Apex

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Jalia frowned. “You’re only twelve cycles old?”

  “Thousand,” Riax clarified. “And it’s years, not cycles. The conversion would be about 15,000 cycles.”

  The Junta just stared at him.

  “What?” he finally asked.

  “I’m thirty-­six . . . cycles.”

  “Everyone starts somewhere.”

  Jalia gave him an ‘I don’t believe you just said that’ look, raising an eye ridge.

  “You asked,” Riax pointed out.

  She visibly shook off her thoughts. “What’s special about being a Beta that makes all this . . .” she said, waving a hand at the mechanical monstrosity, “ . . . kids’ play.”

  “Our kadash focuses on naval warfare, so starship construction, maintenance, and repair is of added importance.”

  “How many are there . . . were there?” she corrected sheepishly.

  “Since I was born, twenty two at the most, fifteen at the least, and twenty when the war began.”

  “Why the change in number? What happened to them?”

  “Kadashes sometimes split, or are destroyed. Rarely, one will be created if need be.”

  “Destroyed?”

  “Well, the kadash members aren’t killed, no ships or resources are lost save for a negligible amount expended in the trials. If a kadash loses all of its holdings, it’s considered ‘destroyed’ and ceases to exist.”

  “Sorry, you lost me,” she said, shrugging.

  “A long time ago we realized that our dominant position in the galaxy had the disadvantage of making us inadvertently weaker than we expected. We needed challenges, and looking back through our history, our rise to power was in direct response to a need. If an enemy was militarily stronger than us we had to increase our strength to match, then overcome them. If our supply lines were too long to sustain colonies past a certain range from our homeworld, we had to create faster ships to make distant colonization possible. Humans respond to adversity and challenge, without it we stagnate.

  “So we restructured the Empire into kadashes, ten to begin with. We staged competitions for access to resources and privileges in the beginning, but it eventually evolved into all out simulated wars which we dubbed the Trials. Worlds were conquered, fleets exchanged hands, and populations were captured and assimilated into the victorious kadash. If one kadash proved inept, it would eventually be annihilated. Basically, it gave us a way to keep our edge without the Empire having a significant threat to key off of.”

  “No one died?” Jalia asked to clarify.

  “Never,” he assured her.

  “Not like our clans then,” she said regretfully. “They don’t fight any large scale wars anymore, but a lot still die in smaller conflicts, plus those sold as slaves and never return.”

  “I’ll put a stop to that,” Riax promised.

  Jalia’s eyes narrowed. “How?”

  “Watch and learn,” he said, putting his arm across her shoulders in a tight hug. “But right now . . . time for more food.”

  Jalia laughed once and rolled her eyes, turning towards the door. “Come on, I’m not carrying it all up here for you. Human or not.”

  Chapter 16

  AFTER ANOTHER LONG conversation with Riax, Jalia eventually left him to work and returned to her captain’s quarters. Ever since he’d woken up from that crate he’d been working on something, with her rarely seeing him sleep. If it wasn’t fixing or upgrading something on the ship it was tinkering with the Cres’s armor or slugging his way through lines of computer code. The Human just never stopped. No wonder he ate so much.

  Jalia locked her quarters’ door and slipped out of her clothes and into her sleeping pod, running through the day’s new revelations. Part of her still couldn’t believe she’d actually met a real living, breathing Human . . . yet another part of her was becoming friends with him like she’d known him half her life. The two disparate perspectives were banging around inside her head and making quite the fuss, with her not able to nod off to sleep for more than two hours. Eventually her thoughts transitioned to something more tangible, which was the fact that he was smoking hot.

  With all manner of familiar thoughts following that topic, Jalia’s mind eventually relaxed and allowed her to drift off to sleep, for a few hours at least.

  “WAKE UP,” RIAX WHISPERED, his hand on the head of one of the Kayna as he triggered a release from its coma.

  The large creature stirred slowly, its mind working its way through multiple layers of suppression. Riax made his telepathic presence known early, and guided it back to full consciousness. Its four eyes opened briefly, then blinked multiple times adjusting to the light. It sniffed once, then growled annoyingly as it found its body tight and stiff.

  Riax backed up half a meter, but kept his face directly in its line of sight. The Kayna put its thick clawed arms underneath its body and lifted its head a fraction more, then sniffed at the Human.

  “That’s right, you recognize me,” he said slowly, knowing that it wasn’t going to understand him. He reached out again and stroked its forehead just above its nose slits.

  It growled/barked a clipped string of sounds. Riax knew it was language, but he could only glean so much telepathically. He had to associate words to thoughts and thoughts to context before he could even begin to attempt a translation, but he needed to establish some basic means of communication right now.

  According to the information he’d gotten from the mercenary, the ‘Dreklors’ could understand the commerce language to a degree, but they couldn’t speak it. Orrona was standing a few meters back to translate if needed, but she wouldn’t be able to understand their language. Riax had to do the hard work and learn a bit of theirs in the next few hours, to a workable degree at least.

