Star Force: Rift Page 9

  “Gutted, but the exterior still remains.”

  “And the datafiles?”

  “We copied them before we lost Earth the first time.”

  “Would you allow us the curiosity of checking on a few things?”

  “Possibly. What do you want to know?”

  “Everything that they did not tell us. If you have access to the J’gar and Oso’lon files, we would like to see them.”

  “We haven’t agreed to be friends yet, now have we?”

  “We have offered. The decision is yours to make.”

  “You said you were here to negotiate, so it’s not as simple as that. What are you unwilling to do?”

  “It is not a matter of what we are unwilling to do, but what we are requesting that you do. We want you to incorporate our race into your empire in the most effective way possible to fight the V’kit’no’sat. We have some ideas of how that would occur, but you know better than us. We do not want to be reduced in stature to match the other races. We wish to be enhanced and unleashed on the V’kit’no’sat. You have knowledge and technology that we did not possess during our rebellion. We have ample experience fighting the V’kit’no’sat. We wish to combine the two to maximum advantage.”

  “We always do everything to maximum advantage,” Sara pointed out, finally releasing the battlemeld with Randal. “But we fight with honor, and will not compromise it to attain a victory.”

  “It is that honor that we are trusting in. We would not be here if we thought you would behave the same as the V’kit’no’sat.”

  “But will you hold to the bounds of our honor?”

  “Once we learn them, yes. Your combat record is enough to vouch for it, even if we do not understand it.”

  “To put it simply, we do not focus on the short term. Doing something wrong might gain you something in the short term, but it weakens you in the long term. That’s why we are able to negotiate with other races to the effective level that we do. We have a history of trustfulness…and a history of doing the right thing simply because it is the right thing. That has gained us much over the long term, but we would do the right thing even if it gained us nothing. We fight enemies because they are threats, not because of vendettas. Sometimes the two overlap, but we don’t kill people who don’t deserve it, and we don’t barter lives.”

  “Which is why you do not use death marks?”

  “If you have to ask that question you really understand very little of us.”

  “We are willing to learn if it helps us fight the V’kit’no’sat more effectively.”

  “Well that’s a start,” Sara noted unenthusiastically.

  “What is that alteration to your hand?” another Rit’ko’sor asked.

  Sara held up her palm and pointed to the slit in it. “You mean this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Randal, bioshield please.”

  “Fire at will,” he said, generating a shield over himself…and even that appeared to catch the Rit’ko’sor by surprise. Then when the bright white streak of plasma leapt out from Sara’s palm and impacted his shield he could sense even further anger and awe from their guests.

  Sara didn’t fire a long blast, but held it long enough that the Rit’ko’sor got a good look at it, then closed down her hand slit with the glow disappearing entirely.

  “It’s called Choratrik,” she explained.

  “The Les’i’kron possess the same,” Tarck said, “but theirs emits from their mouths. It’s considered a weak psionic compared to Saroto’kanse’vam, but useful in certain circumstances. Do you use it much?”

  “Not when we’re in armor with weapons, but it’s nice to know you’re never unarmed in case you’re separated from your armor.”

  “That’s why we wear ours,” he said, referencing the pile of jewelry against the far wall that was their own battle armor in condensed storage mode.

  “Ours is more formidable against single strikes. Yours is more flexible. A tradeoff we made.”

  “Why?”

  “We want someone to be able to survive a large, single hit. If they die from it, then the longevity of your armor becomes useless.”

  “How often do you fight against that level of firepower?”

  “Whenever the larger V’kit’no’sat races invade. Against Zen’zat our armor lasts long enough unless they poke a hole in a specific spot…but then that spot can be defended whereas yours fills in and weakens the entire armor.”

  “So that’s why you wear static armor…” another Rit’ko’sor said, as if some long-held mystery had been discovered.

  “Not entirely static, but we need to be able to take a large hit and keep fighting. We rely on skill and teamwork to deal with repetitive smaller hits.”

  “And your psionics,” Tarck added, seeing another strategic advantage.

  “Yes. It doesn’t make us superior to the Zen’zat, but it does allow us to fight in a style of our own choosing.”

  “We were not even allowed full armor if we were not of high enough rank,” the Rit’ko’sor leader said with disgust. “We had shield generators, nothing more, and were expected to accomplish missions via our numbers. They valued our lives cheaply, and as a resource they would rather expend than let us build the necessary armor.”

  “Why? Why did they waste you like that?” Randal asked, not fully understanding.

  “They were given weak opponents,” Sara answered before the Rit’ko’sor could, “and were expected to win with less equipment. Otherwise they would not be dominant. Correct?”

  “We were allowed full equipment against the Hadarak, but we were not even permitted to create it in sufficient numbers for our entire military. Other races had similar restrictions, but the larger ones did not. They valued their lives more, while the smaller races were seen as expendable. Star Force uses races as small as my foot to fight and kill V’kit’no’sat. You make use of the smaller races. You do not waste them. This is why we choose to trust you.”

  “Your strength is your coordination,” Sara pointed out. “We can use that, but you must also be able to fight as individuals.”

  “Our ability to do so would increase with additional psionics.”

