Lurker

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Morgan got a couple of updates including data of the Lurker cannibalizing its own minions. If what the other trailblazers thought was true, then this might be an Essence harvesting mechanism…and if it was, then it would be a way of recharging what was lost far faster than natural, or it might be an overcharge mechanism similar to the way some of the Essence users stored a reserve in a personal item, such as a ring or bracelet. They would move some of their Essence into the specially crafted Magicite container and have to periodically add a little charge to maintain the Essence reflectivity of the material, for only that reflectivity allowed one to put additional Essence inside as a bottle without it ‘leaking’ out or disappearing entirely the way Essence normally did away from a Core.

  Then again it could be something else entirely, but the more tidbits that came in seemed to suggest only one thing…that this new Hadarak could use Essence, and with a body the size of an asteroid, that was a whole lot more passive Essence than Morgan could ever hope to match given her tiny body comparison. Her Essence skills were far beyond passive now, with her possessing 17 times as much Essence as she had when she first broke through to her initial Essence Rush referred to as ‘popping the cork’ by Head Trainer Wilson.

  Now, whenever she used her Essence in a major way, her body, or more accurately her ‘person,’ adapted to give her a bigger Essence presence, far more than her body required for life. But 17 times was nothing compared to someone miles in diameter. The thought of what a Hadarak could do with Essence truly scared her, but they had to confront this thing, from a distance at least, and figure out what it could or couldn’t do.

  Eventually one of the V’kit’no’sat ships found it, and was gracious enough to send out scouts to inform the other hunting fleets. By the time Morgan’s caught up with it, it was two systems further away and three other trailblazers had beat her there…but the moment the Opal Ranger came out of its braking jump into the system she got an emergency request for all her drones on the Star Force battlemap.

  Morgan didn’t hesitate, trigger the fastest release possible for the column of tightly packed drones trailing her cubical ship and making it look 5 times as large as it actually was. As they began to fly out like dust from the column, her ship’s sensors began to catch up with the deceleration lag and what she saw stunned her. The Lurker was nearby, but not close enough to endanger her fleet, whose ships that had already arrived were now devoid of drones, having been pulled away on Jason’s order. He, Greg-073, and Ace-095 were already here and based on the battlemap data, their Borg-class vessels were almost entirely stripped of their drones.

  It didn’t take long for Morgan to mentally sift through the battle reports from previous days, and it was in that review that she began to learn the truth about the monster they were hunting. It did, in fact, have the ability to use Essence, but it was displaying multiple techniques unknown to Star Force, including a disruption effect that basically undid the bonds between molecules and just reduced a target into an expanding nebula. That was what had killed Riona, but not most of her crew.

  None of the manned Star Force ships were getting anywhere close to the Lurker, but the Zak’de’ron had and their servant crews had been killed just by getting into proximity, save for the few that had regenerators on. According to the information they were sharing, it was some type of attack that triggered a heart attack, where all blood pressure stopped as the biological pumps were ‘frozen’ in place. No sign of any energy or matter interference was noted, and the Zak’de’ron had been pleading with Star Force for an explanation.

  It had taken some work, but together they had figured out that there was a spherical pulse attack from the Lurker, which Jason and the few other Essence users could actually see happen. The Zak’de’ron could not, nor could the V’kit’no’sat, and Jason now had a Zak’de’ron onboard his ship as an observer so he could look through Jason’s mind and see the Essence that they could not.

  That was a bold move on Jason’s part, trusting a Zak’de’ron to get that close, but he wasn’t plugged into his astromech right now and the Sanguine Blade was keeping far out of range while sending in drones and having them get eviscerated by the Lurker…which was why they had been running out of them.

  But the urgent plea now was because this system was inhabited by Hadarak minions, and the Lurker was headed down to the second of two planets while the drones in play attacked it mercilessly…and it ignored most of them. Seeing the battle records Morgan understood why. It had been using Essence to destroy them, for ramming didn’t work well against targets that ‘small,’ at only a mile or less long, and the drones were faster than it except when it used Essence to enhance its engine power. It had managed to ram a few when it had a split second head start, but that wasn’t an efficient tactic when it had to consume Essence for each super-fast maneuver.

