Star Force: Battlemeld (SF45) Read online

  “This is so cool,” he said, going through a few more unpredictable arm and hand movements that Jason mimicked perfectly. “Just wish my head wasn’t killing me.”

  Suddenly Jason withdrew his connection.

  “We can practice later. I just wanted to make sure you could link in at will. Go take a nap.”

  “Yes, Master,” Greg joked, standing up on the wide cushion and stepping off onto the hard floor. “Looks like you’re ready for a new apprentice. Who’s up next?”

  “Dakota and Dante should be on their way,” Jason said as he too stood up. “At the moment, I’ve got some practice to do with Paul.”

  “Battlemeld?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  “You need to sleep.”

  “I can sleep later. I want to see you two in action.”

  “Danger Room,” Jason said, checking his watch. “2:30. You can catch a half hour nap before that.”

  “No, I’m going to get something to drink. If I crash now I have a feeling I won’t be getting up for a while.”

  “Walk slow,” Jason suggested, heading out ahead of him.

  Greg knew enough to not try and match his pace, and as Jason suggested he took his first few steps slow, feeling a pounding in his head with each one. Rather than wince and curse he chose to take it as a challenge and managed a decent pace after a few dozen steps, heading down to the lower levels in the pyramid and stopping by the cafeteria on the way to make a ‘suicide’ out of the available drinks, mixing red, blue, green, and black together in a large bottle and taking it with him as he headed towards the Danger Room, sipping away as he walked out to grab one of the mongooses.

  He drove down the narrow ramp that Star Force had installed over portions of the V’kit’no’sat version and down into the lower levels of the pyramid, not feeling like running and knowing that walking would mean a lot more pounding in his head. When he got to his destination he was early, but found Paul already inside, along with several more rooms being occupied by other Archons…though Paul had claimed the largest of the Balboa Lane upgrades.

  The ‘Danger Room’ was where the Archons went to cut loose on targets, with multiple versions being able to be remotely controlled and moved throughout the chamber, which in Paul’s case had a diameter the length of a football field and a ceiling height spanning several stories, making Greg feel like he was entering a sports stadium. The floor was firm but slightly cushy, expecting occupants to fall regularly as they got knocked about, but there was nothing else inside aside from Paul who was doing some warm-up drills that included flips, tumbles, and spins.

  The targets to come were stored in wall compartments and computer controlled, with thousands of different combinations possible. When Jason finally got there he programmed the scenario they wanted to run and left Greg by the control console to watch as he and Paul met up near the center and a host of man-sized vertical pylons came out from the walls and moved down to the floor, forming up into a grid that flowed out around them and set up covering almost the entire chamber. Each object was lightly padded and had pressure sensors to register hits and intensity of hits…but that’s not what they were using them for this time.

  Jason stayed put and braced himself. Greg could see him angling his legs to the side, putting himself almost off balance as Paul jogged off behind him then curved around and ran forward on a flanking line. When got back up even with Jason and set about 15 meters away Jason put both his hands up, palms forward towards Paul and he did likewise, jumping up slightly into a twist and landing with both feet planted, whereupon he skidded on his heels.

  Greg was surprised he could manage the slide, not because it was hard to do but because it was something he had never tried, let alone at the speed Paul managed. A moment later his jaw dropped when he saw Paul’s skid arc to the right, pivoting around Jason’s position. Eventually he came to a stop almost 90 degrees into the turn, whereupon he held position and Jason took off running, going wide them coming back up even and them switching rolls.

  The same thing happened, with Jason skidding forward and curving around Paul, with Greg seeing that they were going around at least two of the pylons each time. They didn’t stop after a few goes, but worked their way throughout the chamber, zigzagging here and there and setting a pace that thoroughly impressed Greg. He didn’t know what they were doing, but it was all very clean and rhythmic…up until they swung by his position, which was when he noticed a little bobble in the skidding arcs.

  It took him some 7 minutes of observation until he figured out what was happening, realizing that however they were linking themselves together, probably through some type of energy field, every time their line of connection passed through one of the pylons it either weakened or cut out, reacquiring on the other side as they skidded around it. Greg saw them stumble a few times from the disruption, but neither of them went down throughout the 20 minutes they practiced the odd, but very cool drill.

  Greg was about to ask them what was going on when Paul came over to him, but the fact that he was running suggested he should hold off on the questions, with him coming over to adjust the control panel before running back out to the center. As he did the man-sized pylons retreated into the walls and longer horizontal bars shot out, flying towards their positions and hovering in place, locked into magnetic/anti-grav holds to keep them solidly in place as various sized cubes came out and coated the floor in clumps…setting up some sort of an obstacle course.

  Once it was in place Paul hopped up about a meter and set his feet into Jason’s hands, then somehow he launched him up more than ten meters over his head to where Paul got a hand on one of the horizontal bars and flipped himself over it and dropped back down to the floor…except he never made it down. Halfway there Jason walked underneath him and put his hands over his head, almost meeting Paul’s feet but the two never touched…at least that’s what it looked like to Greg, but he was so far away he couldn’t be for sure. The gap had to be only inches if there was one.

