by Aer-ki Jyr
He got clipped in the right foot and left calve as he got to the other side, tripping him up and sending him face first down to the planks that made up the bridge, but he managed to curl up into enough of a ball to roll forward and into cover on the other side…though his rifle didn’t make it with him. He dropped it mid fall, and as his recent luck held, it careened over the side and off the bridge.
“Damn it,” he said, pulling his numb legs further behind cover as he concentrated and found Angel’s mind up in the observation nook on the far end of the course. I’m down and I lost my rifle. Leg hits.
How fast can you crawl?
Are we that close?
Frank is almost there. If you can open up the turrets from range we can still do this.
Guide me, Paul insisted. He didn’t see how this was going to work, but she had a better view of the situation than he did.
Zigzag left. Stop at square.
Paul crawled further away from the bridge on his elbows, getting some use out of his half numb knees in the process as he ducked down a side hallway in the tree house-like enclosure he was in. Like Angel said there was a zigzag-shaped hallway that exited into a square intersection that had two possible choices. When Paul got to it he signaled his readiness and waited.
Go right and tell me if you’re in range of the turret.
Paul did as instructed and dragged himself through another hallway and up to a corner but sensed a turret nearby so he didn’t duck his head out, though the corner of the hallway junction had the nook of the outer wall missing, exposing it to the course exterior, offering an opportunity to shoot out…or in.
I think I can get it, Paul told her. His Fornax range wasn’t great, but when used in beam mode he had extra juice to work with and fortunately the target wasn’t moving, otherwise it would have been another story entirely.
Paul received the shorthand ‘standby’ signal and he kept hunkered up near the inner corner of the 90 degree turn, but far enough back inside the hallway to keep out of view of what other turrets might be operational outside. Each time the Archons ran the course their locations would alter, not allowing them to trust their memory and forcing them to stay on their toes each time they attempted the challenge.
Paul felt Angel’s ‘go’ command and he concentrated again, sending a Fornax burst along the tight beam trajectory to the target. Though Paul couldn’t see or feel it, the disruptive telepathic energy washed over the receiver in the turret around the corner like water from a squirt gun, save for it passed through the target and out the other side, diminished only by the amount that soaked into the receiver.
The rest continued on, spreading out as it went and dissipating. According to the V’kit’no’sat database this was a simplistic use of the ability, but what Paul thought of as ‘second level’ because it required coordination with his Ikrid to feel out the targets…not to mention learning how to produce the white noise in a straight line rather than ‘shouting’ it in all directions.
Still, he knew there was a way to disable a target directly, without having to ‘beam’ it…which meant if another person got in the line of the beam they’d be hit too, whether on this side of the target or the other. The dynamics of that still perplexed him, because he was thinking of energy transfer like a laser…but there was some way to ‘hack’ into the target and deliver the Fornax to a single point. It required Ikrid, he knew, but beyond that the explanation of the dynamics was still beyond him and his vocabulary…of which Kara had been no help, because there weren’t English translations for much of the ‘mental’ terminology that the Archons were having to discover through their training.
Paul’s best guess was that there was a binary nature to the Fornax, and that two ‘strands’ had to overlap at a certain point in order to take effect…but in truth that was just a stand-in explanation for Paul’s head to wrap around until he figured out the truth. It worked, somehow, and Paul seemed to automatically go to naval metaphors whenever he needed an explanation for something, hence the binary, which was the way several weapon systems worked in the V’kit’no’sat archives. They didn’t use them, but several of the races they’d defeated had, being able to target one building through another for demolition and other more interesting applications…some of which were downright grotesque.
As bad as the V’kit’no’sat were, their purges of sufficiently advanced races in the galaxy had the side effect of cleaning up some of the other nasties out there.
You’re clear, Angel told him, up to the platform.
Paul crawled around the corner, acknowledging her with a simple telepathic ping in their shorthand meaning ‘copy’ as he saw the turret set in the middle of a little roofed cupola with its target sphere coated in green paint. He hadn’t heard the shots, but judging from the angle they must have come from one of the other Archons in play that had a sniper rifle. There were six of them in total, plus Angel working as coordinator. She had no weapon and couldn’t move from her observation spot, per the rules of the challenge, but could use her telepathy to aid them as much as possible.
The other Archons weren’t trailblazers, but they were the more advanced psionic acolytes remaining in the pyramid, acting both as trainers and trailblazers of their own as they pushed the boundaries of their abilities and logged their progress for others to follow. The trailblazers, meanwhile, continued their training in the field as they attended to war duties that were growing by the year as both fronts began to expand, leaving other Archons with more and more significant duties…things that otherwise the trailblazers would never have let them take the lead on, but given current circumstances that had changed drastically.
War aside, many of the second geners were as skilled or more skilled in the psionics than the trailblazers…though Paul’s class was catching up, despite their field training disadvantages. That said, Paul was helping the group here advance as much as they could, and they were returning the gesture, helping him catch up where they had the lead. His ranger-level physical skills surpassed theirs, and their psionics in turn surpassed his, making challenges like this tricky to execute, but advantageous if they could organize properly.