  Ace had been able to document a basic power curve of its engine power, which was about 1.7 times better than a Hadarak without enhancement, but then when Essence was added it jumped off the Hadarak charts and gave it speed equivalent to technological gravity drives…but not within predicted levels, because how much Essence you devoted to it had an effect. Morgan knew from Star Force’s own Essence-boosted techniques regarding Yen’mer, the flight psionic, that it was like stretching a rubber band. The more Essence you put into it, the more you were able to cheat physics, but also the more you put into it the less additional boost you got.

  That meant they did not have a top speed rating for the Lurker the way a mechanical engine would have, and that meant they could not navigate close to it with the manned ships to get some long range Tar’vem’jic shots in without risking the crews…and the drones were far too small to carry Tar’vem’jic.

  The V’kit’no’sat didn’t know what to do, and thankfully they were not sending their ships in to die needlessly. They were staying back and supporting Star Force, and right now Morgan saw that a lot of them were in fact burning the minions off of both planets…and suddenly she knew why the Lurker was heading back to them. It needed a recharge of Essence, and if it could steal it from the minions that was essentially the equivalent of reloading. Though how much could it actually take from those so much smaller than it was a question mark at this point.

  “Fucking vampire,” she sneered, altering course with her Borg vessel even as the rest of her fleet continued to jump in behind her and send their drones off to Jason. “Time to test the garlic.”

  Morgan sent the other trailblazers a message rather than holo due to the time lag that had them spread out too much for realtime communication, indicating what she intended to do, and Greg responded with a best case/worst case assessment of her chances, but none of them called her off, because she had something they didn’t. When the others had come out to fight Hadarak, they’d left all their Materia weapons behind, not intending to waste them on such large targets as the Hadarak, but Star Force needed to know as much about this bastard as they could, so Morgan was willing to use the single one she’d kept onboard her ship in order to poke it and see what happened.

  “Cap, you know the drill. She’s all yours,” the trailblazer said, leaving the bridge in the hands of Captain Andor as she ran into a corner alcove and disappeared into a transit pod that would rapidly carry her across the 327 mile wide ship to a large number of key points, one of which was not too far off from where she’d hidden the Materia.

  It took a few minutes for Morgan to sprint the rest of the way through the empty corridors on the huge ship, then she came to a door with no handle, knob, or interface of any known kind…except for a simple bar hidden within the door itself and visible only to Pefbar.

  Morgan used her Lachka and rotated the heavy bar around…something most psionic wielders could not due to the weight of it, and unlocked her personal vault, inside of which was a number of different items, but she ran past the rows of shelves until she got to the back where there were individual compartments lining the far wall, inside of which was a ruby red crystal the
size of a phone booth that held not only a lot of Morgan’s Essence, but the deposits of thousands of others gathered back in Star Force territory. Morgan had to top it off every now and then to maintain the shielding, but she had also been draining herself regularly in order to provoke adaptation to more than 17 times her original Essence level.

  And a lot of the time when she did the draining, it wasn’t in training. It was here, gradually filling up the container that could theoretically hold 178 times more, but what it had in it already was more valuable than a cargo ship packed full of solari from stem to stern.

  Morgan used an anti-grav harness, then attached the crystal to her back and ran out of the vault, triggering it to seal behind her as she headed for the nearest proper lift car that would take her to one of the Opal Ranger’s Tar’vem’jic batteries, for it was about to get a huge, one-time upgrade.

  8

  The Tar’vem’jic itself was massive, more than a mile long and half a mile thick in its core alone. Morgan had to work her way through a lot of corridors not designed for straight line movement before she got to the outer shell of the reaction chamber. There was no door to get inside it, for it wasn’t somewhere you wanted to be when it turned on, but her ship had been built to accommodate Magicite, so there was an injection port waiting further to the left where the trailblazer set down the ruby red crystal matrix and tipped it over with the narrow end pointing towards the port.

