by Aer-ki Jyr
What effect she was having was overwhelmed by the mass of goo, and she realized with a depth gage that it wasn’t diminishing like acid would, it was actually enlarging as it went, feeding on the ship and making more of itself. How that was happening she didn’t understand, but if she stood here and let it get around her she was going to be consumed as well.
Morgan took off again, flying through the corridors and having to override some bulkhead doors, eventually gaining enough distance that she was able to hop into a lift shaft and let it carry her far away from the infection her ship was suffering. A few miles further and her connection to the internal comms came back on, along with the battlemap data, and she saw part of the infection had already reached the bridge…but Andor and the others were on the move through the ship, and Morgan needed to figure out how to deal with this before…
“Morgan, requesting permission to shoot your ship,” Greg’s voice suddenly broke through into her helmet as the Linebacker decelerated next to the heavily damaged Opal Ranger.
“It’s alive and growing,” Morgan warned him. “Miss my crew, but burn it the hell out.”
“Way ahead of you,” Greg said as she began to feel tremors through her ship and she could see the impact points on the battlemap. Greg was shooting not at the goo, but into intact portions of the ship and cutting out sections to contain the spread, much like old school firefighters did by cutting down trees or setting small fires of their own to stop the advance of a much larger wildfire. “Left you a little present, did he?”
“I don’t want it. How well did the Magicite do?”
“Beautifully…right up to the last few seconds. Then it was able to thin the incoming beam somewhat. Looked to me like some sort of Essence shield, but I wasn’t close enough to tell for sure and I’m guessing based on sensors that couldn’t see it. I think you caught it off guard when you drilled a hole straight through it.”
“What happened to the beam?” Morgan asked, still getting further and further away from the infested areas.
“The outer edges, and I’m guessing here, looked like they reverted back to a normal Tar’vem’jic.”
“Essence countering Essence and nulling out?”
“Might be, but the core of it passed through. We could see it coming out the other side. Turned the orange beam into a blood red. Did you know that would happen?”
“It did small scale, so I assumed it would large. I didn’t make any new alteration to it.”
“Just checking. The beam registered really funny on sensors.”
“How so? I’ve been a bit busy.”
“Physics not working like they should. Impact with the Yeg’gor was really odd. We got a reverse stream of material that traveled halfway up the beam before dislodging. I wasn’t sure if that was affecting the color or not.”
“I didn’t even notice. How’s that goo holding up to weaponsfire?”
“About like water. Why?”
“Make sure it doesn’t vaporize and spread across the void.”
“Ugh. That’d be particularly nasty if it did. You said it’s alive? As in one or a billion?”
“I can’t find a brain, but my Essence touch said it’s alive.”
“New type of minion I guess,” Greg said as another huge jolt shook the ship around Morgan.
“What was that?” she asked as her battlemap went down again, but her comms were barely getting through the interference of all the mass within the ship around her.
“Sorry, just had to send a piece of your ship on its way. A rather big piece.”
“How much am I going to have left?”
“At least half,” Greg said apologetically. “The Lurker took out about a fifth on its own and I’m having to trim down a lot of pieces. You should still be jump capable. Glad we designed these things redundant as hell.”
“Thank the Borg for the inspiration,” Morgan said as she finally arrived at an appropriately redundant auxiliary bridge where a few crewers had already arrived, but most were still enroute or headed to other areas of the ship. When she entered her battlemap suddenly came back on, but that was only because of a short range transmitter within the bridge itself. Everything else were ‘land lines’ imbedded deep within the ship’s architecture that didn’t have to transmit through bulkheads.
Morgan snapped her fingers theatrically and rerouted Greg’s comm to a hologram pedestal, with her brother’s image popping up beside the stool-like chair she slid into. Her hands went to widely spaced squashed orbs, giving her a direct mental link to the ship’s systems as her armor retracted back down into its normal stylish gold/white Star Force gauntlets on her otherwise nude body.
“Back in the saddle,” she told him as she rapidly began surveying the damage in detail. “This stuff is hungry as hell.”
“It’s sending runners out faster than it can digest everything,” Greg said, already several steps ahead of her. “So it looks faster than it is. Actual digestion rate is about 1.4 meters per second through the denser stuff and up to about 3 for the lighter materials.”
“That’s still damn fast. Did you see how it emitted it?”
“That’s in your ship’s records, and I’m not seeing any hints. It was inside the sensor blind spot and there were no surrounding ships to look in the hole it tore, so I don’t know.”
“I don’t suppose this is the thing’s blood we spilled?”
“That would be creepy as hell if it’s alive. Got any other theories?” Greg asked.
“I didn’t see any pores on the Lurker, so unless they’re hidden or Yeg’gor can do something we don’t know about, best guess is the hole in it.”
“Vengeance weaponry?”
