Carnage Read online

  “I’ve tried to confirm that, but I haven’t been able to find anything at fault. It’s more a matter of my mood.”

  “You going back to the way things were before the end of your greatest war?”

  “Psionics seem more honorable. Hand to hand combat more right. Essence weapons that mass destroy entire planetary populations…that’s just cheating.”

  “And space monsters that just run into and eat chunks of planets rather than conquering them is also off?”

  “Our not being able to talk to them is off. Not being able to argue or negotiate. Not being able to mouth off…”

  “You’re having to fight inferiors who have superior power, and not by skill or training.”

  “It feels like the universe is being dumbed down,” Paul said, resting his elbows on the railing and pulling up his hood so he could see the spectacular view ahead, which included no less than 6 distant waterfalls coming off a jungle-covered ridge some 15 or more miles away.

  “Because you’re outgrowing it?”

  “Maybe. I have so much more power now, but I don’t know how to really use it. Nothing feels equal to it.”

  “Overkill?”

  “Yes, in some ways. A waste of time in others, though not to the people we’re helping.”

  “This world you’ve helped immensely through inspiration alone.”

  “I’m meant for something more, Cal-com. This stuff is what we do on our vacations.”

  The Voku nodded, pulling back his hood until his blue visor was visible, and he looked over at Paul’s smooth, but chiseled face. “It’s time for you to move on to greater challenges while your second gen takes over your previous work.”

  “What greater challenges?” Paul asked, looking at him.

  “Not the Hadarak. You learned how to beat them when you beat the lizards. Now you’re just adapting the methods to a slightly different enemy. Essence alters the equation, but you’ve made the necessary adjustments. Now it’s just a matter of naval fleet strength accumulation.”

  “What else is left?” Paul asked, almost pleading with him for something bigger to do.

  “Solve the mystery of the universe.”

  The Archon looked back out at the jungle and the waterfalls. “Doesn’t that involve greater Essence knowledge?”

  “Now I am suspecting that you don’t just dislike Essence combat, but that you somehow hate it. Explain.”

  “We used Uriti Essence to upgrade faster,” Paul said with disgust. “We didn’t just use our own. We didn’t earn it, and someone else out there might not be earning it either and getting way ahead of us. It’s like we’re racing to see who can become the biggest battery, not the best warrior.”

  “Essence users are not warriors,” Cal-com said pithily.

  Paul glanced at him. “That’s exactly what I’m feeling.”

  “And you fear the non-warriors being able to defeat you, thus making warriors obsolete unless you play the Essence game on their terms.”

  “Don’t we have to?”

  “So you’ve lost your main nemesis, who essentially taught you everything by trying to kill you using advanced technology, psionics, and techniques that were wasted on their darkside empire. You learned them, turned them to the lightside, became superior warriors despite the impossibility of it, and now your warrior status is superseded, potentially, by a bunch of lazy, fat living batteries that do nothing more than donate some Essence every day for a million years.”

  “You’ve been hanging out with me so much you’re picking up some of my vocabulary tendencies. You’re losing your polish.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “I can’t change the universe,” Paul said defeatedly. “I feel that it should be different, but I can’t find anything I’m missing.”

  “The game isn’t what you originally believed it to be.”

  “Essence ruined everything,” Paul admitted. “And yet it has given us the ability to survive the Hadarak. It’s not optional, and we can’t turn it off in our enemies. We’ve been forced to play their game or become irrelevant on the galactic level.”

  “Why can’t you forge a superior path?”

  “I’m trying. We all are. We have been. We can’t find one.”

  “And you fear one doesn’t exist.”

  “Yes.”

  “I brought you here to show you that the galaxy can take care of itself now. Even those outside your empire. You’ve succeeded enough you can let them continue the crusade, despite you always being a little better at it than them. But all of this can be destroyed by an enemy they cannot fight if you and the others do not keep advancing. You can help these people a little by being personally involved in actions that millions of Star Force personnel can accomplish. Or you can potentially save them all by growing stronger than future threats before they get here. You have to stop being Archons and become the Vanguard. You’ve been doing both your entire life, but now you’ve got others to handle the Archon duties. You need to specialize and take on the challenge of Essence sucking. Either make it your own, or find a way to surpass it.”

  Paul’s eyes narrowed as he looked into the Voku’s blue visor that shielded his three tiny eyes. “Surpass it? Do you know something that I don’t?”

  “Unlikely. But I recognize that you know something that I don’t. Your misgivings about Essence are obviously coming from some sense that I do not possess. You know something. You just can’t articulate it. There is an imbalance. That much is clear. Warriors will always be superior. If they are not, then there is not something wrong with the universe. There is something wrong with your perception of it.”

  “Or our belief in warrior supremacy was wrong.”

  “You would not have survived the V’kit’no’sat war if it was not true.”

  That one comment seemed to settle Paul a bit. “Where do I start to track this down?”

  “Go back and verify everything, looking for a variance. And to do that, you have to become ‘small’ before you can become ‘large’ again.”

  “How am I doing so far?”

  “Crude progress. You have forgotten how to relax.”

