by Aer-ki Jyr
“Captain?”
“Here,” Wilkinson answered. “Good to hear your voice. What’s your status?”
“Alive…what’s the jumpship’s status?”
“The Calavari pulled their transports out about an hour ago. Apparently the Nestafar attacked the hangar and they couldn’t hold it with the few people they had left. There’s one onboard that wants to speak with you as soon as you’re able.”
Morgan closed her eyes for a moment, with the mass losses weighing down upon her. “Give me an hour, then I’ll meet him and you on the bridge.”
“Very well.”
“I…did anyone else make it back?”
“No,” Wilkinson said softly. “I’ve got a dropship sitting just above their hull and it’s picking up their telemetry data, but there’s no response on comms and they’re not moving.”
“Including mine?”
“Yes.”
“I know Rev took his armor off and tried to head back. They may all have when the gravity kicked up.”
“What happened in there?”
“An ambush. What’s the highest the Red Ranger’s gravity plating can go?”
“2.5 if you want to burn the generators out with an overload pulse, otherwise they’ve got a 1.5 max rating. The ones in the training areas go up to 5.0 I believe.”
“Find out how high the other Alliance races’ go, and while you’re doing that target one of the other two jumpships…they’re still contained, I presume?”
“They are.”
“Target one and demand its surrender. When it refuses or ignores you start poking holes in the ship until they come to their senses. Don’t use the rail gun or the missiles.”
“To what point?”
“Until they surrender or until they’re all dead,” Morgan said angrily as she walked over to the door and out of the med bay, her legs and arms still feeling the shakes. “If they feel like dying maybe the destruction of one ship will convince the others to surrender. Just make sure you leave their comm systems intact.”
“They may try to bolt like the command ship did,” the Captain pointed out.
“Keep enough ships around all three to make that costly for them, and see if you can’t poke their gravity drives with a cleansing beam or two. I think they figure that if they can hold us off long enough they’ll get reinforcements. Make it clear that their jumpships are not going to be used to further this invasion, one way or another.”
“I understand. If they capitulate how do you want them removed from the ship?”
“The Calavari have a lot of empty transports,” Morgan said morbidly.
“I’ll take care of it. Just get yourself patched up. Everyone up here is overly relieved you came out of there alive.”
“So am I,” she said meekly before shutting the earpiece off with a touch of a button as she headed through the ship’s corridors in her aqua medical uniform and shoes. She got a lot of odd looks along the way, but didn’t understand why until she got back in her quarters and looked in a mirror.
Her irises had changed color from a dark brown to some sort of twinkling gray, almost as if they were glowing with sparkles. Morgan blinked several times, finding the sight unnerving, both by the unnatural look and the level of damage that must have been done to require that much restructuring. For a moment she wondered if the regenerator hadn’t added some mechanical components, but a close inspection showed Human iris tissue, just in a bizarre color.
She didn’t know why it would change, but it somehow seemed appropriate given how close to death she’d come. With her eyes a constant reminder and the privacy of her personal quarters lowering her mental barriers, she clutched her arms around her chest and slid down to the floor, leaning against the wall as another round of shakes overtook her, followed quickly by tears that she couldn’t suppress any longer.
What she had gone through was bad enough, but her mind kept focusing on the 10,000 dead Calavari…ten thousand! All killed in a matter of minutes by something as pathetic as a gravity field. She’d requested their help taking the ship and now they were all gone, save for a handful that had survived in the hangar bays, though why they hadn’t been affected was beyond her. She was glad a few had survived, but she felt responsible for the others even though she hadn’t been leading the assault. She’d been there to assist, but the mission was her stupid idea and they’d paid the price for it.
Worse than that, she’d lost 13 Archons. They may have been smaller in number, but their value to her was worth far more than the Calavari, as insensitive as that thought seemed. Archons weren’t supposed to die. They’d lived and trained for over 300 years…to what? Get smashed to death on some stupid enemy jumpship whose worth was minuscule in the grand scheme of things. Their lives had been wasted, as hers nearly had been, all because of a mistake.
She blamed herself for the failure, but knew the mistake was not hers alone. In all of the material the Alliance had provided Star Force they’d never so much as hinted at using gravity generators as weapons against the lizards. Star Force models weren’t even designed to push to lethal level. Such things could be built, of course, but they’d been specifically designed NOT to in case of a malfunction or overload. They didn’t want someone dying because of an accident, and she’d assumed all the other races would have had similar safeguards in place.
The fact that they hadn’t mentioned cranking up the gravity as a potential defense had seemed to reinforce that assumption. Had she assumed wrong or was this disaster of some other making? If the Nestafar had built their ships with this capability she had no doubt Star Force’s techs would find a way to defend against it, but there was no undoing this debacle. Live and learn, she reminded herself, but there was no way she was simply going to be able to let this failure go.
On top of that she was still freaked out by her own near death. Though fully healed her body still didn’t feel right, even after the walk back. It felt half alive…maybe that was due to all the new tissue that had to be regrown, or maybe it was a mental side effect of the shock she’d suffered.