  He sensed a mixture of worry, confusion, and gratitude from the Kayna and isolated those mental strands from each other, then tied them to the words it had just spoken. ‘Worry’ didn’t link up, but ‘confusion’ and ‘gratitude’ did.

  “Human,” he said aloud, as well as triggering a portion of the Kayna’s genetic memory that linked to his scent.

  A wash of emotions and memories flooded into Riax’s mind as the creature came to terms with the implications of that fact. It began to utter a long string of words, telling a story that the Human tried to follow. It went on for more than half an hour, with barely a dozen words spoken by Riax. At the end Orrona could see tears in the Human’s eyes, but his mind was closed tight.

  “No longer,” he whispered to the Kayna while mentally sending the sentiment. “You are safe now. We will free the others, I promise.”

  The creature huffed once, satisfied, and Riax stepped back from it as it stood up and stretched. Its head rose three times his height, and its twin tails stretched back almost three meters. When it settled, its flat back stood 2.5 meters tall and its giant head held level with the Human’s.

  Riax stroked its forehead again and circled around to the side, inspecting the healed wound from his impromptu grenade damage. The thin skin held firm, flexing and melding as it should, though it would take a much longer time to regenerate its normal four centimeter thickness.

  “Orrona, come closer,” he said, his hand still on the Kayna’s side.

  The unarmored Cres tentatively approached.

  “Friend,” Riax whispered, telepathically sending the same message.

  The Kayna stepped forward, but to her credit Orrona stood motionless. She could also sense its emotions, and guessed that Riax had gotten through to it . . . but the memories of the recent battle and the deaths of Ivara and Lornas were still fresh in her mind.

  After several sniffs of her marine-­like scent, the Kayna huffed its satisfaction and sat down on its tails, bringing its head up well above the pair. Riax sent Orrona a telepathic message and she walked off elsewhere in the cargo bay as he moved to the second
Kayna and woke it up. He did less communicating with this one, instead letting the pair converse with each other.

  After getting the sniff check and approval from the second, the pair elicited a loud, high pitched howl that left Riax’s ears reverberating.

  “I’m glad they’re on our side,” Orrona said, returning with a large box of food they’d taken from the merc ship. She opened it and set it down on the floor.

  The Kayna thudded over to it and began pulling out foul smelling chunks of food with their clawed hands, devouring them in rapid succession.

  “We’re going to have to find something better for them to eat,” Orrona commented.

  “It’s at the top of the requisition list,” Riax agreed, stepping beside her.

  “Are they going to stay here, in the bay?”

  “I think they’ll fit in the crew quarters . . . barely.”

  “But probably not the sanitation stations,” the Cres pointed out.

  Riax closed his eyes, mentally kicking himself. “I completely forgot about that. Looks like I’ve got some refitting to do.”

  “Want some help?”

  “Grab some cutting tools and ask Jalia which two quarters she wants torn up,” he said, half apologetically. “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  Orrona nodded and walked off.

  Riax explained the situation as best he could, and the Kayna agreed to stay in the bay until they were finished with the renovations. Given the cargo bay was by far the largest room on the ship and the Kayna’s preference for open spaces, it was an amicable arrangement. They were restless anyway, and Riax sensed their need for some physical activity. He left them to explore the bay and headed up to the crew quarters to get busy with the modifications. Given how much they’d just eaten, he figured it wouldn’t be too long before they required the use of a lavatory.

  THEY WERE LESS than five hours away from arrival in the Mewlon System and Riax was still busy on the exterior hull of the Resolute, building his makeshift plasma cannon. Most of the construction was complete, but he’d cut the timetable a bit too close and some of the components he’d been relying on had failed. He’d had to build entirely new ones from other salvage, which had eaten up more than a day.

  Jalia had turned on the freighter’s running lights for him, but he still required several portable luminous pillars for adequate working light. While his eyesight was adequate for low light environments, there was zero environmental light to work with. The ship’s shields, extended several meters above his head to allow for workspace, completely blocked out all radiation, including visible light.

  That was a matter of necessity, of course, else the normal starlight would have been accelerated past the visible spectrum, past gamma rays, past all naturally occurring frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum to become exceedingly destructive radiation, even in the minute quantities encountered in interstellar space. Had it not been for the exterior illumination on the ship, Riax would have been safely in complete darkness.

  The envirosuit he wore was bulky and rigid compared to Human standards, but adequate. It was equipped with a helmet lamp and adhesive boots, allowing him some reasonable movement across the hull and a light source for the nooks and crannies of the cannon where the pillars’ glow couldn’t reach. He also wore a safety line attached to an adhesive slug that rolled about on the hull. If his feet broke contact and he started to drift off, the cord would catch him before he bounced off the inside of the shields, which were set more heavily to particle deflection, as well as energy absorption, just in case he did manage to lose his grip and careen off.

  Overly cautious by Human standards, Riax didn’t feel like taking any chances. The suit and technology he was working with were unfamiliar and he needed his mind at ease while he troubleshooted the continuous headaches he was encountering with the plasma cannon.