  Regardless, Paul launched back up into the air and passed over another bar, with Jason repositioning underneath him and sending him back up like volleyball multiple times until they got to one of the cube clumps. Paul grabbed hold of the last bar and climbed up on top of it, tightrope walking across and dropping off onto one of the clump peaks as Jason took off into a sprint below.

  Paul angled his legs and pushed his hands out towards him, looking for all the world like he was about to let loose a Kamehameha blast. Jason did the same and jumped, with their invisible link somehow acting like a rope that pivoting him up through the air like a fulcrum to a half-sized cube stack top…but he didn’t wait there, for as soon as he got his footing he jumped off at a different angle, or more precisely ran off, stepping down a couple times to gain speed before pulling a Tarzan and swinging through open air and coming down on the floor.

  But again Greg was surprised, for he didn’t hit despite the obvious math that said he was about to. Somehow the ‘rope’ between them shrunk and Jason swung out through the middle of the arc and back up the other side to where he was suddenly cut free and let to drop on the top of another cube cluster equal in height to the one Paul was on.

  As soon as Jason was there he turned and pointed his hands towards Paul, who then jumped off his. Together in alternating fashion they moved from one mini mountain to another, zigzagging their way seemingly in random fashion across every corner of the Danger Room until they came back to the center and the largest of the cube clumps. Paul swung Jason up to the top then dropped down the side in three leaps until he got to the floor and set up on the receiving end of a platform dive by Jason.

  Greg flinched as soon as he saw it, for despite how strong they were, dropping from that height, head first, was going to result in some sort of injury if he hit ground, potentially even snapping his neck if he came down wrong, but with the way Jason jumped off it looked like he didn’t care. He came down hands first and absorbed most of
his fall against Paul’s equally outstretched hands, with the remainder bouncing him back up into a short arc that he twisted out of and landed on his feet a few meters away before both of them took off running towards another spot on the course.

  “Shit guys, you’re making me look like a newb,” Greg said to himself as he watched them launch each other over various obstacles before moving to a gauntlet of short cube clumps where he saw them each climb up on one side and jump into the narrow gap between them where they bumped into each other and rebounded off with surprising force back onto the cubes without hitting the floor. They did that multiple times, working their way through the gauntlet and Greg was fairly sure by the end that they weren’t actually touching on impact.

  The pair worked through a few more drills before finishing off with the high beam throws, this time with Jason going up and Paul bumping the volleyball, after which they came back over to Greg and the control console, shutting it down rather than starting another session.

  “What…the…hell…is…that?” Greg asked slowly, the coolness literally dripping from his voice.

  “Thought you’d like that,” Jason said with a smile.

  “It’s called a Repulsor,” Paul told him. “It’s a type of binary energy that acts like a tractor beam.”

  “And it’s inverse.”

  “Push, pull, and…bounce?” Greg asked.

  “That counts as push,” Paul explained, “but we also have a neutral version that only pushes or pulls enough to maintain shape.”

  “Like a rope?” Greg guessed. “I saw you using it on those swings and skids.”

  “Yeah, cool stuff when you figure out how to use it. Takes two to work, which is why it’s a melding ability only.”

  “So the V’kit’no’sat don’t know it exists?”

  “Hopefully not,” Jason said, “though it’s possible they might have discovered it by now, or at least seen the Zak’de’ron Zen’zat use it when they fought them.”

  “That doesn’t mean they know they have it,” Greg differed. “They could have thought it was an upgrade the Dragons gave them after the fact.”

  “Point,” Paul conceded. “Either way it’s useful if you don’t mind getting fancy.”

  “Which you two don’t,” Greg pointed out.

  “None of us do,” Jason reminded him, “which is why we’re cooler than the second gen.”

  “Among a hundred other reasons,” Greg agreed. “Do the twins have this Repulsor energy too?”

  “They’re the ones who discovered it and we copied them, but they haven’t done much with it.”

  Greg frowned. “I thought they couldn’t train others?”

  “By ‘we copied them,’” Paul explained, “he meant we figured it out by watching and feeling them, then we had to uncover it on our own.”

  “He got it a few weeks ahead of me,” Jason pointed out. “By keeping our training almost the same and sharing the battlemeld every day we’re ascending at more or less the same pace and the same abilities.”

  “But you still can’t share them directly?”

  Paul shook his head. “It’s different with the melds, but no, we can’t.”

  “What we can do is nudge each other in the right direction by linking up,” Jason added. “We share so much biofeedback that it helps to physically align us properly in order to trigger the upgrade. What we’re trying to learn to do is mentally align with an Ikrid link to trick the trigger into thinking that we’re physically where we need to be. Still a long way from achieving that.”

  “So I heard. I saw you bobbling on the skids when a pylon passed in between?”

  “We can transmit through thin walls, but matter in the transmission path diminishes the interlink effect,” Paul said. “It’s not a normal push/pull relationship, it’s a single energy conduit that we both contribute to, like tying each of us to the end of a long beam.”

