by Aer-ki Jyr
“Just now,” she said, keeping her eyes on Jason. “Sorry about interrupting, but I didn’t want to wait. How’s he doing?”
“Am I missing something?”
“His head. How’s he doing?”
“Well enough. David’s got it worse.”
“David?”
“441.”
“Does he have telekinetic abilities yet?”
“I don’t think so…what’s going on?”
“I’m here to help,” she said firmly as she watched Jason display his superior agility as he jumped from one pillar to another with barely half a second spent on top of each, bouncing left and right as he chose an erratic pattern, grabbing the medium to large pillars to maximize speed.
“How?” Kian asked, his eyes dropping down to the jewel on her left wrist.
She followed his eye line, then raised her forearm up so he could get a better look. “How much did Mark tell you?”
“Some form of retractable armor.”
“And?”
“You couldn’t take it off, even with an army of medtechs.”
Kara smiled. “It does a lot more than that, and I’ve had 4 years to work with it.”
Kian noticed the uniform she was wearing, including the green stripe bracketing the sides. He pointed to it. “When did you make ranger?”
She shook her head side to side. “Not just ranger. Level 43 ranger.”
Kian’s face scrunched up in disbelief, and Jason had a similar look as he hopped off the last pillar and jogged over to them.
“Say again?” he asked.
“I’m a level 43 ranger,” Kara said evenly, then held up her forearm jewel. “It’s a cheat, I know, but I’m stuck with it.”
“Cheat how?” Kian asked.
“It boosted my strength, agility, speed…everything. Took a while to take effect, and the increase was one time, as far as I can tell, but all that can wait,” she said, looking at Jason and motioning him forward with the fingers of her right hand. “Give me your head.”
Jason and Kian exchanged glances. “What for?”
“Your mind is blocked from my Ikrid, so I need physical contact.”
“Ikrid?” Kian asked.
Kara rolled her eyes. “Sorry…telepathy. I think in V’kit’no’sat half the time now…can’t help it.”
“Wait,” Jason said, raising an eyebrow. “You know what it’s called?”
“Yes, and a lot more. This little baby,” she said, pointing to her left wrist, “holds more than armor. Puff didn’t just give me Zen’zat equipment, he made me a full Zen’zat, meaning a huge knowledge upload. I’m not through all of it yet, pieces keep popping out at random, but I can help you with your head, I think, but I need to touch it.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned any of this before?” Jason asked.
“I’ve been on Daka and spent most of my time flying and figuring this thing out in my spare time. Mark knows most of it, didn’t he tell you?”
“Ah, no,” Jason said, a bit perturbed at the oversight. “We’ve been looking through the database for anything related to these superpowers but we didn’t have the keywords to search. You’re saying you do have them.”
“Ugh,” she complained, wishing they’d just trust her. “Rensiek, Fornax, Ikrid, Sesspik, Pefbar, Lachka, Ensek…the seven basic Zen’zat psionic abilities. We’re supposed to have access to them from the get go. Breeding wasn’t figured into the equation so they’ve gotten a bit funky. Genetic deactivation, I’d guess. You guys are shuffling your bodies around enough through training adaptation that you’re probably triggering a Menslavenchednes…sorry, a…resetting of your abilities to your defaults, though apparently not all at once. You can see all around you and lift objects, correct?”
Jason and Kian exchanged glances again, thoroughly blown away. “Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“Not me, as far as I know.”
“I can do this,” Kian said, throwing off a disruption burst.
Kara squinted, but her body didn’t move while Jason slumped a bit, even though he knew what was coming.
“Fornax. Always wondered what that felt like.”
“Me too,” Kian echoed, studying her closely as if he wasn’t sure she was being genuine.
Kara caught the gist of his look and closed her eyes for a moment.
Suddenly Jason slumped again, while Kian nearly fell over. He caught himself after Kara’s disruption blast passed and stared at her with wide eyes.
“You have them all?” Jason asked, picking up on what she’d said earlier.
“All the basics. I haven’t broken through to the higher abilities. Will you please let me help you?”
“How?”
Kara held up her hand and stared at him.
“You don’t think you can give me at least a little explanation of what you’re going to do when you start poking around inside my head…which I thought wouldn’t work on Zen’zat anyway?”
“You guys can be so stubborn,” Kara said, still holding up her hand. “Trust me. Time matters.”
“Alright,” Jason said, stepping closer. “But if you mess anything up Kian’s going to kick your ass.”
“He wishes,” Kara scoffed. Then Jason remembered what level ranger she claimed to be, which put her ahead of all of them save for Morgan and Steve.
“Just hold still,” she said, touching her fingers to his forehead as she concentrated. She held them there for only a second, then started running them through his hair around to the back of his head. There she lingered, bringing up her second hand around the opposite side of his head in a loose embrace with her face a few inches away from his. She had her eyes closed, but his were open and staring at her. He felt nothing and wondered what exactly she was doing.
“Damn, you’re chewed up alright,” she said without letting go. “Did you use a Kich’a’kat?”
