Star Force: Ascension (SF27) Read online

  Morgan knew she needed to have a chat with Paul about that one, because this Nestafar front of the overall war was just plain insane. If this type of fighting ever came to Star Force territory they’d better have a damn good battle plan in place, for this chaos was totally unacceptable…and she had no idea how many millions of Calavari had already died as a result.

  Banishing such thoughts from her mind for the moment, the trailblazer hit the locker room in the sanctum and swapped out her casual uniform for a pair of formfitting shorts, sports bra, and running shoes, then headed over to what the Archons called ‘Balboa Lane.’ When she entered the long rectangular room it was completely empty, just a three story high ceiling with walls set about twice that length apart and running about a football field and a half in length.

  As the doors auto-closed behind her she turned a sharp right and adjusted the control board set into the back wall. Panels opened up along the length of the chamber, sending out a myriad of floating objects suspended by precisely controlled magnetic fields so there were no connecting wires or supports. Some were man-sized and pill-shaped, like traditional punching bags. Others were squares, spheres, bars, targets, platforms, etc. The course layout Morgan used was preprogrammed, as was her music playlist which she cut down to a single song, ‘Stamp on the Ground’ by the ItaloBrothers, and set it for continuous repeat before she walked over and activated the training challenge with a tap to the start pedestal that had risen up out of the floor on the left side of the door.

  She timed it perfectly to coincide with the beat of the music and ran forward lazily matching up her footsteps and jump-kicking a punching bag-shaped target. She left herself fall down to the ground on the opposite foot, then pivot and sidestep to the right, side-kicking another before bouncing back left and side-kicking a third. From there she moved forward rhythmically, following a sequence of targets she had done so many times she could probably do it blindfolded, though she’d never tried.

  With the music pumping through the chamber Morgan got into the groove, punching the next series of targets, also punching bags, but using their trademark Archon Punches for the forward targets and the side of her fists/wrists for the lateral attacks. She alternated between the side attacks and elbow-lunges that the trailblazers had learned to use long ago in lieu of punching with their knuckles when unarmored. The ‘Archon Punch’ required getting bodily closer to your target, which Morgan actually liked because it took a higher skill level to execute, and swinging your elbow up along the side of your body and into a level ramming level, using a shoulder twist to add extra momentum into the blow.

  As Morgan Archon Punched several of the targets the monitoring equipment inside measured the intensity of the blows, as it did everything in the chamber, which she could review afterwards, but right now the trailblazer was losing herself in the music and fluidic movement, punching, kicking, and jumping into a sort of training trance that most of the higher level Archons had mastered. It required living in the millisecond and linking one moment to another…something that Morgan did so easily nowadays this was actually like recess to her.

  She worked her way down the course, which gave her progressively harder targets, but none overwhelmingly difficult. The sweep bars came halfway down, which were floating forwards and back over a 20 meter stretch like a pinched racetrack. Morgan hit the first one with a forward flip, sailing over it cleanly before ducking down beneath the next one and coming up to forward flip over another as they continued to come at her. When she got to the end of the row she sidestepped over to the right and began back flipping up the reverse stream of bars, landing and immediately flipping into the next jump for a series of 11 leaps before coming back out in front of the zone.

  She went back through the first line again, this time doing a leg-flip jump, cartwheeling her legs over each bar as she leaned at a 45 degree angle with her torso, keeping her head upright and mostly stable as she playfully moved down the length of obstacles. She spun out of the final landing and ran forward to the next section, kicking up on the underside of a floating sphere with her knee, then danced over to another one on her left and repeated with the opposite leg.

  From there she went through a mix of punching bags and cubes that had one side highlighted as a target, requiring a lateral attack, then one in the center of the room that required an aerial attack.

  Morgan took three long strides and jumped up above the meter-high squishy box, spreading her arms wide a la Trinity and brought her knees together, stretching out her quads and turning her body into a falling arrow that imbedding her knees in the target before spilling her forward through a partial summersault off the box. Her arms caught her before she could fall far and she did a front handspring back up onto her feet and into a run for two steps before an almost instantaneous Archon Punch into a punching back, then reversed herself diagonally to hit another one back left.

  From there she zigzagged through a plinko course of the objects, having a considerable amount of fun matching her movements to the music’s beat. The targets on the far end of Balboa Lane got stranger and more complicated, including some hoops she had to jump through while kicking, the last of which required a backflip overhead kick into a target atop the hoop. Morgan nailed it with a few inches to spare, then brought her knees up to her chest and continued the abbreviated rotation.

  She stuck her legs down just in time and managed to land on her feet, then stutter-stepped with her back facing towards the far wall. Morgan turned the recovery motion into an additional two intentional steps and dropped down into a hunching position, driving her left elbow into the top of the reversal pedestal…which altered the course into the second half arrangement.

