Star Force: Scorpion (Star Force Universe Book 42)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Transporting the captured Uriti took two years for the Zak’de’ron, but eventually they arrived at a planet inside the borders of V’kit’no’sat territory, but one they never bothered to monitor. An appropriate facility had already been constructed when they arrived, and the complicated transfer occurred within a day’s time, returning the barren system back into anonymity even for those with the advanced sensors to see otherwise.

  The facility was below ground and completely hidden, inside of which the Zak’de’ron studied the sleeping Uriti for many years before several ships arrived carrying thousands of the Dragons. They arrived cloaked, landed while cloaked, and from any potential observer’s perspective they were never there at all, but 3,839 of the strongest Zak’de’ron gathered together inside the Uriti chamber, braving the telepathic aura as they clustered together in a tiny dot of a crowd next to the miles wide mass of Bulmuthal.

  They stayed back, not needing physical contact, and the closer they got the more trouble they had with the telepathic pressure, but they needed to be closer, for the farther away they were the weaker their own telepathy was. 12 miles had been determined to be the sweet spot, so that was where they gathered in the figurative shadow of the Uriti in the otherwise dim chamber lit only by artificial lights.

  All the Zak’de’ron focused hard to keep their balance, but as they began to use their Pa’no’semak ability, which Star Force called battlemeld, to link their minds together that changed. As soon as they joined in clumps of 3 or 4 the mental pressure decreased, but they didn’t stop there. They kept linking up with others until 3,472 of them became a single mind and they could handle no more. The others stayed nearby, linking into a second group, but they were just extra. How many could actually battlemeld together in the aura of the Uriti had been a guess, and they’d guessed high, but now the presence of the huge sleeping beast was a mere tickle against the Zak’de’rons’ combined mind.

  Yet it was still tiny compared to the mind of the Uriti, even in its sleeping mode, but it wasn’t totally dormant. No living being could be shut down like a machine. Not even the Zak’de’ron when they went into stasis. Slowed down, yes. Shut down, no. And it was to that slowed down mind that the combined Zak’de’ron battlemeld reached out to.

  And they got a response.

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