by Aer-ki Jyr
Jyra considered that for a moment, still not fully understanding but making several connections. The purpose of the Archons and the military throughout Star Force history now got a thorough revamp in her mind, leading to the obvious question.
“Where are they?”
“Most of their empire exists in the galactic core. We only have outdated maps, but it stretches to cover so much territory that it makes the Skarron domain look small.”
“Shit,” Jyra said as they approached the doors and a row of mongooses parked outside.
“Climb on behind me,” San said, sliding onto the nearest one. “It’ll take forever to get around inside if we walk.”
“Who are these other races that make up the…Vick.”
“V’kit’no’sat,” San repeated as she slid on behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He stared up the mongoose and slowly wheeled them over towards the huge doors, avoiding the light traffic coming in and out that kept the pyramid supply lines functioning. “Did the maturias mention anything about dinosaurs?”
“No, but I’ve heard of them in some video games.”
“The dinosaurs are the V’kit’no’sat. We found their skeletal remains long before this place. Everyone thought they were primitives, but in truth they’re superior to Humans.”
“Superior how?”
“Smarter, stronger, sometimes faster, and a whole lot bigger,” he said as they passed through the doors and Jyra could see the size of the interior hallways. “Hence the supersized infrastructure.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, taking it all in as San drove them on.
“Nope. And even after eight and a half centuries, with this place and their database fully at our disposal, we still haven’t caught up with them tech wise. Psionics, however, we’re a bit more even. We even have a few advantages that we don’t…or more accurately, the trailblazers do. That’s a story we’ll get into later. The reason you’re here, in addition to letting you see all this, is to use the medical tech to give your genetics a scrubbing and get rid of all the rust. It’ll also enable you to grow the tissues you’re missing without complications and do so in a matter of seconds. We can’t match that yet with our own tech, but every year that passes we come closer.”
“So you’re saying we all have dormant superpowers?”
“The basic 7, yes. Upgrades have to be earned through the unlocking of genetic triggers. You have the potential for those, but the Archons have figured out how to share them with each other. When I reached padawan rank I was given a lot of new ones by my mage master. For Arc Knights and Arc Commandos it’s different, and to be honest we’re not totally sure about where both will go, but that won’t matter to you for a long time, because Archons have to be a mid level ranger before they’re even physically capable of sharing abilities. We’re not supposed to be able to do it. It’s a glitch we stumbled upon, and yet another reason why the V’kit’no’sat will kill us on sight.”
“How many people know about this?”
“Every Archon and a lot of upper level personnel. Pretty much those who need to know and those we trust not to spill the secret.”
“And there haven’t been any leaks in 800 years?” she asked disbelievingly as San drove them up a ramp next to what looked like oddly shaped, giant-sized stairs.
“About this site, no. But people know Archons have powers, even if we never officially confirmed that.”
“Do our allies know about this place?”
“No. And only Humans within Star Force know of it…save for the Dragons.”
“There are dragons?”
“Long story. And it’s something most Archons don’t know about either.”
“So you can’t tell me?”
“I can, and will, but there’s a lot for you to absorb and I don’t want to jump ahead to the details when you’re just learning the basics. In fact, you’ll know a few things that most lower level Archons don’t after we’re done, so keep them to yourself.”
“What about other Arc Commandos, or Arc Knights?”
“Arc Commandos you can discuss anything with. Arc Knights have a different mandate and do not have a full picture. They’re brought here and let in on the secret when they get their genetic wash, but their focus is on dominating hand to hand combat. Yours is more broad in scope and you need to be in the know.”
“Makes your pain in the ass training worth it,” she said, looking around at what appeared to be a busy city with Human techs and a few Archons moving about everywhere. “Almost.”
“If it was easy anyone could do it.”
“I’m not going to argue with you today.”
“That’ll be new,” San said, transitioning over to another up ramp. “The Zen’zat levels are near the top. After you get your treatment we’ll spend a couple days exploring and get you up to speed…somewhat.”
“How much danger are we in at the moment?”
“We never know. The V’kit’no’sat are too far away for us to spy on, and we’ve decided not to try, else we risk revealing ourselves. We’re basically holding our breath and hoping they don’t show up today, and it’s been that way ever since day 1.”
“That’s crazy.”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“How far ahead of us are they, military wise?”
“We can scratch them now navally, and Zen’zat vs Archon is pretty much even, but bottom line is we can’t stand toe to toe with them and hope to survive. If they come we have to run, and will probably lose a lot of people anyway.”
“I thought you said we had their database? What’s in it?”
“Everything. But their tech is so advanced we’re still trying to figure out the intricacies of it. Now that we have the star forges we’re making more rapid progress, but we’re not going to get caught up anytime soon.”
“What’s a star forge?”
“Mining facility that pulls rare materials out of stars. The V’kit’no’sat weapons and other tech require compounds that we couldn’t synthesize or mine prior to the star forges’ development.”
“Where are they at?”
“When you get your real codes you’ll be able to fish that out of our databases. The ones you’ve been using in training were limited.”
