by Aer-ki Jyr
From there she went through a mix of punching bags and cubes that had one side highlighted as a target, requiring a lateral attack, then one in the center of the room that required an aerial attack.
Morgan took three long strides and jumped up above the meter-high squishy box, spreading her arms wide a la Trinity and brought her knees together, stretching out her quads and turning her body into a falling arrow that imbedded her knees in the target before spilling her forward through a partial summersault off the box. Her arms caught her before she could fall far and she did a front handspring back up onto her feet and into a run for two steps before an almost instantaneous Archon Punch into a punching bag, then reversed herself diagonally to hit another one back left.
From there she zigzagged through a plinko course of the objects, having a considerable amount of fun matching her movements to the music’s beat. The targets on the far end of Balboa Lane got stranger and more complicated, including some hoops she had to jump through while kicking, the last of which required a backflip overhead kick into a target atop the hoop. Morgan nailed it with a few inches to spare, then brought her knees up to her chest and continued the abbreviated rotation.
She stuck her legs down just in time and managed to land on her feet, then stutter-stepped with her back facing towards the far wall. Morgan turned the recovery motion into an additional two intentional steps and dropped down into a hunching position, driving her left elbow into the top of the reversal pedestal…which altered the course into the second half arrangement.
New obstacles shot up to replace a few of the others while the rest repositioned slightly to offer her a different choreography to work through. Morgan headed back through on rhythm and eventually ended up back where she began, slapping the finish pedestal and stopping her timing clock. She held position for a few luxuriously exhausted breaths, then walked over to the control board to see how she’d done.
Her time was about what she expected it to be, a few seconds slow because she was going for rhythm and not speed. The concussion levels were well below normal though, which she didn’t like. That meant she was hitting and kicking weaker than normal, which she reluctantly admitted was probably due to her body’s repairs from the gravity trap. Jason and others had said the healed tissue didn’t work as well, but part of Morgan had hoped it would just be a matter of reacclimation rather than rebuilding strength.
She’d had enough time to adjust by now, so apparently she’d been wrong. The damn Nestafar had set her back in her training…one more thing that she would never forgive them for.
Morgan reset the controls for the course but let the music continue to play. There was one thing the Nestafar hadn’t set her back in, and in fact may have helped her to accelerate.
All the objects within the long room disappeared into their compartments save for one punching bag that moved into center position about 30 meters down from the entrance. Morgan walked over to it, jumping playfully a few times when the music lyrics said to do so, then she set herself and stepped into the bag, Archon Punching a single time, then stepping back and looking to her right…where a holographic concussion score of 173 was floating.
She stepped back in and threw a few sidearm blows and even a knee for good measure, then walked back about two meters and faced the left wall so her right arm was aimed towards the target.
“Ok, Morgan. Let’s see how hard this is,” she said, raising her arm up lazily and summoning the tingle that was already present within her body and that the agility run had shaken up even more. Like before they manifested along her spine, as well as with a bit in the back of her head and upper left leg. Using a considerable amount of will she sucked all the tingles up and into her shoulder, then sent them down her arm where they caught in her palm, just as they had in the nexus.
The energy wanted to blow out in all directions from her hand, but somehow Morgan was able to focus it down into a small point which she imagined to be directly in the center of her palm, and like a water hose being pinched by your thumb to aim the spray she sent the energy out of her hand towards the punching bag.
There was a small ‘thump’ in the material that Morgan couldn’t hear over the loud music, but she could see the wrinkle in the surface of the bag when it hit. Then the concussion counter registered a score of 6, confirming that she had actually hit it with the invisible blast.
Morgan nodded, smiling from ear to ear. “Again,” she prompted herself, trying to summon another wave of the tingles. It took more effort this time, but she succeeded in bringing them forth and forcing them down her arm. They released a bit easier and with less ‘spray,’ or so she imagined.
The hologram flashed bright and changed the number from 6 up to 8.
Morgan blew out a slow breath. This wasn’t going to be easy going at first, she knew, but she had what she thought of as a ‘training foothold’ on the ability and in the end that’s all she truly needed. Now that she could summon it at will she had a way to train for it, and she was more than eager to not only get the random energy discharges under control, but to learn how to focus the energy into a myriad of combat applications.
New training.
New ability.
New challenge.
That was Archon candy, and Morgan was more than happy to bite off a mouthful of this challenge.
She summoned up another wave of the tingles and got to work.
10
March 27, 2405
Brokal System
Ra’sa
Morgan was lying in bed, half-waking between deeper sleep sessions that seemed to oscillate every couple of hours, during which her mind leapt about in a semi-dream state. Ever since coming out of the gravity trap she hadn’t slept well, as if her body/mind were still damaged and undergoing subtle repairs. Even when she got a really hard workout in the fatigue would only knock her out for four or five hours, then she’d start to oscillate again until her alarm finally pulled her all the way back to consciousness.