Or maybe it was because it had only happened hours ago...though Morgan still wasn’t sure how many. Most of the post-generator part was a blur and she figured her mind still hadn’t caught up to the fact that she was alive…and she certainly didn’t feel like she should be.
The trailblazer waited out the tears and shakes until they gradually faded away, letting the emotions bleed out until she was ready to clamp them back down again. When she did she got up, wiped the tears away, then stripped off the medical uniform and washed the remaining blood and grime off her body in the shower tube for a few minutes but chose not to linger, despite the fact that the warm water was eating away at the odd feeling throughout her body.
10,000 Calavari and 13 Archons were dead, but the fight wasn’t over and she certainly wasn’t going to spend time relaxing in the shower. The Nestafar had invaded this system, intent on eradicating the Calavari, and they’d just killed a good number of them along with her own brothers and sisters. They were the aggressors, not the victims, and Morgan needed to avenge those that had been lost. To push it aside and continue on like nothing had happened would have been akin to treason in her mind.
She wasn’t going to turn into a savage and kill them all out of spite, but the kid gloves were coming off. If they wanted to surrender she’d give them that option, but if they didn’t she’d blow them to hell along with the jumpships.
Morgan had told Wilkinson to start with one of the others because as much as she wanted to blast the jumpship she’d just been on into pieces she couldn’t bring herself to abandon all hope that one of the other Archons had survived. Maybe even some of the Calavari, if they’d stumbled across one of the Nestafar safe zones…for she didn’t believe that all of them could have been flying around in the main chamber.
She didn’t think anyone else had survived, and she knew in her gut they hadn’t. That wasn’t the point, though. She was going to give them the chan
ce, just in case they had survived against all odds, for she couldn’t live with herself if they had clung to life, only to be killed by a subsequent attack on her orders.
No, they’d leave that jumpship for last. Hopefully the fate of the other two would convince the Nestafar onboard to surrender, whereupon they’d be escorted off the ship to Calavari prison camps on the surface…then Star Force could board the vessel and look for survivors, as well as recover remains and decide whether or not the ship was salvageable.
A vessel of that size was hard not to be salvageable, but there was no way of knowing how much internal sabotage the Nestafar might do on their way out…if they chose to surrender. If they didn’t, then the definition of ‘salvageable’ truly came into play.
That would be undertaken by the Calavari or Kvash, because Star Force didn’t have the personnel in system to handle a ship of that size for more than basic operations, let alone repair and refit duty. Morgan’s concern was to deny the enemy the use of the ships and the material and troops onboard…if they were to become of use to the Alliance after that fact then that was just a bonus.
Morgan dried off quickly and walked down from the top of the shower compartment and over to her closet where she began pulling out fresh clothes. As she did a tingle manifested in her arm and discharged against a uniform top as she brushed up against it like static electricity…save for the fact that the sleeve of the uniform jumped back an inch from her arm like a gust of wind had blown it.
She blinked twice, then dismissed the thought as something random, either her eyes playing tricks on her or she’d nudged it without feeling…which was entirely possible given the sensory disruption in her body. Everything felt as if she was controlling her body like a puppet without actually being inside, a sort of disconnect that she hoped would wear off soon, though her brief breakdown period had helped.
Morgan pulled on a T-shirt then covered it with a white Archon’s uniform top, zipping it up along the left side and around behind the shoulder and up to the neckline, hiding the thin division in the material from frontal view. She pulled on a pair of white socks that matched the white shoes then found a dark hair tie for her ponytail. As she was pulling it back her other arm got the tingles again, like a case of goose bumps that moved from her elbow down towards her wrist.
She flexed her arm and felt it discharge in a flurry…as well as seeing the cuff of her uniform puff up for a moment.
“What the hell?” she said, digging her fingers underneath the material and rubbing her wrist and forearm. That was twice now, and she doubted that she was completely seeing things, though she still didn’t fully trust her senses.
It had been tingles both times, so she tried to summon them up again. At first they wouldn’t come, then she remembered having been able to make them come back as a kid. She thought hard, trying to pull up the memories that had always elicited them. It wasn’t a scary movie, or being surprised, it was…
Then she remembered. In her mind she heard a familiar voice yell out, not in anger or rage, but in sheer effort and determination. She imagined her hair changing to blonde in a flash and energy racing from her body…then the tingle came back, this time down her back and moving up her spine. She mentally held it there for a moment then pushed it outward, trying to get the tingle to move down her right arm. Instead it dissipated again, going out her neck and popping her pony tail up into the air, again like a gust of wind.
“Ok, I am not seeing things,” she said to herself as she found a chair and sat down. Her head had been pounding ever since she’d walked out of the med bay and she rubbed it for a moment as she thought about her eye color change, wondering if the regenerator had also changed some other things in her body, including whatever this was.
Part of her wanted to push it aside and get up to the bridge as soon as possible, but she forced herself to take a moment and self-analyze…what exactly had she just done?
