Star Force: Liberation (SF56)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  Actually there were only three, all moderately large. One was what they thought was the queens’ lair and ‘capitol’ of the Bsidd colony. The other two were industrial, one for making materials and the other for making people. The latter was her destination and the striker moved to the closest entrance and slipped inside, bypassing a foot patrol of what she recognized as soldiers. They were taller than her but their torsos were almost nonexistent, with their mass made up of a head and a lots of arms, legs, and whatever else they had.

  The two she passed each walked differently, apparently choosing which appendages to use to move about, but both were armed though not armored. She’d spotted a few other pairs out on patrol as well, which she assumed was standard protocol given that there were no threats here and the Bsidd couldn’t fight off a stiff breeze right now given how few of them there were.

  It took a moment to work the door controls, then she was inside and maneuvering her way through twisty, curvy hallways that didn’t remain on the same elevation. There were ‘hills’ going up and down in no predictable fashion, with Raven having to navigate with the help of her psionics and memory as she scouted out the facility where the mind count jumped dramatically. There were literally thousands inside, all packed closely together, which she took to investigating carefully, having to backtrack numerous times to avoid running into someone roaming the halls, but for the most part the corridors were deserted. It was the chambers that were packed.

  The first few she came to were barracks holding adults, apparently on sleep cycle while the others worked outside, but she eventually came to chambers with some level of activity and lesser minds…the first of a new generation of Bsidd maturing in colony fashion, with her avoiding those areas completely. There was no way she could distract that many minds, so she had to find other routes through the convoluted building, feeling very much like Solid Snake as she snuck her way around being careful not to be spotted so much as once.

  She had the ability to erase memories, but had never tried on a Bsidd…let alone felt one of their minds before today, nor had many others. That unfamiliarity was a problem she was having to overcome on the go, but her experience with other races was paying off as she was able to find some similarities and build off of those, though distraction wasn’t difficult when the target in question used the same basic senses as you did, namely sight and sound.

  Raven continued to explore the facility and add each twist and turn to her growing battlemap, giving her a means of backtracking easily enough and leaving herself waypoints to help orient herself. After two more steep climbs, then a corkscrew downhill, she came to a large chamber that had no minds in it at present, and with her Pefbar she could tell it was large even before she opened the hatch-like door, with the single segment pulling back inside the wall to allow her entrance.

  But the chamber wasn’t empty, it was filled with maturation vats that contained eggs at various stages of growth ranging from microscopic to marble-sized. Nothing larger was here, and based off the information Davis had given her about Bsidd reproduction she knew their eggs had to get quite a bit larger before the birthing process, which wasn’t quite ‘hatching’ but a waking process as they came out of their gelatinous cocoons.

  None of these were even close to that, which was why she wasn’t able to detect any minds. The entire room reminded her of the Kamino cloning facility, only more tightly packed with catwalks and other narrow passages separating the open air tanks full of sticky, stinky liquid that her helmet didn’t fully block the smell of. She was glad though, because that meant she wouldn’t have to actually break into any of the containers to steal some of the eggs.

  Davis had said he needed unkeyed eggs, and that was going to be the difficult part. All of these currently growing were unviable, so she needed to find a vat that hadn’t been keyed yet, if one existed, or find the throwaways that didn’t take. Unfortunately the medtechs hadn’t given her some nifty scanner to be able to differentiate between the two, so she was just going to have to use her Archon ‘wisdom,’ as Davis had put it, to find what they needed…that or come back for another try later if she grabbed the wrong ones.

  So Raven started looking for the microscopic tanks, inspecting as many as she could come across and unable to differentiate between them. They were all pools of goo, and short of just scooping up a sample and hoping for a hit she didn’t have any way to stack her odds…so she kept looking, with no one else in the huge chamber to spot her, though surveillance was always a threat, but she hadn’t noticed any visible monitoring devices.

  No one had come after her either, so she felt that she was still operating under the radar and had time, so she made a thorough examination of the room and finally came on what she was looking for, though she hadn’t know it earlier. There were small pods full of a different kind of goo, sealed, and put in some sort of storage chamber and not growth pods.

  And there were a lot of them, all carefully and respectfully stacked into individual slots on a honeycomb-like wall, and Raven had the distinct feeling that these were eggs from the queens that were waiting to be vatted. The info packet she’d got indicated that the queens couldn’t produce eggs nonstop, but did so in bunches. With only so many vats here to grow the maturing eggs in it only made sense that they’d store the excess so they’d have them available when other buildings finished construction and upped their growing capacity. If the Bsidd were eager to get as big a population as possible the queens would be pumping out eggs as fast as they could regardless of the number of vats they currently possessed.

