by Aer-ki Jyr
Pulling back from the sensation no longer worked, as it seemed to seek him out now. Nor did distraction or overloading his senses with extraneous data. He’d tried audial, visual, and tactile stimuli but none of them would kick him out of his spidey sense mode and he began to wonder if this could actually kill him if allowed to escalate further.
With the blood rushing into his head and seeming to counter-push the cranial pressure he tried to relax and slip into a meditative serenity but literally every thought he made felt like barbed wire, so the only way he could avoid mentally cutting himself into ribbons was by holding absolutely still in mind’s eye…which he couldn’t do with a massive headache pounding him nonstop. He had to push back against it, and that mental activity ground on him. When he got frustrated with it, it became even worse. Jason couldn’t find a way to beat it or escape it…he couldn’t even find a way to fight it, for everything he did or didn’t do just made it worse.
So he was just trying to ride out the storm, keeping his frustration and mental activity in check and causing as little additional damage as possible, hoping that this would right itself eventually. Holding his handstand he closed his eyes…yet was still able to ‘see’ everything around him in faint outlines that helped him orient his balance. After 10-15 minutes he began to make some progress, with the painful hurricane flying through his mind settling down to a mere thunderstorm…then like a flash of lightning a random jolt of pain blinded his new sense for a split second and he lost his orientation.
The next thing he knew his back smacked the floor, knocking the wind out of him and undoing all his mental barriers as he lost connection with reality from the unexpected jolt. The pain was still there, however, and as soon as his brain woke up enough to feel it he instinctively pushed back with all the frustration and anger that he’d been containing before he could remember to stop himself.
Like Goku going super saiyan, Jason screamed inside his head with every muscle in his body clenching up in effort as he tried to blast away the pain by sheer force. When he realized what he was doing it was too late, so he just went with it…tired of backing down against this internal enemy no matter what damage he caused.
The mental scream intensified and soon found its way to his vocal chords, which matched in intensity what he was feeling inside. His back arched off the ground as he stared at the ceiling through closed eyes and yelled, not a scream of pain, but of power and rage as if trying to vocally beat back his enemy.
Somewhere in all that he felt something pop, and when he ran out of air and the yelling stopped he felt a warm, wet trickle rolling down the right side of his face. He flipped over onto his belly and reached a hand up and swiped at the liquid, then saw the blood on his fingertips. With a sigh he just laid down and let it drain out for a bit. The pain in his head was still there and now throbbing, but the building pressure had diminished, and for that, at least, he was grateful.
When the drips coming off his nose got annoying he reached up and pinched off his right nostril, intent on holding it closed until the breach sealed. He slid a few inches away from the small pool of blood on the mat and stared at the dark red puddle, acknowledging the fact that this mental problem was definitely spilling over and having an effect on his body. Part of him had wanted to just see it as a software problem, but in biologicals the software and hardware were never completely separate entities, and as much as a good run could clear his head, a messed up head could certainly screw up his body.
The blood stood out against the lightly colored mats, but it also stood in perfect clarity within his mind. He could feel its shape and texture, as well as the cloying nature of the liquid. Even with his eyes closed he knew its position and could feel the millimeter of height it had up off the mat. When he looked at it his visual senses seemed to enhance the 3d sense, causing it to go into more detail as if it were piggybacking on his sight data analysis program in his brain.
The mass of blood seemed to take on a special presence within his mind, as if it were a tiny pressure point of its own alongside the monster inside his head and the physical pressure of his finger-blocked nostril that was now pulsing amidst the coppery smell. He couldn’t do anything with those two aside from wait them out, but he reached out and tried to push the blood from his mind, feeling it weighed as much as a rock but gave slightly as if it were made of half-dried play dough.
A ripple formed in his mind…and to his shock his vision registered it in the blood as well, like a slight tremor impact. The pool quickly reformed its mirror-like, smooth surface as if nothing had happened, but Jason had seen it and despite the maelstrom in his head he was damn sure not going to let it sweep away that memory.
He found the tiny pressure in his mind again and pushed, harder this time. A shot of adrenaline followed as he realized that the big pressure in his mind drained a bit as he pushed, as if the effort was siphoning it off just a touch. Glad as he was for finally finding at least a small outlet for the mental pressure he also saw the blood ripple again, this time from a slight impact crater on the surface his side of dead center…which was the exact position he had pushed against it in his mind.
Emboldened by both discoveries he put a good amount of force into his next push, feeling like his mind was shoving its way through a bush leafed with razor blades. He clenched his teeth against the searing pain, trying not to flinch in body or mind in the process. Another spurt of pressure left his head…and the center of the pool of blood pushed out away from him, dragging and spreading the liquid a good inch further out onto the mat.
Tears welled up in Jason’s eyes from the pain that didn’t stop when the effort did. It lingered on as if he’d just took a piece of sandpaper made with glass shards and scraped it across his knee. Take the paper away and the injury lingers, as did this insane shredding of his mind.
Through the tears he stared at the misshapen pool of blood and grit his teeth as he forced his mind into a semblance of function along with a body that had begun to shake.