“Might be,” she said, referencing some other races that developed technology that only activated once a ship or vehicle was disabled or destroyed. Some were self-destructs, but others had gotten a lot more intricate…much like Kara’s jewel had when she tried to take it off. “Let’s assume this stuff can jump and keep your distance.”
“Move back a little if you can and let the junk drift away.”
“Done,” Morgan said with a thought directed to the still intact gravity drives, of which she had 68% undamaged and another 14% that were partially operational and currently shut down. She didn’t want one of them exploding when she sent power to it, so those would have to wait until repair crews ascertained if they were salvageable or not.
“Give me another ten minutes and I’ll have it off you,” Greg said as he continued to shoot Tar’vem’jic and other cutting beam weapons into her unshielded hull, slicing up the Borg vessel like it was a birthday cake and letting momentum carry the infected pieces away from the rest. “What do you want to do with keychain down there?”
“Keychain?”
“Look at where the hole you punched went.”
Morgan brought up a schematic of the arrowhead-shaped Lurker and saw that the hole was in the forward section on the left side, almost near the rim. Which was exactly the position a keychain ring would go.
“Aptly named,” she agreed. “We’re burning too many drones and it isn’t even dead yet. We can’t contend this much further.”
“I want to know how much Essence it has left. It felt low to me, but until it stops shooting the drones we won’t know for sure.”
“It did stop, didn’t it?”
“It came after the Borgs, couldn’t catch us, then bugged out. Not sure if that meant it was empty or it didn’t want to wait around for one of us to skewer it again. It can’t know that we don’t have more Magicite aboard.”
“Just don’t let it come into contact with the minions.”
“We’re finishing them up and daring it to come back out to stop us. I don’t think it will.”
“We know one thing for sure,” Morgan said as she watched the progress in removing the devouring goo from the remains of her ship. “It has way too much Essence to use. There’s no way we can produce enough to match, and I don’t see how we can defend the Ysalamir
even if we have Magicite with us. It will just ram them if it gets close enough if our dampeners are being countered.”
“It can’t with an Essence user onboard watching and full engine power, and even then it can’t get very close before our star tracking programs sense an anomaly. It would have to ambush us near cover, and I don’t think that’s its MO. I think its cloak is good enough to get by everyone else.”
“It probably is. Until we figure this out, we have to issue run on sight orders.”
“Agreed. And the Zak’de’ron are asking what kind of weapon you used.”
“Ha, I bet they are. Not many of them left, are there?” her voice asked, dipping into regret.
“They weren’t shy about the combat. The V’kit’no’sat held off better, but there’s not much they could do without more candlesticks and they lost all but two before you arrived. The Zak’de’ron troops just died to get almost no results.”
“They got data, and beyond that they probably don’t care. A weapon that causes heart attacks to all your crew is damn effective without the regenerators. Now they know to avoid it or equip their entire crew with the Kich’a’kat.”
“And they will,” Morgan said darkly. “Then they’ll send them in to die a bit slower.”
“The Viks will too unless we give them another path. I’m surprised they stood down like they did here. They don’t like being useless.”
“They burned the minions, so not entirely useless, but I understand. I think seeing the Zak’de’ron do exactly what they would have encouraged them to do the opposite. But yeah, we need some options to give them. And it’s not like we have Magicite to just pass around. And even if we did, I’ll bet there are more Lurkers waiting to come out after this one reports back. This war just became a whole lot more unwinnable. What are we going to do?”
“Paul wanted us to poke it with a stick, and we did. Now let’s hope The Admiral can figure out something we’re missing.”
9
“What was the weapon she used?” the Zak’de’ron asked Jason.
“A very expensive one,” he said, looking out at the star where the Lurker had taken refuge through an observation ‘window’ large enough to fly a dropship through. He stood next to the huge blue dragon, who had its wings tucked and looked a lot like a spikey Oso’lon if you didn’t know better. “It’s an Essence weapon. We refer to them as ‘Materia’ and have learned we get the biggest effect when modifying an existing weapon. The Lurker obviously did not, and used its Essence to directly attack us, but it has a lot more to use given that body size. We have to store up little bits over time, and the one Morgan used took thousands of years to save up. It was a one shot.”
“A valuable one,” Nil’horn commented. “And your personal Essence is limited to your body size?”
“Your default level is. With training it can be increased, but a Hadarak with Essence is capable of producing levels we will never touch. We can’t fight them Essence to Essence. We can’t produce it fast enough, and I think they can harvest it from others, which makes their minion armies even more problematic.”
“They sacrifice them to recharge quicker?”
“I think that’s what was happening on the surface, but the technique is not known to us.”
“Nor would you use it.”
“Would you?” Jason challenged.
“If sacrificing low level troops gave us a weapon that could do more good than their conventional deaths, why would we not?”
“Because death is not the ultimate defeat. How you die matters.”
“And that is one reason you will not give us Essence?”