And organizing properly was one of the Archons’ greatest skills…even if they had to do it improv.
Paul knew the turret would come back online soon, and with a random downtime so they couldn’t know for sure exactly when, so he crawled as quick as he could, keeping below the low fence-like walls of the cupola that the turret stood within and around its base…then off the opposite side and into a short hallway, hoping that he wasn’t going to get shot in the butt on the way.
He pulled off around a corner before that happened, thankfully, and had a few meters of hallway to work with before it opened up onto a platform half the size of a volleyball court…underneath which he could feel two more turrets down at an angle.
I’m here.
Stay put, the platform is guarded. What can you hit from there?
Paul concentrated again, sensing a third turret up high on the ceiling. Three. Two low, one high…but they’re at range. 50/50 on reaching threshold.
Dual strike, she suggested. Lower right from your position on my mark.
Paul sent the ‘copy’ signal and waited, keeping his mental lock on the contact and excluding all else from his mind. Some 20 seconds later the ‘go’ signal popped into his mind and he beamed as much Fornax energy as he could down through the platform floor towards the target, knowing that it was going to mushroom out trying to go that far away, not to mention that passing through matter scattered it a touch as well.
Meanwhile, Kanse-449 sent his own disruption beam at the same target from an even greater range. Combined they overwhelmed the threshold on the receiver and the turret’s target sphere raised…then was hit by a sniper from even further away, enabling a closer Archon to move up and duck behind cover as the other lower turret peppered his steps with blue paint splats.
Paul couldn’t see any of it, aside from the mental image of t
he Archon running forward once he stopped concentrating on the individual turret. He waited for Angel’s next signal, not wanting to bombard her with questions while she was talking to the others…that would work almost as well as white noise, as they’d learned from previous challenges, so he knew they had to keep communication to a minimum and let her decide when to make contact…that was her part in the challenge, which worked to train her communications skills in an improvised setting.
Paul waited what felt like a long time then finally couldn’t stand just sitting still while the pins and needles began to work up his legs. Status?
Almost there. Stay put.
Paul sighed, glad that they were making progress but not liking to be kept in the dark. Half of the Archons were visible in mind’s eye, but the others had moved off far enough to escape his tracking ability…or more accurately, his tracking radius had begun shrinking with fatigue. At the outset he’d been able to sense nearly the entire course, now he was down to about a third of it.
A few moments later the course was bathed in blue finish light as a challenge-end klaxon blared once, indicating that they’d won. A few seconds later Victor-773’s hands appeared on the edge of the platform, then the Archon pulled himself up on top and walked over to Paul.
“Need a hand?”
“Legs, actually,” he said, letting the Archon pull him up onto his feet and dip a shoulder underneath his arm, allowing Paul to wobbily stand.
“One more down,” Victor said as he helped Paul waddle across the platform, referring to the new challenges that kept popping up seemingly every week, of which the super hard ones were being given to Paul and the other higher level Archons to work on. Their success/failures would then be analyzed by other Archons/trainers and the challenges would be tweaked, eventually getting them to the ‘standardization’ point, which would result in them being officially sanctioned and sent out to the other sanctums across Star Force territory for them to add to their training regimens.
“My range still sucks,” Paul said as they neared the edge. “And it shrinks faster than I’d like.”
“You’ll get there,” Victor assured him, setting his feet and acting as a living rope as Paul stepped off the edge and climbed down his arm until their hands latched, then Victor knelt down, eventually dropping to his belly and lowering Paul over the side as far as he could before releasing his hand.
Paul dropped the last few inches, knowing his legs were going to give out, so he made his landing as elegant as possible, dropping into a roll that left him standing on his knees below as Victor swung over the side and dropped down beside him.
“Me…it’s going to take me decades to get as fast as you are. No way any of us could have made it across that gap. Your turret settings are insane.”
“Morgan’s are insane,” Paul corrected him. “Mine are just hard,” he said as Angel came towards them from somewhere on the course carrying a vial of destun serum.
“Thank you,” Paul said, telekinetically grabbing it as she tossed it into the air in front of him. It took a moment to slow its momentum, but he landed it in his hand deftly enough then jabbed it into his neck, feeling a wave of cool relief pass through his body, swiping away the bit of dizziness in his head, arms, and chest, then eating through the roadblocks in his legs, taking with it most of the uncomfortable pins and needles gathering there.
He gave it a couple of seconds to work its magic then he stood up, nodding to Angel. “Nice work up there.”
“Yes, very,” Victor added.
“Team effort,” she deflected. “They’re not making it easy on us, though.”
“Easy isn’t the point,” Paul reminded her.