This time her mind flashed back to the Nestafar jumpship, a mix between dreamy alterations and memories. First she was fighting the Nestafar infantry, then she was climbing the leg of the walker. Somewhere down the chain of battle snippets she found herself back in the crush of the high gravity, shooting at the energy wall blocking her way from the generator. Hazy as the memory was it replayed intact, and she could feel the desperation and hopelessness of the situation, along with her determination not to give in to it.
Morgan curled up in a ball underneath the covers, her closed eyes squinting in effort as she relived the moment…then just as she felt trapped and never able to get out the tingling sensation returned and she was through the shield, then her mind zipped over to the zero g aftermath of the explosion of what the techs had subsequently deduced to be a cooling unit. When it had gone offline the overtaxed gravity generator had almost instantaneously fried itself, thus saving Morgan.
In her dream state she began to float down the maintenance tube, but there she forcefully stopped her dream and put it into reverse…going back to the energy field and making it replay again in her mind, though some elements became distorted by the effort.
With a jolt of adrenaline she jerked in bed, then blinked away the post-dream haze as she woke herself up. She pulled her torso up into a sitting position, ensuring she wouldn’t fall back asleep, and rubbed some of the ache out of her forehead as she tried to line her thoughts up in an analytical manner that wasn’t possible in a dream state.
The tingle.
Morgan pulled the covers off of her bare legs, slipping on a pair of casual shoes lying by the bed and then bolted out of her quarters at a brisk walk, intent on testing her theory despite the differences in technology. It had long been bothering her as to how she’d been able to get past the security shield with only a pistol. She’d considered that the power level might have been lower because of the energy needed to create the higher gravity, or that the emitters were affected by it and therefore less effective.
&
nbsp; She’d also put down the occurrence to faulty memories, realizing that there may have been another factor in play that she was unaware of due to the tunnel vision that the gravity crush had put her under. Now she realized she had known all along how she got through, it just hadn’t clicked before.
Morgan made her way through the Red Ranger’s decks in T-shirt and shorts until she came to the security wing…which was empty. They’d never housed any of the Nestafar prisoners on the ship anyway, leaving them all on the transports until Morgan had finally released them prior to one of their planetary assaults to be used as messengers to encourage a surrender. It hadn’t worked, and they’d probably just been armed and sent back at her troops, but she’d been glad to get them off her hands regardless…and after that point they’d been leaving all the prisoners taken with the Calavari, not wanting to devote any more of their limited resources to their enemy’s well-being.
Morgan walked through the outer reception area and back into one of the cell wings. She turned on one of the clear blue force fields used as both door and window and tapped it with her finger, getting a slight buzz as the physical shield resisted the pressure.
Closing her eyes and focusing, she summoned up a small tingle down her back and forced it down her arm and into her hand, then pushed against the shield and released it, half expecting some type of blowback. Instead her hand slipped through the clear blue barrier, then was caught at the wrist as the shield reformed around her arm.
“Ha!” she laughed, finally realizing how she’d been able to get through the Nestafar shield. Somehow the tingles had manifested themselves during the gravity crush…not from the regenerator’s repair work afterward. That meant she had developed this ability on her own…and if she had not, then the pistol would never have been enough to get her through to knock out the generator, and she would have died onboard that ship along with the others.
Morgan could accept that, though how close she’d come to death still freaked her out, but at least this way she knew she’d saved herself…not to mention had a very useful skill to now employ.
Her smiled faded when she tried to pull her hand back out of the cell and couldn’t. The shield had constricted her arm down to the most narrow point during her wiggling, and now had her pinned in place like a giant handcuff…and she was too far away from the on/off switch to reach it with her other arm.
“Wonderful,” she commented, knowing that there was no one on duty given that there were no prisoners to guard. She closed her eyes and tried to summon up another tingle, but only managed to get a few goose bumps to transfer to her arm and not nearly enough to loosen the shield’s grip on her.
Morgan mentally kicked herself for not thinking ahead. She’d been using so much of the bio-energy that she’d exhausted herself several times and had gained a decent understanding of what that felt like…which she was also experiencing now. The energy she’d used to punch through the shield was probably about all that she’d recovered during her partial sleep period, and now she was going to be stuck until her body built back up more charge…unless she could psych herself up enough to summon another round of tingles from wherever it was stored inside of her.
A glance sideways at the control panel stalled that action, which she shifted over to plan-B status. Experimentally Morgan stepped to the side and lifted her foot towards the panel and stretched out, seeing that she had just about enough reach. She pulled her leg down and lifted her right foot up to her free left hand and pulled her shoe off, wiggling her bare toes in anticipation, then reaching her leg back out towards the panel, tipping her upper body the opposite direction to get as much length out of her leg as she could.
Her toes brushed the control panel, settling on a blank section of the flat box. From there she dragged them up towards the off switch…then had to eek out another half inch before she made contact. Wiggling to try and get some momentum, she gently pounded the button half a dozen times before getting enough pressure for it to register.
The shield deactivated, and given that she was pulling against it for balance, dropped her onto her backside when it vanished.