The ranger thought about it for several minutes and, coming to no conclusions, did what any sensible Archon would.
She tried to do it again.
It took a couple tries to find the right mental switch, piggybacking on memories of Dragonball Z, but eventually she got the tingly sensation to form in her right forearm and willed it to move up into her hand…then she pulled her left arm overtop so that her sleeve hung down an inch or so above her opposite palm. With an easy effort, as if the tingle wanted to be released, the sensation bled out of her hand.
In response the cuff of her sleeve moved, not once, but like a quick flutter…or more precisely, as if a tiny conduit of air had blown on it for about .75 seconds.
Morgan stared at her palm, wide eyed…then her sparkling orbs narrowed as another thought occurred to her.
“The dragon,” she whispered. “It said we should have other abilities. Maybe the regenerator kicked them on.”
Following that line of thought she got up and went back over to the mirror and stared into her intimidating eyes.
“Ok, this needs investigating. A little hand puff isn’t dangerous, so it can wait a few hours,” she said, staring into her reflection and wondering if it was really her body she was in, given how odd the rest of it felt, not to mention this new…skill.
“Alright,” she said, nodding at her new look. “Airbending skills can wait till downtime. Avenging my brothers and sisters comes first.”
With that thought focused firmly in her mind Morgan took her still shaky body and left her quarters headed for the bridge.
Ascension
1
March 1, 2405
Brokal System
Sri’ka
Morgan ducked to the right, letting a dodgeball-sized projectile shoot by over her shoulder and impact the back wall of the training chamber. It dented on contact with no rebound, absorbing the momentum, and dropped down into a retrieval trough that ringed the chamber as it slowly reformed into a perfect sphere. A tone sounded, indicating that the ball had in fact nicked her shoulder and subtracted a point from her accumulating score that was tallied on the upper wall in front of her.
Morgan would have frowned, but two more balls were coming her way, one from front left and the other from back left. She spun coming up and caught one on the outside of her right wrist with it deforming around her hand and barely catching on the sensor gloves she wore that counted it as a stop rather than a hit. As she flicked it off to the side and outside of the small circle she had to remain within she knelt down and caught the other, palming it, and throwing it towards a target on the wall. It hit and fell inside the holographic wall panel, adding 3 points to her score as another came in and hit her in the back…subtracting 2 more.
Normally she didn’t have this much trouble on the agility drill, but ever since her gravity crush and subsequent repair her body hadn’t felt right. Most of the oddness had dissipated, but she was left feeling ‘hollow’ and it was taking a lot of physical activity to chip away at that feeling. To top it off she was weaker than before, probably due to the new tissue being grown, but given that she hadn’t had any major injuries…such as a missing piece of muscle like Sam had endured a few decades ago…she’d figured the catch-up time would be minimal.
Honestly she didn’t know what was going on with her body, but in the past training had always straightened her out and it was training that she fell back on now, frustrating as it was.
She took several more hits, all nicks that impacted the walls, but was getting enough dodges in to keep a positive score…plus the occasional captures that added bonus points. Her score sucked compared to previous runs, but at the least she was staying in the positive through the first few rounds of the ascending challenge she was running. Morgan fought hard to stay in the positive as long as she could, twisting, turning, and occasionally jumping to avoid the balls and stay alive, but eventually the level difficulty came up to the point where she was getting hit more than evading and her score went negative.
When that happened the challenge ended and her level
reached was emblazoned on the wall…
Level 18
Morgan felt like cussing but didn’t have the energy. She’d doubled up her ambrosia doses and was carrying a sugar high-like headache as a result, but her body wasn’t soaking it up like it used to. She was constantly tired, but wasn’t backing off her workouts, planning to fight her way through it because the idea of just sitting and thinking was unbearable right now. With everything that had just happened and her body being out of whack, calm was the last thing she wanted. She needed to act, and at the moment naval combat was all that was available.
Her fleet had been bombarding one of the Nestafar jumpships for nearly a day now but it still hadn’t surrendered. Captain Wilkinson had reported they’d disabled its gravity drives, so it was no longer a flight risk, but pick at it as they may the crew wasn’t giving up…and all Morgan had to do was sit/stand on the bridge and watch the plasma bombardment as they beat the crap out of the giant ship’s hull.
There was only so much of that she could take, so Morgan had banished herself to the Red Ranger’s sanctum and had been training in one form or another ever since, catching only a pair of half hour long catnaps along the way. After that she couldn’t sleep, another little side effect of her recent brush with death.
She’d had the medics do another scan to confirm that the regenerator had put her back together correctly, which it had, and they had no explanation for her eye color change. They had told her that it was a pigment change only, so no latent superpowers there, but they also couldn’t detect any variations that resulted in her airbending skills either, so other than making sure all her organs were intact the medics were of little use.
Morgan felt like having another go at the challenge but opted to stop now after 20 tries, reminding herself that she needed to take breaks if for nothing else to clear her head and get some water. To that end she walked over to the all but invisible door and flipped up a cover panel, pressing the button underneath.