  Paul sighed. “Any suggestions?”

  “You must become vulnerable in a situation where there is no threat while amongst threats.”

  Paul thought back to his high school days. “Like skinny dipping in the high school pool when the lights are out but the janitor is in the next room and could hear you if you got too noisy or if he just randomly chose to come out the side door?”

  “I have not heard you tell that story before.”

  “Didn’t happen to me, but I was told about a group of seniors doing it and it stuck with me.”

  “Why were senior citizens in your school?”

  Paul smiled. “Old Earth terms were conflicting at times. ‘Seniors’ meant our eldest class of students within the school. Not the eldest people in our civilization.”

  “Were these seniors male or female?”

  “Female. Cheerleaders actually.”

  “And they were sexually desirable?”

  “The most so in the school.”

  “I am amazed how you Archons have risen above the base sexual desires and yet you still prioritize much on it, including memories.”

  “When you’re not fully developed, even lazy seniors seem like the hottest thing in the universe. It’s a matter of perspective.”

  “And now no one is more fit than you, so no females are as desirable?”

  “Not even close. Those memories cannot be approached now.”

  “So you cling to them because they give you a false grasp of the superior?”

  “It was an accurate assessment at the time. I’ve just outgrown them by eons.”

  “But you wish you had such superiors again?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Then you do not crave mating, socializing, or peerdom. You are drawn to superiority. To leveling up. And the people on this planet are the opposite of this. You have lost you
r target lock on the superior and do not know how to find it again.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it. Are you hungry?”

  Paul laughed. “Actually I am. Odd, considering we haven’t done more than walk.”

  “Come then. Food is essential and not a divergence from the path of the warrior. Pursuing it is therefore on the proper path, if only for a few steps.”

  “Food it is then,” Paul said, pulling his hood back over his face as Cal-com did the same. “Lead on, and try to find something that won’t make us both puke. What we passed earlier was not promising…”

  8

  April 17, 154930

  Solar System (Home One Kingdom)

  Earth

  Taryn-047 stood in an isolation chamber inside Atlantis with nothing but herself and a pillar in front of her. It was made of blue crystal like the Responders in the Temples, but this was of Star Force design and operated a bit differently. She pointed her bare hand at it, with her first two fingers locked together like a gun barrel, and with a gentle squeeze of the muscles in her hand she triggered an Essence attack to fire a little orb of light towards it.

  It hit…a little lower than she’d intended…and Taryn adjusted her aim, knowing the attack was more about how she released it from her fingers than where her fingers were pointed. The Essence pooled in her fingers again, gripping the air molecules around it and condensing them into a river of closely packed molecules, essentially squeezing the extra energy out of them and causing them to turn into plasma as she bound them up in Essence and launched them across the 8 meter gap to her target.

  The Binder technique was one of many the Neofan had taught Star Force. It allowed for molecular locking, compression, and expansion on will. A more gruesome use of it was to enwrap a target and crush them down into a tenth of their normal size…or to expand them, essentially blowing them up as you pulled apart their molecules further than they could go while still locked together in the form of your body.

  But a civilized use of it allowed you to do a lot of management actions…in this case keeping the plasma together long enough to hit the target, as well as the compression done beforehand to squeeze out the energy so that it could be delivered to the target.

  Some of the Essence would be absorbed by the blue pillar on hit, and it would be transported down into a collection system that fed into the city’s central reservoir. It was a Magicite technology, but one linked into the planet’s defense grid. The reservoir was one of 194 on the planet that was filled by tankers coming from the Uriti, as well as small donations by the Essence users on Earth…and that Essence is what would fuel the planetary defenses, so every bit of practice Taryn got in here contributed a little more to the stored amounts.

  Waste not, want not…so all the training equipment designed for Essence abilities was also equipped with collection technology, but you never got the same amount as you used to craft the weapon. Taryn estimated about 20%-25% was being recovered, and that was due to her sloppiness. The better one got with crafting Essence weapons, the less uncrafted energy remained.

  But the pillar wasn’t just collecting uncrafted Essence that she was accidentally sending along with the weaponized part. It was also capable of taking crafted Essence and de-crafting it…but that required Essence use by the pillar itself, so there was no point in that when the amount collected would be less than what was used…except when you wanted to practice very damaging techniques. When the ‘safety’ setting was activated on the pillar, it would absorb all those attacks and not be destroyed itself…or the walls and the rooms beyond them.

  Taryn’s little light show wasn’t anywhere near that damaging, and the blue crystal was too tough for a little plasma to mess with it, so she was just doing some target practice to work on her aim when Wes-049 melted the door behind her to expose the hallway through the otherwise smooth-walled egg-shaped room as he walked in.

  “You forgot to knock,” Taryn said, ignoring him as she continued to shoot very slowly and methodically.

  “We already have bioplasma that is far more accurate. What are you trying to achieve?”

  “Just a little skill work. What’s up?”

  “Paul just conquered a star system on his vacation with Cal-com.”

  Taryn blinked and turned around. “What? Where?”