“Whoo,” she said, relieved as she sat up and slipped her shoe back on, then the Archon just sat there for a moment, thinking. She replayed what memories of the gravity trap she had and confirmed that she had, in fact, penetrated the shield using this invisible energy she was generating, putting an end to that unanswered question.
With a bit of closure completed she stood up and started walking back to her quarters, not sure if she’d be able to sleep or not, because now she knew she could walk through force fields, and how cool was that!
The next day Morgan ordered the salvage crews back to the warships, leaving behind a lot of untouched wreckage but she figured they’d pushed their luck as far as she was willing to risk it. The Red Ranger and the other three Warship-class jumpships took what they could with them and docked their remaining drone warships in their berths, then made a microjump away from the planet, crisscrossing the star system out to the 18th planet and braked against its tiny gravity well. It was located much further out than the inhabited planets where all the fighting was taking place, barely more than a spherical lump of rock caught in stellar orbit.
Its one use was for navigational purposes, and Morgan’s fleet had been here before. Using its gravity again they gently floated further towards the edge of the star system, traveling several hours before using their conventional engines to null out their momentum. There they found the Hycre jump cradle they’d used to enter the system on, along with two drone destroyers they left behind to shoot at anything that approached it.
The Red Ranger reassumed remote control of those two ships and brought them aboard, then the warships carefully maneuvered their massive tonnage around and into alignment beneath the cradle on thrust-based engines alone. All four parked in a square underneath the spindly device, then the jump cradle made physical connections with the ships before extending its considerable inertial dampening field around them all, creating an invisible bubble that would carry them together across the stars.
Using the tiny gravity wells of other large, floating rocks out further in system the jump cradle gradually created forward momentum, eventually bringing it back to the 18th planet, swinging into orbit then jumping back towards the star. From there they fell into a low stellar orbit and waited to come around to the proper jumpline, then with a massive burst of speed the jump cradle sent the four warships and itself out and away from the Brokal System and its ongoing micro-war, heading them back to rendezvous with another portion of Morgan’s armada and continue picking on the smaller enemy deployments across Calavari territory.
Morgan took a quick break from her training exercises and walked over to the satchel she’d left by the entrance to Balboa Lane. She pulled out a couple of ambrosia wafers and chewed them up quickly, having learned over the past 2 weeks of nearly nonstop training while traveling in the jump cradle that she couldn’t wait for ‘meals’ to refuel.
This new ability, which she’d dubbed ‘concussive energy,’ seemed to suck the ambrosia out of her body almost in realtime and she’d learned that having snacks on hand would help increase her workout longevity…for when she ran out of energy she literally ran out. It wasn’t like a typical workout where she could continue at lower intensity and/or greater difficulty. When her concussive energy emptied out there wasn’t much left afterwards to try and work with, hence the necessity of the snacks.
Her ability to produce…and subsequently suppress…the ‘tingles’ had gotten much better, almost to the point of being predictable, though there were still some nights she’d wake up, half uncover herself, and throw a blast up towards the ceiling in what she called a ‘concussion wave’ just to bleed it off. That would usually relieve the pressure on her internal buffer until morning, which allowed her to get back to sleep.
She didn’t know, biologically speaking, how the energy was being contained, but purely from workouts and self-analys
is she’d determined that she had a ‘buffer’ of energy inside her that she could draw from, and that it was constantly filling. When it reached capacity she’d get the tingles whether she wanted them or not and would have to discharge.
Morgan had intentionally pushed that barrier several times just to see what would happen if she held it in. She found she had some leeway there, and with effort could force her buffer to hold more, but it was always a matter of time before she relented and bled off the excess energy. To her it felt similar to having a full bladder and trying to hold it in…sooner or later it was coming out whether you liked it or not.
The Archon had also noticed, both through guesswork and the measurement systems in Balboa Lane, that her buffer was increasing in size, allowing her to store up more energy for either larger concussion waves or greater numbers of smaller ones. It seemed to work much like some of her favorite video games, aside from Halo, where you had a limited supply of ‘magic’ or ‘force’ to use on various skills that would gradually replenish. Trick was with her, she had to keep eating to get it to recharge quickly, prompting her to pack ambrosia wafers by the hundreds to take along with her to training sessions…or on future missions.
This new ability was definitely changing things for her, but she liked it…a lot.
After her snack she gave her body a few minutes to process the ambrosia into her bloodstream and for her little nodules to soak it up…or at least she assumed it was them. Biologically they were the only anomaly detectable, aside from her eyes which they still hadn’t figured out and Morgan hadn’t been able to induce any superpowers from yet.
After the snack she took the time to do some contortion-level stretching exercises, already having been warmed up. Her range of motion wasn’t all the way back to normal yet, but it was close, and she wanted to get it back there as soon as possible, prompting her to include extra stretching workouts throughout the day. Once she got it fully back she’d start focusing on other areas, one at a time, until she got her entire workout routine back to where it had been pre-gravity trap.
