Star Force: Recalibration (SF30)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “I’ve seen your swimming scores,” Angel said with a smirk.

  “Which I continue to work on,” Paul reminded her with a bit of wounded pride, though not much. With Ariel’s help he’d made up some ground on the others, though he still hated going underwater without breathing gear. “But I can see some of you guys focusing on one skill almost exclusively just so you can show off.”

  “Us…show off?” Victor asked mock wounded. “Perish the thought.”

  “Can’t level up our ranks that way either,” Angel said, reminding him that they weren’t that different…which Paul already knew, though he still liked to mess with their heads a bit from time to time.

  “We going again?” Riona asked, walking up behind Paul and stopping just off his shoulder. “Or moving on to the next one?”

  “Next one,” Paul said, knowing that meant they had to switch rooms. “Unless you guys are too low on brain juice?”

  “I think we’re fine,” Angel said, suppressing a smile. “Are you good to go?”

  “I’ll manage,” Paul said, realizing he’d walked into that one. He was still low man on the psionic totem pole in this group. “Let me find my rifle, then we’ll head over to the poppers.”

  “Lovely,” Victor said with a cringe.

  “That’s the spirit, newb,” Paul said, clapping him on the shoulder before he walked off back towards the underside of the suspension bridge.

  8

  July 12, 2410

  Solar System

  Earth

  Paul blew out a slow breath and pressed his left hand against the synthetic material of the measurement wall in front of him. He felt out the contact point and kept his mental handprint focused in his senses as he increased his internal body temperature. His entire physical structure began to run hot, then he began shifting the excess heat into his core and out through his arm to his hand in a process he still didn’t fully understand.

  It had been explained as increased control over his body’s internal functions, but he knew from a physics standpoint that something had to be either pushing or drawing the heat out of his tissue in order for it to move away from equilibrium. He also knew that his body couldn’t take too much of a temperature increase, so he tried to focus it to only a few degrees higher than normal, then drag it down to his arm where it began to build up to uncomfortably hot levels as he held most of it inside and away from his skin to keep from dissipating it into his clothes and the air.

  That amount of control intrigued him, and while his mind couldn’t academically explain how it was happening he was learning to do it by feel alone…as well as knowing he was going to royally cook himself if he didn’t stop soon.

  But he didn’t. He kept the heat building and flowing down into his arm, pulling it away from the vital areas of his body down into that one extremity, then before he could burn his hand again…as he’d done a month ago…he channeled the heat through his palm and into the material of the wall in front of him, feeling it drain out and open up room for him to move more heat out from his core.

  Now was the tricky part. He needed to heat the wall past a required point, which was well above the boiling point of water. Doing that would burn his hand again, but whatever part of his body allowed him to move the heat around internally also acted as a blowback shield…if he did it right. There were no useful instructions on how to do that, which left Paul having to figure it out through trial and lots of errors, though some of the other Archons had tried to give him a few tips.

  Today, though, was going to be one of his successes. While he couldn’t store a massive amount of heat inside his body, including his hand, he could create a continual flow of it, which was now pooling in the wall directly beneath his hand. He could feel it there, but for some reason it wasn’t burning him, almost as if he had a one-way force field covering his palm that allowed the heat out but not back in…yet it allowed him to sense how much heat was there.

  Some of the other Archons had been investigating this phenomena as well, but their sifting through the V’kit’no’sat database ran into the same problems his had…a lot of vocabulary they didn’t understand, and Kara was no longer around to translate. However they were doing it, they were able to shield themselves from the heat coming back into their body, and both Paul and the others knew that if they could do that in their hands, then it might be possible to do that over their entire bodies and give themselves some level of immunity to high heat situations…or at least a little bit of air conditioning on hot days.

  Right now Paul was just focused on this test which, if passed, would rank him up again, given that he had the other 5 psionics areas already sufficiently advanced to reach level 11 acolyte, with the Sesspik healing trace something that they’d chosen not to measure, given that it would require an injury to test.

  The wall in front of his hand didn’t glow, but he could feel the heat building on the other side of his palm as he channeled more and more of it from his core, out through his arm, and past the barrier on his palm, reducing his internal temperature…which then required him to create more heat, and at a rate that would be sufficient to affect the wall, for every bit he put into it, it was also bleeding off into the surrounding material and air.

  It was a race of dissipation, with Paul barely winning out. In the computer monitoring program the degrees in the wall continually and slowly ticked up, though there was no hologram for Paul to monitor it with. He was completely on his own, and had to guess how close he was coming based on the ‘feel’ through his magical barrier…which was very tenuous at this point, so he just kept creating and pumping heat into the wall and hoping it would be enough.

  His concentration slipped twice, with a hot spot quickly forming on his index finger the first time, then his thumb the next. He got the barrier back into place almost immediately, but he knew he’d have a couple of burn marks afterwards. Cursing himself for his lapse, he concentrated as hard as he could without shaking himself and kept at it…eventually reaching the 110C/230F mark that resulted in a completion tone.

