Star Force: Instinct (Star Force Universe Book 49)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  3

  December 2, 4922

  Ennit System (Dagran Region)

  Vis

  Lara had changed, and not just in the physical. Her body was a wreck, but her mind was in a state she had never experienced before as he climbed up a ladder then swung her feet through an aperture that led to a slide. She twirled around and around before landing in a sand pit that she began to run across and up a nearby dune inside the training facility. Her movements were slow and awkward compared to what she had once been capable of, but she could barely remember those times.

  The past 3 years felt like an eternity. The wars she had fought in the past were gone. Her training as an Archon was gone. Her memories of Star Force were gone. All she knew now was the training courses and the medbay. Everything else was such a hazy blur it was like she had never existed anywhere else.

  She’d partially held out against the onslaught of the physical changes for 6 weeks before Vortison’s backup plan had to fully kick in and Lara became a quavering mass of sexual arousal around the clock. It had felt good but sickening at the same time, for it couldn’t completely obscure the damage happening to her body. But worse of all, what it had done was break her defiant mojo and sent her into a tailspin of confusion and vulnerability, for she couldn’t identify her target to fight back against.

  That had been the point, so her internal conflict wouldn’t snowball into an overload, but it had hit Lara far harder than she’d expected. Right now she couldn’t remember much from then, for the period of sexual arousal had only lasted a few months. Since then she’d regained a semblance of stability and held it together enough that the backup plan wasn’t needed, but it was still there and she desperately did not want to go back into that state.

  Like many younger Archons had testified too before, once inundated with unnaturally strong orgasms over and over again, the pleasure torture lost its effect on Lara as she adapted to it, but the disruption remained. She was no longer ‘shy’ in that regard, and a curious thing had happened during that transition. Despite the looseness of her mind now that she still couldn’t manage to shake, not for two seconds, she had somehow managed to transcend the arousal, disconnecting from her body in a fashion that allowed her to see it for the biomechanical function that it was.

  It wasn’t her. It wasn’t a part of who she was. It was the body she was in, and once that fact had fully sunk in she had been able to smooth out her resistance to it and turn it into an advantage. That had been what had allowed her to regain enough stability to no longer need it, and while that was a valuable lesson learned it was almost meaningless compared to what was still happening to her.

  The obstacle course she was running now wasn’t too hard, but it was impossible compared to what she had been going through two years ago. The more strength she gained the more Vortison changed her, but there was base improvement going on that was allowing her more and more ability. That made it look like she was recovering, but she wasn’t. In fact, the torrent inside her body was getting gradually worse.

  She was in constant agony, lost in the pain and torsion that she experienced as Vortison made small changes to her biology…allowed her to adapt to them…then made more changes based on how that adaptation occurred. He wasn’t going to graft alien genetics to her, which would have been far easier. No, he needed her body to produce tissue of its own for various functions that Humans didn’t currently possess, and the process had never been done before so he was being very clunky in the modifications.

  Vortison had refined the process a great deal already, meaning the next person to go through this would not have the same difficulty, but Lara was the trailblazer and taking the hits along the way to give him the data he needed, and it was her body that was telling Vortison what was and was not possible.

  For Lara, riding that out was pure agony, and her determination had long ago faded. Now she was in a zombie mentality, moving through minute after minute with no hope, no drive, no goals, no nothing. There was just endurance. Holding on to the moment and trying not to lose what little self-control she had scraped together by being subjected to the arousal treatment again, because she knew if that happened she’d go back to being totally rudderless.

  But right now she was in heavy defensive mode and hanging on to any small amount of progress she had, as if pulling on a giant rope through the fog, unable to see what was ahead or behind her and only the few knots in the rope near her grasp. Getting to the next knot was all that she could focus on, and this had been going on so long she had no idea how long the rope was behind her, nor ahead, leaving her lost inside the cocoon of the changes being made to her.

  But she didn’t have to know, she just had to endure and keep pushing forward. Vortison was the one that had to know, and in the past 3 years he had learned more about the Human body than he’d learned in the past millennia. He had gone past the V’kit’no’sat and Chixzon files, far past now, and Lara was truly becoming superhuman as her body made what was mostly intra-cell upgrades.

  That meant no new body parts, as far as organs went. She still looked the same, though gaunt from the cascade of treatments. Lara was back to eating food now, but she still visibly looked sick. Vortison had no idea how much torment she was in, but he was aware of it. He didn’t want to be doing this to her, but there was no going back now. She was in a transitional state, and if he tried to stabilize her here she’d die. Her adaptation was the only thing holding her together, along with the regenerator, and if she stopped pushing forward the adaptation would slacken and her cells would literally rip apart.

  She was in a state of flux, and thankfully she hadn’t asked to quit. Saving her life would require gutting her and essentially sending her back to the state she was in before becoming an Archon. It would destroy all her years of training if he was successful. There was a decent chance that he couldn’t even achieve that small victory. The only real path for her now was forward, and he didn’t want to even think about going backward. It would destroy her, one way or another.

