Star Force: Cascade (SF73) Read online

  That in itself was a huge responsibility, for it had a direct impact on Star Force’s upper end tech production. He’d gotten good at it over the years, but every day was a new challenge and he expected to have to move the station in a few more hours after sucking up as much from the current deposit of denomsi as they could get. The tiny globule had disconnected from a chunk deep within the star that, honestly, shouldn’t even be there. How this star had acquired a compound that was only typical of high mass stars was still a mystery, and getting down to harvest it directly was one of his standing goals, though they were far from that day. Whenever a bit of it would break off and float up to the surface regions where it was possible to collect it he immediately retasked the entire station, for it was just that damn valuable.

  The Yamcha star forge, the third in the line to be produced, was currently working through the headaches of mining one of those insanely large stars, and it was from there that Star Force was getting the bulk of its limited denomsi supply. Whenever Claven could contribute to it he felt obligated, for it was the solari responsible for the newest and most powerful weapon that Star Force possessed…the Dre’mo’don. Without denomsi it couldn’t be built, and the same could be said of other solaris and technologies under development that this star had in far greater amounts.

  The Administrator had to get to them, collect and process, then either fabricate or ship out to be used elsewhere on as regular an output schedule as he could manage. His crew was damn good at what they did, but this operation was always in flux due to the unknown hauls they would be bringing in.

  As he hopped into a lift car to take him down a segment of the 94 mile long station, he selected a region where a transition was being made. One of the factory segments was shifting from haviti saturation to chori condensation thanks to the band of the latter that they’d had the luck of hitting, or rather being hit by, as it cycled through the subsurface currents. The condensation process was meant for packaging, diminishing the volume required by stacking the element in its raw form into tightly linked molecular handshakes…that were difficult to uncouple later, but that wasn’t his problem.

  There were only so many jumpships available to haul cargo and he had to get his output compressed as tightly as he could in order to load them up and keep from having to scale back production to match the traffic flow. Though in truth he could get as many jumpships as he requested, giving the importance of this operation, but after centuries of working within Star Force he hated being inefficient and didn’t want to waste a jumpship that could be put to use someplace else just because he couldn’t pack smartly enough.

  When he got off the lift he walked a considerable distance through mostly empty corridors until he got to the section that had been transitioned, according to the report, but it was good to see with his own eyes that all was operating smoothly as he walked into the command booth with four other men working or monitoring their stations.

  “How we doing fellas?”

  “Purring like a kitten,” the eldest of them said, bringing up the large hologram so the Administrator could see for himself. Most of the sector’s internal machinery had multiple uses and only a few specialized components, allowing it to be transitioned from task to task in order to save space and the diagram showed that everything was now into chori condensation mode, with bricks of the element being sealed inside protective casings so they wouldn’t react with the environment and go boom…or probably more like melt through a deck or two via various chemical reactions that would simultaneously create a noxious cloud that would kill anyone nearby. Such things didn’t happen under Star Force’s careful attention, but anytime you had raw solari in such density there were bound to be violent reactions if exposed to a ‘natural’ environment.

  One of the other techs frowned at their chief. “What’s a kitten?”

  “A baby cat,” the older man explained, throwing a glance at his age peer in Claven.

  “Cat…like Scionate cat?” the tech asked, still confused.

  “No,” the Administrator explained before the chief could. “It’s a race that now lives exclusively in the sanctuaries. Back in the day they were kept as pets and would make a soft rumbling sound when they were asleep or happy.”

  “What’s a pet?” another of the younger techs asked.

  Claven sighed, looking at the chief. “I’ll leave that one to you. We’re good here? Aside from their lack of dark age cultural knowledge.”

  “We’re good, though I think in a couple, maybe three days we’ll have to pull a maintenance shutdown given the amounts coming in. Gotta manually scrub those headers.”

  Claven nodded. “Make the call when necessary. Still no word on the upgrade yet.”

  “That’s alright, boss. I don’t mind the manual labor. Gives us something to do other than watch holograms and push buttons.”

  “I prefer it that way,” Claven differed. “If you get busy that means things are breaking and I’m having a really bad day. So stay bored, please.”

  “As ordered.”

  “Carry on,” the Administrator said, walking out of the booth and back into the hallway to continue his rounds. He couldn’t hit everywhere on the station, for it was just too freaking huge, but he chose a few vital areas and then stopped by locations he hadn’t in the previous days. There was something wrong about being in command of a facility that you never set foot in, not because he didn’t trust his crew to do their jobs, he just didn’t like to be out of the loop.

  An hour later his wrist beeped and he held up his arm lateral in front of him to activate the holographic torso of one of his assistants.

  “What is it?”

  “Supply convoy is here early. Do you want me to get the ball rolling or wait for you?”

  “Anything unusual in the manifests?”

  “Just getting them now.”

  “Are they all loaded?”

  “Seven ships in total, two are empty.”