“Tried,” Jason said, recognizing the V’kit’no’sat name for the device Star Force referred to as a ‘regenerator.’ “If it helped, it wasn’t enough to notice.”
“I can see the repairs it tried to make. It probably bought you a little time, but it can’t heal what isn’t there to begin with. Your pain is coming from new tissue growing incorrectly. If you had the tissue and then it was damaged it could repair it to previous condition, but given this is new to your body it has no pattern to work off of, so it tried to repair the incorrect pieces to their previous incorrect status. Understand?”
“Actually, that makes a lot of sense.”
“I’m still lost,” Kian offered.
“Fortunately, I can fix this,” she said, still probing the damage. “But it’ll require you and I take a long nap together.”
“Careful, Jason. I think this second gen is hitting on you.”
“I’ll take the chance,” Jason said bluntly. “How are you doing what you’re doing?”
“Remote Ikrid download is blocked, so someone can’t pry into your memories or thoughts and extract information, nor can they take control of your body. Physical Ikrid operates differently in that it allows you to directly access the nervous system. Zen’zat have some blocks there as well, but most of those are conscious ones. They wanted us to be able to interact with each other, but not with other races. Rit’ko’sor, for example, can’t access our minds through touch any more than they can through remote Ikrid.”
“What I’m doing now is basically hacking your localized nervous system and getting some basic status feedback from it. Damage assessment. My Ikrid ability isn’t high enough to get more than a few inches from source of contact, but if it was I could hack your head by simply touching your finger.”
“No more pinky swearing, I guess,” Kian joked.
“By the way,” Kara added, “your Ikrid ability is manifesting too. It’s dormant because the tissue isn’t developed enough, but I can feel it beginning.”
“How close am I?”
“I don’t know enough to give you a good estimate, but it’
s coming,” she said, finally releasing his head and taking a step back.
“My turn?” Kian asked.
“Oh, now you trust me?”
The trailblazer gestured at Jason. “He didn’t die, so…”
“You having headaches too?” she asked, stepping up to him and touching his head.
“No, but I’ve only got the one power. Can you tell me if I’m getting any more?”
“You’ll get them all, eventually. At least you should. Depends how you’re shaking them loose…you’ve got a very small Pefbar growth,” she said, moving her hands around his head to various locations, “but I don’t feel anything else at the moment.”
“Pefbar?”
“Your third eye,” she answered metaphorically before pulling away.
“Spherical sight?” Jason asked, just to be sure.
“That’s one way of describing it,” Kara said, turning her attention back to Jason. “You want to find a bed or do this here?”
“What’s ‘this’ exactly?”
Kara held up her clear jewel. “This is also a Kich’a’kat. It has tendrils throughout my body…or can extend them out, haven’t quite figured that one out yet. Anyway, I can connect to another person. Basically my body becomes a Kich’a’kat and you have to wear me for a while for it to make repairs.”
“I thought you said a regenerator couldn’t fix the problem?” Kian asked.
“Well, it can, but not on default settings,” Kara said, catching herself again. To her all of this was common knowledge. “If they’re not set to rebuild you to previous settings and go on straight genetic replication, they’ll build entirely fresh tissue...unaugmented tissue. It’ll wipe away years of training in a matter of minutes.”
“As much as I hate the headaches, I think I’ll pass, thanks,” Jason said, taking an unconscious step back from her.
Kara noticed and laughed. “Relax. It only targets damaged areas, and I can use it to build brand new tissue around what you’ve already got. I may have to nick off a few pieces here and there, but for the most part you’ll retain what skill you have already.”
“And that will stop the damage?”
“You’ll be fully formed, then you can upgrade from there naturally.”
“If this works, can you do it for the others?”
“Yes.”
Jason laid down on the floor. “Do it…then get to David. He’s in worse shape than me.”
“Ok,” she said, straddling him. “This may feel a little weird. The tendrils are going to have to penetrate into your brain, same way they do when repairing muscle, and like a Kich’a’kat it’s important that you don’t break contact until the process is finished. Don’t want to jerk around pieces of your brain. It doesn’t take damage as well as muscle does.”
“Don’t move, got it,” Jason said, glancing over at Kian. “See to it that we’re not disturbed,” he joked.
“Jason and Kara…sprawled on the floor…” Kian said mirthfully until she turned around and pointed her index finger at him like she was holding a gun. She pulled her thumb down and the trailblazer felt a telekinetic thump against his chest that knocked him back a step.
“Don’t,” she said seriously. “I need to concentrate. This won’t be automatic like usual.”
“Got it,” Kian said, matching her serious tone.
“You’ve never done this before, have you?” Jason asked.
“Actually I have, just not on someone’s head. Ready?”
“Anything I have to do other than stay still?”
“No.”
Jason leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Do it.”
Kara leaned forward and rested against his chest, then nestled her head up against his, pressing her left arm against the other side and putting a light vice grip on his head to increase physical contact and hold it steady.
She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, concentrating on the mental interface with the device that she’d been refining over the past few years.
The clear jewel lit up, as it always did when used as a regenerator, and Kara could feel little tendrils coming out of her head like new hairs being grown. When they touched Jason’s head they immediately numbed the tissue and bored their way inside in the magically technological way that left no penetration damage.
