Star Force: Sav (SF51)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “How about you two tandem it this time?”

  Jason smiled as Paul finally got back up to the start area, having walked through the corridors of shame below that linked the pits to the start area. “You’re on.”

  Bo walked back over to the start pedestal as the other two had a brief telepathic conversation, then they lined up beside him and Paul tagged the button, sending all three off…with Bo coming out the easy winner once again, but at least Jason and Paul did manage to get to the finish with the help of a battlemeld link and staying close enough together to help block for one another, coming up with a finish score of 208.

  They tried once again while Bo made half a dozen more runs, bumping his score up to 1321 and demonstrating several weaknesses in the challenge. They’d keep it as is, but if they were going to push his new ability they were going to have to design something…harder, which Jason and Paul got to work on later that day, turning in the schematics to the techs before evening so they could get it built as quickly as possible.

  Two weeks later a whole new wing of Atlantis had been retrofitted into a Sav-specific training area. Paul and Jason couldn’t use it, though they’d tried and failed miserably. They’d had to really jack up the difficulty level in order to find Bo’s current limits, which they knew would only grow with time and training. He could have designed them himself, but given that he was the first to attain this ability they didn’t want him to have to do that, instead they wanted him to focus on beating challenges rather than creating them.

  So they did it for him and got to analyze from afar what he could and couldn’t do, making tweaks here and there and adding new challenges as they thought them up…but there was one application they didn’t understand the full implications of until Bo happened into a sparring match with Vermaire one day…and beat him.

  Fortunately they’d been recording that match in order to study Bo, and he’d been wearing a monitoring headband at the time, as they all did now. Between the two there was a lot of analysis going on, both from the medtechs and the Archons, but it was Wilson who finally got the prize for making the connection. He reviewed the records, along with those that Paul had been feeding him of Bo’s other training activities, and sent a message to both of them to stop by his ‘lair’ when they had a chance.

  Both of them knew not to keep him waiting, for when he had something he wanted to talk about with them, which was rare, it was usually significant. His office complex within Atlantis, from where he ran the entire Archon trainee program, wasn’t a typical office. Over the centuries he’d reworked it into part combat operations center, part training facility of its own, and when the two trailblazers got there he had a very young trainee going through some null gravity training inside a containment cylinder…drawing skeptical looks from both trailblazers.

  “A bit of disorientation syndrome,” Wilson said as he came out to meet them, holding up four fingers at the trainee inside, who nodded…throwing off her balance and causing her to start twisting about until her hand hit the sidewall of the shield that was keeping her inside. As she continued to bounce around trying and failing to steady herself Wilson looked on, knowing well that she had to learn to do things on her own without him jumping in to help whenever one of them got into trouble. If they wanted to become Archons they had to learn to improvise.

  “Bad?” Paul asked.

  “Very. Which is why I have her here every third day for special sessions. Her mind doesn’t want to calibrate to the zero g. I’ve seen this before and what is required is a lot of metaphorical face punching before the subconscious finally catches on and makes the adjustment,” he said, turning away from the trainee and pointing a finger at Bo. “You, on the other hand, are something new. And I always like new challenges. Come with me.”

  Wilson led the two trailblazers out of the main area and into a side chamber, with Paul immediately recognizing V’kit’no’sat script floating in holo above three different workstations in the moderately small room. Wilson telekinetically shut the door behind them and the room’s lights dimmed with him bringing up a central hologram depicting Bo’s fight with Vermaire.

  “Nice piece of work, and far better than I could do, but still very sloppy.”

  Bo raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

  “I’ve been studying the V’kit’no’sat records in detail, as I’m sure you have, but there are a lot more entries than those just listed under psionics…which you know are not, given the lack of an organization system to the database. I’ve come across numerous seemingly random entries with training components, and the techs send any new ones they’ve translated my way, but I make a habit to peruse the untranslated files and I’ve found bits and pieces of information over the years that suggest a duality in the physiology of combat…as far as the psionics engineers were concerned.”

  “Go on,” Bo said, not insulted but rather intrigued by whatever Wilson was getting at.

  “The mind upgrades similar to the way the body does, but a person can only fight as fast as the slowest portion. Your slowest portion is now your body. Your processing power has risen beyond it, allowing you to make more of your senses and leaving your muscle response speed lagging, which is why you were fighting sloppy…though it was enough to outmatch Vermaire. His strength is still beyond you, but he couldn’t handle your speed. But then you already knew that or you wouldn’t have tackled him the way you did.”

  “Um, well…actually I was just trying to avoid getting my ass kicked. I didn’t spot a weakness, I was just staying ahead of his movements for the first time in my life.”

  “Then you were even sloppier than I realized,” Wilson continued, again without negativity and just coming with a fresh, honest, and useful analysis. “Up until now your physical speed has been held back by your mind’s ability to process, but freed of that you were still making choppy/floppy attacks. I thought there had been some strategy in them.”

  “Afraid not. I was just poking him where I could. He almost had me several times.”