  “A system called Ha’ven Nu’meori.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “We had an embassy there. Primitive world, didn’t care for us much, and was apparently following the rules. Paul walked into an assassination attempt, did some telepathic searching, and found out the bastards were making a habit of it. All nicely off the books so no executions were recorded.”

  “And Paul’s called for an invasion?”

  “Already done it. Duke Corrington is there now and Paul and Cal-com are off to somewhere else.”

  “So Sean is right. We’ve got a problem hiding in obscurity under our collective noses.”

  “So it would seem, unless this was an anomaly.”

  “Fat chance of that. We’re going to need a surveillance push into all of these non-Star Force systems before we even think about going into the frontier en mass.”

  “Yeah,” Wes agreed. “Looks like.”

  “Did Sean say so?”

  “Not yet. But it’s getting painfully clear we’ve let too much slide locally in the name of sovereignty. It seems we can’t catch a break.”

  “Wrong. The Zak’de’ron leaving is a huge break.”

  “So why doesn’t that lower our workload any?”

  “Because the galaxy is too damn big when you’re trying to be responsible for all of it,” Taryn said, turning around and firing again…this time missing her mark by twice the previous amount.

  “You pulled your right elbow too much,” Wes noted. “Why don’t you just point and release?”

  “That’s not as fun,” Taryn said, pulling up both hands and firing three shots from each rapid fire into the pillar in what looked like a shotgun pattern rather than a sharpshooter’s work.

  “If you say so,” Wes said, looking at her shoddy targeting. “Did you have any more thoughts on last night?”

  “Yeah. I have no idea what Wilson is talking about.”

  “Me neither. I can’t find any disadvantage to using Essence…other than by overdrawing. But he seemed damn certain about it.”

  “I know. But all he has is a gut instinct, and I can’t confirm it. Though I do like real guns better…except these have unlimited ammo,” Taryn said, holding up her paired fingers as if they were pistols.

  “Any ideas on how we can confirm it?”

  “Stop using Essence and see if something changes.”

  “Are you volunteering?”

  “Nope. I’ve got work to do. You?”

  “I’ve been trying to feel any draining effect while using it, but I got nada. And Wilson didn’t suggest we stop using it. I wonder why?”

  “Holding back isn’t how we figure things out,” Taryn said, firing another two shots before turning back to face Wes. “When in doubt, shoot about.”

  “If there was a problem with Essence, Kara should have it more than us.”

  “Yeah, and she’s still strong. I don’t get what he’s getting at, but it’s bugging me too. He doesn’t pull practical jokes…though this would actually be a good one.”

  “I don’t find it funny.”

  “It’s not. But as an idiot check, it has some merit.”

  “You think he’s wrong?”

  “I think I’m going to keep an open mind. If Wilson can’t pinpoint it, then it might not exist, but something is off with us. I think it’s more boredom than anything waiting on the fleet to build up before we can take it to the Hadarak. I hate waiting.”

  “Paul didn’t come back, so I’m guessing he isn’t having much success self-analyzing either.”

  “He’s not. He has Cal-com to help him analyze.”

  “Even worse.”
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  Taryn sighed, then threw her hands wide in surrender. “We’re all missing something. We don’t know where to go from here other than to repeat the past. Either there is nothing else or it’s well hidden.”

  “Or we’re all stupid and missing the obvious.”

  “How could we be at this point?”

  “We’ve had to deal with plateaus before. Now all we do is throw Essence at it. Maybe Wilson has a point in that.”

  “That it’s messing with our perspective? Ok. For the next week no more Essence use. We’ll play old school rules.”

  “No psionics either?”

  “Not what I meant, but maybe that’s not a bad idea. We’ll need to use inhibitors or it just won’t feel right holding back.”

  “We don’t have inhibitors for Essence...at least not any that I’m using.”

  “True, but there’s a difference between not choosing to fly and not being able to. Psionic inhibitors while we promise not to use Essence. We can let Wilson figure up some special challenges for us on those parameters.”

  “Put up your pistols then,” Wes said, looking at her hands.

  Taryn fake twirled her ‘pistols’ and put them into nonexistent hip holsters. “Done. We’re going to have a lot more free time without psionics and Essence to work on.”

  “When’s the last time you did a long run?”

  “I did 40 miles last week.”

  “I said long. Like 20 hours.”

  “I haven’t done anything that long in…well, actually I can’t remember.”

  “Up for a group run? Then communal nap time?”

  “Sure. Are we racing this or just running?”

  “Just running. Maybe we’ll knock someone’s brain loose enough to get an epiphany.”

  “So we are going to run each other into the ground,” Taryn predicted.

  “Not at first,” Wes said, shrugging. “You know how it works.”

  “No turning blonde then. We make this legitimately old school.”

  “Good idea. How soon?”

  “Couple hours. See how many of the others you can grab.”

  “On it,” Wes said, turning and walking out of the room as the doorway melted back into a wall as Taryn was about to command the pillar to retract…then stopped herself before using her telepathy. Instead she walked over and hit the physical button, then walked over to the wall and found the tiny icon there and opened the door with a finger press as the pillar sank into the floor and disappeared, as did she, walking out and leaving the chamber in powered down mode.