she wondered why she’d ever missed it.

  She couldn’t pinpoint it within her body, not from a medical sense, but she recognized it as one of the many inflow points from the Essence realm that activated when her body was low. The difference in pressure caused new Essence to seek in through these tiny cracks until she was refilled, then the balance between the two would be restored…and likewise, if she overdosed on Essence from a Magicite ring, it would flow out of her through these ports as she slowly lost the charge until the two sides leveled out again.

  This was why Archons couldn’t store excess Essence in their bodies. It had to be in a Magicite ring that kept the Essence reflecting off itself inside an object that had no natural cracks to the Essence realm like all life in the galaxy had.

  And one of those cracks inside Kara was malfunctioning.

  It was the barest amount of soreness, and she was proud of herself for having the inner sense to figure it out amongst all the other noise from normal Archon duties and the constant training they underwent that had far more pain from even the easiest workouts than this was causing her. But now that she’d dialed back to zero the disturbance was obvious, though what to do about it Kara did not know.

  Finding it had been her first mission objective. Her second was now to observe and get as much information about it as possible, so she finally let herself move and stretched out, extending her legs forward and leaning back into the snow as she made a body-forming cast out of it as she looked into the semi-lit sky that still showed a fair amount of stars along with a slight blue haze.

  Her muscles had needed that much change at least, and more would be needed later, but for right now she closed her eyes and left herself even more vulnerable than before with no psionics active to look around. She was encased in snow and ice with the front face of her body open to the sky above, and in that state she began probing the little sore spot inside her ever so carefully, relishing in the reckless stupidity of her current position…as well as realizing it was necessary to probe this deeply within.

  Thankfully the galaxy and this planetary fragment was big enough to lose herself in, and for the first time in a long time Kara was able to actually rest as she played around with the soreness. No missions, no duty, no teammates, no empire. Just little Kara naked in the wilderness and loving every blissful chilly minute of it while the exploration of her inner self gave her the excuse needed to do so when the galaxy was burning under the weight of a billion different p
roblems.

  But right now, from Kara’s perspective, they didn’t exist. People didn’t exist. Clothes didn’t exist. All that did was her body, the icy footprint she laid within, and the jewel on her wrist that was being patiently quiet and staying out of the way of her insight.

  And now it was time to do some unrestricted exploring.

  8

  Kara sat in the snow so long she began to get hungrier than she was stiff, but her focus was so clean and clear she didn’t dare move to disturb it other than a few rolls and twists as another snowstorm came up and began to fill in the mech track in which she sat even more. The Archon had no food on her, nor pockets to carry it, but she did have her Vorch’nas and her Dogorat’nah tier 4 psionic, both of which could achieve atomic alchemy at the cost of a lot of power.

  Seeing as how Kara was sitting here and not expending much, she began to use both in tag team fashion to take the air and ice molecules and began reconfiguring them into sugar. Thankfully she didn’t have to do any elemental alchemy on this one, for glucose was made up of three different atoms…hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon…two of which were present in the ice, with the third in a decent concentration in the air left over from when the planet was fractured and massive amounts of carbon dioxide leaked into the atmosphere from the volcanic activity that had since frozen over.

  It wasn’t so much she couldn’t breathe, but it was enough that Kara didn’t have to try and capture the carbon coming out of her lungs with each breath. The alchemy process wasn’t fast, and Kara would have had real trouble if she didn’t have her Vorch’nas stepping in to help on some of the more complicated molecular realignments, but soon she had a small but steady trickle of sugar entering her bloodstream as she lay face down towards the snow with one leg kicked up in the air and her arms crossed in front of her to prop her head up slightly.

  Her toes moved every now and then, curling up and releasing in a slow flex as she continued to study the ‘sore’ spot inside her, and she had to continue to keep herself extremely exposed and open to attack in order to see it. The day before she’d started to reflexively get back into combat mode when the stiffness began irritating her, and her vision of it nearly disappeared. It was so subtle a thing she knew she wasn’t going to be able to study this any other way, so Kara decided to just camp out here as long as she could. Sugar alone wasn’t going to be enough, for her body required hundreds of different types of molecules for fuel, but those were for repair parts and not energy, so those could wait a while longer. The sugar she needed now, and thankfully once she got the process smoothed out she began cycling between it and probing her new discovery at regular intervals as she tried to extend her window here as much as she could.

  At first she observed, then she tried to touch it…which was like fumbling around for a needle while wearing mittens. She could brush up against it at times, almost randomly, but she couldn’t control anything. Still, those few brushes were successful in causing a little Essence to squirt through the sore spot…which made it even more sore…and the Archon was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t been damaged sometime in the past without realizing it.

  But as more hours passed and she entered her third day here, Kara began to realize she wasn’t dealing with damage, but rather a new ‘muscle’ that she had never used before. It wasn’t a physical one, but it was a part of her, and its soreness was because it was for some reason now needing to be used.

  So Kara kept trying to bump it with her mittens to little success, then she switched tactics and tried to work on her ‘mittens’ to see if she could upgrade them, and practiced with other parts of her inner self…mainly through mental drills and probing the very depths of her mind…until she got a more refined technique down, then she tried again, this time getting a tentative grip on whatever it was.