  “I noticed. What you need to do is retrain your body to make use of your faster mind. I’m fairly sure you’ve got greater speed in you already, just uncalibrated. After that you’ll have to physically train for greater speed, but the first step is getting yourself back in alignment. You’re off balance and while you’ve leveled up considerably you’re still fighting sloppy.”

  “Do you have any drill suggestions for calibration?” Bo asked.

  Wilson walked a step to his left and grabbed a datachip. He input it into a slot on the console and had a new hologram pop up alongside the fight with Vermaire, which was playing continuously and on a loop. It was 8 minutes long and Wilson didn’t want to have to reload it every time he rewatched it, with him going through it blow by blow for several hours previously.

  When it came to a certain section of the fight he paused, rewinded, and replay a specific series of blocks Bo had made and set it into its own mini-loop. Wilson went on to point out the small errors and the drills he had constructed to counter them, then proceeded through the entire fight in a similar manner…switching over to footage of some of Bo’s training drills at the end and offering a few upgrades there as well.

  After he was finished he had a question for Paul.

  “How close are you to finding the next trigger?”

  “Battlemeld is the only reliable one, but I thought we were close to nailing Pren until he went Sav. He was doing the same training the rest of us had done to trigger it, and I’m at a loss as to what happened. I thought we were starting to get a handle on it but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Tell me how this individual compares. I know he isn’t nearly as advanced, but from what you’d learned prior to Bo’s ascension how close do you think he is?” Wilson asked, grabbing another datachip and bringing up the biotelemetry data that Paul could almost see in his sleep by now, he’d gone through so many of them.

  He gave it a quick look then glanced at Bo, having a silent conversation.

&n
bsp; “Close,” Paul said, mildly impressed. “All the major skill areas are weak, but the internal alignment looks favorable. Who is this?”

  “Not an Archon,” Wilson answered vaguely. “Is it worth your time to train with them, or would they be too much of a stretch?”

  Paul didn’t know if this was a test or a request, so he just took the question at face value. “I’m curious as to how he got to this position. He’s so stacked towards what we thought was a Pren trigger that even if he didn’t get it quickly I think we could learn something from the attempt. And the closer we get to the triggers the better. What division is he?”

  “Gotta be commando,” Bo said, looking at the stats. “No one else does that much physical augmentation…and he’s too short to be a Knight.”

  Paul shook his head, taking to the guessing game they seemed to be playing. “No, he’s missing several commando traits. Could be an oddball, but my gut says no.”

  “Then what?” Bo asked.

  Paul hesitated, then went ahead and said it. “This can’t be true, but the only connection I can make is this being a quitter,” he said, referencing the handful of Archons that had turned in their badass card and went civilian. “One making a comeback?”

  Paul looked at Wilson, but the taller man shook his head. “No, but I’ll thank you for the compliment. You’re looking at my biotelemetry.”

  Bo let out an exasperated sigh. “Should have known.”

  Paul glanced at the numbers again. “Have you been trying to get to Pren?”

  “Yes. There’s only so much I can help you guys with if I don’t experience these things for myself. I can’t be a backseat driver and do much good.”

  “Your past history says otherwise,” Bo added, “but I get what you mean.”

  “Do you have time to join us?” Paul asked.

  “Do you have time to train here while there’s a war going on?” Wilson countered. “I’ll make time, if you think it’s worth yours?”

  “I’m too curious to say no regardless,” Paul said with a smirk and extended his hand to the bigger man. “Welcome onboard.”

  Wilson took it with a fairly firm grip.

  “But don’t expect us to go easy on you,” Paul warned.

  “It’d defeat the purpose if you did.”

  “Alright then,” Bo said, feeling like getting back to their workouts. “Let’s get at it.”

  7

  July 15, 2546

  Solar System

  Earth

  Bo sat in one of the sparring chambers, legs crossed, eyes closed with hundreds of tiny thuds orbiting around his body in a pattern too intricate to easily pick up on…except that the trailblazer was hardly concentrating on them. Archons often found pure meditation not to work, and that in order for them to really disconnect from their environment and let their minds wander they had to be at least partially involved in the environment, as if no action whatsoever put them on guard for something to come and low level activity allowed them to relax.

  Some of the Archons used handstands, others more active drills that required little effort that they would repeat over and over again. Ever since his Sav ascension Bo had turned Jedi, levitating and orbiting objects around him not so much to free his mind but to work out some of the lingering pain that seemed to be grudgingly diminishing with each day that passed. It was 1 pm and he’d just finished up an hour run, with the slight fatigue that brought warming his legs as his mind worked through the telekinetic manipulation necessary to keep his little star system of thuds in order.

  Two hours from now he would get back to harder workouts, but for now he wanted to get some meditation time in before catching a shower and a quick nap…the latter of which was helping his head. Straight rest and he’d lock up, but action/rest cycling helped to loosen him up…an old Archon training trick they’d learned back in their first 100 years.