  “Start filling them with the armor pallets. I’ll handle the rest when I get back.”

  “Offloads?”

  “Put them in the bays the pallets leave.”

  “What about bay 7?”

  Claven shook his head. “No, we’ll have to slow production here when the backup hits. Keep bay 7 open for the chori.”

  “Understood. I’ll tell them to hold off until they can shovel out their own floor space.”

  “I’ll be back inside half an hour,” Claven promised, deactivating his communicator and casually walking on, cutting his inspection tour short but hitting two more locations before heading back up to the command center and his staff of 6. If he didn’t make these tours those 6 would be the only faces he saw on a regular basis, for given the size of the station and the automation, his crew of over a quarter million were so spread out that they didn’t bump into each other much during work, and Claven spent most of his time working or training, with almost no interactions in the residential zones.

  He was in them to eat, sleep, and train…all of which he did quickly and usually alone, then he was back in his office or roaming the station. This posting was too important for him to allow himself time off, so he never did. If a time came when he needed a break he’d resign and let someone else fill the slot. Until then he was on call round the clock in order to make sure this behemoth kept functioning and feeding Star Force the valuable materials that only it and its twins could produce, and until they caught up with the Prometheus’s production levels the weight of responsibility was even more on their shoulders.

  Or rather his, for he deferred everything to himself while allowing the crew the downtime he didn’t take. They all had shifts and replacements to take over while they decompressed and pursued personal agendas, but there was only one Administrator, and even when he slept he kept his communicator on just in case something went wrong. From the day he stepped on this station to the day he left it he considered himself never to be off duty, for he knew that trouble could come at any time and any place, a
nd it didn’t have off hours.

  9

  May 9, 2894

  Solar System

  Earth

  Paul stood in the center of a small circle, arm raised and redirecting towards various thuds as they were thrown at him from a narrow arc. As each one came he summoned up a small burst of concussive energy in his bare arm and threw it forward from his palm, intercepting and knocking down the little balls before they could hit him. His aim was improving, but it was still difficult to emit a precise blast, for the Jumat was more like a tsunami than a rifle shot. Still, he could throw enough over a certain vector to block a single thud coming at him, with this drill focusing on his aim and repetition.

  He no longer had trouble summoning up the goosebumps that the energy manifested from. That was now a skill that he could trigger at will, with many other aspects of the psionic being added in these first few years thanks mainly to Morgan’s notes, for she had meticulously kept them and formed a training database on the ability from her first year to the present. In it she listed mental tricks that had helped Paul learn the summoning skill faster than she had, as well as numerous training simulations that she’d developed over the years and that now Paul had the benefit of using straight off.

  His progress with the Jumat was far faster than hers had been, and now he felt that he truly understood why Ginsi was climbing the ranks as fast as she was. He’d always been the trailblazer figuring things out or with his peers, but now he got the opportunity to see what it looked like to be following someone else through and gaining from their experience.

  It was literally night and day, for he didn’t have to figure out ways to train…Morgan had already done that for him. All he had to do was throw himself into the drills and challenges and work on improving. He was literally a kid in a candy store, and that combined with the fact that he’d started out with more raw power than Morgan had put him way ahead of her progression rate and he intended to keep it that way, for he was so far behind her that he doubted he’d ever catch up. She had centuries of working to develop her Jumat as an advantage over him, and though they hadn’t met up to spar yet, for she was busy waging her private war against the lizards in Ninja Monkey territory, Paul knew it would be a laughably one-sided affair.

  Hitting and pushing back the thuds took a decent amount of his energy, but if he’d wanted to he could knock a person off their feet with ease…he just couldn’t do it with repetition. His tissues were so new that they didn’t hold charge well, though with his ambrosia levels being so high he had yet another advantage over the Morgan of the past, for the Jumat consumed ambrosia as a quick resupply fuel source. Problem was Paul’s tissue wasn’t good at absorbing it, at least not as good as Morgan, so whenever he tried something big he usually got one or two shots at it before he had to take a sip from his ambrosia bottle and wait for it to process.

  He literally had enough ambrosia in that one bottle to service 1000 adepts for months. Paul didn’t want to have to constantly run off for supplies, so he’d had a concentrated liter of it made up for him so he could ingest it at will without having to fill himself up on foodstuffs or water. Overdosing was a big danger, for he couldn’t measure accurately sipping through a straw, but he was managing it well enough. Plus all he had to do to overcome a mistake was fire off some more Jumat blasts as soon as his tissues soaked up the abundant fuel source.

  Per Morgan’s notes he knew the best way to increase his abilities wasn’t in going big, but in working on repetition and getting his cycling rate up. He hadn’t yet learned how to manifest the energy outside his clothing, but he had learned to channel it to various parts of his body, forgoing the need to train naked when all he had to do was keep one arm bare. Today he was wearing a sleeveless shirt so he could alternate arms, but neither one of them would fatigue, for his entire body was producing the energy and transmitting it to a given location. His arms, or whatever other body part he chose, became his firing array, not the generation point.