  She tossed aside the anti-grav pads and lifted the whole thing up on muscle alone, ramming it hard into the port so that it would accept it, then the crystal began to melt around the rim and fuse solid with the firing chamber…but that wasn’t going to do it. Morgan was going to have to manually fire this thing, because it required her Essence trigger to open, and that couldn’t be manufactured into technology, at least not as far as Star Force had learned to date.

  “Cap, I’m ready,” she said through her armor’s comm, though it was currently retracted into two arm gauntlets. “Pick your spot and make it count. You’re only getting one shot.”

  “I know,” the Xorell Captain said with his race’s telltale warble voice. “Do you want a full armor hit or should I try to get one of the dents enlarged?”

  “Go for a dent, but the Lurker might get crazy when I start to use Essence, so be ready to hit a moving target. I don’t want this wasted.”

  “Understood. We’re moving into position now at extreme range and we’re currently aligned for a shot. Activate it at your convenience, unless you want us to get closer?”

  “This should enhance the range, just make sure you can follow the target once you shoot. And I need you to get a beam lock before I engage. Do so now.”

  “Firing,” Captain Andor said, with the reaction chamber two feet ahead of Morgan suddenly getting dangerously hot. She could feel the heat coming off it as she instinctively kicked in her Rensiek to shield her face and other exposed skin as the weapon mixed its exotic cocktail and shot it out at the Lurker continuously. Morgan snuck a peak through the battlemap, seeing it hit the Lurker from range as the swarm of drones moved aside just enough to let the beam pass, as there were other Tar’vem’jic shots from different ships risking themselves to help distract away from Morgan’s prime shot.

  The Lurker just shrugged them off, suffering the armor damage as it continued to suck up minions from below and tear through drones above that were far closer and more annoying than the few larger Tar’vem’jic stings. They had its attention right now, or maybe the minion harvesting did, but it was racking up a huge killcount of the closer enemies despite the outer layers of armor they had been removing with millions upon millions of tiny stings. Already it had destroyed 3.6 million drones, and at the rate it was going it would destroy the rest before they got through its outer armor layer…assuming it was of similar thickness to that of the regular Hadarak.

  The Tar’vem’jic from the Opal Ranger wasn’t the only one firing constantly. The others were as well, taking advantage of the Lurker’s lack of movement with each hitting different ‘dents,’ but since the drones were coming to it, there wasn’t a need to break away from harvesting to return fire. Its disruption attacks were increasing as it took out drones in single shots and turned the harvesting area around it into a quickly growing cloud following the battlefield as the minions were actually moving into harvesting range to increase efficiency until they realized that they were going to be killed, then they tried to flee with no hope of getting away.

  “Please just sit there,” Morgan said as she focused and summoned up her own Essence Rush. The energy inside her began to swirl, with her pushing it beyond her body and into the air like a pair of invisible hands. The Lurker sensed it, even from this far away, and stopped harvesting as it headed up towards her ship even as the Tar’vem’jic continued to fire and Andor reversed course, staying ahead of the Lurker as it accelerated hard up through the atmosphere to catch up.

  Morgan took one last breath, then shoved her Essence into the Magicite and took control of the mechanism at the end, which altered the Essence stored inside into the proper technique to enhance the beam…then she began pouring it into the reaction chamber and the heat level jumped so much her clothing caught on fire, but she ignored it. She kept her Rensiek up and let her clothing just burn off her body as her skin remained safe. The Essence stored up wouldn’t release all at once, not with this weapon, so she had to keep finessing it, for she was the one powering the alteration ‘valve’ and if she stopped it would just dump into the machinery and probably cause it to explode inside the ship…or it might freeze it all out. She didn’t know and didn’t want to find out, so she had to stay put and make sure the Essence coming out remained a beam enhancer and not anything else.