  “We don’t trust everyone with psionics. Only those who prove themselves worthy. Rit’ko’sor already having psionics is a problem.”

  “One that you can solve for future generations as you see fit. We know that you will not waste power when it is presented to you.”

  “No we don’t, but this war is going to be won or lost on the naval front. You were able to produce a massive fleet in secret. How?”

  “We knew where the V’kit’no’sat would not look, and our Lachka was configured for smaller applications. We have undone that, to some extent, to give us more power in battle, but we were originally designed to use our Lachka in groups and individually as techs. We were not enhanced purely for battle as others were.”

  “You have good techs then?”

  “We are good at production. We are not as good at research, which is why we needed to steal blueprints to build our Mach’nel and other assets.”

  “Do you have more than one?”

  “No, and that one was extremely difficult to construct. We needed it against the Hadarak, but against the V’kit’no’sat it can be overwhelmed with lesser ships, as you know well. You have destroyed two of them.”

  “Two and a half,” Sara corrected.

  “You said there were battlemeld abilities,” another Rit’ko’sor interrupted. “Show us some of these.”

  Sara glanced at Randal and the two linked up again, then they took off running in separate directions, turning and running around the perimeter of the circular sparring ring dragging an invisible Trielo conduit between them. When it passed through the Rit’ko’sor it transmitted the stun energy into their bodies, knocking them to the floor semi-unconscious, for the Archons had dialed back the intensity for demonstration sake.

  Tarck and the others stumbled to their feet, trying to st
and and regain their balance as they wobbled.

  “Impressed yet?” Sara asked.

  “Psionics are power, and a power that has been denied to the Rit’ko’sor in many ways…yet we still have enough psionics to make us superior to the races in Star Force. Your Archons have more power than we imagined, and if you can learn to transfer some of those psionics to us, you will not be disappointed with the results.”

  “That’s getting way ahead of ourselves, but I won’t rule out that possibility.”

  “Then you will accept us?”

  “We have to work out a lot of details, but if you’re willing to accept doing things our way, the answer will be yes.”

  “If doing things your way gets us our vengeance, we will happily accept following your lead.”

  “Leadership is about direction, not suppression. That’s something the V’kit’no’sat still haven’t figured out. I hope you learn faster than they do.”

  “The blood of our kin has prompted us to reassess many things over previous years.”

  “As has ours. In that we share a common legacy.”

  “We have hurt them more than any other,” Tarck said with a note of pride. “You have defied them in a way no other has ever accomplished. Together, I believe we can do a great deal more.”

  “If they give us time to build,” Randal added ominously.

  “If they give us time,” Tarck agreed. “If not, we will still be honored to fight and die alongside you rather than wallow in self-imposed exile.”

  10

  March 2, 4848

  Axalon System (Pavana Region)

  Stellar Orbit

  It’d been two years since the meeting with the Rit’ko’sor, two long years for Sara as she and half the members of the 1s had been assigned the task of annexing the most powerful race ever to join Star Force. The 2s had got to fashion the lizards into Paladin, and now it was the 1s job to do the same with the Rit’ko’sor…only this was considerably harder.

  Ethan-014, Erin-016, Kevin-017, and Landon-019 weren’t here, being tied up with war duties on the Rim, but the other 5 members of her original team were and they’d been working with a trio of Rit’ko’sor who had stayed behind in Star Force territory while the rest returned home and began packing. They weren’t going to leave their current planets with technology that others could recover, so over the past 2 years they’d been deconstructing them and converting every ship they possessed into transports to bring their entire population here in one massive convoy.

  The Mach’nel helped greatly with that, but Sara had been told they were still packed tight and would have few foodstuffs to spare by the time they’d arrived, which was why Star Force had been in a frantic hurry to construct the necessary facilities in this formerly deserted system to sustain them upon arrival. Even now there were an army of Kiritak and Bsidd working round the clock while a large chunk of the Kvash navy was patrolling the system and keeping everyone else out. This was the heart of Star Force territory, safely away from the V’kit’no’sat and other threats, but word had already begun to spread and travelers were coming to take a look at the construction even before the Rit’ko’sor fleet started to arrive.

  Star Force had designated this system off-limits, but there were many ships that came anyway and had to be turned back and Sara doubted that would end now, for the Rit’ko’sor had come straight here and passed through one of the black hole routes in former Nexus territory, so there were many local eyeballs on them and Davis had to put out a press release informing people why a V’kit’no’sat warfleet was moving through their territory.

  The response had not been kind, but then again the inclusion of the lizards hadn’t been popular either in the aftermath of that war, and it was just one more factor that Sara and the 1s were going to have to deal with. For now, though, they would be left here in hopefully quiet isolation to build while waiting to see how the V’kit’no’sat responded. Would they break their truce and attack immediately? If they did, at least Star Force would now have added a Mach’nel to its combat capability, but it was really the Uriti that would make the biggest difference and they’d already added one more to their ranks, though having a Mach’nel now certainly didn’t hurt.

