Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) (6 page)

She pivoted her hands up, bracing with her entire body
for his weight was transmitting down to her limbs, but she held her position
and allowed him to ride the pole all the way up over her head, then as he began
to tip over to the street side the Archons transitioned the ‘solid’ state of
the pole into a repulsive conduit that actually pushed him further. That thrust
was less controlled, but their previous practice with one another had been
sufficient for them to get the distance they needed, with Levi eventually
letting go of the psionic and falling the last few meters as he reached out
with his hands and feet and stuck against the side of the far building Garfield
style.

Jenna saw and felt him slip, for she was still
battlemeld linked, but he held on with a few fingers as the bounce bled off,
then he was able to steady himself and begin crawling up to the roof. When he
got there he spun around and planted a foot against the slightly elevated rim
and made himself the grip point as Jenna backtracked to get some distance, then
took off sprinting for the edge.

When she got there she jumped, getting more altitude
than Levi had managed out of his own legs, but without the help of the ‘pole’
she didn’t get nearly as high. But as she got into the air the pair established
another
repulsor
conduit between them, but caused it
to attract rather than push. Like a long rope retracting, it pulled Jenna
across the gap and up a bit as her own momentum did most of the work. A few
seconds later she hit feet first against the wall below Levi, then she scaled
the side on his invisible rope until their hands met and he pulled her up over
the edge.

Their battlemeld link broke then and Jenna searched
the street, surrounding roofs, and windows to check on her psionic blanket
she’d laid down.

“We’re good.”

Levi turned and looked across the huge roof to the
slightly taller building beyond that was their eventual target, picking up a
few minds in between behind several protrusions and access hubs into the
building below.

“We’ve got company up here.”

“I’ll take left,” Jenna said, with the pair breaking
up and quietly sneaking off to different sides of the roof to send the sentries
into naptime once they got within close enough proximity to establish a firm
Ikrid link to them all, for they couldn’t have one nod off in the view of the
others, meaning they had to do them simultaneously when their sight lines
overlapped.

But it wasn’t something new to the Archon pair, and
within a couple of minutes the rooftop was theirs, setting up their last jump
over to the Varshoo command center.

6

Jenna clung to the building wall with two feet and one
hand, holding Levi’s armored glove in her other as she blanketed the
surrounding area in Ikrid, keeping any onlookers from noticing the two tiny
ticks attached to the side of the building as her padawan slowly traced his
finger across the window.

Or rather through it, for his fingernail was fully
imbedded inside the material and poking through to the interior air as he used
his Rensiek to increase and channel his internal heat production onto the
surface of an invisible shield covering his finger. The heat went to it,
pouring through his flesh and pooling there to reach the temperature necessary
to melt the glass. Jenna hadn’t been sure that he was strong enough to get to
the required point, for not every planet’s ‘glass’ was made of the same
material.

This stuff appeared fairly flimsy, but she didn’t want
to just break or shoot their way in. She would have done the cutting, except
that her Ikrid skills were also well beyond Levi’s and keeping them hidden
while in plain sight was the priority at the moment. They still had several
hours of night left, which certainly helped their efforts, but the city lights
made it difficult to hide down low on the streets. Likewise the top of the
command center was ablaze with all manner of illumination, prompting her to
decide to go in one of the dark windows on the other side of the street from
their jump point and nearly at the same altitude.

Levi pulled his finger slowly, needing to keep the
heat flowing to it in order to melt the material. Little globules ran down over
his finger, hardening as they dropped off or moved onto the rest of the window.
He had to maintain the heat shield all the way up to the knuckle, for if even a
little droplet hit his exposed skin it would burn it instantaneously. It was
odd how he could hurt himself with his own heat, but the numerous applications
that came into play as one got stronger in Fornax more than made up for the
danger.

The Archon patiently made a huge arc over his head,
having to reposition his body several times to keep the motion continuing into
a large circle taller than his height. He made it approximately two meters wide
and had to scoot to the side on the window to keep from falling off when he
finished the cut. With some telekinetic pressure he held and pushed the clear
circle inside, with Jenna crawling over and following it in with a hand placed
over top the hole and the mage swinging herself down and inside.

She took the glass plug from him and pulled it aside
while he crawled in, disconnecting one of her gloves in the process. The pair
then slid the circle back into place and used their hands to squeegee the
excess material back into a few spots in liquid form, letting it harden enough
to hold the window segment in place, though there was no way to hide the
finger-wide cut.

Jenna released her last Ikrid links and waited,
assuming no one would notice the odd window given its height and the darkness,
but she didn’t want to be sloppy. When no mental alarms were triggered she
tossed Levi his glove and reattached her own, then the pair got moving across
the dark room and linked up in the battlemeld.

With Levi’s abilities adding to her own, Jenna began
searching the building and accessing the nearest minds as she began looking for
one of the priority targets. Language issues and unfamiliar mental structures
bogged her down, but by constricting the search to hierarchy placement she was
able to get an idea of which floors held the commanders. With those being in
range of the pair’s combined Ikrid, she searched them one mind at a time until
they got their first hit.

Jenna logged that position on her blank battlemap
using a program that had been introduced along with the telepathic armor that
allowed for tracking data to be gathered by her psionics. As a result a
waypoint popped up inside the building even before the floors did, aside from the
one they were on that was within range of her and Levi’s armor sensors.

The mage didn’t stop with the one target, but kept on
searching for others and tagging their locations. Eventually she found three
before she ran out of contacts. The building had over 200 people in it, and one
target was enough to give them a shot at figuring out what was going on with
this invasion.

Thinking together as one, Levi went to the door and
opened it, knowing that the hallway outside was clear. He broke the battlemeld
link just outside and headed for the few minds on this floor, intending to
black them out given how sparsely populated the large building was.