  And if these containers were full of microscopic eggs then there were truly a lot of them, for the clear canisters showed a milky white goo that she guessed was pure egg, though some type of stabilizer liquid might have been included. She didn’t know, but hoped that these eggs were still unkeyed since they were in storage. Knowing that this was her best bet she began looking for a way to open one of the sealed containers, having to use her Pefbar and Lachka to find and pick the ‘lock,’ for the opening mechanism wasn’t built for her hands.

  A double seal released, then an even fouler smell caused Raven to choke a bit but she held it together long enough to pull a sampler out of her pack and sucked up a decent amount of the goo, but not enough that would be detected as missing, she hoped, then she resealed the container and put it back in place before quietly making her way out of the building and city, then back to the forest and her waiting dropship.

  Davis had sent Trell with her to Christmas so he could analyze and handle whatever Raven brought him, and the Archon was pleased when he confirmed that she’d grabbed unkeyed eggs and more than 150,000 of them. That meant she wasn’t going to have to go back for a second run and her mission was completed.

  Raven left the planet on the next available flight, as did Trell, but after that they split up with the Archon heading out on a combat mission and the medtech back to Sol but not to Earth. He went straight to Venus and the facility Davis had been building there for this project, should Trell be successful. The future of the Bsidd now rested on his shoulders, with him needing to fabricate a new key for the eggs and to do so without screwing up a batch of them. Not because he didn’t have enough, but because once they started to grow they were on their way to becoming people and he didn’t have the luxury of letting them mature before figuring out if he’d been successful or not because the failures would be totally unacceptable.

  He and Davis had had many discussions on that front and had worked out a course of action for his ‘experiments’ that focused heavily on computer simulation. The geneticist had already done a lot of the groundwork previously, so he was ready to start his additional sims now that he had actual eggs to analyze instead of just the genetic blueprints for them. In theory that wouldn’t matter, for they should be structured the same, but reading genetics was not an easy thing to do and more often than not you needed context to understand it…which these eggs would hopefully give him.

  He didn’t try keying
any up at first, merely analyzing them with some portable equipment from the pyramid in addition to the facilities Star Force had built for him in one of the many cities on the planet’s inhospitable surface. It was still hot, dense, and full of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, but inside the cities built to withstand that hostile environment he felt just as much at home as he did on Earth and dropped into his research without missing a beat.

  He spent two weeks scanning and sorting through the data, comparing it to his expectations and making a few adjustments where they didn’t match up, then came the tricky part. He went about fabricating the key that he’d been working on designing for months. It had been pirate grown from the adult Bsidd sample he’d previously had, then with modifications made to erase the hive mind commands imbedded within it. Davis didn’t want him trying to add anything new, just releasing the genetic shackles on the Bsidd…without screwing anything up.

  There were many keys to choose from, but he’d began with the one he was most familiar with…that being the variant that the diplomat had been. The Bsidd hadn’t been so kind as to share that bit of data with the Alliance but Trell was calling it a #4 and worked hard on it as a proof before even attempting to fabricate keys for the others.

  With every possible safeguard in place and more than adequate simulation he crossed his mental fingers and added the fabricated keys to a group of 12 unkeyed eggs and introduced them into a Star Force version of the growing vats…with a much more aromatic liquid tailor made to suit their genetic requirements rather than trying to copy the Bsidd version. Figuring out that need had been easy compared to the keys, but waiting was in some ways harder as he monitored the growth of all 12 individuals after bombarding them with enough keys for them all to take.

  With every day that passed he scanned and monitored their growth, looking for anomalies and gratefully finding none. Soon the eggs grew to the point where they were visible, then they continued to mature over the following weeks up into fruit-sized dimensions, developing mental signatures of their own and eventually ‘birthing’ by breaking free of their gel sacks and popping up from the oxygen-rich goo and having their respiratory systems kick in, which simultaneously deactivated the birthing organs that had sustained them during their development.

  Those would be reabsorbed into their bodies over the following weeks, but the newly born Bsidd were now air breathers and needed to be treated as such, with specialized handlers taking them out of their vats and into a brand new maturia…one that was going to have to learn the ropes on the go, hence Davis had brought in the top people he had in the field, including several non-Humans from Axius that were egg-produced.

  The twelve Bsidd ‘trailblazers’ were thoroughly examined, with Trell overly relieved that there were no anomalies present…physically speaking. Mentally and socially was another question that wouldn’t be answered for a long time, and until it was Trell wasn’t going to key up any more of their eggs. That meant he was going back to other assignments while keeping a waiting eye on this project, ready to return when more data had been collected, and hopefully, to talk with those Bsidd he’d just helped into the universe.

  But even as he returned to Atlantis and let the maturia handlers do their thing he couldn’t shake the worry that he’d messed something up by deleting the pieces of the keys that held the queens’ commands. There was so much about the structure of life that even the V’kit’no’sat didn’t understand that he didn’t like meddling with such things, not because he didn’t like the challenge of it, but because if he screwed up then someone else was going to pay for his mistakes.