  Paul pulled his hand off immediately and vented the remaining excess heat out of his body like releasing the air from a balloon. The internal constrictions he’d been using to contain and move it where he wanted disappeared and the heat flushed out to his skin and began to vent in the air…along with beads of sweat breaking out across his body. Oddly enough, his natural cooling mechanism had been deactivated somehow in the heat redistribution effort, but now that he’d released it his internal thermostat had reverted back to normal function.

  Paul swiped his forehead with his right hand as he examined his left, seeing the two red marks from where the heat had bled back onto his skin. He held still and closed his eyes, ignoring the statistics popping up on the console and taking the opportunity to practice his healing trance as well as wanting to get rid of the annoying pain. It wasn’t much, but the sting was annoying.

  In mind’s eye he deactivated his hand, locking it up rigidly in its current posture and essentially putting it into hibernation as he mentally forced a calm energy into it, or at least that’s what it felt like. The database said it wasn’t a type of energy, but rather an excited state being induced in the cells, causing the tissue to regenerate faster than normal. Paul could partially understand that, but it still felt like an energy surge, and he wasn’t going to completely discount his senses in favor of the V’kit’no’sat notes.

  “That puts you where?” Ben-5449 asked as he entered the small training chamber.

  “Level 11,” Paul said, feeling the first few whisks of cool air on his neck as his heat plume finally dissipated. He held his hand still in front of him but turned his head to face the other Archon.

  “In what…a year?”

  “8 months,” Paul corrected him, still holding his localized Sesspik trance. For that psionic, at least, failure in Rensiek provided extra training opportunities, painful as they were.

  “You hurt your hand?”

  “A couple of
small spots. Just trying to get a head start on the healing process. A couple of minutes and I should be good for the rest of the day.”

  “Can you do that walking?”

  “So long as it’s just my hand, yes,” Paul said, thinking. “If I don’t bounce too much.”

  “Message came through for you. Some guy named Tennisonne wanted to see you as soon as possible. I didn’t want to bother you with it until you’d finished.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said, stepping back from the now cool wall thanks to the internal heat sinks that had activated as soon as the test was complete. “All yours.”

  “Appreciated,” Ben said, toggling the control panel and dismissing Paul’s completion emblems, then selecting the parameters for his own training/testing session.

  Paul walked out, keeping his hand fairly rigid and energized, and made his way out of the training sanctum. He paused for a minute or so next to the mongooses outside, then deemed his hand pain-free enough to grab the handle bars, deciding he’d finish healing the damage later when he took a nap.

  Paul drove across the command deck and down the ramps, moving lower in the pyramid until he came to the Oso’lon section. Inside those large rooms he found another mini Star Force cityscape that held a local research and development facility where the upper level techs were continuously working to crack the secrets of V’kit’no’sat technology.

  Paul wove his way around several of the buildings until he came to smaller complex and parked outside next to three larger mongooses designed to carry four passengers. He went inside and grabbed an elevator up to the 15th level where one of the small scale fabrication labs was located.

  “Mr. Stark,” Paul said loudly as he walked in on Tennisonne with his head buried in the side of a mechanical monstrosity, “what have you for me today?”

  The man wearing a dark green uniform with 5 gold stripes running down the sides pulled back out and stood up, frowning in Paul’s direction. “Grand Admiral Thrawn…nice of you to finally show up.”

  Paul returned his frown. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Don’t call me Stark,” Tennisonne countered.

  “Stark is cool,” Paul argued, walking over to the man and having to navigate his way around equipment trays and other random projects to get there.

  “And he has toys compared to what we’re working with,” the master tech said, pointing across the room to a small booth. “I need you to try the mental interface again. I think I’ve got the feedback connection powerful enough this time.”

  Without a word Paul walked over to the booth that was a compact version of the command nexus the Archons used to control their fleets and organize ground battles from afar. There was a control pedestal, as usual, but the walls were so close it almost felt claustrophobic…or would have if the back side hadn’t been cut out, though once he stood inside his peripheral vision didn’t extend far enough back to notice the gap, making it appear that he was inside a vertical tube.

  In addition to the usual control board there was a central sphere sticking out a foot or so above the board and recessed into the wall to keep it out of the way. Paul pulled it out, bringing it to chest level in front of him, and placed his hands on it.

  “Ready.”

  “Just a sec,” Tennisonne said, walking around the backside of the chamber and fiddling with something. “Ok, give it a try.”

  Paul closed his eyes for a moment, finding the telepathic receiver in the sphere and extending his Ikrid energy into it remotely, just as he’d done a week ago, making a mental link with the device.

  “Anything?” Tennisonne asked.

  “Just a connective tone…no sequence,” Paul said, ‘listening’ with his mind.

  “Well…I didn’t think that would work anyway. Give the tactile interface a go.”