“One of many,” Jason admitted. “But you can always attain it on your own, as we did.”
“It is not for lack of trying. We simply do not know what it is we are attempting to obtain.”
“Find a crack and explore it. That’s what we did.”
“You could reduce our learning curve greatly, and once we obtain Essence our larger size would charge your material much faster.”
“Do you really think I haven’t considered that?” Jason said, looking away from the star and staring up at Nil’horn’s angular face. “I wish we could trust you, but I know we can’t. You seek dominance, and as soon as we are no longer useful you would betray us so you could reign supreme.”
“At the moment that is of little concern. Can you take Essence from another without killing them?”
“We can give it. In theory you could take some, but we…”
“…do not know, nor would ever use such a technique.”
“When are you going to admit that we’re superior to you, in methodology at least, and try to emulate us rather than continually insisting that we are naïve?”
“I try to understand, but I see you throwing away valuable alternatives. Though after today, I cannot and will not deny your compartmentalized superiority.”
“And you fear it,” Jason noted.
“Our entire race was reduced to one survivor,” Nil’horn reminded the Archon. “Are we not wise to be cautious?”
“Wiping out all your competition is not what I would call acceptable cautiousness. And the V’kit’no’sat are what you made them to be, though Mak’to’ran at least is finally shedding his shackles and seeking another path. A better path. I worry less about the V’kit’no’sat than I do the Zak’de’ron.”
“And yet we have not made war against you.”
“Kara would disagree with that.”
“I was not responsible for that decision. Why do you hold all of us in suspicion for it?”
“Based on what you taught the V’kit’no’sat, you’re not big on individual thinking. You act, live, and breathe as a unit, and what tendencies one has the others will as well. Those that do not, I imagine you alter or eliminate them. Am I wrong?”
“You exaggerate greatly. We do not kill our own.”
“What do you do to them when they do not obey?”
“In all my life I have never known one that did not. We all work for the common good. Lesser civilizations war against one another. Zak’de’ron do not.”
“Do you monitor each other’s thoughts?”
“Of course.”
“Therein lies your inferiority.”
Nil’horn huffed a single puff of fire at that insult. “Explain.”
“Creativity and inspiration cannot occur when the mind is bound to parameters. Only free thought produces the most efficient research. Thought monitoring diminishes this.”
“Why would it when there is no threat involved?”
“A person must be able to contemplate breaking the rules if they are to break the status quo. Defiance is necessary. You are too tightly bound together.”
“Our unity is necessary. Do you contemplate betraying your kin?”
“No, but that’s my choice. Nobody is in my head telling me what’s fair game to think and not.”
“And yet you must constantly police your lesser members. I do not think the tradeoff is worth it.”
“It gained us Essence where you did not. Do you truly think it is not worth it, or are you refusing to accept our gaining Essence was anything other than a fluke?”
“After today I will never consider anything you do to be a fluke. You have been hiding yet another breakthrough from us, and I give you immense credit for that, but if you cannot produce enough Essence to fuel a large number of these Materia, then how do you plan to defeat these Lurkers?”
“Drones,” Jason said simply. “Better drones.”
“How can we assist?”
“Build your own so you don’t have to sacrifice personnel in the heaviest of combat.”
“They were of little use here.”
“Oh?” Jason asked, letting that thought linger for a moment.
The Zak’de’ron looked puzzled, then he caught the gist of what Jason was referring to.
“You believe the Lurker is now low on Essence? How long does it take to recover one’s full amount?”
“For me, weeks if I push it close to the danger line. My recharge rate varies and has also improved somewhat, but it’s fairly stubborn within a loose range and based off my total capacity. I have a suspicion that theirs might be considerably longer, though that’s little more than a wild guess.”
“Why would it differ?”
“I do not know. It’s just a feeling.”
“Something you sensed in this one?”
“No. Just the nature of their movement. This one can accelerate far beyond its natural ability, similar to how we upgraded the Tar’vem’jic. If it could fully recover within weeks, the coast phase of interstellar travel would replenish them enough to indefinitely use it to travel at our speeds.”
“Do you require sustenance to recharge your Essence?”
“No, but the more distress the body is under, the more Essence is required to keep the Core attached to it. That is why some individuals die from extreme situations and a Kich’a’kat cannot revive them. You programmed them not to activate when this occurs. Were you unaware of what was happening?”
“We did not know of Essence, but we knew the interaction between Core and body required more than physical components regrown. Once a certain connectivity was lost, the body became an empty shell even if it did breathe. When that connectivity was no longer present, there was no point in wasting time repairing the empty body, so the Kich’a’kat were programmed to test for connectivity and only activate when it was minimally present.”
“That connectivity is Essence, and it allows the bridge from body to Core. No Essence, no bridge. No Core, and the Essence doesn’t linger long. It simply disappears. We have to be tricky to store it when we make Materia.”
“How many more do you possess?”