“Worth…it,” he pronounced piecemeal, as if needing to convince himself by hearing the words. Steeling himself against the pain to come he slowly built up mental pressure on the blood, as if spreading out the pain into smaller pieces that he could handle, then he pulled from the pressure in his head and pushed in a long, steady flow that, while rubbing his mind raw, relieved another portion of it like a deflating balloon that nearly compensated for the pain.
With his head turned to the side and his mouth closed so there could be no chance of his breath being responsible, he watched in both sight and 3d sense as the dark red liquid stretched out as if someone had drawn their finger through it and created a tendril offshoot.
Jason pushed it further, then released and pushed another section…nearly choking on the pain of transition. The second tendril pushed out at a slightly different angle forming a shallow ‘V’ that Jason then expanded upon with a third, shorter offshoot more to the side that seemed to drain away nearly half of the pressure in his head, giving him back a portion of his mental capacities that had been pain-numbed for days.
Flinching against the new damage he’d just done, he managed a laugh as he looked at the crude Vulcan salute he’d drawn with his mind.
He blinked away more tears, half from the pain and half from sheer joy. Not only had he finally made a breakthrough against the mental pressure that was literally killing him, but he’d also just discovered he was telekinetic…and the significance of that wasn’t going to be lost on him no matter how much pain he was in. Not after all those hundreds of hours of watching TV and movies as a kid and wishing he could summon the remote control from across the living room with a mere thought and twitch of his hand.
Though back then he had no idea that a mere thought could prove so painful, but that didn’t matter now. He had force powers…and a way to bleed off the pressure continually building in his head, which meant this internal war was now a fair fight, rather than the hopeless struggle he’d been enduring for months.
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br /> He had a lot of painful work to do, and was by no means out of danger, but he was going to win this fight...no matter how long it took.
Death Knell
1
February 27, 2405
Brokal System
Sri’ka
“Are you ready?”
Morgan nodded towards the slightly delayed hologram of the Kvash commander. “We are.”
“I wish you luck,” the rocky biped groaned in the trade language. Its various joints clicked as it raised its squat, flat head higher. “Commence countdown.”
Morgan glanced to her right, making sure her people activated their end of the highly synchronized attack they were about to pull off. To answer her question a holographic countdown clock appeared over the bridge of the warship she was commanding. Three others were nearby in high orbit around Sri’ka, a major Calavari world and capitol of this system’s micro-civilization.
Seven planets, all highly industrialized, made the Brokal system one of the Calavari’s economic linchpins, making up a significant portion of their starship and starfighter production line. The Nestafar had hit it hard a little over a year ago, but like Sol with so many inhabited planets, stations, and populations it couldn’t be captured in one fell swoop. An ongoing mini war had been occurring in the system ever since the first Nestafar attack on Sri’ka, with mixed results. The Calavari were holding on to it with a vengeance and even the Kvash had dispatched a battlegroup to keep the Nestafar from taking the valuable industry and turning it to their advantage…not to mention the Valerie starfighter line.
The fighting had been heavy and hard from the get go with both sides throwing reinforcements into the system, but as the available reserves dwindled the system commanders had begun to scale back combat to what they could manage without overcommitting their forces. A partial stalemate had occurred, with some planets in the system seeing lesser conflicts as a giant chess match played out with the Nestafar making small gains as the weeks rolled by.
Star Force, on its juggernaut roll through the list of small Calavari worlds the Nestafar had taken, had been requested to come in and break the stalemate before the Nestafar could summon up additional reinforcements of their own. Morgan had already split up her forces at that point into 3 groups assaulting nearby systems while progressing along a common line. She’d pulled off four warships from normal operations and used a Hycre jump cradle to interlink the four and make the much longer trip out to the Brokal system to drop the hammer on the Nestafar there.
The rest of the jump cradles had already been repurposed elsewhere, as the Hycre helped move around troops from other ‘slower’ races to more opportune locations, essentially stranding the Star Force troops in Calavari territory…but that had been part of the plan all along. This side mission had been on the spur of the moment as conflicts all across the region tied up more and more fleets in combat while lizard attacks continued further out towards the rim, splitting the Alliance forces and stretching their resources thin, allowing smaller worlds to be swept up with minimal effort while the major population centers were being vied for.
Which was why it was so important for Star Force to remain loose in the region as a purely offensive force…while the other supporting races deployed into defensive rolls to protect key systems. If all of them did likewise then it would give the Nestafar the advantage, and the Archons definitely weren’t going to allow that to happen. They had been hitting the Nestafar occupation zone where they were weak for the past 2 years, forcing them to devote additional troops and ships to defend them or lose the little ones that they themselves had taken in a similar manner, exploiting the Calavari’s weakness.
The distances between systems were also problematic. It took at least a week to transition between inhabited systems, even with the Hycre jump cradles. The galaxy was vast and this small corner of it was no exception. If a system was caught off guard it was most likely to fall, given that alerting others to its plight, let alone getting reinforcements sent out, was problematic. This definitely gave the attacker the advantage if they came in with sufficient forces to overwhelm their target.
