Point Zero

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “I know,” he said, sitting down and just staring at her. “I’m going to stay until the transformation starts.”

  “It already is,” the medtech said as her cells began uploading the new genetic instructions in the liquid, bonding to each cell and creating a temporary addition to the chromosomes that would coordinate the size reduction that was not called for via training or any other natural effect. “She’s the first Archon, isn’t she?”

  “First with all the Psionics, and first of her new race.”

  “Her new race is still mostly Human, just…”

  “Super Human now,” Wilson finished, making it clear in his tone he wasn’t interested in idle talk. “Any flags?”

  “Nothing yet. It’s taking smoothly. More so than a Knight reduction.”

  “Good,” Wilson said, half expecting that…and half expecting her body to outright reject it if it matched her own stubbornness. “Good…”

  8 days later…

  Morgan groggily realized her body hurt as she tried to wiggle around in bed and turn over onto her shoulder…at which point she realized she wasn’t in her own bed, and from there her mind began to claw its way to consciousness rapidly.

  She managed to roll over onto her right arm, then felt so tired she flopped back down on her belly…except the bed wasn’t wide enough and her body only half hit, with her falling off the edge only to have someone catch her and lift her back up before her eyes finally cracked open.

  The Archon looked around, blinking heavily as if the light hurt her, and the heavy hand on her right thigh was the first thing that came into focus. She followed it up the arm until she saw a blurry blob that slowly resolved into Wilson’s face.

  “Whhhhaaatt?” she groaned, as if her body wasn’t fully responding to her commands.

  “Easy, Morgan. You made it. It’s over. You’re tiny again.”

  The blinking increased, until she finally got her eyes working, then she looked up into Wilson’s face unmoving. “Ouch.”

  “You’re at Point Zero, sweetheart. Take it slow and build. It’s all uphill from here. No more going backwards.”

  Her head finally moved enough to look down at her body…which was laying inside very baggy clothes that no longer fit her. “Let me see.”

  “You can’t move, can you?” Wilson asked.

  “No. Everything is raw. If I move…”

  “Easy, I understand. Give your Haemra time to identify and work on it. Focus on activating it.”

  “She shouldn’t be in pain at all with the Regenerator,” the medtech said, furiously flipping through diagnostic screens.

  Wilson reached over and pulled the armband off, which drew looks of disbelief from the medtechs. “Her Haemra is better, and the Regenerator only knows familiar physiology. Hers is new. It won’t work as well until it has a good baseline.”

  “Possibly, but the amount of pain she’s suggest…” he said, getting cut off by a hand gesture from Wilson.

  “Concentrate, Morgan,” he whispered. “Clear the fog first, then remind your body it belongs to you, and it will reconfigure to your liking, not the universe’s.”

  That seemed to shake her more awake, and when her eyes closed he knew she was getting a handle on it even without trying to use his Ikrid and hack into her nervous system.

  When she opened her eyes again, he saw recognition, but still pain.

  “Better,” she announced. “Take my clothes off…so I don’t have to. I want to see.”

  “Cut them off,” he told the nearest medtech. “Don’t move her legs.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Do you want to give her a reason to be mad at you later?” he said almost humorously.

  “As you wish,” he relented, digging out a tool from a nearby wall panel that served as a hidden cabinet, then as Wilson pulled off her already too big of shoes with his telekinesis, the medtech ran the device up her socks and gently pulled the pieces off without moving her foot.

  He preceded up her pants and pulled those away, laying them out on either side and not trying to pull them out from under her. He moved up to her shirt and got it all off with the help of Wilson, then hesitated until Morgan glared at him…then he preceded to cut away her underwear as well, leaving her laying naked as she was propped up on one elbow looking down at her very pale legs that seemed to have lost what tan she’d had before. Now she was almost albino…and a scrawny one at that.

  “You lost a lot of muscle,” Wilson commented. “It will take time to rebuild it all, but it will be Furyan muscle, and you will no longer be limited as you were before.”

  Morgan started to cry again, with sobs this time, and each time she convulsed the pain rippled down her, but Wilson could tell she didn’t care. She was so relieved he was surprised at her reaction.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Better,” she confirmed, slowly raising her left hand and running it over her vagina and her abdomen experimentally. “Is it gone?”

  “Your uterus was removed as requested,” the medtech answered before Wilson could. “But your ovaries are intact to preserve your hormone levels and egg production.”

  “What’s my ambrosia production level?” she asked, referencing the new tissue that was supposed to replace the pointless reproductive organ that she’d never use.

  “Currently 81 times the average of the other trailblazers.”

  Morgan snickered, glancing at Wilson as she continued to focus on her Haemra as it sought to figure out what the pain was from, track it down, and heal it. “Call me a cheater.”

  “You’re a cheater,” he admitted, also with a smile.

  “Damn right,” she said. “Help me sit up.”

  Wilson did as requested, eliciting a groan from her, but it left Morgan able to look down at her body with a sagging head, but no need for support from him.

  “I feel like a puppet with her strings cut.”

  “It’ll pass with time. Be patient, reckless one.”

  “Oh I’m going slow, trust me.”