  Right now he’d learned to use his arms and chest as emitters, for it took a while to calibrate the mental control necessary to use other body parts. The chest he’d only added within the previous year, doing a DBZ flex in order to pool the energy just below the surface and transfer it out in a finishing move-like attack. For that he had to be shirtless, but today he wasn’t working in it so he’d donned his sleeveless tank that was now soaked with sweat after four hours of work, first of which began on the track and now had transitioned into the thud firing chamber.

  Using the Jumat was exhausting, which was why these smaller bursts were key in developing his endurance and teaching his tissues to soak up ambrosia faster. They could charge through other means, but all were slower. The key to using Jumat as a serious weapon was in having the ambrosia handy, otherwise it was just going to be a surprise or last ditch attack that he’d have to hoard. Once expended, the Jumat tissues would take hours, if not more than a day to fully recharge naturally while the ambrosia would hit his bloodstream and he’d feel the effects within a minute.

  As useful as telekinesis was, there was no substitute for Jumat. It was literally the cannon to the Lachka sword. It was crude in comparison, but he had so much firepower available now, in burst at least, that he understood how vitally important an advantage he had over the Zen’zat that he had kept his non-training activities to a minimum and had been making the advanced training group his semi-permanent home as he worked to get a handle on this oh so impressive Tier 3 ability.

  Paul secluded himself in training so much that others had started interrupting him via comm when they needed something, knowing that if they waited he might not come out of the sanctum for more than a day. So as Paul was batting one thud out of the air at a time a voice filled the chamber and he kept going without delay.

  “I’m here,” Paul said, twitching his arm to the left and surging another pulse of invisible energy to cancel the thud’s momentum and lightly bounce it back towards the wall and the collection ring at the bottom. “What do you need?”

  “Just got word from Vortison,” Rio’s voice said eagerly. “He says he’s found the trigger and wants you to verify it.”

  Paul stopped what he was doing and looked towards the ceiling out of reflex. “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” Rio said as the next thud came out and hit Paul in the chest, bouncing off him and ending the drill in failure, but he didn’t care.

  “Now?”

  “If you can spare the time.”

  “Dumb question,” Paul said, telekinetically grabbing his ambrosia bottle and heading out the door. “On my way.”

  Paul walked into the lab along with Rio, both clad in fresh clothes as the medtech in charge of genetic research waved them over with a pair of curled fingers as he was manipulating a hologram with his other hand.

  “Talk to me,” Paul said, walking up on his shoulder.

  “I’ve always wondered why this one was so elusive, and now I have my answer. I think it’s a resistance measurement with a temporal cap restriction of at least a few minutes so some freak attack or condition wouldn’t trigger it. Morgan’s gravity damage and her resistance to it was prolonged and, I think, enough to push her over the edge. Your level of training, without considerable breaks, pegged you out. Step into the scanner please.”

  Paul listened as he walked over to the duplicate of the V’kit’no’sat medical station made from Star Force tech. It wasn’t nearly as advanced in the alterations department, but they’d been able to fully copy the scanning tech. As soon as Paul walked in a hologram of his body lit up on Vortison’s console and he began manipulating it to get the suspected trigger under scrutiny.

  “Hmmn,” Vortison said, looking at the live data.

  “What?” Rio asked, more than eager to get his own Jumat.

  “His is turned off.”

  “Meaning what?” Paul asked, for his Jumat ability was most definitely ‘on.’

  “The trigger and ascension protocol are separate on this one. Or to
be more precise, there’s not the usual overlap. Most of the triggers we’ve discovered are a completion measure, so that once you attain that, for lack of a better word, ‘fitness’ level you activate the trigger. This means it’s always turned on so long as you’re maintaining or improving…which allows you to share them. Right now Paul’s isn’t on, so it isn’t just a matter of finding which part of yourself to mimic.”

  “I have to recreate the stress level,” Paul guessed.

  Vortison nodded. “Yeah, I think so. What I don’t know is how long the trigger will be on. Could be a few seconds or a few hours. Think of it like a coffer with a small hole in it. You fill it with stress until it overflows the brim, but if you stop adding stress the level will diminish and eventually dry up completely.”

  “So I’m going to have to catch him during hard workouts?” Rio figured.

  Paul shook his head. “We’ve got to figure out how much stress is required, then program a biomonitor to measure in realtime.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Vortison confirmed. “I need you to hang out right where you are for the next hour or so, and hopefully I can create a program to measure how close to peaking out you are.”

  “Limit break?” Rio asked, glancing at Paul.

  “Done.”

  “Done what?” Vortison asked as he worked.

  “Naming stuff,” Paul explained as he crossed his arms over his chest as he stood more or less still. There was nothing for him to do but wait, though in this case he wasn’t going to complain. “Is it possible to overfill the coffer?”