  New obstacles shot up to replace a few of the others while the rest repositioned slightly to offer her a different choreography to work through. Morgan headed back through on rhythm and eventually ended up back where she began, slapping the finish pedestal and stopping her timing clock. She held position for a few luxuriously exhausted breaths, then walked over to the control board to see how she’d done.

  Her time was about what she expected it to be, a few seconds slow because she was going for rhythm and not speed. The concussion levels were well below normal though, which she didn’t like. That meant she was hitting and kicking weaker than normal, which she reluctantly admitted was probably due to her body’s repairs from the gravity trap. Jason and others had said the healed tissue didn’t work as well, but part of Morgan had hoped it would just be a matter of reacclimation rather than rebuilding strength.

  She’d had enough time to adjust by now, so apparently she’d been wrong. The damn Nestafar had set her back in her training…one more thing that she would never forgive them for.

  Morgan reset the controls for the course but let the music continue to play. There was one thing the Nestafar hadn’t set her back in, and in fact may have helped her to accelerate.

  All the objects within the long room disappeared into their compartments save for one punching bag that moved into center position about 30 meters down from the entrance. Morgan walked over to it, jumping playfully a few times when the music lyrics said to do so, then she set herself and stepped into the bag, Archon Punching a single time, then stepping back and looking to her right…where a holographic concussion score of 173 was floating.

  She stepped back in and threw a few sidearm blows and even a knee for good measure, then walked back about two meters and faced the left wall so her right arm was aimed towards the target.

  “Ok, Morgan. Let’s see how hard this is,” she said, raising her arm up lazily and summoning the tingle that was already present within her body and that the agility run had shaken up even more. Like before they manifested along her spine, as well as with a bit in the back of her head and upper left leg. Using a considerable amount of will she sucked all the tingles up and into her shoulder, then sent them down her arm where they caught in her palm, just as they had in the nexus.

  The energy wanted to blow out in
all directions from her hand, but somehow Morgan was able to focus it down into a small point which she imagined to be directly in the center of her palm, and like a water hose being pinched by your thumb to aim the spray she sent the energy out of her hand towards the punching bag.

  There was a small ‘thump’ in the material that Morgan couldn’t hear over the loud music, but she could see the wrinkle in the surface of the bag when it hit. Then the concussion counter registered a score of 6, confirming that she had actually hit it with the invisible blast.

  Morgan nodded, smiling from ear to ear. “Again,” she prompted herself, trying to summon another wave of the tingles. It took more effort this time, but she succeeded in bringing them forth and forcing them down her arm. They released a bit easier and with less ‘spray,’ or so she imagined.

  The hologram flashed bright and changed the number from 6 up to 8.

  Morgan blew out a slow breath. This wasn’t going to be easy going at first, she knew, but she had what she thought of as a ‘training foothold’ on the ability and in the end that’s all she truly needed. Now that she could summon it at will she had a way to train for it, and she was more than eager to not only get the random energy discharges under control, but to learn how to focus the energy into a myriad of combat applications.

  New training.

  New ability.

  New challenge.

  That was Archon candy, and Morgan was more than happy to bite off a mouthful of this challenge.

  She summoned up another wave of the tingles and got to work.

  10

  March 27, 2405

  Brokal System

  Ra’sa

  Morgan was lying in bed, half-waking between deeper sleep sessions that seemed to oscillate every couple of hours, during which her mind leapt about in a semi-dream state. Ever since coming out of the gravity trap she hadn’t slept well, as if her body/mind were still damaged and undergoing subtle repairs. Even when she got a really hard workout in the fatigue would only knock her out for four or five hours, then she’d start to oscillate again until her alarm finally pulled her all the way back to consciousness.

  This time her mind flashed back to the Nestafar jumpship, a mix between dreamy alterations and memories. First she was fighting the Nestafar infantry, then she was climbing the leg of walker. Somewhere down the chain of battle snippets she found herself back in the crush of the high gravity, shooting at the energy wall blocking her way from the generator. Hazy as the memory was it replayed intact, and she could feel the desperation and hopelessness of the situation, along with her determination not to give in to it.

  Morgan curled up in a ball underneath the covers, her closed eyes squinting in effort as she relived the moment…then just as she felt trapped and never able to get out the tingling sensation returned and she was through the shield, then her mind zipped over to the zero g aftermath of the explosion of what the techs had subsequently deduced to be a cooling unit. When it had gone offline the overtaxed gravity generator had almost instantaneously fried itself, thus saving Morgan.

  In her dream state she began to float down the maintenance tube, but there she forcefully stopped her dream and put it into reverse…going back to the energy field and making it replay again in her mind, though some elements became distorted by the effort.

  With a jolt of adrenaline she jerked in bed, then blinked away the post-dream haze as she woke herself up. She pulled her torso up into a sitting position, ensuring she wouldn’t fall back asleep, and rubbed some of the ache out of her forehead as she tried to line her thoughts up in an analytical manner that wasn’t possible in a dream state.