  Sara watched from the bridge of the Dominator as the Rit’ko’sor ships continued to pour into the system via their jumppoint and move directly for one of three planets that had freshly built Star Force infrastructure on them. None were even close to fully constructed, but they had the necessary bioharvest facilities up and running and right now the quartaries were at 83% complete. That meant some of the Rit’ko’sor would have to live on the ships for a while until the Kiritak and Bsidd finished their work, but both the 1s and the Rit’ko’sor had wanted to make this transition as fast as possible, for if the V’kit’no’sat did hold to their truce they only had a limited number of years to prepare for the resumption of the war and they didn’t want to waste even one.

  Already there were maturias set up to receive the incoming eggs, and it had been decided not to reduce them in capability. The Protovic had been the first experiment with psionics in the general population, but even they had to earn them through merit standards. Creating a similar system for the Rit’ko’sor was doable, but it would still mean watering down their Ikrid to the point they couldn’t hack into other people’s minds and remotely control their bodies. That was a line that Star Force was not going to cross, and the few people that had that capability had to be those that were deserving of the power and the responsibility that came with it…not to mention Lachka, which could crush a person’s brain or heart with a single thought.

  No race could be given that power, which was why either the Rit’ko’sor had to be reduced or kept separate from the rest of Star Force…and the 1s had decided on the latter. If any individual Rit’ko’sor wanted to leave they could, but they’d have to forfeit their psionics to do it, just like a Human that spontaneously generated their dormant psionics. If they didn’t agree to follow certain protocol they were denied the psionic, for Star Force couldn’t let unscrupulous people run around with that kind of power.

  So what Sara and the others had decided was to treat all Rit’ko’sor as if they were Arc Knights until they opted out, and already Star Force’s medtechs were working on creating new versions of existing psionics to add to the Rit’ko’sor, first on the list being bioshields. Initially that hadn’t been the plan, but the 3 Rit’ko’sor that Sara had gotten to know fairly well over the past 2 years had changed her mind considerably, for now she realized what it truly meant to be elevated to a V’kit’no’sat member race.

  She didn’t know what the Rit’ko’sor had been before the dragons found them, but now their bodies healed remarkably fast, making self-sufficiency much easier to maintain. More so than Humans or even Zen’zat, for Humans were really a watered down version. A lot of tinkering had been done to the Human genome by Star Force to close that gap, but the bottom line was that Zen’zat were never designed to reproduce so a lot of their power didn’t translate through the generations.

  For the Rit’ko’sor it did, and not only could they attain self-sufficiency much easier, they also learned quickly. Their minds didn’t possess Sav, but they were structured in a way that made them superior and was not part of their original genome. They’d been upgraded, and Star Force geneticists had been studying that for millennia now, but with only a few small experiments of their own to show for it. Davis wouldn’t permit anything dangerous, for Star Force wouldn’t sacrifice people to gain scientific knowledge. The V’kit’no’sat were another matter entirely, but still there were some races in Star Force that had been upgraded here and there were there was an easy fix to be made.

  Advancement through training was the preferred method, and often it yielded better results than from direct manipulation, but there was no denying the level the Rit’ko’sor were on was superior to Humans…and Humans were superior to every other race in Star Force. The genetic wizardry of the V’kit’no’sat w
as now clear to Sara in a way it had never been before, but it wasn’t enough on its own and that was why Star Force had survived so long. They didn’t rely on a race, but rather individuals, and Sara was individually superior to these Rit’ko’sor even if her base genome wasn’t.

  That was a concept the Rit’ko’sor were having a hard time acclimating too, though they were trying. Everything about their previous culture was based on their race, and they were going to have to unlearn that…though the hatchlings wouldn’t. How to train a superior race from ‘birth’ was going to be hit or miss as they began, but Sara knew they’d get the hang of it eventually and she was eager to see just how fast they would progress.

  Faster than Humans, she knew, for Rit’ko’sor grew to adulthood in less than half the time. It was how fast they learned and adapted that she was interested in finding out…though there was one modification they were going to make to them that would cause some trouble. Rit’ko’sor were telepathic from birth, as many V’kit’no’sat races were, but not all. Some restricted the telepathy and other base psionics, such as the Era’tran, until they developed further, but the Rit’ko’sor did not and the pack mentality was developed in them from infancy. Even now those in eggs could feel the others nearby, but the eggs that were soon to arrive in Star Force hands would be undoing immediate genetic alteration.

  Doing so in a developing hatchling was dangerous, for the growth was based on very specific plans that, if messed with, could have disastrous consequences. Back when Star Force first began Sara had found out, after the fact, that Davis had searched the planet for malformed babies and had them brought in secret to be treated with V’kit’no’sat regenerators. Any bad growths, such as two individuals being born with their heads connected, would be fixed and separated within minutes because the base genome hadn’t been corrupted, it was only the growth sequence that had seen a glitch.

  But this was far more serious, for making alterations to the base genome could have unintended consequences, and a regenerator could only repair you according to those genetic blueprints. It couldn’t adapt and solve problems, only rebuild you to specs. Fortunately the procedure that the eggs were going to have done on them was adding something rather than changing tissue, in that they were getting an Ikrid block identical to what all Humans carried, though by necessity it was slightly different due to the structure of the Rit’ko’sor minds.