  The trouble was, unlike the three lachar batteries that he’d already installed on the Resolute, the plasma cannon wasn’t something he’d transplanted from the merc ship. He’d built it from scratch, using components scavenged from other systems, plus some he’d had to fabricate himself. His telekinetic ability gave him a myriad of manipulative options when dealing with technology, but some components simply had to be made in a factory. The technology level he was working with here wasn’t sufficient to create a plasma cannon, which was why it should give them a significant combat advantage if he could just get the damn thing working.

  Betas had been taught to be innovative, both with technology and combat philosophy. Their fleet had been the strongest of all the kadashes because they’d gone beyond the basic designs and modified them, sometimes on a ship by ship basis to overcome technological advances made by the others, particularly the Zetas, which had conquered many worlds by employing radical new technologies. Some of those the Betas had managed to win in trials and add to their technological acumen.

  Of all the Humans, Betas were the best improvisers . . . but this cobble of components was giving Riax fits. He’d faced similar challenges during his tech training when his squad was denied the resources of the Human Empire and forced to work with whatever was on hand. Reliance on first rate components and resupply were weaknesses that Beta philosophy sought to counter, thus Riax and other techs had been forced to learn to do without early in their training.

  In some of their tests they’d been forced to create a roundabout for lack of computational power, which was something they couldn’t fabricate on their own. That was Riax’s bane right now, with the magnetic containment and guidance system for the plasma requiring more control than the available processors could handle.

  The trick was to rig manual controls for as much as possible, leaving the computers to handle a smaller workload. With the plasma cannon that was possible. Rigging up the manual controls was the difficulty at the moment.

  Riax checked the urge to swipe at a bead of sweat that was protected beneath his faceplate with his hand and instead paused his telekinetic construction, focusing on his forehead. The bead and rivulet of sweat squeegeed up and into his hairline, safely away from his eyes. That done, he telekinetically gripped the input lines and held them in place while he fused them to one of the processor’s control boards with a small handheld device.

  Try it now, he telepathically told Jalia.

  She was seated in one of the auxiliary bridge control stations that Riax had torn to shreds then reassembled into a gunnery station. She flexed one hand control and the gun above Riax’s head tilted upward two meters, then back down to horizontal.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” Jalia said, with Riax monitoring her thoughts. The coils for the plasma turret blocked out the envirosuit’s comm signal.

  Hold on, he told her as he fused another line into place, cutting two others in the process. And now?

  The gun agreeably swiveled side to side.

  Riax nodded, relieved. His magnetic field control lines had shorted out the targeting controls about an hour ago, but now they were finally back online. Run containment field up to 10 percent.

  Static popped on his suit’s speakers and he felt a slight tingle to his skin as he studied the control boards in front of him. He could sense some bleed through, but fortunately nothing was sparking this time. Isolating the greatest breach point, he telekinetically pulled the electrical connection microscopically away from its housing and slipped a thin liquid insulation material underneath, spreading and smoothing it out along the length of the silvery strand.

  He ran a cauterizing wand over the line, turning the liquid into solid and cementing it in place. Riax paused and ‘felt’ for the energy flow through the line, detecting only a negligible bleed at the connective points. He’d have to deal with those later, but for right now he needed to seal the major arc pathways.

  Three hours later he finished and had Jalia run through a full power up of the containment systems, with no overload occurring. H
e was fairly confident the plasma feed system was working, but they couldn’t test that with the shields up and blocking the interstellar radiation. A malfunction could temporarily breach the shields and allow a small portion of radiation through, which would give the ship a nasty sunburn, as well as eat through Riax’s envirosuit in a very short amount of time.

  With all the technical magic he could muster completed, he buttoned up the turret and made his way back inside, telekinetically dragging the luminous pillars with him. They had less than two hours before their deceleration jump, and he was desperately in need of a nap.

  Chapter 17

  WHEN THE RESOLUTE arrived in the Mewlon System, it came to a halt outside the orbit of the third of seven planets with the immediate space clear on sensors, but after a few minutes of signal lag catching up a single ship waiting just off the jumpline was detected. Not long after it began a microjump in the Resolute’s direction.

  “Here comes the other frigate,” Jalia guessed, sitting at the helm station. “Run or fight?”

  “We need to refuel,” Riax said, looking over her shoulder at the sensor display, “and there’s only one planet in this system to go to. If we don’t fight them now, they can just sit and wait for us to come in.”

  “Fight it is,” Jalia said, reactivating the gravity drive. “I’m moving us off the jumpline. Anywhere in particular you want them to catch up to us?”

  “Clear space where we don’t have to maneuver. I need to siphon power from the engines to run the weapons.”

  “Easy enough,” she said, plotting a generic heading at low speed. “You guys can draw lots now, because it’s my ship and I’m calling dibs on one of the turrets.”

  Ella half laughed. “I’ll take the helm and monitor sensors and shields,” she said, knowing that some maneuvering might be necessary, even if it was just rolling the ship to present an undamaged section of shield towards the enemy. Basic naval combat doctrine that the Junta mat or may not have been aware of.