“I get the feeling that Arc Commandos are a bit higher level than I thought.”
“You’re an experiment,” San said honestly. “What you become is ultimately up to you. We’re giving you our tools and knowledge with a much smaller focus. Even though there are only a few hundred of you right now, and there are over a million Archons, we don’t have enough Archons to accomplish all we need to. Some of those duties, specifically strike missions, will be given over to you, but what your eventual incarnation will be is still up in the air.”
“So you’re basically giving us all the cool toys and saying ‘impress us?’”
“Pretty much.”
“No pressure,” Jyra said as they passed, or rather were passed by a group of what she assumed were Archons out of their armor and running in formation along the traffic flow, then darting off across a huge cavern that had Star Force buildings set up inside it.
“One step at a time, youngling. And your first step is getting your basic psionics. After that things begin to get interesting.”
“And this isn’t?” Jyra said, referring to everything around her.
“Right now you’re the equivalent of a tourist. Once you get your psionics you’re going to see things in entirely new ways…especially considering one of them, called Pefbar, allows you to see in every direction simultaneously.”
“How?”
“It works like a sensor, and there’s no point in trying to explain it now. You’ll have your own inside the hour.”
“An hour? This treatment works that fast?”
San laughed. “Remember this moment when we discuss flash growth and ascensions later. Your tissue growth is going to be painless.”
“And yours wasn�
�t?”
“Like I said, things get interesting, and very complicated, going forward.”
“I’m game.”
“Good, because you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
8
May 12, 2897
Epsilon Eridani System
Corneria
Jyra rode her speeder just above the treetops, save for these weren’t covered with snowdrifts. While a lot of her field training had been in the frozen forests of the planet, a few missions had been to the warmer regions but none had been to the southern hemisphere’s region 3 that she was now zipping through. The forest was denser here than anywhere else on the planet and bordered on jungle humidity, making it impossible to fly through the trees at any speed.
She couldn’t feel the heat in her armor, but that wouldn’t be an issue either way today. She was no longer being sent on training missions, for with her Tier 1 psionics being unlocked and her enlightening tour throughout the V’kit’no’sat pyramid, her time in the program was at an end. When she had returned to Corneria it was as a full Arc Commando with a new assignment.
That assignment hadn’t been spelled out, though San had insisted that this wasn’t another test. He said she’d get all the information she needed when she arrived on site, so Jyra had grabbed a speeder from within one of the cities that ringed the region 3 forest and headed for the coordinates he’d given her.
It was a long way to travel, but on a speeder it was easy enough. A few hours of zipping over the treetops brought her to the upper third of the unused wilderness area where she saw nothing on the battlemap. Not a city, building, outpost, or relay beacon. It was called a wilderness area for a reason, and there was nothing here as far as the interlinked Star Force comm systems could tell, but San had also given her a code to use at these coordinates, so when Jyra hit the approximate area she typed it into the speeder’s comm board and transmitted it in a single pulse.
She got an instantaneous reply, also a single pulse, that updated her battlemap with a ghost icon…meaning that it wasn’t an active signal, but a memory of the location the pulse had identified. It wasn’t exactly matching the coordinates that San had given her but fairly close by and only took Jyra another 3 minutes to get there.
The Arc Commando slowed to a stop, looking down at the thick trees and seeing nothing despite sitting directly on top of the waypoint that was on both her helmet and her comm board. She sent out the signal again, but this time there was no response. Jyra tried twice more but nada. The transponder was silent.
“Single use code. Savvy,” she said, looking for a place to push down through the treetops. There was literally nothing below her, so she flew off a hundred meters or so to the south and found a nook that she very carefully lowered her speeder into, finding it a shallow depression rather than a shaft to the ground.
“Crap,” she said, not seeing where to go and also not wanting to just try and break branches that she couldn’t see through the leaves…or could she?
Concentrating, Jyra was able to turn her new Pefbar on and see all around her. The sense still freaked her out a bit and only stretched a couple of meters, but it let her see each and every leaf, including the branches they were attached to below her. Her mind was overwhelmed with sensor detail and she couldn’t hold it for long, but she got just enough information that when she did release it back to her normal senses she knew to move the bike two meters to the left then depress one.
Jyra sank on her metal steed with a sea of leaves moving in around her standard issue, dirty white armor as she turned her spherical sight on again and plotted her next bit of movement…which was forward a meter and a half, then to the right one. After that her head sank into the leaves and out of the sunlight, with her continuing to navigate down through the thick canopy until she finally got her speeder into the void below.
Very little light made it this far down, leaving it perpetually dark with just a green glow emanating from above like a nightlight. Aside from a bit of hardy grass there was no underbrush, just tightly packed tree trunks that looked like toothpicks for their lack of limbs this far down. Jyra had to move slowly, making constant twists and turns, but she was able to find enough gaps to fly between the trees and back over to the waypoint.