  “For about ten minutes,” he admonished, drawing another smile from her. “Try and stretch it to 20…please.”

  “Why is my tan gone?”

  “Your skin was reset to defaults that didn’t exist, so without a need for it you didn’t develop the adaptation to the UV light. You will as needed going forward.”

  “Factory reset, huh?” she asked, bringing her hands up in front of her dipped face and flexing her fingers slowly…and seeing the tiny digits again brought tears to her eyes. She had her body back instead of that super-sized monstrosity. “I think Ginsi could take me now.”

  “A stiff wind could take you now,” Wilson said, walking around and kneeling next to her bed so he could look up into her face. “I’m serious about going slow. This isn’t Human you, it’s Furyan you, and that’s a new playbook you have to write.”

  “I know. Thank you. My nightmare is over.”

  “Was there a problem with your larger body I wasn’t aware of,” the head medtech asked.

  “Yeah…it didn’t fit the person inside,” she said, wiggling her toes and finding that hurt more than anything, with shots of pain running up her legs each time she applied tendon pressure to those even shorter digits. “What shoe size am I now?”

  “Furyan 7.”

  “Furyan?” she asked.

  “The foot pads altered the height of your feet, so we had to add a new race designation. If you put a Human shoe on that’s not custom fitted, it will be tight vertically.”

  “I haven’t wore standard shoes since the V’kit’no’sat War,” she admitted, for everything provided to the Archons, and especially the trailblazers, was custom fitted for their exact body sizes.

  “Still horny?” Wilson asked.

  “Thankfully no.”

  “It may come back later when the pain goes away. A lot of problems will. They’re just suppressed for now,” he warned.

  “Noted,” she said, trying to wiggle her toes again and sea
rching out the pain so she could manually target the Haemra on the issue…which she got after three more wiggles, and the pain in her right leg began to bleed away. “Give me some time alone.”

  “Don’t fall,” Wilson warned, standing up and leaning over her head as the medtechs left the room. He kissed her on the forehead. “Welcome back, Number 1.”

  A smile broke out on her face from ear to ear. “I’ve got a lot of work to do to earn that again.”

  “Work yes,” Wilson agreed as he walked away. “I’ll have your first workouts ready when you are.”

  He left her then, and Morgan was alone with a few empty beds and walls of equipment. That and her pale white body that she could barely move without racking herself in pain…but this is exactly where she wanted to be, rather than running around in someone else’s body and carrying that burden with her everywhere she went.

  She might be back to newb status, but Morgan was Morgan again, and the rest could and would be taken care of with time and training.

  And she had ample opportunity for both.

  But that didn’t stop her from trying to swing her legs off the edge of the bed…resulting in a cascade of pain that made her jerk in response…and that jerk threw her off the edge and onto the floor.

  Except she didn’t hit. She managed to activate her now Furyan Yen’mer, and while it also hurt, the pain was less than in her muscles, leaving her floating a few inches off the floor in a crumpled superman pose that she soon straightened out and just held the hover there, finding the lack of physical contact preferable to the pressure of the bed on her legs.

  She closed her eyes again and triggered her Haemra everywhere she felt pain, and continued to wiggle here and there in naked flight searching out the points within her body that were waving the biggest warning flags...

  9

  October 18, 154931

  Huev Lio System (Olloplo Kingdom)

  Kikiko

  In the outer region of the galaxy, in the gap between the Perseus and Cygnus galactic arms where the stellar density was very low, there were still a scattering of star systems with long jumplines between them, making them hard to get to unless you had the more advanced engines and navigational equipment. Within the Star Force network that wasn’t an issue, but the Heuv Lio System was not Star Force owned, rather a quiet neighbor that kept to itself and was so far out of the way that it barely ever saw a Star Force ship pass through, let alone come into orbit of the one and only inhabited planet in the system, the marginally habitable desert world of Kikiko.

  All water on the planet was subsurface, as were most of the cities with little top portions poking up into the sandstorms and scorching heat like snorkels…and today those snorkels spotted not one, but 12 Star Force Warship-class starships arriving into low orbit disgorging a swarm of landing craft.

  Those craft were escorted by aerial fighters and gunships all the way down to the snorkels of all 81 major cities on the planet as well as some of the minor ones. No return fire came until they were nearly to ground…and when it did, it wasn’t from the native Kiio population whose weaponry was minimal, but rather from one of the minor cities in the form of topaz-colored beam weaponry that burned through several of the Star Force dropships on approach before the others immediately broke off and ran for distance as more were targeted and downed.

  But no one died, for the leading dropships were decoys being flown by remote to draw out any return fire that the Chixzon might have around one of their clandestine bases. One that Star Force had never even come close to finding, given how good they were at hiding, but the assault fleet had been given coordinates and the basic layout by an unidentified source whose information was now confirmed. Few in the galaxy had the technology to produce Ardent weapon batteries, and the Chixzon had acquired the technology from the V’kit’no’sat before they had joined Star Force.