  He was more suited to fixing problems and creating upgrades in people that already existed, not tinkering with the basic blueprints for those yet to develop…but in this case it needed to be done, and Davis had convinced him of that fact early on. He was trying to free the minds of the Bsidd that were locked into a highly influential hive mind on a genetic level, meaning that it didn’t control them per se, but it made it an uphill battle for them to develop ulterior thoughts to those prescribed given that the controlling influence was inside their heads rather than just environmental.

  Freedom was every individual’s right, or should be, and this project was a big leap towards that for the Bsidd and for Star Force, who’d never tried anything like this before. He just hoped he’d got it right on the first try, and that worry would plague him for years to come until the twelve Star Force Bsidd completed the limited basic training program established for them and were incorporated into Axius. There they were quietly monitored, with the results of their interactions and socialization coming back to Trell and putting his worries to rest.

  If there had been anything lost, it wasn’t detectable. The Bsidd were fully functional individuals and now free to live their lives as they chose…not to mention Star Force trained and now visible to others. Word of that would filter back to the other Bsidd eventually, but that was going to happen sooner or later anyway and was something Davis would deal with.

  Trell now had the results he wanted and a plethora of data available to him…with the next phase of the project now on his shoulders once again. He needed to create the keys for the other variants, or at minimum just the one that would allow them to produce their own eggs, that being a queen.

  6

  June 19, 2572

  Solar System

  Venus

  Nadei woke up, blinking her deep set eyes and pushing open the panels of her sleep cocoon as she fully regained consciousness. The silky coverings kept in the heat and blocked any cooling wind, though in her quarters there was none aside from thermal eddies from the cooling/heating strips in the walls. Still, she felt better with the wrappings covering her body and got a rush of cool air on her abdomen as she sat up and climbed out of the horizontal pod.

  The Bsidd stretched her 18 appendages, some short, some long, some thick and some thin. All were useful for movement, but she preferred to walk erect as the Humans did, relying on her thickest ones for use as legs as she moved over to the shower to get ready for the coming day. She climbed into the squarish compartment and passed through the containment shield as the water started to fall. She didn’t linger, spending only a few minutes in the nearly scalding hot water before stepping out through the energy shield and having it whisk the moisture off her for the most part, leaving the steamy chamber behind as she pressed the cycling button that would reset it as she got dressed.

  Nadei wore a body suit covering all but her appendages, including her neck, head, and most of her face, leaving only a strip where her eyes were and giving her a ninja-like visage. Once that main piece was on she slipped her gauntlets onto each of her appendages, covering them up save for an inch or so of exposed flesh at the points where they met the body suit. Her purplish skin was thick and hard, almost like a carapace, but it didn’t retain heat well and the Star Force colony always felt cold to her, hence the full body clothing.

  Her gauntlets doubled as shoes/gloves, with the Bsidd having no hands or fingers. Several of her appendages ended in small nubs that, when used in concert, could grasp objects and press buttons, but using the Human-style controls was difficult. They had designed special ones for her physiology, but Nadei didn’t want to use them. She wanted to integrate as much as she could with the Humans, who were her only friends and acquaintances, and had raised her since hatching.

  She knew there were many other races in Star Force, but the Humans had created it and were the leaders, not to mention responsible for her existence. Nadei knew of the other Bsidd on Christmas and how her egg had been stolen from them, and while she was curious to meet them some day she already knew a great deal about them and was following their growth…while being deeply disappointed by them. They were working against Star Force at every turn, despite all that they’d done to help them get established after granting them sanctuary. Nadei wanted to do better, but before she’d have a chance to do so she’d have to finish her basic training…and in order to do that she had to g
et through today’s workouts.

  First off she headed out of her quarters and over to a climbing course, one that she was proud to say she could handle better than most of the Humans, though they always seemed to find someone who could beat her. She figured it was to keep her motivated and improving, though she didn’t like to get beat. Today it would be a solo workout, as most days were, with her putting in the repetitive requirements necessary to level up her scores and get her another inch closer to graduation.

  After the climbing came running, then swimming and flying…with the swimming being the hardest. The flying was by anti-grav and had her moving about through another obstacle course using small thrusters to adjust her movements because the levitation was basic and only vertical…not lateral propulsion. That made it tricky, but still fun.

  After that it was time for food and a quick nap, followed by simulator work and information downloads. She had a great deal to learn and the more she did the more she wanted to contribute to Star Force, though in what way she wasn’t yet certain. Nadei knew that, physiologically, she was a Bsidd queen and capable of reproducing others for Star Force, but she didn’t want to become an egg factory. She wanted to do something that mattered.

  She’d been told that after graduation, if she made it that far, her path would be her own choice and she’d be able to leave the planet and go where she liked. Nadei looked forward to that day but didn’t plan on leaving Star Force. Where she would end up she didn’t know, for her scores were pretty even across the board, but she was definitely going to find a niche and make good on the investment that Star Force had made in her.