Star Force: Revelation (SF79) Read online

  “Speculation.”

  Paul shook his head. “Intuition. The same way I learned how to fight warfleets.”

  “Intuition can’t be taught.”

  “But it can lead you to knowledge that is teachable.”

  “And you think by teaching me you will undo the Chixzon in me?”

  “Augment. I know there is no way to remove the memories. You may be Chixzon, but Star Force isn’t about races. It’s about the individuals.”

  “Are you trying to coopt me?”

  “Trying to return you to form, perhaps a better one given the benefits the Chixzon have given you.”

  “Once I learn lightside techniques?”

  “You’re the one who asked.”

  Radonon looked at the flat, white ceiling and the likewise bare walls around him. “It seems I have time to kill. If there is wisdom in your techniques, show it to me. I will judge.”

  “It only works if you’re willing to learn.”

  “I will not block knowledge for the sake of tradition or cultural structure. We were destroyed once for failure. We cannot allow a misstep or oversight to doom us a second time.”

  “I’m not going to be here long term, so I hope you learn fast,” Paul said, telekinetically adjusting the console and opening up a new keyboard for Radonon and triggering a second console to rise up from the floor, with him having to move his chair to the side.

  “What is this?”

  “Best way to teach you is to kick your ass, so we’re going to spar, navally, and I’m going to explain in detail why the Chixzon lost.”

  “You anticipated my request?”

  “Yep,” Paul said, bringing up the program list and giving Radonon access to it via a temporary code.

  7

  March 19, 3094

  Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

  Nym

  Radonon stood in a handstand alone in his quarters, save his was a tripod on each arm. That gave him far more stability than a Human or Protovic, allowing him to hold the position for long periods of time. Chixzon didn’t meditate like Star Force did. Theirs involved mantras and other active components, whereas Star Force meditation was just a formal way of saying one quieted their senses and became passive, eliminating unnecessary distractions to provide potential new insights otherwise missed.

  Which accomplished nothing. The mantras were necessary to realign the mind, which was what meditation was for. However, as he was meditating in an inverted position keeping focus was a bit more difficult, and to his shame he had picked up a habit of drifting off and finding himself lost in thought. His words would end and his mind would quiet with him slipping into a Star Force meditation and today was no different. Ever since Paul had come here to school him on why the Chixzon had been defeated, Radonon’s mind was plagued with running calculations, variations on what they’d done and not done, seeking to find a way to do what he said was not possible with their ‘darkside’ methodologies.

  He couldn’t help himself, so as he was holding his handstand his mind drifted there again but this time it branched off to other thoughts, almost as if he was in a daydream and not in full control of his mind. The chanting would have prevented that from happening, but with the importance of finding the fault in their history overriding everything else he’d stopped uttering the words and allowed himself to become lost in thought.

  Radonon couldn’t retrace much of his thoughts in a state like this so he never knew where he’d end up, but something happened this time. Something that shocked him to his core. For a moment he wasn’t Chixzon, and his view of their history, his time as a Protovic, his personal assessments of everything happening in the galaxy today…all of it shifted, as if coming into alignment. It chilled him to the bone, but then it was gone just as fast.

  He tumbled over, getting his feet on the deck but not standing up. He sat in a crouch, searching himself in an attempt to determine what had just happened. He was Chixzon again, but for the briefest moment he hadn’t been. He remembered an anger at the Chixzon that he now couldn’t comprehend…but it had happened. It wasn’t a dream or mistake, though he was losing his limited memory of it already. Within a few seconds it was gone completely, leaving him with a mystery to solve that he would not ignore.

  Something was wrong and he couldn’t just brush it off. He’d found an error, meaning that everything that seemed in order now was a lie. Something was hiding within his mind and there was no tolerating it…but how to find it again?

  There were no Archons here. He was sealed inside his isolation chambers where even they couldn’t sense his mind. He’d learned the walls were made of a material that blocked telepathy. How that functioned was beyond the Chixzon, but yet another item on his ‘to obtain’ list. That meant they hadn’t seen it and could offer him no help. This was something he was going to have to track down on his own.

  After several minutes of mental sifting he had no answers, so he did the obvious thing and put himself back into the handstand, hoping to recreate the same situation. To that end he didn’t chant, but tried to think of the same things he had vaguely remembered considering before…which was how to use the Uriti to poke an enemy rather than smash, and what kind of alterations would be needed in their coding to give the Chixzon the necessary control over the beasts.

  He tried hard, which was possibly the reason why he failed to encounter the anomaly again. He remained in his pose for the next four hours until the door opened and he righted himself, feeling only a minor head wash from the long time being inverted.

  “Busy?” Kip asked sarcastically…then his eyes narrowed, obviously picking up on the Chixzon’s thoughts. “What’s wrong?”

  “A mental disturbance that I am unable to recreate, thus I cannot analyze it. I am annoyed.”

  “What happened?”

  “A shift in perspective is the best I can describe it. My memory has fogged in the aftermath.”