  It was assumed they’d stolen it rather than entered into any agreement, and for millennia the Chixzon had wheedled Star Force through intermediaries trying to weaken and take them down through everything other than a direct assault, but they’d never shown themselves through all that time, and since the Hadarak surge had begun Star Force hadn’t been able to track any activity back to them.

  Which now made sense, for the informant also stated that the Chixzon were responsible for initiating the Hadarak surge by baiting it out of them through a false activation signal, and that they had a network of repositories in deep space where they were collecting individuals who agreed to work for them in exchange for protection as the galaxy burned…and this world was one of the gateways into that hidden network that the informant had no location data for.

  That meant this invasion was more than just about confronting the Chixzon directly for the first time in Star Force history. It was also about obtaining information regarding the location of the others and their deep space habitats.

  As soon as the ground batteries opened fire the warships responded, finding their first few salvos blocked by surface shielding, but the Chixzon hadn’t invested enough resources in the planet to defend against a Star Force fleet…only to quickly destroy any local traffic if necessary to keep their anonymity a secret. Now though, they knew they were found out the moment the warships arrived, so the exposing of their weapons was a last ditch effort to offer what little resistance they could as they probably went about erasing files and destroying whatever links to the rest of their race they now had exposed.

  That’s why as soon as the orbital bombardment cleaned the surface, the real dropships sped down to the landing pads and a few other places that were not designated entrances and disgorged the first wave…which was composed of hundreds of Archons, all of which were Saiyan level, for two reasons.

  One, the Chixzon were probably the most dangerous foe left in the non-Hadarak portion of the galaxy. And two, if they were destroying information, they needed the first wave to have the maximum speed possible.

  That’s why they all hit the ground while blonde, though you couldn’t see it inside their full armor as they ran in a blur out of the lowering ramps before they fully touched the ground and moved to entrances and ducts and any other way down while a few more decided to create their own passageways using explosives.

  The Chixzon didn’t have any defenses at the city top…other than to blow it up. A series of detonations took out chunks of infrastructure and collapsed others, but none were targeting the Archons specifically. They were trying to block the easy routes and delay the invaders’ arrival.

  That had been expected, and soon a few Saiyans found ways down and the others responded, flocking to their call and moving like frenzied ants below ground where they immediately stunned any non-Chixzon they came across…and there were a lot that weren’t Kiio…and left them to be rounded up by the later waves, for this planet was becoming Star Force property immediately, knowing how the Chixzon manipulated their business partners into situations where they could not exist without them.

  That meant it was safer for the Kiio if Star Force made sure they were taken care of directly rather than leaving them to their own fate after plucking out the Chixzon, even if that’s not what they wanted. But that’s not what the Saiyans were here for. They had come for the Chixzon and only the Chixzon.

  Lower and lower they went, scanning with sensors, telepathy, and some with Essence every room, hallway, and interior space out to the bedrock and further in one giant network of battlemeld linked individuals that operated as the most advanced hive mind in the galaxy…even if it was just a temporary one.

  First contact came 18 levels down in a stairwell as a fleeing Chixzon was caught in transit. He knew the Saiyans were coming before they got into view, and stopped just short around a hairpin in the downward stairs, jutting his shoulder appendages backward and activating the lightsaber-like cutting surface on the ends as he tried to jab the first person to catch up to him as they blindly came around the corner.

  But the Saiyans weren’t blind, and could see throu
gh the walls with their Pefbar as the first one easily ducked underneath the double jab and wrapped his arms around the Chixzon’s rock-like torso and used his momentum to push the monster further down with a twist that slammed him into the next landing below…with the Saiyan ending on top and emitting the tier 4 psionic Takbri, which was a biological stun pulse, at point blank range on the unarmored Chixzon.

  The green glow from his appendages that were cutting into the nearby wall as they hung limp faded back to neutral black as he was rendered unconscious, then another Saiyan moved up to the pair in a blur and threw several technological stun blasts into him just to be sure as he and the others moved on downward while the single Saiyan that had grabbed the Chixzon was going to stay with him until the second wave came through to properly claim and contain him.

  But that didn’t mean the Saiyan had to be idle, and while his prisoner was unconscious he tapped into his mind and began to search around for any and every bit of useful data, copying the memories using his tier 2 psionic Do’shi, then redundantly logging them in the mechanical memory of his armor as he mentally transferred them to preserve integrity in case he was in too much of a hurry and left out or corrupted something, knowing that there were automatic suicide nodules in the Chixzon’s body that would kill him if he was taken prisoner.

  And there were, but they hadn’t been activated, so maybe they weren’t automatic if they just passed out.

  As the Saiyan recorded data mentally, he used his armor’s Regenerator to reach into the Chixzon’s body and go after those nodules and delete them…and to his surprise there wasn’t a backup in place to prevent it. Within a few minutes he had them all destroyed and no other biological interference was popping up as a team of Clan Saber Esquires finally caught up to him.

  “Take him,” the Saiyan said, and when a Calavari reached down to pick him up he took off in a blur past several other Clansmen, running across the walls at some points to get by them as he moved to the head of the line and raced to catch up to the others that he was still in battlemeld contact with, and he knew that several of the Chixzon were already dead through their own efforts and not Star Force’s.