Star Force: Instinct (Star Force Universe Book 49)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  And Lara didn’t only ‘burn’ inside, but the water around her began to produce little bubbles off her skin as it literally started to boil in small streams…but she held still, forcing calmness and being rewarded by the sensation continuing to creep out further.

  She held that constant tug of war with her instinct to reach for it over the following minutes that gradually crept into half an hour. Lara could sense others nearby, including Vortison, for they had apparently seen the changes on her stats and had come to see what was going on. Thankfully they knew better than to interrupt her, let alone stop her, for she was finally getting a feel for this.

  She waited a long time, then when it felt like her entire body was aglow with an internal fire she very gently indulged her instinct and reached for it. Like dipping your toe into a pool when your inner badass told you to do a cannonball. That little effort was much harder to accomplish, for it required abandoning her calm trance and that almost vaulted her into a much larger effort, but she caught it and calibrated herself down as she felt the sensation try to flee again.

  But it was too far out, and she got her first tentative hold on it. Fixing it in place inside her body with a huge swoon of heat pouring fourth that turned the water around her into a torrent of vaporizing steam that made it harder to breath, but she had her Hanme to draw on and did so, for there was no way she was letting this go.

  Lara didn’t push. She knew that would lead to something very bad, for she had a feeling that it wouldn’t diminish now, but overload her. She had to go very, very slow, but she felt the intense heat inside her solidify in a tiny point, and from that the cool sensation ran parallel with the heat and expanded. It wasn’t actually cold temperature, but something in her biofeedback that was positive and the sensation came through as ‘coolness’ while the heat was a byproduct of damage correcting itself in an explosive fashion.

  Slow down, she heard Vortison tell her telepathically. You’re nearing overload and I can’t heal you here.

  Don’t worry, I’ve got this, she said, then ignored him and the others completely as the Archon slowly nudged the process forward, feeling like she was holding onto the end of a long rope that wanted to yank itself out of her hands. Lara fed that rope one inch at a time, and soon the pain began in earnest.

  It felt like her body was going to fly apart, but even as it did something else inside her was realigning. One part of her wanted to stop it, another told her to make it blow up, but a third instinct said to be patient and let it creep on, and that’s the one she chose to go with. After all this time, there was no point in being hasty.

  Two more hours passed, and when her Hanme ran out she had to split her focus and create a bioshield conduit up to the air to breathe through…but when she did the water level began to drop rapidly around her. It leveled out just below her chin, and she realized that was Vortison’s doing. The water was bleeding off her excess heat, which was why he didn’t want it all gone, but she needed to breath and really didn’t want to try moving, for she was sure it would knock her out of alignment if she tried.

  Lara continued to burn up for another 3 hours with a cloud of steam surrounding her as she occasionally felt cold water being added to the pool to keep her from evaporating all of it off, though her clothes didn’t hold up that long. They melted into strands and even some of her hair burnt off when her Rensiek slipped off the edges, leaving it unprotected from the heat pooling on her skin and then being released. When she didn’t regulate it properly the buildup could poor back on her body and burn her, but so far only a bit of her hair had suffered that lapse.

  The cool sensation continued to fight against the heat, and eventually it won out, completely consuming the pain and instability and leaving her calmer than she ever knew possible…while her head was pounding from a very intense heartbeat. Lara took a moment to collect herself and make sure it she was stable, then she slowly stood up above the water level and looked at Vortison.

  “Well?” she asked, seeing a wide-eyed look on his and the others’ faces.

  “Your hair,” he said, but she couldn’t see it. It was too short now to pull in front of her face and Pefbar couldn’t see colors, so she held up her left hand and pulsed a Jumat energy field around it…and saw that it was yellow/gold.

  That confirmed what she felt inside, for the color change of her hair had been preprogrammed into her genetic code along with her Jumat to change when she reached the finished state Vortison had been gradually changing her toward…and that meant she had finally reached it.

  Lara smiled, not wanting to do anything that might kick her out of it and having no idea what this actually was or how to use it, but eventually when nothing happened…no changes, no fluctuations…she started laughing and couldn’t stop. After everything she’d been through, she was finally here. She’d ascended up to superhuman level, or as far as she was concerned, a Saiyan level.

  “Lara, we need to get you into the medbay,” Vortison said as the boiling water around Lara slowly cooled and new bubbles stopped forming. “There may be some small changes needed to lock it in.”

  “I need ambrosia…and food,” she said, realizing how famished she was. “A lot of it.”

  “Done. Now come with me. We don’t want to lose this.”

  “I’m stable,” she said, floating up into the air above the water and hanging there as she pulsed her Jumat until she was aglow with golden energy that almost matched her short, yellow hair that was sticking out with what looked like static electricity, but that too had been preprogrammed into the follicles at Lara’s request, though it made her look like a spike ball right now.

  “Please,” Vortison insisted. “You can play later.”

  Lara sighed and her aura disappeared as she floated down next to the medtechs completely naked and with a red tint to her skin that was probably a result of the heat that had been passing through it, though the pounding veins visible everywhere on her musculature were a worrying sign even if Vortison didn’t have a datapad giving him more accurate warnings.