  “I sense nothing beyond your vexation.”

  “I anticipated as much.”

  “If brute force won’t recall a memory, taking your mind off the subject may allow it to resurface.”

  “I can’t let this go. It is important.”

  “Why?”

  “It is dangerous. I cannot leave myself with a weakness.”

  “If you have a better idea you would have tried it already. So where does that leave you?”

  “I do not know.”

  “A superior mind would find it.”

  Radonon’s black eyes flashed green for a moment. “Which is why I cannot let it go. Come back tomorrow. I must pursue this.”

  “Good luck,” Kip said, oddly not offering any resistance or redirect. He simply turned around and walked out with the door shutting him into his solitudes again.

  Radonon stood there for a long moment, considering going back into his meditation or trying something else. He compromised, wanting to maintain his inner search but choosing a different physical stress…one with greater difficulty that might loosen his mind. To that end he left the ‘guest’ room and went down a short hallway that led to his person training sanctum. He went straight to the track and began hop/running laps and attempted to lose himself in thought and time.

  Round and round he went until his muscles started to become warm and a bit numb. By then his thoughts were lost again, moving away from the mysterious glitch and back to conquering the galaxy. Most of the thoughts were repeats, with him going down the same mental paths as before and getting the same simulated results. It vexed him that Paul’s analysis seemed so flawless, but that meant the Chixzon were doomed to possibly repeat their own demise if they were faced with a similar situation. They needed greater power, but the darkside techniques they employed were wholly inadequate.

  The most obvious solution was to find a way to inoculate the Uriti or future creations against the sedative, but extensive work had been done on that before and there were zero viable options to work there. Radonon didn’t discount that possibility entirely, but
even Paul had covered in detail how he could have defeated the Chixzon even with the Uriti holding the same immunity that the Klamensh did, for the same sedatives were not effective against them. It was in the alterations that the Chixzon had made to groom them into weapons that gave the Uriti their weakness, but it had become clear that the Uriti were not the Chixzon’s ultimate solution.

  They had to use ‘darkside’ techniques, for they were too useful not to. What Radonon had to discover was a way to access more advanced versions or perhaps repurpose the ‘lightside’ tactics that Paul had proved were effective when conducting galaxy-wide empire building. Trust and predictability were key, and Radonon had to admit that the tendency to backstab others out of convenience undercut that. He had to find a way to work what Paul did into the Chixzon’s lexicon of tactics, despite the Human’s openness and mocking of the Chixzon.

  Part of Radonon’s mind knew that was because Paul was right and that darkside users wouldn’t be able to access lightside techniques, but the rest of him would not accept that, with him getting lost in logic loops like this often as he repetitively searched for a way to accomplish that task. Falling into that familiar exercise, Radonon kept making laps and having no more luck solving the riddle than he had previously.

  When he wasn’t thinking about tracking down the anomaly and barely paying attention to his hop/jumps he had a sudden and uncontrollable flash that caused him to nearly trip and fall. Radonon coasted to a halt and knelt down on one knee, seeing things clearly again and trying desperately to hold onto the sensation. It lasted a few seconds, long enough for him to realize the magnitude of what had happened to him. All of his memories were still here, but they’d been altered. Like they’d had all the color from them removed, then further distorted to make them fit Chixzon culture.

  Whatever had just happened, his mind was seeing them clearly again, while at the same time seeing all the Chixzon memories and knowledge from an almost disconnected perspective. He could see the Star Force in him and the Chixzon, with his mind finally coming to grips with the fact that he had been seeing things incorrectly. What he had been learning from the Archons now made full sense, and allowed him to judge the Chixzon in that moment and see them for what they really were…more than the Archons ever could, for they could only sample his thoughts and memories. He was the only one that truly knew.

  He also remembered that he had lost this last time, so he held his crouch and tried to hold on to his true self and cement this clarity in place for at least a few more seconds. He didn’t know what was happening, and neither his old Star Force knowledge nor his excessive Chixzon intellect could make sense of this, but from his perspective it seemed like he was waking up from a long dream and now everything was making sense…horrific sense.

  He held still and soaked it in, with more revelations hitting him with each passing moment…but that wasn’t important. He had to hold onto this. Even if he lost it again he needed to make mental notes that he could use later and hopefully retrace his mental steps.

  Except that he didn’t lose it, not yet anyway. Feeling as if he was breathing again after being smothered with lies, he took the opportunity to work through things now that seamed painfully obvious, including his most recent vexation. Paul was right because…he was right. The Chixzon were the enemy and rightly so, not victims of bad luck or misfortune. Their methods had served them well in many regards, but they’d also doomed them. Rather than build true strength they sought to destroy those who were stronger, making the Chixzon defaultly ‘superior’ without enhancing themselves.