  He was doing a great many things to her, but the biggest change that all the others fed off of was her metabolism. Humans had a variable metabolism, but not on the level that the Archons needed. Adjustments like the psionic Inas that allowed them to need less sleep were an improvement, but nothing on the level that Lara had currently become, let alone what she was headed towards.

  The Chixzon had detailed several races with hyperactive metabolisms, and it was from that basic knowledge that this crazy idea had started. Those races had to constantly keep moving or they’d die, because they were built for movement. Sedation would literally kill them, and it had been argued that since the Archons trained close to that anyway, this would be a massive upgrade for them.

  The trouble was, Human cells were not built to sustain constant activity. They needed recharge, hence sleep, and that down time caused the cells to be structured differently than the few hyperactive races the galaxy fielded. The build-up and discharge model that Humans were built on had to be modified to a massive extent with overlapping functions so that a piece of them could rest while the others kept up the burden of activity.

  To achieve that, the Human cells had to be completely redesigned. A design that neither Vortison nor the V’kit’no’sat possessed. You couldn’t have a regenerator build the new tissue without that design, and since the body was melded with the invisible Core that science hadn’t yet been able to probe, it didn’t always function as predicted and trying to academically design new body tissue had almost always been met with failure.

  The body had to upgrade itself through adaptation, and when one had done so it could be copied to others. The Zak’de’ron had upgraded the various V’kit’no’sat races by similar methods over the long haul while implementing large changes immediately based off of tissues found in other races. Melding the two together was tricky, but it was far easier than just creating something new.

  And adding something to the body, like the Hjar’at’s spines, wa
s easy. Changing the basic cell structure of the body was damn hard, and every mistake that Vortison was making, Lara was paying the price for it.

  And he was making lots of mistakes because he was essentially fumbling around in the dark until he found something that worked. When he did he latched onto it and then began prompting smaller changes to it, using that success as a baseline for further adaptation. In essence, he was walking into a room filled with buttons and had to learn how they worked by going around and pressing each one, only to figure out what it did by watching what happened. And that included a lot of bad things.

  But he had a map now. Where Lara had gone he had charted it out and now knew how to avoid the pitfalls she’d dragged herself through. That would help others cross the same gap, but it did nothing for the new ground Lara was exploring with each step forward. A more apt analogy was walking through a mine field and setting one off with every few steps. It cleared a path for the others to follow later, but Lara had to take and survive each explosion along the way.

  Without the regenerator she would have died a long time ago. Having it rebuild her diminished her adaptation, for the new tissue was weaker, but some of the bigger mistakes Vortison made would have killed her if he hadn’t been able to quickly rebuild the damage and change direction. He never would have done this to an unwilling person, but even with that said, he would have refused entirely if he had known it would be this bad.

  But he wasn’t about to bail on her now. As long as she was making progress, he was going to do everything he could to help her get to a sustainable state. And the thing was, she wasn’t anywhere close to one yet. At least he didn’t think so. This was all so new he couldn’t say for sure, but he had a feeling she had just dipped her toe into the necessary changes, while from her perspective it probably felt like she’d dove into the pool in cannonball fashion.

  Somehow she was not only surviving, but managing to get a handle on the unpredictable changes occurring to her. Right now she was running another challenge course, with her realtime biomed data being relayed via her eye piece to the computer systems. Vortison was monitoring them now even as he planned the next treatment, trying to figure out the puzzle before he saw all the pieces.

  Failing constantly and seeing Lara take the punishment for it was something Vortison hadn’t been prepared for, but he too had adapted, because he had to. No one else in Star Force had his genetics knowledge. He couldn’t turn it over to them, for he was already getting their assistance constantly. Some were here, others were afar and he was bouncing ideas off them over the relay grid, but he was the point man and the one Lara had entrusted her life with. No matter how much this bothered him, he had to see it through for her, but he’d already promised himself that he would never sanction something so damaging as this again. This wasn’t science, it was bordering on barbarism.

  A chime alerted him to an incoming message from outside his sphere of thought, and he almost ignored it before bringing up the text. He didn’t want to waste 30 seconds that he could be spending on Lara, but then he realized it was about her. She was having to consume so much ambrosia to feed the metabolism upgrades that had already been made that Vortison had had to include a feed on the machine to deliver it to her directly. Her digestive systems couldn’t handle the full amount she needed, and he’d decided to ask for a redesign to try and match the mixture to her growing needs.

  He’d been waiting for months, but it appeared that Neandry had finally found a solution and Vortison was now looking at the extremely complex formula for Ambrosia 2.0 that, if the expectations held up, would contain 317% of the energy release per equal mass of regular ambrosia. It also was packaged differently so it could more easily enter the bloodstream through the digestive tract. The stated delay rate had decreased 23% when tested on other Archons, but how Lara’s new digestive tract would hold up was unknown. He’d already made a lot of adjustments trying to make it use regular ambrosia more effectively.

  But there was a catch, with that being that the new formula was so potent that if accidentally taken by someone in large enough doses, it would kill them. Regular ambrosia had been theorized to potentially kill with a sufficient overdose, but no one had ever been stupid enough to take that much of it. But this new formula wouldn’t take too much to send someone’s metabolism to such high levels that it would literally tear the body apart.