“Hiding in anonymity, huh?” she said as she parked her speeder on the ground, deactivating the anti-grav after extending the landing gear. She slid off the pommel seat and walked a few steps over to the simple circular hatch just sitting on the forest floor. It wasn’t camouflaged at all, but it was flat to the ground without so much as a lip sticking up, meaning you’d have to be standing next to it in order to see it, and with hundreds of miles of forest to search through, this was pretty much as hidden as you needed.
Still, Jyra thought you could have covered it with dirt and left a smaller marker up top.
The newly minted Arc Commando took a knee and slid her armored fingers into the small lip near the edge, finding an overhang to give her enough grip to lift the circular plug up a few inches but no further. It took her a moment to realize it was on a pivot point, then she rotated it around to expose a short shaft and ladder that bottomed out about 4 meters below, though she had to use her nightvision to see that, for the forest was too dark and her Pefbar wouldn’t reach that far.
Jyra stepped over the edge and climbed down the ladder, leaving the hatch open for the moment, and eventually stepped off into a small room barely wider than arms’ reach. A glowing marker on the wall was visible, but only in nightvision, highlighting an area with a simple circle. She walked over to it and ran her hand along the wall, finding nothing there. Feeling like this was another test, she used her knew psionics to look into the wall where she saw a small interior switch.
Jyra bit her lip. Her telekinesis, which the V’kit’no’sat called ‘Lachka,’ was very hard to use and she had almost no power in it at all at this point, but apparently the switch had been designed with that in mind. Using her Pefbar to watch and control the Lachka, she reached past the solid wall and just brushed the stick-like switch inside. It moved slightly, but apparently that was enough, for a section of the left wall pushed inward then transitioned to the side revealing a lit hallway that stretched on a considerable way before dead-ending.
“Cool,” she said, walking down the very narrow walkway that would force anyone passing another to scrunch up against the walls. The ceiling was low too, so much so that a Knight would have to duck down…or a Zen’zat, for they were the size of Knights.
When she got to the end of the hall it had a stairway descending to the right, which she followed down for some distance as it curled around itself in a boxy corners, eventually dumping her out into a wide room that had a thick, but open door. It was what one would call a ‘blast door’ but at the moment it wasn’t attempting to keep anyone out, and considering the two turrets built into the walls flanking it, she was pretty sure this was a kill box that could be used in case of attack to defend whatever was beyond this point, for all she could see was a short hallway leading to what looked like another dead end.
Jyra walked past the retracted blast door, seeing that it was about 14 inches thick. Overkill, unless what was down here was really important.
When she came to the end of the hallway there were two staircases headed off in either direction, but they were only a few steps deep and allowed her the view of a large room in each. She went right, then realized that it was actually one giant room that the hallway was blocked from view of.
There was no one here, but it was definitely meant to be lived in. There were couches, vid screens, tables, stools, what looked like a kitchen and storage cabinets. Jyra walked further in, then saw that on the backside of the stairway ‘T’ was a wall with a holographic scene playing out from Star Wars, particularly the battle of Nephosis in episode 19, but when she got within a meter of it the sight of Jedi fighting off rock monsters disappeared and a real life Commando replaced the fiction.
In front of him were three colore
d orbs, which Jyra knew were message prompts. She touched the green one first, for basic information was usually colored as such.
“Hello, Arc Commando. This facility is what we refer to as the ‘Nest.’ Archons have their sanctums, we have our nests. This is where you will do the bulk of your psionic training, though in a pinch you can also use the sanctums. You have code access, and if a lower level Archon questions you being there, just show them your psionics and that should confuse them enough to not bother you. Right now only rangers and above know about Arc Commandos, so feel free to masquerade as an Archon in order to get your workouts done in the field that require the special training equipment for your psionics.”
“But usually we will come to a facility such as this to do the majority of our training in private. This is where we develop and hone our skills, as well as share experience and help one another when we cross paths. The Archons have left instruction manuals on the psionics, but they will not teach us how to use them personally. They want us to develop them on our own, tailoring their use to our needs, and perhaps discovering a new trick or two that we otherwise wouldn’t if we just patterned after them.”
“The bottom line is, this is Arc Commando territory only. Even the Archons don’t come here and it’s completely off the grid. No battlemap location, and information is acquired through a landline tap of the closest cities so there is no signal to trace back here. We’re ghosts here, and intend to keep it that way, so don’t ever bring guests.”
“Beyond that we are Arc Commandos and charting our own path. Learn from those that have come before you while also figuring things out on your own. The Archons didn’t develop their corps quickly, and neither will we. Patience, persistence, and ingenuity will shape our legion going forward. Add what you can and welcome to the club.”
The hologram ceased talking, so Jyra hit the yellow button and the image of the armored man disappeared, replaced by lists of data. She realized they were an instruction manual of sorts…and 259 pages long. Not going to sift through that all right now, she pressed the red button and a holographic schematic of the facility replaced the data, with her realizing that this room was but the tip of the iceberg. It was as big or bigger than an Archon sanctum, and from the look of it held numerous training chambers, some of which were labeled for things that she wasn’t familiar with yet, though the track and pool were obvious.