  Paul severed his mental connection with the receiver and shunted his Ikrid over to physical ‘hacking’ that used his nervous system as a conduit for the Ikrid energy, increasing the efficiency dramatically. The material of the sphere had been designed to allow the energy to pass to the receiver in the center, similar to how another person’s nervous system allowed the physical transfer to the mind via touch, establishing a bridge between the two while bypassing the ‘wireless’ linkage that had been disabled for all Zen’zat.

  The type of interface that Paul was attempting required 2-way communication to access information, and with all Zen’zat configured to only be able to transmit information at will an individual could receive all kinds of external control influences, but the return part of the neurological ‘handshake’ would never return, thus blocking the connection. If you couldn’t link with the target all you could do was blindly transmit, which in the case of a message was all you needed. If you wanted to remote control someone’s mind or dig into their memories for information that wasn’t possible with Zen’zat, save for physical contact…which then bypassed the transmission blockage due to the fact that the person’s own nervous system was being used to get in through the ‘backdoor,’ so to speak.

  The sphere in front of Paul was supposed to operate the same way, allowing him to link with the receiver to not only send signals but get return information.

  “2…3…1…1…5…4…2..3…”Paul said, counting the beats in his mind.

  “Good, good…” Tennisonne said distractedly from wherever he was working on the opposite side of the curved wall in front of Paul. “Here we go, switching to full access.”

  Suddenly Paul’s head froze up with shock…but it quickly bled off as the information coming in began to process. It was all scattered at first, like watching a video screen that was malfunctioning, but his mind started to pull bits and pieces of it apart and he could sense certain areas as being distinct from the others.

  “Well?”

  “I’ve got something. What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Power up the screen, Admiral,” Tennisonne said sarcastically.

  Paul frowned, then reached over with one hand and turned on the hologram, with the walls around him disappearing as they were replaced by status displays and charts. As soon as they did the information in his mind seemed to process, and he could feel icons for many of the things he was seeing, as if the telepathic signals were overlapping with the visual ones.

  “Much better,” Paul said, ignoring the tech’s jibe.

  “Do you see the program?”

  Paul looked around a bit, then saw the start function directly in front of him…with four options.

  “What do you want me to run first?”

  “Doesn’t matter, just pick one.”

  There were four labeled icons…A, B, C, D in front of him, so Paul mentally reached for ‘C’ and, to his surprise, was able to press the telepathic button, despite the fact that he didn’t know what it was that he was really doing.

  “Eureka!” Tennisonne said. “There’s four months of hard work being put to use. Keep running with it as much as you can. I’ve got a diagnostics program measuring your interface, so even if you screw up it’ll be beneficial.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Paul said as a tactical program popped up. It was a watered down version of a videogame, with icons for mechs and vehicles of Star Force make aligned against a similar force of Nestafar units…and they began engaging each other without Paul’s prompting.

  He concentrated, highlighting a single mech in his mind and feeling three ‘growths’ appear, as well as seeing three new options pop up holographically over that mech. He ‘touched’ one of them, with another branch of four options appearing. When he mentally chose one of those the branches disappeared and the mech in question veered off from its current target and began tracking the strongest one.

  “Not bad,” Tennisonne commented. “Thought you’d have more trouble than this. Have you mentally selected targets before?”

  “I’ve tracked the turrets, but never had to interface with them.”

  “How are you pushing the buttons?”

 
“Um…not quite sure. If they were a box, I’d be shaking it every which way until it did something.”

  “Randomized action then,” Tennisonne said thoughtfully. “Good thing I went with isolated commands. Binary would probably have been too hard.”

  “Binary?” Paul said, moving another mech around on the map, this time to a specific point he highlighted, mentally dragging a ‘mouse’ icon to the spot he wanted and ‘clicking’ it.

  “On and off. Right now you’re just hitting a button. The receiver can read different signals, so I can set up an ‘on’ switch and an ‘off’ for lots of things. Pushing ‘on’ twice won’t turn it off like it does now, because all your options are one command, like a handheld controller with only one button to press.”

  “I get it, I’m just glad I can finally press a button.”

  “Well, the mechanics of it aren’t that complicated, but our fabrication techniques for some of the components are still crude. This should have worked last time, but there were some impurities that I had to refine out. The Nerantium is tricky to work with. It wants to pick up hitchhiker molecules whenever possible. I’ve got it coated in a sleeve of aluminum now, but we’re going to have to redesign the manufacturing process. I can’t be manually refining each piece coming through because of sloppy processing.”

  “What do you need?”

  “The V’kit’no’sat processors,” he said scornfully. “I know the reason we’re not using them, and I agree with you, but it’s times like this that are damn frustrating.”

  “I’ve heard similar complaints from some of the Archons, wondering why we don’t use the Zen’zat weapons or armor. Bottom line is, if we can’t produce new ones, we’re not going to get hooked on using them.”

  Tennisonne nodded, knowing that both men were on the same page. “What I really need is a slew of new fabrication equipment, but I don’t have the time to design them with my current projects. We just don’t have enough level 5 engineers, to be frank. We’re rarer than you Archons, come to think of it.”