  Lara walked through the assembled staff to the nearby door, but stumbled when she got there as her hair changed back to dark brown.

  “Lara?”

  “I’m ok. I think I just ran out of fuel. I can still feel the change.”

  “Medbay, now,” Vortison insisted as the posse of medtechs escorted Lara out of the training area and back to the alteration chamber.

  8,310 lightyears away…

  Megan-026 flew in a skeet over the charred surface of Attatori, a world that once housed more than 3 billion of a race called the Sortia. They were an ally of the Skarrons and hadn’t been sparred when the lizards took them out on this world or any of their others. Recently there had been a large number of lizards here, but their numbers had just been drastically reduced along with their infrastructure. The planet and system were now Megan’s, but there were still pockets of lizards everywhere that had to be hunted down and destroyed.

  She offered to let them surrender, as the Archons always did, but none had taken the offer and she knew the remaining ones wouldn’t either, which was why she had ordered Starkiller down into the atmosphere. Right now the Uriti was above her and to the right, with its four long spikey appendages reaching out from a very small midsection to caste a ‘+’ shaped shadow on the ruined surface.

  As Megan flew she saw it slowly land, and from a pouch on each appendages a piece of it was pushed out and buried into the dirt and rock below. Once all four were deposited, Starkiller returned to space leaving the minion factories behind as a few already grown ones spread out like ants and began collecting bits of rock and other debris that they then carried back to the organic factories that digested them in a very Zerg-ish manner.

  New minions would be produced within a day if the necessary resources were nearby, and Megan had made sure Starkiller had a full belly of the necessary monster cubes to stock the minion factories full before deploying them. That would allow many more minions to be grown without
addition resources, but the growth pods required space and those minions could not all be grown prior to landing. That meant the resources being collected now would go to the development of minions weeks away from now, and Megan knew the process would quickly snowball far faster than the Paladin ever could.

  But these minions weren’t alive. They were biological machines, but with no one inside, much like a tree, except these ‘trees’ were extremely advanced and capable of carrying out orders given to them by the Uriti or an Archon with a Wrangler gauntlet. Megan wouldn’t be staying here more than a couple of days, nor would Starkiller, but the minions would along with an Archon to finish cleansing the planet of lizards no matter how long it took.

  And after that they would hold and defend the planet against squatters, but right now Megan was just having a closer look around than her command ship’s sensors would allow. Sometimes she needed to be physically here, and today was one of those days. Also, the sight of a Uriti landing and depositing biological factories wasn’t something the galaxy saw very often.

  She could feel the Uriti’s telepathic aura, but her Ikrid block kept her safe from it despite a mild headache. Others couldn’t get this close without having serious problems, including the lizards, but from the looks of things there weren’t enough of them left to attack the factories when Starkiller left. None the less, Megan and others were going to remain on station in the air and on the ground until they got a decent foothold and perimeter established, just to be safe.

  “Another down, a bazillion more to go,” the trailblazer whispered to herself as she sat on the pommel seat in the cockpit and looked out through the ‘window’ at the surface below as she lazily flew over top. “But not fast enough...”

  9

  July 3, 4941

  Ennit System (Dagran Region)

  Vis

  Lara was in the middle of a sparring match with a machine when Aaron-010 walked up behind her and crossed his arms over his chest in a perturbed gestured.

  “You guys were busy,” she said, not looking at him as she kept dodging and counter punching a series of robotic arms swiping at her.

  Aaron telepathically interfaced with the sparring equipment and shut it down, prompting Lara to turn around and scowl at him…but his own expression was much more pissed.

  “You nearly got yourself killed, youngling.”

  “I made it,” she said defiantly. “And you’re welcome, by the way. You won’t have to go through that hell hole now that Vortison has a roadmap to follow. Don’t you have more lizards to kill?”

  “I wasn’t in lizard territory. I was out in The Nexus cleaning things up. I’m done now.”

  “Already? That was fast.”

  “There wasn’t much left by the time we got to them.”

  “And the Sety?”

  “On my personal black list, but they’re still intact along with a few other races that stuck together at the expense of the others. We have loose control over most of what used to be The Nexus, and the follow-up work doesn’t require a trailblazer. I was heading to help the others with the lizards, then I found a report on an Ikrid breakthrough. Took some backtracking, but I eventually found your little program you hid from us.”

  “As I said, you guys were busy and you weren’t going to let me do it, so I did it myself.”

  “Davis says you really went through the grinder. How are you now?”

  “Superhuman, which was the point. But a weak one. My body is trash, but my base attributes are so high it makes up for it somewhat. I had to rebuild myself once before. If someone was going to have to do this the hard way, it made sense for it to be me.”

  “It’s the not telling us part that really has me steamed.”

  “For your own good. Just because you guys came first doesn’t mean you’re the only ones that get to take risks.”

  “You should have told us after you started.”

  “You were all busy and didn’t need the distraction. And for the record, I was going to tell you guys once Vortison got everything smoothed out. We’re not quite there yet, hence the omission. The only person at risk here was me, and I don’t need your permission to do something stupid with my own ass.”

