by Aer-ki Jyr
The tech sighed. “I think waiting is my only hope. You’re done now, so you can step out.”
Paul walked out, seeing his field of vision go with him, which he measured at about a meter or so in range. He concentrated, trying to get it to shut off, and succeeded on the third attempt, then he turned it on and off several times until he’d gotten the feel for it.
“Are you alright?” the tech asked.
“Bit of a headache…and head rush. These new perceptions are intense.”
“You’ll adjust…what are you smiling at?”
“Nothing,” Paul said, forcing the expression off his face. “Thanks a million.”
“If you feel like sharing with the rest of us let me know,” the tech said, trying one more time.
“We’ll see,” Paul said as he walked out. There wasn’t anyone else standing in line, which gave him a few meters of clear space where the tech couldn’t see his face and Paul let his unguarded smile return.
Now…a Jedi you will become, he said mentally in Yoda’s voice. And a powerful Jedi you will be.
7
April 2, 2410
Solar System
Earth
Paul raced across the obstacle course, stinger rifle in hand, and ducked down behind a low barricade just as a flurry of shots passed through where his head had just been. He ‘heard’ a telepathic signal in his head, a sort of sound/image that the Archons had developed as copies of their hand signals, with this one meaning to stay down…followed immediately by the wait command.
Paul did as instructed and stayed hunkered down behind the wall as he heard more whiffs of stingers being fired elsewhere on the course. He couldn’t see much beyond the floor in front of him and the wall to his left, so he flipped on his Pefbar and immediately got an image of what was on the other side of the wall, including the turret that had been firing at him. He saw its barrels rotate around and away from him, quickly followed by him receiving a telepathic ‘go’ command.
The trailblazer rose up on a knee and spun, bringing his rifle around and disconnecting his Pefbar as soon as his regular vision crossed the contact…then he reached out and felt for a presence in the turret, finding the mechanical version of a ‘mind’ inside the device. He mentally latched onto it and concentrated hard as the barrels fired a few shots off to the side then began to track back around towards him.
Summoning what felt like all his mental strength he used his limited Fornax ability and sent a disruption beam into the turret, specifically targeting it and not generating an omnidirectional field. The mechanism in the turret registered the telepathic white noise effect and deemed it to be above the threshold limit…which triggered the targeting sphere to quickly rise up out of the top of the turret for a few seconds of vulnerability.
Paul peppered it with green paint splatters then duck-rolled to his right, coming back up just in time to hit it with two more before the target sphere retracted. With enough stun energy delivered to the target it ceased firing, though no other visual sign was given that it was deactivated. The target sphere retracted and the turret remained silent, prompting Paul to launch himself over the barrier and run up towards a vertical pylon just on the other side of the turret where he began climbing a ladder built into the side one handed, as he still held his rifle but without any armor or strapped rack to attach it to for carrying purposes.
Knowing that the turret behind him would eventually reactivate Paul moved quickly, but hesitated when he got to the top.
Clear? he asked Angel-676 telepathically, focusing specifically on her mental location. Like his Pefbar ability, he could sense minds in all directions simultaneously. Some appeared like stars, tiny pricks on the horizon, while others stood out much larger, despite their varying distances. The tiny ones were the telepathically active machines, while the other Archons in this challenge were the larger signatures.
He got the ‘hand signal’ version of ‘clear’ coming back rather than the word, which they’d learned to use to differentiate between saying it was clear and asking if it was clear. Paul’s transmission ability had progressed to the point where he could articulate words, but signaling to an individual person was still tricky and required him to stop and concentrate to do it.
Fortunately one didn’t require any Ikrid ability at all to receive signals, so while he popped up over the top of the ladder and began crawling across the raised platform that led to a suspension bridge he heard Angel’s telepathic warning loud and clear.
New target on the ceiling…move Paul!
Trusting her he launched himself across the bridge at a run, only sensing the new pinprick above him as he hit the halfway point. He didn’t bother trying to knock it out with a Fornax beam, because there was no way he was going to be able to hit it with his rifle over his head on the run before it nailed him…so he just tried to outrun the stingers that began falling around him.
Had this been one of the old school turrets he would have made it across…but the newer versions had been improved with greater rotational and tracking speed to counter for the Archons’ growing agility, and despite his official level being only an acolyte, his physical skills were still ranger level and the difficulty of the turrets had been adjusted to match.
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 abi
lity, 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 the 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 in
sane.”
“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.”