Likewise it favored the more developed systems that had multiple worlds that could reinforce one another. Those were extremely hard to take, and as such favored the defenders…meaning that assaults on Brokal and others were vast affairs that could take years to resolve, meaning that the entire Alliance war effort was really dozens of individual wars being fought simultaneously, often without knowing what was happening elsewhere. Communication was an Achilles heel for the Alliance that the Bsidd were trying to counter with their relay network, but even messages passing through it were significantly delayed.
Morgan and the other trailblazers had already learned a crucial lesson in space warfare…the victors were those who were prepared. Territory grabbers were notoriously weak, and it was those that could hold what they took and develop those planets up into ‘fortress worlds’ that would eventually dominate the overall war.
But where there was chaos there was opportunity, and a bold race could take dozens of minor systems and hold them with a few ships if they knew the enemy wasn’t in a position to respond, such as Star Force had been doing with the Nestafar occupation zone, except that Morgan’s troops weren’t holding anything…they were returning it to the Calavari and leaving the holding to them.
In war there was much opportunity for the wise to exploit, but part of wisdom was knowing your enemy, where they were, how strong their fleets were, etc…but this war, or rather this regional conflict with the Nestafar, was essentially occurring blind. Both sides were slugging it out, guessing at target strength and reinforcing where they could, which was resulting in a yoyo effect that had seen territory taken, then retaken…only to be lost a second time to another batch of reinforcements.
Morgan poured over every bit of detail she could get her hands on, constantly shaking her head in dismay at how events were progressing. This whole Nestafar/Calavari theatre was playing out like an unorganized free for all, and she knew she had to keep her fleets moving or else they could get caught on the wrong side of one of the mini pushes. Their best defense was to keep mobile and the enemy unaware of where they were, because by now they had to have poked their way onto the Nestafar radar as more than the minor threat that most races in the Alliance had initially considered the Humans to be.
Part of that had been the fact that Star Force territory was on the edge of Alliance ‘territory,’ which was actually bits and pieces around the perimeter of the lizards’ holdings. The Human piece was one of the furthest outliers, so the Alliance races, including the Nestafar, hadn’t had much interaction with them nor knowledge of their worlds. This was advantageous because Star Force could hit the Nestafar without having to worry about them hitting back…anytime soon, anyway. They had their hands full with the Calavari and the rest of the Alliance, though if Star Force’s allies fell, to either the Nestafar or the lizards, Morgan expected their enemies to have a good enough memory of events to come looking for payback eventually.
But for now Morgan was on offense, as she preferred, and this current mission that her four warships were just wading into was the biggest opportunity to stick it to the Nestafar to date, as well as being the most risky, but the fog of war was on their side given that they knew from the others fighting in the system where the enemy was and how strong they were…while the Nestafar had no idea her strikeforce was incoming.
When the timer reached 3 minutes Morgan saw no change, but down on the surface of Sri’ka, in one of the Calavari-held regions, 583 Valeries lifted off from one of their major airfields and burnt hard for space, heading for the position of the main Nestafar fleet in the system that had been interdicting the planet for months, cutting off any large scale hope of resupply and keeping possession of low to middle orbit while they either destroyed or captured the installations around the planet. The part of the blockade the fighters were heading up to was the thickest, and even as impressive as 500+
Valeries were, it was an insignificant force against the Nestafar warships…even if they didn’t have a fighter screen of their own.
Which they did. As the Valeries shot up through the thinning air the Nestafar carriers began deploying squadron after squadron of their own fighters, supplemented by a number of Valeries they still possessed, all of which raced out ahead of the wing-shaped warships in order to intercept the Calavari before they could get within range.
Instead of trying to fight their way past and go after the enemy warships the Calavari pilots halted their advance and engaged the fighters directly in a massive starfighter fur ball just above the atmosphere. Hundreds of dots swirled around each other on the Nestafar sensors, cancelling each other out in ones and twos with the Calavari maintaining their traditional edge. The formation of capital ships just sat and watched the battle until a pair of destroyers on the right flank suddenly turned off, accelerating away.
As if oblivious the rest of the fleet held position in clustered rows…then a cruiser went off, followed by a squadron of corvettes until the sensor ghost they were picking up finally resolved itself into a single, massive warship as it dropped its sensor stealthing matrix so it could fire on the destroyers.
Like a cloaking device, what had been black, signal dampening panels suddenly turned stark white, picking up the sunlight and reflecting it back like a dull star in low orbit that had somehow snuck up on the Nestafar formation. Capital ship grade plasma streamers shot out a deep maroon-colored plasma from the forward two sections of the ‘tri-sphere’ ship, which looked like 3 golf balls mashed together into a solid lump that was one of the most notoriously well-defended ship designs in the Alliance.
Two plasma streamers hit the leading destroyer, sapping its shield strength for several seconds before they broke through and hit the hull on the starboard wing as the Nestafar ship fired off a salvo of glowing green missiles. It emptied its hold of the weapons before the plasma streamers cut the ship in half and diverted to the incoming cruiser, with the missiles flying in an evasive spiral in towards the port sphere on the Kvash battleship.