  Lara’s developing changes wouldn’t be affected, for her body would just gobble it up. Eventually she wouldn’t be damaged at all, in theory, if this experiment actually succeeded, for the other races the Chixzon had discovered could not overload on fuel. But Humans, as they were now, could. Hence the little Ambrosia 2.0 that had been produced was under heavy security to make sure none of it accidentally got mixed in with the regular supply, for it tasted nearly the same to those with sufficiently high metabolisms to drink it straight up.

  “Finally some good news,” Vortison mumbled, filing the message away and getting back to the settings for Lara’s next upgrade. He had another 7 minutes to work before she walked in with her handler staying right behind her in case she fell. Right now she looked alright, not too wobbly, but she stumbled a couple times when she slowly took off her clothes, dropping them in her wake and not caring to pick them up into a pile, physically or telekinetically. She ignored them as soon as they were off and walked straight into the alteration chamber.

  Her hair was now only two inches long, for she’d burnt the rest off multiple times and had eventually decided to just leave it short. She’d also burnt off her clothes more than 20 times during challenge course runs as her Rensiek malfunctioned and turned her into a glow rod. Right now her temperature was normal, but he could visibly see stress marks on her body where her blood vessels were surging harder than they should and swelling up on the surface.

  Despite the sickly look to her, Lara was still strikingly attractive and that was never lost on Vortison. Somehow her inner strength affected her body, literally screaming superiority in a way that other attractive women did not. And it wasn’t just her pheromones either, which had a considerable effect on all men, for the more fit a person became the more desirable their rating as a mating partner became on a genetic level, which was then transmitted via the pheromones.

  Her pheromones, along with all the other high level Archons, literally made her glow as far as scent was concerned. It wasn’t quite palpable, but there was always a buzz around her and the others. The male pheromones he couldn’t pick up in the same way, for they registered for women and not him, but there was something else about Lara that he couldn’t quite quantify. It didn’t distract him from his work, but it was there none the less and until today he could never put it to any scientifically verifiable source.

  But when she connected to the machine…or rather its mandibles reached down and connected to her…something happened. The calibration programs he’d built to monitor even the slightest variables in her state were off. Not much, just a tiny amount, but they shouldn’t have been.

  “Wait a minute, Lara. I’ve got to check on something,” he told her, but she didn’t respond. She rarely responded anymore, just going about her daily routing as a mute zombie and only speaking when absolutely necessary.

  “Anders?” he asked, with his assistant already having seen the disparity.

  “I don’t know. I can’t trace it.”

  “Something is there,” he said, pouring through the massive amount of monitoring stats that Lara was providing beyond the eyepiece now that she was in the much more advanced monitoring machine. He never could have gotten through them all without the mental interfaces, but even they were not enough to immediately give him the information he required. It took almost ten minutes before they finally got their first clue.

  “Ikrid tissue,” he noted for the sake of his assistants as the four of them in the room began looking at that particular part of her body, one that hadn’t undergone any changes during these treatments. “It’s registering at 138% maximum charge.�
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  “How?” Baker asked.

  “I have no idea. Her cells are still reading level 17 and 18. Even with all 18s Aaron has never registered this high. Have we altered anything in her Ikrid?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No, nothing,” Anders confirmed as he reviewed her current cell structure there. “It hasn’t been touched.”

  “Then what has changed?”

  “No clue.”

  “Something has. Find it,” he said urgently.

  “Lachka and Pefbar are also over 100%,” Baker noted.

  “What the hell,” Vortison said as an epiphany hit him. “Verify equipment status.”

  “Checking…all in the green. Computer analysis is not flawed. This is real data.”

  “Back check when this started,” he said absent mindedly as he began analyzing something else.

  “Scaling began 9 months ago,” one of them said, cursing under his breath for missing this. They hadn’t looked because they hadn’t been changing the structure of those cells because the psionic tissue was basically add-ons to the body rather than the default hardware and they didn’t want to damage them with the experiments and undo the training effect in them until they mastered the changes on the rest of her body. “Peak occurred 3 days ago after the last treatment.”

  That clinched it for Vortison, though he double checked a few other things anyway before slowly backing away from the interface equipment.

  “People, I want you to take a moment and burn this day into your permanent memory. I believe this is the first verifiable proof of an Essence effect.”

  Everyone was dead silent, enough that it even got Lara’s attention through her permanent haze.

  “What is that?” she croaked with a voice that had barely been used over the past 3 years.

  “A Chixzon legend,” Vortison said, walking around the elaborate diagnostic setup and coming up directly in front of Lara where he looked her in her pained eyes. “Nefron said they could never confirm it, but there were reports of biology functioning beyond molecular capacity in rare cases. They could never locate a source, and they theorized that there may be a connection to the Core. That your life force, invisible as it always has been to our tools, was having an effect on the body in a way that defied science. They called the idea Essence, and had a number of encounters with individuals that displayed it. They tried to harness the power boost but failed, for they could not find the source.”