  She didn’t have much focus left to monitor the battlemap, but as the seconds went by she noticed a shift in the target and the ship…then suddenly the Magicite was empty and there was nothing left for her to do other than put out the burning scraps of clothing hanging off her body.

  Her gauntlets were undamaged from the heat, though they were too warm for her to release her Rensiek and not get burned by them. Morgan walked away from the reaction chamber wall as it began to cool back down to ‘normal’ level as the Opal Ranger continued to fire from it, perhaps not realizing that Morgan’s enhancement had run its course.

  “I’m empty,” she told Captain Andor, then suddenly there was a lurch in the ship that threw her into the sidewall. Her head hit, nearly blacking her out, then her armored deployed over her body and the regenerator inside it quickly cleared the fog from her concussed head as the ship shook again.

  She caught a glimpse of the battlemap and realized the Lurker had rammed them right through their dampening shields, rotated around inside the ship and was in the process of slicing off a piece of it, then it had been broken free by a quick emergency jump out into the system at a speed it couldn’t match.

  That had torn the ship even further apart, but not the section that Morgan was in. The sensors blurred with the microjump, then she belatedly realized that the Lurker had a hole in it. She double checked the past few moments of battle, and confirmed that the Tar’vem’jic hit had burned through the armor and into…no wait, not into it, right through it and out the other side!

  Morgan glanced over at the Magicite container that was still attached to the side of the reaction chamber like a tick. “Looks like Yeg’gor can’t stand up to some badass mojo. I take back everything I said about you,” she told the device as she stood up and tried to get updates on the Lurker’s position, but they were accelerating away from the battle at nearly interstellar jump speed heading nowhere and the Captain was now trying to slow them before they ended up lost in space too far from a star to slow down again.

  That meant they were actually traveling faster than the comm signals coming from the rest of the fleet, so it took quite a while to figure out what was going on back there, but eventually Morgan found out halfway back to the vault with her empty Magicite carried on her
back without the anti-grav pads that had broken during the jolt.

  The Lurker had tried to come after them, but whatever magic it had used to get the speed necessary to ram them wasn’t up to the task of chasing them that fast…or maybe it didn’t want to get lost in space itself, or didn’t have the necessary strength to accelerate then immediately decelerate. Either way, it had not followed, and rather than engaging the remaining drones it had gone after the other Borg vessels…none of which were in a mood to get caught. Once it figured that out it turned and ran back to the star, diving inside and hiding there, but still very much alive and relatively undamaged except for the one narrow drill hole that Morgan’s ship had just put in it.

  Later she ran into a bulkhead that shouldn’t have been shut, then redirected around the damaged area that seemed to be expanding. That didn’t make any sense until a mass of green goo started to burn through the wall ahead of her.

  “Oh shit,” she said, turning around and running with the Magicite on her back, but the advancement rate was too fast and she had to actually start flying through the corridors to avoid dropping it and running for her life.

  “Active weapon system inside the ship!” she yelled over the comm. “Use internal shields.”

  No response came from the bridge, and Morgan didn’t have time to check on their status as she rounded one corner after another, then had to race to get past another closing bulkhead as the air behind her started to get sucked out into space.

  She didn’t want to leave the Magicite behind, but eventually she had no choice, throwing it backwards in disgust as she shot on ahead and started to gain ground on the corrosive goo that seemed to have a mind of its own.

  When that description ran through her mind it caused an epiphany, with her using her Essence to scan it, at which point she realized it wasn’t just a weapon, it was actually alive!

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, turning around and heading back to where she dropped the Magicite. Before she got there the goo did, but she tried attacking it with a variety of psionics and was disappointed when Ikrid didn’t connect to anything. She switched to Essence probes and used it to enhance her psionics, pushing and pulling the goo away from the Magicite with limited effect as it surrounded the container and consumed the nearby walls with rapid pace.