Star Force: Cascade (SF73) (9 page)

“What’s a pet?” another of the younger techs asked.

Claven
sighed, looking at
the chief. “I’ll leave that one to you. We’re good here? Aside from their lack
of dark age cultural knowledge.”

“We’re good, though I think in a couple, maybe three
days we’ll have to pull a maintenance shutdown given the amounts coming in.
Gotta
manually scrub those headers.”

Claven
nodded. “Make the
call when necessary. Still no word on the upgrade yet.”

“That’s alright, boss. I don’t mind the manual labor.
Gives us something to do other than watch holograms and push buttons.”

“I prefer it that way,”
Claven
differed. “If you get busy that means things are breaking and I’m having a
really bad day. So stay bored, please.”

“As ordered.”

“Carry on,” the Administrator said, walking out of the
booth and back into the hallway to continue his rounds. He couldn’t hit
everywhere on the station, for it was just too freaking huge, but he chose a
few vital areas and then stopped by locations he hadn’t in the previous days.
There was something wrong about being in command of a facility that you never
set foot in, not because he didn’t trust his crew to do their jobs, he just
didn’t like to be out of the loop.

An hour later his wrist beeped and he held up his arm
lateral in front of him to activate the holographic torso of one of his
assistants.

“What is it?”

“Supply convoy is here early. Do you want me to get
the ball rolling or wait for you?”

“Anything unusual in the manifests?”

“Just getting them now.”

“Are they all loaded?”

“Seven ships in total, two are empty.”

“Start filling them with the armor pallets. I’ll
handle the rest when I get back.”

“Offloads?”

“Put them in the bays the pallets leave.”

“What about bay 7?”

Claven
shook his head. “No,
we’ll have to slow production here when the backup hits. Keep bay 7 open for
the
chori
.”

“Understood. I’ll tell them to hold off until they can
shovel out their own floor space.”

“I’ll be back inside half an hour,”
Claven
promised, deactivating his communicator and casually
walking on, cutting his inspection tour short but hitting two more locations
before heading back up to the command center and his staff of 6. If he didn’t
make these tours those 6 would be the only faces he saw on a regular basis, for
given the size of the station and the automation, his crew of over a quarter
million were so spread out that they didn’t bump into each other much during
work, and
Claven
spent most of his time working or
training, with almost no interactions in the residential zones.

He was in them to eat, sleep, and train…all of which
he did quickly and usually alone, then he was back in his office or roaming the
station. This posting was too important for him to allow himself time off, so
he never did. If a time came when he needed a break he’d resign and let someone
else fill the slot. Until then he was on call round the clock in order to make
sure this behemoth kept functioning and feeding Star Force the valuable
materials that only it and its twins could produce, and until they caught up
with the
Prometheus
’s production
levels the weight of responsibility was even more on their shoulders.

Or rather his, for he deferred everything to himself
while allowing the crew the downtime he didn’t take. They all had shifts and
replacements to take over while they decompressed and pursued personal agendas,
but there was only one Administrator, and even when he slept he kept his
communicator on just in case something went wrong. From the day he stepped on
this station to the day he left it he considered himself never to be off duty,
for he knew that trouble could come at any time and any place, and it didn’t
have off hours.

9

May 9, 2894

Solar System

Earth

Paul stood in the center of a small circle, arm raised
and redirecting towards various thuds as they were thrown at him from a narrow
arc. As each one came he summoned up a small burst of concussive energy in his
bare arm and threw it forward from his palm, intercepting and knocking down the
little balls before they could hit him. His aim was improving, but it was still
difficult to emit a precise blast, for the Jumat was more like a tsunami than a
rifle shot. Still, he could throw enough over a certain vector to block a
single thud coming at him, with this drill focusing on his aim and repetition.

He no longer had trouble summoning up the goosebumps
that the energy manifested from. That was now a skill that he could trigger at
will, with many other aspects of the psionic being added in these first few
years thanks mainly to Morgan’s notes, for she had meticulously kept them and
formed a training database on the ability from her first year to the present.
In it she listed mental tricks that had helped Paul learn the summoning skill
faster than she had, as well as numerous training simulations that she’d
developed over the years and that now Paul had the benefit of using straight off.

His progress with the Jumat was far faster than hers
had been, and now he felt that he truly understood why Ginsi was climbing the
ranks as fast as she was. He’d always been the trailblazer figuring things out
or with his peers, but now he got the opportunity to see what it looked like to
be following someone else through and gaining from their experience.

It was literally night and day, for he didn’t have to
figure out ways to train…Morgan had already done that for him. All he had to do
was throw himself into the drills and challenges and work on improving. He was
literally a kid in a candy store, and that combined with the fact that he’d
started out with more raw power than Morgan had put him way ahead of her
progression rate and he intended to keep it that way, for he was so far behind
her that he doubted he’d ever catch up. She had centuries of working to develop
her Jumat as an advantage over him, and though they hadn’t met up to spar yet,
for she was busy waging her private war against the lizards in Ninja Monkey
territory, Paul knew it would be a laughably one-sided affair.