  “Stable then?”

  “Very, until something passes in between. We weren’t losing full connection, but the momentary dip in power caused the bobble you saw. Just something we have to get used to and anticipate.”

  “Wish I could join you, but it looks like I’m a long ways from this.”

  “So’s everyone else,” Jason admitted. “We can’t train like this with anyone else, so it’s pretty much just us and us writing the training manual for the battlemeld.”

  “Don’t know who’d be more qualified than you two anyway, though I wish I could help out a little. I’m going to stick around at least a few months and get a handle on this before I head back to lizard land. If there’s anything I can help you guys with let me know. Right now I’m heading to bed before I keel over. You guys going again or have something else to do?”

  “We’ve got other abilities to work on, so we’ll be in here a bit longer. You need a lift back to quarters?” Jason offered.

  “I’d say yes, but I don’t want to lose you any training minutes. I’ll make it back alright. I’m not so far gone that I can’t sit and steer. Keep at it, fellas.”

  “Night,” Paul said as Greg slowly walked out, bottle in hand.

  He’s got to be really hurting right now.

  He is, Jason confirmed, but it’s a good pain. The more the better.

  I hear that, Paul agreed, walking over to the control panel and setting up a scenario designed to test their linked Lachka fields, which the V’kit’no’sat called Nemsa, though they referred to it as ‘Power Lock.’

  The first of six large targets exited nearby walls and moved towards them, with the pair already with an active battlemeld linking their telekinetic fields and throwing an invisible punch into the first of them with far more power and range than either could have managed solo.

  10

  June 23, 2489

  Solar System

  Earth

  The Danger Room spat out another weight, floating it over to the target zone and dropping the couch-sized cylinder a moment later. It fell straight down, but slowed to a sudden stop four meters above the floor as Kara and the twins used a three-way meld to combine her considerable Lachka abilities with their weaker versions, strengthening all into a single field that allowed them to stop and hold aloft the object before it crashed down on top of them.

  Stopping it was hard enough, stretching the three near to their limit, but in order to achieve a count for this drop they had to move it over a few meters to the left and up to a holographic wall almost as high as it had been dropped from. That required more skill and power, for the longer the range involved, the less effective their Power Lock.

  But this wasn’t their first object, rather their 18th. They were all of the same mass but different shapes that required different grips, some of which made the objects increasingly difficult to both stop and maneuver over to the finish point. The cylinder was one of the easier shapes to catch, and together the three Archons lifted it up and over to the desired location in midair until it breached the holographic plane, at which point the Danger Room retook control and floated it off elsewhere as the twins took a short, but much needed breather.

  The next object came some 22 seconds later, dropping a sphere on them that was much more difficult to telekinetically grab, but the threesome managed all the same and chucked it back up and out, then waited on the next one. They made it through several more tries, but on number 25 it was a no go, with a cube coming down on top of them and Kara reaching out to stop it like before with the twins’ help, but as soon as they made contact she felt the two of them disappear from her mind and her/their available power level dropped drastically…as did the cube.

  Kara’s own strength was insufficient to lift it, but she did slow the fall as Karen and Travis dove out of the way. Kara didn’t follow them, choosing to hold her ground, and raised her left hand in the air as her wrist burst forth in a flurry of red particles that coated her arm and spread over the rest of her body as the cube made contact before she was fully covered.

  Kara had trouble holding onto it, b
ut its weight wasn’t a threat to her, even without armor. Using her own Lachka as a third hand she steadied the cube, then like Atlas from mythology she held it over her head and jumped into the air. There she spun around in a circle twice before flinging the object over to the holographic wall with ease given her powered armor, whereupon the Danger Room picked it up and cycled it off, ready to bring in the next one.

  “Tomosat, ka,” she said, instructing the computer to stop in V’kit’no’sat.

  The next incoming object froze in place, as did the others circling around near the ceiling. Kara held her airborne hover for a handful of seconds, then the mass of red armor scales retracted and she dropped to the floor in her Archon training garb, landing in an agile crouch.

  “Sorry,” Karen offered.

  Kara shook her head. “Don’t be. That’s three more than last time. You two are making progress, but you’re still dropping your battlemeld when you get fatigued. You have to learn to focus at all times.”

  “Our battlemeld stayed up,” Travis told her. “It was you that disappeared.”

  “I didn’t sever the connection. Both of you pulled out simultaneously…again. Your twin mojo has a lot of advantages, this…is not one of them. You’re reverting back to each other as your default when you get rattled, not when you’re incapable of continuing the meld, which is why you jerked away from me.”

  “You felt that or are you guessing?” Karen asked.

  “I could feel your strength give way, then you both blinked out. Some simple deduction and you can figure out what happened.”

  “I still don’t understand why we give out so suddenly,” Travis complained. “You’d think it would be more gradual.”

  “It’s not muscle, it’s an energy pool,” Kara explained. “When you exhaust it, all you have to work with is the recharge stream.”

  “Are we done here?”

  Kara nodded. “Good work for today. We’ll have a go at some more tomorrow if you’re available.”