She could feel the strands on her side, for they had only been partially numbed so as to let her be able to monitor the link and not accidently pull away, forgetting that she was still attached. In mind’s eye she could see the thousands of tiny lines worm their way into the rear portions of Jason’s brain and engulf the damaged and unstable tissue in both locations, as well as the connecting filaments.
Once connected she had a zoomed in mental map of the area and she began tagging what to keep and what to lose…on top of which she ordered the Kich’a’kat to grow the remainder of fully functional units based off his repressed genetic code, which hadn’t originally grown them from birth.
Kara knew better than to speak while in such close proximity, for fear of it jiggling the connections, but a tiny smile, barely visible appeared on her lips as she connected to his nervous system simultaneously and sent him a crude, but audible telepathic message.
You can relax, Jason. I’ve got this.
Recalibration
1
September 4, 2406
Solar System
Earth
The Kich’a’kat leads withdrew from Jason’s head back into Kara’s body and she sat up looking down at the trailblazer. “How’s that feel?”
Jason blinked twice, seeming to come back to his senses after having disappeared inside his mind’s eye and doing a check on his abilities, finding the pain and fragmentation gone…along with a touch of his power reserves, but that didn’t matter.
“Hey,” Kara asked, frowning a bit. “You still with me…or did I unplug something I shouldn’t have,” she joked.
Jason reached up and grabbed her head, pulled her back down, and kissed her once, hard.
“Thank…You…” he said emphatically.
Kara smiled broadly. “You owe me one.”
“That I do,” Jason agreed as she slid off him and they both got to their feet.
“I assume whatever you did worked?” Kian asked.
“She’s definitely got the magic touch,” Jason said, flicking his spherical sight on and off several times, trying to get the pain to return and happy when he couldn’t. “David’s next. Can you find him?”
Kian frowned. “You got somewhere else to be?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said, turning to Kara. “Pefbar?”
She nodded, then added, “and Lachka.”
“Get to David and the others. I’ve got some homework to do.”
Kara turned to Kian. “Let’s go.”
The other trailblazer nodded and followed her out of the training chamber, throwing Jason a questioning glance on the way out.
Jason gave him a subtle nod, indicating that he was truly ok, then he found himself alone on the platform and took a moment to reshuffle his thoughts…including bleeding out a few tears from the sheer relief of having the fragmentation in his mind cured in a matter of minutes. It seemed cheap, in a way, because every inch he’d scraped for over the past months had suddenly become irrelevant.
Jason took a knee and sat on his heel, breathing in heavily and relishing the calmness of his mind.
“Now,” he whispered, “it’s time to start playing catch up.”
Half a dozen things leapt to mind, training wise, that he wanted to tackle today now that the pain was no longer inhibiting his workouts, but getting some answers was going to take precedence. With that thought in mind he stood up and walked out of the training chamber with an intensity that had been sorely lacking…and only now did Jason realize just how debilitated he’d been.
He left the sanctum and passed up the group of mongooses parked outside, preferring to run instead…and finding a measure of his speed had returned, now that he
didn’t have the mental drag on his movements. Jason ran across the command deck to the nearest of the pads and scaled the attached stairs, coming up on top and shooing away the techs working there.
“Move aside fellas,” he said, jogging up to the Zen’zat control consoles. “I need to do some research.”
“Anything we can help with?” one of the three offered as they made room for him, either moving aside or to other stations, giving him the primary.
“Actually yes. I need you to assemble of list of terms that we have no V’kit’no’sat translation for, specifically items that we’ve tried to locate in the database and failed to do for lack of necessary vocabulary.”
“How long a list are you wanting?”
“Everything you can think of,” Jason said, accessing the console and bringing up a holographic interface display. “We’ve got someone who can translate now. Start with engineering terminology.”
The techs eyes went wide, but they held their questions, sensing that the Archon was busy.
“Right away,” one of them said as all three left the platform in a hurry to find their peers and start compiling the list.
Jason didn’t give them a second thought, digging into the database with tunnel vision. He input the first word, Pefbar, and got an immediate hit…several actually, for the ability was present in many of the V’kit’no’sat races. Resisting the urge to start exploring their capabilities he focused on the Zen’zat entry, and upon opening it was overwhelmed with data.
Good as his V’kit’no’sat was, he had to concentrate to decipher the alien script, though there were many charts and schematics to work off of as well, all floating in holo before him. One detailed the position in the brain where the relevant tissue was located. Another was a chart of different developmental tiers. There was a wealth of knowledge here, with Jason drooling like a kid in a candy store, but the overall assessment he was gathering without having to dig too deep into any of the individual files, was that the spherical sight ability was something that could be developed in multiple ways.
He’d originally thought that the telekinesis was the second stage incarnation of the ability, but that appeared not to be the case. There was a small subset of data related to the interaction of the Pefbar with the telekinesis, but Jason set that aside for later and dug through the timeline. It seemed as though his current incarnation of the ability was at level 1, with level 2 manifesting itself internally.