  The tingle.

  Morgan pulled the covers off of her bare legs, slipping on a pair of casual shoes lying by the bed and then bolted out of her quarters at a brisk walk, intent on testing her theory despite the differences in technology. It had long been bothering her as to how she’d been able to get past the security shield with only a pistol. She’d considered that the power level might have been lower because of the energy needed to create the higher gravity, or that the emitters were affected by it and therefore less effective.

  She’d also put down the occurrence to faulty memories, realizing that there may have been another factor in play that she was unaware of due to the tunnel vision that the gravity crush had put her under. Now she realized she had known all along how she got through, it just hadn’t clicked before.

  Morgan made her way through the Red Ranger’s decks in T-shirt and shorts until she came to the security wing…which was empty. They’d never housed any of the Nestafar prisoners on the ship anyway, leaving them all on the transports until Morgan had finally released them prior to one of their planetary assaults to be used as messengers to encourage a surrender. It hadn’t worked, and they’d probably just been armed and sent back at her troops, but she’d been glad to get them off her hands regardless…and after that point they’d been leaving all the prisoners taken with the Calavari, not wanting to devote any more of their limited resources to their enemy’s well-being.

  Morgan walked through the outer reception area and back into one of the cell wings. She turned on one of the clear blue force fields used as both door and window and tapped it with her finger, getting a slight buzz as the physical shield resisted the pressure.

  Closing her eyes and focusing, she summoned up a small tingle down her back and forced it down her arm and into her hand, then pushed against the shield and released it, half expecting some type of blowback. Instead her hand slipped through the clear blue barrier, then was caught at the wrist as the shield reformed around her arm.

  “Ha!” she laughed, finally realizing how she’d been able to get through the Nestafar shield. Somehow the tingles had manifested themselves during the gravity crush…not from the regenerator’s repair work afterward. The meant she had developed this ability on her own…and if she had not, then the pistol would never have been enough to get her through to knock out the generator, and she would have died onboard that ship along with the others.

  Morgan could accept that, though how close she’d come to death still freaked her out, but at least this way she knew she’d saved herself…not to mention had a very useful skill to now employ.

  Her smiled faded when she tried to pull her hand back out of the cell and couldn’t. The shield had constricted her arm down to the most narrow point during her wiggling, and now had her pinned in place like a giant handcuff…and she was too far away from the on/off switch to reach it with her other arm.

  “Wonderful,” she commented, knowing that there was no one on duty given that there were no prisoners to guard. She closed her eyes and tried to summon up another tingle, but only managed to get a few goose bumps to transfer to her arm and not nearly enough to loosen the shield’s grip on her.

  Morgan mentally kicked herself for not thinking ahead. She’d been using so much of the bio-energy that she’d exhausted herself several times and had gained a decent understanding of what that felt like…which she was also experiencing now. The energy she’d used to punch through the shield was probably about all that she’d recovered during her partial sleep period, and now she was going to be stuck until her body built back up more charge…unless she could psych herself up enough to summon another round of tingles from wherever it was stored inside of her.

  A glance sideways at the control panel stalled that action, which she shifted over to plan-B status. Experimentally Morgan stepped to the side and lifted her foot towards the panel and stretched out, seeing that she had just about enough reach. She pulled her leg down and lifted her right foot up to her free left hand and pulled her shoe off, wiggling her bare toes in anticipation, then reaching her leg back out towards the panel, tipping her upper body the opposite direction to get as much length out of her leg as she could.

  Her toes brushed the control panel, settling on a blank section of the flat box. From there she dragged them up towards the off switch…then had to eek out another half inch before
she made contact. Wiggling to try and get some momentum, she gently pounded the button half a dozen times before getting enough pressure for it to register.

  The shield deactivated, and given that she was pulling against it for balance, dropped her onto her backside when it vanished.

  “Whoo,” she said, relieved as she sat up and slipped her shoe back on, then the Archon just sat there for a moment, thinking. She replayed what memories of the gravity trap she had and confirmed that she had, in fact, penetrated the shield using this invisible energy she was generating, putting an end to that unanswered question.

  With a bit of closure completed she stood up and started walking back to her quarters, not sure if she’d be able to sleep or not, because now she knew she could walk through force fields, and how cool was that!

  The next day Morgan ordered the salvage crews back to the warships, leaving behind a lot of untouched wreckage but she figured they’d pushed their luck as far as she was willing to risk it. The Red Ranger and the other three Warship-class jumpships took what they could with them and docked their remaining drone warships in their berths, then made a microjump away from the planet, crisscrossing the star system out to the 18th planet and braked against its tiny gravity well. It was located much further out than the inhabited planets where all the fighting was taking place, barely more than a spherical lump of rock caught in stellar orbit.