Hitting and pushing back the thuds took a decent
amount of his energy, but if he’d wanted to he could knock a person off their
feet with ease…he just couldn’t do it with repetition. His tissues were so new
that they didn’t hold charge well, though with his ambrosia levels being so
high he had yet another advantage over the Morgan of the past, for the Jumat
consumed ambrosia as a quick resupply fuel source. Problem was Paul’s tissue
wasn’t good at absorbing it, at least not as good as Morgan, so whenever he
tried something big he usually got one or two shots at it before he had to take
a sip from his ambrosia bottle and wait for it to process.

He literally had enough ambrosia in that one bottle to
service 1000 adepts for months. Paul didn’t want to have to constantly run off
for supplies, so he’d had a concentrated liter of it made up for him so he
could ingest it at will without having to fill himself up on foodstuffs or
water. Overdosing was a big danger, for he couldn’t measure accurately sipping
through a straw, but he was managing it well enough. Plus all he had to do to
overcome a mistake was fire off some more Jumat blasts as soon as his tissues
soaked up the abundant fuel source.

Per Morgan’s notes he knew the best way to increase
his abilities wasn’t in going big, but in working on repetition and getting his
cycling rate up. He hadn’t yet learned how to manifest the energy outside his
clothing, but he had learned to channel it to various parts of his body,
forgoing the need to train naked when all he had to do was keep one arm bare.
Today he was wearing a sleeveless shirt so he could alternate arms, but neither
one of them would fatigue, for his entire body was producing the energy and
transmitting it to a given location. His arms, or whatever other body part he
chose, became his firing array, not the generation point.

Right now he’d learned to use his arms and chest as
emitters, for it took a while to calibrate the mental control necessary to use
other body parts. The chest he’d only added within the previous year, doing a
DBZ flex in order to pool the energy just below the surface and transfer it out
in a finishing move-like attack. For that he had to be shirtless, but today he
wasn’t working in it so he’d donned his sleeveless tank that was now soaked
with sweat after four hours of work, first of which began on the track and now
had transitioned into the thud firing chamber.

Using the Jumat was exhausting, which was why these smaller
bursts were key in developing his endurance and teaching his tissues to soak up
ambrosia faster. They could charge through other means, but all were slower.
The key to using Jumat as a serious weapon was in having the ambrosia handy,
otherwise it was just going to be a surprise or last ditch attack that he’d
have to hoard. Once expended, the Jumat tissues would take hours, if not more
than a day to fully recharge naturally while the ambrosia would hit his
bloodstream and he’d feel the effects within a minute.

As useful as telekinesis was, there was no substitute
for Jumat. It was literally the cannon to the Lachka sword. It was crude in
comparison, but he had so much firepower available now, in burst at least, that
he understood how vitally important an advantage he had over the Zen’zat that he
had kept his non-training activities to a minimum and had been making the
advanced training group his semi-permanent home as he worked to get a handle on
this oh so impressive Tier 3 ability.

Paul secluded himself in training so much that others
had started interrupting him via
comm
when they
needed something, knowing that if they waited he might not come out of the
sanctum for more than a day. So as Paul was batting one thud out of the air at
a time a voice filled the chamber and he kept going without delay.

“I’m here,” Paul said, twitching his arm to the left
and surging another pulse of invisible energy to cancel the thud’s momentum and
lightly bounce it back towards the wall and the collection ring at the bottom.
“What do you need?”

“Just got word from Vortison,” Rio’s voice said
eagerly. “He says he’s found the trigger and wants you to verify it.”

Paul stopped what he was doing and looked towards the
ceiling out of reflex. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” Rio said as the next thud came out and hit Paul
in the chest, bouncing off him and ending the drill in failure, but he didn’t
care.

“Now?”

“If you can spare the time.”

“Dumb question,” Paul said, telekinetically grabbing
his ambrosia bottle and heading out the door. “On my way.”

Paul walked into the lab along with Rio, both clad in
fresh clothes as the medtech in charge of genetic research waved them over with
a pair of curled fingers as he was manipulating a hologram with his other hand.

“Talk to me,” Paul said, walking up on his shoulder.

“I’ve always wondered why this one was so elusive, and
now I have my answer. I think it’s a resistance measurement with a temporal cap
restriction of at least a few minutes so some freak attack or condition
wouldn’t trigger it. Morgan’s gravity damage and her resistance to it was
prolonged and, I think, enough to push her over the edge. Your level of
training, without considerable breaks, pegged you out. Step into the scanner
please.”

Paul listened as he walked over to the duplicate of
the V’kit’no’sat medical station made from Star Force tech. It wasn’t nearly as
advanced in the alterations department, but they’d been able to fully copy the
scanning tech. As soon as Paul walked in a hologram of his body lit up on
Vortison’s
console and he began manipulating it to get the
suspected trigger under scrutiny.

“
Hmmn
,” Vortison said,
looking at the live data.

“What?” Rio asked, more than eager to get his own
Jumat.