“Duh,” she said sarcastically. “What I meant was these co-op challenges are getting more complicated. Clones of me couldn’t have done this together, nor could clones of you,” she said, gently putting her finger in his chest. “It’s taking different skill levels combined to complete these, and that’s something we haven’t worked on before.”
“Half right,” Paul offered her. “We have, but in the past we didn’t have such varied skills to work with. Ten years from now, when more of us get caught up, you’ll see the disparities disappear…somewhat. If some of us really pull ahead in one area, then we might be getting more varied challenges. I can promise you we won’t be doing that, but I wouldn’t put it past some of the others.”
“Meaning you’ll stay balanced?” Victor asked, knowing by ‘us’ he meant the trailblazers.
“Only way to get our ranger ranks back,” Paul said, seeing the other Archons approaching from various points on the rather large training course. “Plus we don’t like having weak areas.”
“I’ve seen your swimming scores,” Angel said with a smirk.
“Which I continue to work on,” Paul reminded her with a bit of wounded pride, though not much. With Ariel’s help he’d made up some ground on the others, though he still hated going underwater without breathing gear. “But I can see some of you guys focusing on one skill almost exclusively just so you can show off.”
“Us…show off?” Victor asked mock wounded. “Perish the thought.”
“Can’t level up our ranks that way either,” Angel said, reminding him that they weren’t that different…which Paul already knew, though he still liked to mess with their heads a bit from time to time.
“We going again?” Riona asked, walking up behind Paul and stopping just off his shoulder. “Or moving on to the next one?”
“Next one,” Paul said, knowing that meant they had to switch rooms. “Unless you guys are too low on brain juice?”
“I think we’re fine,” Angel said, suppressing a smile. “Are you good to go?”
“I’ll manage,” Paul said, realizing he’d walked into that one. He was still low man on the psionic totem pole in this group. “Let me find my rifle, then we’ll head over to the poppers.”
“Lovely,” Victor said with a cringe.
“That’s the spirit, newb,” Paul said, clapping him on the shoulder before he walked off back towards the underside of the suspension bridge.
8
July 12, 2410
Solar System
Earth
Paul blew out a slow breath and pressed his left hand against the synthetic material of the measurement wall in front of him. He felt out the contact point and kept his mental handprint focused in his senses as he increased his internal body temperature. His entire physical structure began to run hot, then he began shifting the excess heat into his core and out through his arm to his hand in a process he still didn’t fully understand.
It had been explained as increased control over his body’s internal functions, but he knew from a physics standpoint that something had to be either pushing or drawing the heat out of his tissue in order for it to move away from equilibrium. He also knew that his body couldn’t take too much of a temperature increase, so he tried to focus it to only a few degrees higher than normal, then drag it down to his arm where it began to build up to uncomfortably hot levels as he held most of it inside and away from his skin to keep from dissipating it into his clothes and the air.
That amount of control intrigued him, and while his mind couldn’t academically explain how it was happening he was learning to do it by feel alone…as well as knowing he was going to royally cook himself if he didn’t stop soon.
But he didn’t. He kept the heat building and flowing down into his arm, pulling it away from the vital areas of his body down into that one extremity, then before he could burn his hand again…as he’d done a month ago…he channeled the heat through his palm and into the material of the wall in front of him, feeling it drain out and open up room for him to move more heat out from his core.
Now was the tricky part. He needed to heat the wall past a required point, which was well above the boiling point of water. Doing that would burn his hand again, but whatever part of his body allowed him to move the heat around internally also acted as a blowback shield…if
he did it right. There were no useful instructions on how to do that, which left Paul having to figure it out through trial and lots of errors, though some of the other Archons had tried to give him a few tips.
Today, though, was going to be one of his successes. While he couldn’t store a massive amount of heat inside his body, including his hand, he could create a continual flow of it, which was now pooling in the wall directly beneath his hand. He could feel it there, but for some reason it wasn’t burning him, almost as if he had a one-way force field covering his palm that allowed the heat out but not back in…yet it allowed him to sense how much heat was there.
Some of the other Archons had been investigating this phenomena as well, but their sifting through the V’kit’no’sat database ran into the same problems his had…a lot of vocabulary they didn’t understand, and Kara was no longer around to translate. However they were doing it, they were able to shield themselves from the heat coming back into their body, and both Paul and the others knew that if they could do that in their hands, then it might be possible to do that over their entire bodies and give themselves some level of immunity to high heat situations…or at least a little bit of air conditioning on hot days.
Right now Paul was just focused on this test which, if passed, would rank him up again, given that he had the other 5 psionics areas already sufficiently advanced to reach level 11 acolyte, with the Sesspik healing trace something that they’d chosen not to measure, given that it would require an injury to test.
The wall in front of his hand didn’t glow, but he could feel the heat building on the other side of his palm as he channeled more and more of it from his core, out through his arm, and past the barrier on his palm, reducing his internal temperature…which then required him to create more heat, and at a rate that would be sufficient to affect the wall, for every bit he put into it, it was also bleeding off into the surrounding material and air.