  As Bo’s mind wandered he gently nudged it into the parts of his mental capabilities that were untapped, probing the limits of his thoughts almost randomly as if he was bouncing around. That was another old trick, that when one didn’t know what they were looking for they had to ‘shoot around’ randomly. That little tidbit had come from Taryn, who often went crazy in drills trying to shake more speed out of herself. A crude, jerky, almost completely random action sometimes had the ability to access a part of yourself that your normal control didn’t allow you to touch, so in order to find new mental territory Bo was flailing around inside his head, making him feel kind of like a Human pinball machine.

  It was something he had done many times in the past, but now that he had new brain tissue and a whole new mental structure he had plenty of room to bounce around in, and exploring those new capabilities was something he was going to chew on in every way possible…though at night he tried to do the opposite and not think, needing smooth sleep. That didn’t always work, but he found that if he let his mind go in meditation then sleep time would often not be invaded by as many random thoughts.

  Which was another reason to take a nap afterwards and suck up some good minutes while his mind was satiated from the meditation randomness.

  But that wasn’t going to happen today, for somewhere in his ramblings he hit on something. He didn’t know what, but almost immediately he felt instability swelling inside his head.

  “What the…” he said, dropping his orbiting thuds as his mind suddenly lost its cohesion. He focused on the ascension prompt, not understanding how this would happen outside of training. Every single time it had occurred previously, in all the Archons, it had been during some type of physical stress. He was under none now, nor mental stress given how easy holding the thud grid was. What was going on he didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to squander the opportunity for another upgrade.

  With the little semi-bouncy balls dropping and rolling everywhere Bo concentrated, channeling the instability and trying not to overload himself…but then he said screw it. If he got brain burn again so be it. It would be worth it.

  Not taking Vortison’s advice, the trailblazer pushed the instability onward, unable to see the indicator lights on his headband creep up into the yellow. This time the instability fought him, not wanting to be drawn out as fast so Bo went with it and tried a very gradual draw, playing to not lose it rather than force it out. Little by little it crept upward, with the indicator lights marking his improvement up into the red…which was when he sensed another presence in his head.

  It felt like a solid pole imbedded into the ground amidst the hurricane he was riding out and stoking. Bo grabbed hold of it and used the mental signature to stabilize himself further, which added to his ability to channel the mental winds. That didn’t cause him to get to the transition point immediately, but with a considerable amount of time and effort his mental storm took shape and in mind’s eye turned into three tight rings before it flashed and his head began screaming from new tissue growth.

  The pain passed quickly, unlike the Sav upgrade, and Bo blinked his eyes open…to see Paul, Jason, Greg, and even Wilson standing in front of him.

  “Where did you guys come from?” he said, getting to his feet.

  “When you were overdue for your workout I came looking for you,” Jason explained.

  Bo frowned. “What time is it?”

  “A little after 5,” Greg answered.

  Bo’s eyes widened. “That’s not…”

  “I found you here an hour and a half ago,” Jason confirmed. “That’s the longest ascension anyone has ever endured and we were worried that something might have gone wrong.”

  “How long were you in here before it started?” Paul asked.

  “I was meditating and it happened so I jumped on it. I don’t know what time it was…maybe 1:30.”

  “I wonder what he got,” Greg commented.

  “Pren,” Wilson said, holding a datapad that was linked into the biomonitors on all their heads. “I don’t know why your ascension lasted so long, but we got so much data from it that Vortison says he�
�s found the trigger.”

  “When?” Paul said, frowning.

  “Text message about 15 seconds ago,” he said, hefting the datapad.

  “You always carry that with you?” Greg asked.

  “Habit,” he answered, but apparently one he’d picked up after the trailblazers went through basic.

  “You alright?” Paul asked Bo.

  “I think so,” he said, levitating one of the thuds up into his palm, then his eyes tightened a bit and it shot off and ricocheted against a wall and stopped a foot in front of Paul’s chest, with the trailblazer raising an eyebrow as he telekinetically caught it.

  “Definitely a speed increase,” Bo confirmed as Paul tossed the little projectile off to the side. To have gotten that much of a rebound showed considerable strength, but to line up the shot that well to hit him was definitely a Sav moment.

  “Let’s take this elsewhere,” Jason prompted. “I think we all would like to have a chat with Vortison.

  “Agreed,” Paul said, walking out. Wilson and Greg followed him while Jason hung back with Bo a few meters behind them.

  “You didn’t black out earlier, did you?”

  Bo shook his head as they walked through the entry doors. “I had to be awake to keep the instability going, but it felt like maybe five, maybe ten minutes tops…not hours.”

  “I’d like to see what it did to your Sav tissue, if anything.”

  “Think there’s a connection?”

  “You’re the only one to have gone that long, by far.”

  “Could be some other wrinkle we haven’t come across yet.”

  “All the more reason to get you under a full scanner.”

  “Doesn’t explain why I ascended while meditating,” Bo added.

  “Another good point. Seems every time we start to get a handle on psionics something new pulls the rug out from under us.”