  “You stole my medtech,” Aaron pointed out.

  “Ok, you got me there,” she admitted.

  Aaron sighed. “How far did you get?”

  “All the way,” Lara said with a smile. “My efficiency is crap and I’m having a hard time slowing down, but the more control I get the more I can sleep. The hyperactivity is so high that I can only stretch it so far in the opposite way. Most of my rest is spent walking, and my workouts are getting so intense at the top end that I literally have bottles of ambrosia mixed with water and carbs to suck down. Vortison had to make a new ambrosia variant just for me, because the regular wasn’t intense enough.”

  Aaron raised an eyebrow. “Why the purple eyes?”

  “I’ve gone beyond the V’kit’no’sat, so why keep their mark?”

  “But why purple?”

  “It’s not a natural color.”

  “A lot of people have purple eyes by choice. It won’t completely stand out.”

  “It makes a good contrast to the gold.”

  Aaron glanced at her dark brown hair. “You can turn it on and off?”

  She nodded. “My natural state is accelerated whether I like it or not, but when I choose to ramp up the effect coalesces and my efficiency skyrockets. It also drains the crap out of me, so Vortison has created a secondary psionic that has nodules that soak up ambrosia and store them for when my bloodstream saturation drops too low. Before that I couldn’t last more than 12 minutes.”

  “And now?”

  “Several hours before I’m completely out, but I have to eat snacks during. The ambrosia isn’t enough on its own. I’ve got my eye color set to change to blue when I start drawing on my reserves. I wanted that for Super Saiyan 2, but I’m nowhere close to that. I can feel it though, on the periphery. A hyper, hyper mode, but my body is going to need a lot of work before I can move that fast.”

  “How fast are you now?”

  “I was going slow,” she said, referencing the equipment behind her. “Defend yourself.”

  Aaron uncrossed his arms but remained still as she dove at him with a single straight punch…that he caught in the palm of his hand. But Lara recoiled and punched with her other hand and began to machine gun punches at him that he blocked all with the same hand. She gradually sped up and made him use both to defend him, but there was no power behind her punches.

  Then suddenly her hair turned gold and her speed blurred…with her landing a stiffened palm into Aaron’s chest, knocking him back two stumbling steps, but Lara didn’t relent. She moved with him and landed several more hits over the next two seconds, eventually sending him to the ground as she stepped over him and walked in a pacing circle, looking annoyed that she had to slow down.

  “What the hell?” he asked, laughing. “That is insane speed, but your knockdown power is pathetic.”

  “Damage effect. I’m slowly getting my strength back, but I have to rebuild what was lost in the transition. You will too, but Vortison thinks he’s found a way to reduce the trauma. Might want to let some more of us go first so you guys get the refined transformation.”

  “What else you got?” he asked, rolling backwards through a somersault and up onto his feet.

  “My Sav is off the charts. I have a lot of trouble slowing my brain down. I’m starting to learn how to sync my brain and body, but I’m so high strung I’m surprised the walls don’t start vibrating.”

  “Are you on top of it?”

  “It’s rough, but easy compared to what I went through to get here. So yeah, I’m on top of it, but I have a long learning curve to get through. The potential is worth it though.”

  “Would you go through it again?”

  “Don’t have to, I’m already here.”

  “But would you?”

  “No. I’d do it di
fferently. Have Vortison change things more slowly. I really got messed up, Aaron. Which is why I wanted to spare you guys that.”

  “You’re forgiven,” he said, dropping into a combat stance. “Now try and work me over just above my speed limits. I can’t learn much when I’m on the floor.”

  “Happy to, but there’s one question you’re not asking me.”

  “Ikrid?”

  “I got a boost and no one knows how. Vortison thinks it’s something the Chixzon called ‘Essence’ but who knows. I have no control of it. No awareness of it. But I’m getting a power boost somehow.”

  “Consistent?”

  “Varied, with no detectable pattern, but now that I’ve gone Saiyan…and we are calling it Saiyan…I’m maintaining at least a few percent above maximum at all times, with peaks up to 42%.”

  “Over physics as we know it?”

  “Yeah. Pretty exciting, huh?”

  “For those of us cranially challenged, we salute you.”

  “It’s not just the mental psionics, Aaron,” she said with a smirk, then her Jumat aura formed, now golden/transparent.

  “Seriously?” he asked.

  A new target dropped down from the ceiling at her mental command, then Lara released a two-handed Kamehameha that hit the round target board…and ripped it off its bracing. It fell, then hung swinging back and forth by a power cord that was meant to supply the absorption shield that Lara had just over loaded.

  “Show off,” he commented, seeing her eyes shift from purple to blue. “That was more than Essence. Your Saiyan state added power to it too, didn’t it?”

  Lara nodded, breathing a little heavy. “My energy pathways are boosted so much its affected my Jumat cells. It started naturally, then Vortison spurred it on. They can take more power than I can give them right now, meaning I’ve got a very big, but very draining cannon shot when I want it.”