  It was a loser mentality. Knocking others down rather than building yourselves and your allies up. The Uriti were an abomination, a forced Klamensh alteration and deployed like monsters to destroy whatever was in their path while the Chixzon hid and reaped the rewards afterwards, often finishing off opponents when they truly were no longer a fair match. They preyed on weakness and engineered it to happen rather than fight an opponent straight up. They had been effective in what they’d done, with the lost list of the superior races that they’d killed attesting to that, but the Chixzon were scum…and with his Star Force memories and his sanity temporarily restored he could see that and desperately wanted to chisel it into stone so he couldn’t forget it again.

  But when this passed he knew his mind would alter again, so at best he wanted to leave himself some bread crumbs to follow back to this moment of clarity. He spent several minutes just looking at the floor, then when the inevitable cloud didn’t immediately fall back upon him he jumped into a run and headed back to the guest room, punching open the comm button.

  “Brad, Kip, one of you get in here now,” he said, not knowing how much time he had. “Hurry.”

  “Is something wrong?” a guard’s voice answered.

  “I need one of them in here immediately. There’s no time to explain. Contact them even if they’re in training. This is extremely important,” he said, trying to freeze up his mind and maintain this until they could get inside his head. “Tell them my name is Nefron.”

  8

  A handful of seconds later the door opened and Amy rushed in, apparently having been posted outside. “What’s going on?”

  “Help me,” Nefron insisted. “I don’t know how long I can hold this.”

  “Hold what?” she asked, searching his mind.

  “My mind is clear, but I can feel it starting to slip. Help me hold onto it as long as you can.”

  “I don’t know what help I can be if I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, diving into his mind aggressively and ready to make changes as needed. “Define ‘clear?’”

  “I have the Chixzon knowledge, but my thoughts are Protovic.”

  Amy blanched. “How?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m fogging up again. Do something. Anything.”

  “Here goes nothing,” she said, comparing what his mind felt like now to what her experience with him previously had been. There wasn’t much difference, but he wasn’t the same either, that much she could tell. “Keep talking and explain as much as you can. Don’t go passive.”

  “I can see the difference between what I’m told to think and what really is. It’s a very subtle alteration that happened unexpectedly. This is the second time, the first was a brief moment. This has lasted a few minutes.”

  “Are there any alterations we can make to assist?”

  Nefron thought about that, then shook his head in a gesture that the Chixzon never used. “I don’t know what’s happened. The shroud is there and creeping back in, but I do not know the actual source. This was not supposed to have been possible. The genetic rewrite either takes or does not immediately. There is no lagging effect.”

  “Theoretical or actual?”

  “Theory only. There was no trial run…” he said, pitching forward and dropping to a knee, suddenly out of breath as a wave of thoughts flooded into his mind coming from Amy.

  “Culture war,” she guessed. “Use mine as a counter point. If it’s perspective you need you’ll have to fix yourself, but I can counterbalance the Chixzon a bit.

  Nefron’s mind was now awash with two distinctive feels…one being Chixzon, the other Star Force Human and neither being his own, but they did press against each other and leave him a disoriented spectator rather than Atlas trying to hold up his world through might alone. The Star Force in Amy was close enough to his own that he got an echo from it, as well as the relief, and that immediately began to stabilize him…but it also pushed him further into his past than he had been on his own, effectively gut punching him by pulling the Chixzon effect back so much, so fast.

  He hadn’t realized how much of an effect it had had on him until now, leaving him a fatigued weakling in the eye of the storm that was surrounding him. He knew his time was limited, so he tried to catch his mental breath and put himself back together as much as he could, but fearing it wouldn’t be enough he instead focused on her request. Was there anything he could tell them to do that would help
him fight this?

  “How you doing?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Are you losing ground?”

  “Not at the moment,” he said, still taking a knee on the floor and trying not to move or do anything to jostle the precarious position he was in.

  “I think I can keep this up for a while. An hour at least. Make use of the time and collect yourself.”

  “I understand. Thank you.”

  “I can’t read much while transmitting, so most of your head is your own right now,” the Archon said as she basically bypassed her own Ikrid block by continuously sending him a copy of her own thoughts moment by moment. “Kick this thing’s ass.”

  “I wish I knew what to do. I don’t think I’ll be able to resist it if it comes back.”

  “Then breathe the fresh air and store up as much of it as you can. You’ve broken through on your own now, you can do it again later. Plan for the long game and try to construct some advantages for yourself later on. Don’t fall into panic and waste your seconds.”

  “Hard not to,” he admitted. “The Chixzon programming sucks the reality out of life. I can see, do, and remember but it’s all tinted. I don’t feel it correctly.”

  “But you do now?”

  “Yes, more so now with your help.”

  “I’m just making counter noise. You’ve managed a disconnect. I don’t know how.”

  “You mean you don’t know why I didn’t a long time ago.”

  “That too,” she said, realizing he was picking that up from her own thoughts. “Is the programming active or passive?”

  “Passive.”

  “Then you can fight your way around it…again. Learn to see the truth and remember. It may be like digging yourself out of a snowstorm, but if the snow isn’t actively falling it’s just a matter of time and effort. So pull out your shovel and dig.”