  It felt like a zit that needed to be popped, but she couldn’t find the right angle to apply pressure. She worked for hours, taking breaks to generate more sugar that was doing less and less to sustain her as her body began crying out for some of those repair parts to replace the normal micro-damage that occurred just from everyday living…not to mention the strain being put on her Rensiek tissue, which she was running nonstop to keep from freezing to death out here.

  Try and fail. Try and fail. That’s what Kara was fighting through, not knowing what to do and having no instructions to follow. It was refreshing, actually, to be back to square one without any hints or help, having to figure it out on her own…but it was also irritating, as it had been long ago when she had first got her Vorch’nas and suddenly was thrust beyond the trailblazers in ability and knowledge. But this wasn’t a bit of technology the Zak’de’ron had given her. This was something natural and totally unknown…and it was annoying Kara that she wasn’t making better progress at it.

  She stretched out her self-imposed exile to 5 days, having used up most of her body’s fat reserves…which also held some repair parts suspended in them…and then almost randomly the little pimple popped under her bazillionth attempt to pinch it. When it did, Essence burst forth from it and supersaturated her body…which felt like an ambrosia overload high, but slightly salty at the same time.

  It was ‘salty’ because the Essence wasn’t calibrated to her body, and she’d felt the same thing when pulling on Uriti Essence or getting some from one of the other Archons. But once it touched her it began to reform to her mojo, gradually becoming hers, though she could have used it instantly if she’d wanted to.

  The thing was, though, that it wasn’t stopping…which was when she realized it wasn’t a pimple that had to be popped, but a link into the Essence realm that was leaking into her.

  But that made no sense. There was no pressure gradient to push it. Her body was more concentrated than the Essence realm now, so it should flow the other way, which begged the question what was going on?

  She sat there almost giggling as the buzz made her head dizzy, but eventually she was getting so loopy she had to begin bleeding it off intentionally before it started spilling out on its own as her body simply couldn’t hold that much. Kara didn’t try any techniques with it other than a ‘force push’ up into the air, creating an air current that got so fierce it started to create a tornado vortex in the middle of yet another snowstorm.

  If Kara could harness this technique it would change everything Star Force knew about Essence power generation, and while her mind was racing with those possibilities she began to realize that she needed to find a way to shut this off, or at least reduce it, or there were going to be more immediate problems. Her control was slipping already, for she’d never had an Essence shower of this magnitude. Nobody had as far as she knew, and if the Varkemma had any knowledge about this they hadn’t shared it.

  It was hard to focus with so much Essence swirling around inside her, but thankfully the hole through which it was coming in was made obvious by the pressure being exerted on it…and that pressure was something Kara realized she could push back against. She didn’t know how at first, but as the flow diminished she began to learn real fast that it wasn’t from a counter force she was exerting. It was that ‘muscle’ that had been itching before.

  It wasn’t a pimple that needed to be popped. It was an orifice that had needed to be opened, but it could also be closed…or so she hoped.

  And just like using a muscle for the first time ever, Kara was very clumsy at it. It took her an hour and a half to get to the point where she could completely close it for even a few seconds before losing control and having it open again, but give an Archon a taste of victory and they’d be all over it like a post-workout donut tray.

  At the end of it all Kara sat in a now empty mech track, whose snow bath tub had been cleaned out by the tornado with only a small bit falling lazily from the cloudy, yet mildly bright sky. She sat there silent, both on the outside and the inside. Her new muscle had finally kicked off the rust and was obeying her, but it was tired. It had to remain clenched to keep the flow out, and her relaxing it meant
the Essence would come in automatically, but in battle that would be an asset rather than having to focus and try to force it to stay open.

  And suddenly everything she thought she’d known about Essence was thrown out the window. The equilibrium idea now seemed busted, yet when she held the extra Essence in it flowed back out into the Essence realm through the other ‘cracks’ within her. How the two could both be true she didn’t know, but Kara now had her breakthrough and her riddle solved, so why was she still sitting here?

  Her body was hungry, stiff, and cold as her production of heat had slipped along with her sugar levels. But her inner self was more at peace now than it had ever been, and she didn’t want to lose that. She didn’t want to go back to the war, to duty, to the Empire.

  Fortunately she didn’t have to. With her Vorch’nas she signaled her mech, which was still running around the planetary fragment without getting too far away from her position, to come back to her. She had to wait another 7 hours for it to arrive, and Kara could have flown out to it quicker, but she didn’t. She just sat and waited out the hunger pains unwilling to leave her little oasis in the wilderness.

  Eventually the footsteps of the Neo became obvious even from so far away, for her hearing had become so attuned to silence even the slightest vibration sounded loud…but not nearly as loud as the crashing that followed as the mech came up within 100 meters of her position and stopped.

  “Ouch,” she said, belatedly realizing she hadn’t spoken anything in the past 6 days and her voice sounded horrible as a result. She rubbed the inside of her ears with her fingertips as they rang a bit from the intense sounds they were not prepared for. “You are really loud,” she told the mech.

  It didn’t answer, nor had she expected it to, but she ordered it to drop off the crate of supplies nearby…as Kara covered her ears to give them some dampening as they readjusted without being a wuss and using her Vorch’nas to take care of it. After silence returned she finally stood up and stepped out of the footprint, walking on the fresh snow above and sinking in only a few inches, which was still enough to cover the glowing tattoos on her feet as the powdery stuff fell in on them.