“His is turned off.”

“Meaning what?” Paul asked, for his Jumat ability was
most definitely ‘on.’

“The trigger and ascension protocol are separate on
this one. Or to be more precise, there’s not the usual overlap. Most of the
triggers we’ve discovered are a completion measure, so that once you attain
that, for lack of a better word, ‘fitness’ level you activate the trigger. This
means it’s always turned on so long as you’re maintaining or improving…which
allows you to share them. Right now Paul’s isn’t on, so it isn’t just a matter
of finding which part of yourself to mimic.”

“I have to recreate the stress level,” Paul guessed.

Vortison nodded. “Yeah, I think so. What I don’t know
is how long the trigger will be on. Could be a few seconds or a few hours.
Think of it like a coffer with a small hole in it. You fill it with stress
until it overflows the brim, but if you stop adding stress the level will
diminish and eventually dry up completely.”

“So I’m going to have to catch him during hard
workouts?” Rio figured.

Paul shook his head. “We’ve got to figure out how much
stress is required, then program a biomonitor to measure in realtime.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Vortison confirmed. “I need you
to hang out right where you are for the next hour or so, and hopefully I can
create a program to measure how close to
peaking
out
you are.”

“Limit break?” Rio asked, glancing at Paul.

“Done.”

“Done what?” Vortison asked as he worked.

“Naming stuff,” Paul explained as he crossed his arms
over his chest as he stood more or less still. There was nothing for him to do
but wait, though in this case he wasn’t going to complain. “Is it possible to
overfill the coffer?”

“Also on my to-find list. I need your active stats to
determine that as your stress levels recede. It’s a good thing you came
straight from training.”

“I wasn’t hitting it that hard, to be honest. I was working
on my
Jumat’s
finer control. Stressful in its own
way, but not what I’d image this trigger is looking for.”

 
“It has to be
full body,” Vortison confirmed, “to get the necessary levels. If you got your
arm chopped off it wouldn’t be enough because it was region specific. You need
to feel it all over and, I think, you need to be pressing back, so damage alone
won’t trigger it.”

“Trying to walk under heavy gravity,” Rio said,
drawing another conclusion.

“I’m not an Archon, but I think that would be the most
efficient means of reaching it.”

“It doesn’t work,” Paul said, dashing his hopes and
drawing a curious glance from the medtech. “I tried long ago. The level Morgan
probably survived I’ve matched and exceeded in training. It’s not going to be
enough unless we allow ourselves to be damaged at the same time, and we’re not
stupid enough to risk that. She almost died, and I think we’d have to do the
same in order to get at it that way.”

“So how did you get at it?”

“Cumulative effect would be my guess.”

“Specifically?”

“Workout load. Not one specific drill or action, but
the effect of everything adding up into a giant weight that will crush you if
you don’t rest or know how to manage it. I’ve learned and press it harder in
training in order to up my resistance to that kind of stress. I think it’s fair
to say I’ve gone further in that area than anyone else?” Paul asked, looking at
Rio.

“Holistically, yeah, I’d say you have. Vermaire,
however…”

“Damn, why hasn’t he popped the trigger,” Paul said,
thinking hard.

“Mass,” Vortison said off hand.

“What?”

“It’s his mass…I mean I’m just guessing here, but the
larger you are the more tissue you have to spread the load through.”

“Wait a sec…” Rio said, with Paul thinking the same
thing.

“If it’s proportional to size, then the Zen’zat growth
enhancements are actually hindering their ability to achieve Jumat?”

“I’ll know more after we peg this down, but I’d
hesitantly say yes…assuming that the smaller individuals were competing on the
same level. You’re both stronger than Vermaire, I assume.”

Rio cringed. “Not exactly.”

“No?”

“Hand to hand,” Paul admitted, “he pretty much owns
us.”

“Is he stronger, in terms of muscles, per fiber?”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Actually, I don’t know which
one of us is stronger per fiber.”

“Boris is the smallest, though not by much.”

“Percentage strength,” Vortison explained. “If you
lift a static amount of mass, the effort is spread out through your fibers. The
Knights have far more than you, so is Vermaire creating as much force, and
inversely as much strain, as you are?”

“I’ve never thought of it that way,” Paul admitted.
“He’s done what seems impossible by virtually undoing his speed penalty for his
larger size. He moves as fast as us, and coupled with his mass that gives him a
huge advantage in raw power.”

“Vortison is right,” Rio agreed. “He’s a badass, but
there’s a lot more of him to absorb punishment. If this trigger is taking the
whole person into account, then we’re ahead of him.”

“Not by that much,” Paul argued.

“These triggers were designed for Zen’zat,” Vortison
reminded them. “The others aren’t affected by size. This one, I can say,
probably is…but if we can identify how much stress it takes it won’t matter.”

“It will if others want to share it,” Rio said,
thinking ahead. “They’ll have to find their own limit breaks.”

“Damn, you’re right,” Paul agreed. “Only
me
and Morgan have reached them, and hers was a fluke that
she was lucky to survive.”