Jenna stayed put, picking off a few nearby minds from
where she was and forcing the individuals to fall asleep. Once she was sure
they were out of the picture for a good few hours she found a nearby
ladder/stairwell and moved down while Levi continued the hunt on the upper
levels. She got to one of their three priority targets first and stayed with
the two and a half meter tall hairy creature where it laid slumped over a
tabletop.

Pulling her glove off again, she made physical contact
to increase her Ikrid effectiveness and dove into its mind, sifting through
weird and varied thoughts until she found something familiar. Focusing on the
memory of the Skarron walkers’ deployment she backtracked to linked thoughts
and eventually got to the planetary invasion overview after a few minutes.

Levi reported back that the upper building was clear
and she responded telepathically telling him to finish up below while she
worked. Knowing that he’d take care of the rest with ease, Jenna kept digging
into recent events. This one had a different point of view than the lower
ranking soldiers, and eventually she was able to determine that they were here
because they’d been contracted to take this planet for someone called the
Trzzl
. It was a person, not a race, but someone with a lot
of influence in whatever region the Varshoo came from.

They had been instructed to keep as much of the
infrastructure and population intact as they could, but some losses were
allowable. The
Trzzl
wanted the civilization as much
as the planet it was on, but this one didn’t know why. They were here to take
it, hold it, then turn it over to the
Trzzl’s
people
when they eventually arrived. To him this was just a mission and he didn’t care
what took place in the aftermath. Once they were done they’d be leaving, but
Jenna sensed that how they proceeded with this takeover was important and would
have consequences, whether positive or negative, going forward for the Varshoo.

She pressed that further, with the difficulty
increasing the further Jenna went off of current events. Speculation was
something that required an active mind, with the memory of speculation being
something very difficult to track down even in a familiar one. For this mind it
was buried too deep, but she was able to pull a sense that reputation had a
significant effect on the Varshoo and that what they were doing here would
affect their people…all of their peoples, given that they weren’t a united
civilization.

There was also a bit of fear there, but she couldn’t
track it down. She wished this had been a Protovic or
Reen
,
because she could have dug deeper, sleep state or no, but Jenna didn’t even know
what this one’s race was called, let alone was familiar with their mental
structure. Most minds tended to be structured in similar ways, which was how
she and Levi were able to render them unconscious, but even small differences
were troublesome when trying to access memories.

Jenna went back to the walkers, focusing on them and
following that thread to its source. This one did know where they’d come from,
with the Archon triple checking her findings, not believing what she was
hearing through his memories. This one hadn’t been involved in acquiring them
and the others, for the Varshoo had come into possession of several more, but
it had heard the story of how the Varshoo had claimed them.

It was that story that she was trying to check on,
gathering up all the details she could glean from its memories, which was hard
without being able to understand words.

Jenna took what she could get from this one then left
it behind to sleep as she moved down a few levels and found one of the other
three targets that Levi had already knocked out. It was a different race, one
that she recognized as a
Delveb
. The Voku had records
on them and Star Force had linked up the identity when the mercenaries had sent
them data on the invasion. Apparently they were a scattered, yet highly
populated race spread across a significant portion of this galactic arm. Jenna
wasn’t any more familiar with their mental structure than the big guy, but this
spider-like quadruped resembled Bsidd minds in a very limited fashion, offering
her a bit more access due to her past experience with theirs.

The
Delveb
didn’t have any
more information on the
Trzzl
, but its knowledge of
the Skarron equipment backed up what she’d picked up in the other one. There
had been a planet within range of the Varshoo that was owned by the Skarrons,
some type of forward outpost, and it had been hit by another race. During the
fighting some type of biological weapon had been used against the Skarrons,
wiping out nearly half their population over the course of several months. The
remaining troops then fought the attackers nearly to the extinction of both
sides.

The Varshoo had been monitoring the conflict and in a
moment of either brilliance or recklessness they send landing craft down to the
Skarron regions that had been contaminated with the bioweapon. They raided a
military base and recovered a lot of abandoned equipment, which was where they
got their walkers and a lot of other small-scale weapons. Neither side in the
planetary fight stopped them, nor had the means to given the confrontations
occurring on other parts of the planet and the limited naval forces left in
orbit after the Skarron defense fleet was painstakingly destroyed.

Whether the attackers didn’t care or just didn’t have
the gumption to pick another fight, the Varshoo were able to come down and raid
the base and surrounding area for several days before leaving with multiple
captured Skarron transports and their own full of precious war machinery.

Jenna almost laughed. How they had managed that was
almost ridiculous. The
Varshoo’s
tech level was low,
and the fact that they were able to pluck even one walker away from the
Skarrons was hilarious. It also meant that this whole trip out here was a wild
goose chase. The Skarron Empire wasn’t expanding into this region, yet anyway, nor
did they have any affiliation with the Varshoo.

That left just one question for her to get an answer
to…and that was which side here were the good guys, if any. The Varshoo weren’t
here to slaughter, and
Tieor
being the defenders
didn’t automatically put them in the right either. Jenna hated walking away
from a fight, especially when a lot of people were dying, but she wasn’t about
to throw in without making sure what she was fighting for. For all she knew
this
Trzzl
had a reason to take over this planet, and
methods aside, she needed to know more before declaring the invaders ass holes
and gut punching them on their way out of the system.

If both sides were ass holes, then it was possible
that the
Trzzl
might actually end up making the
planet a slightly less yucky place, and if that was the case then Star Force
wasn’t going to get involved in this mess. Bad guy versus bad guy was a fight
that Jenna had learned to stay out of a long time ago, and with this system
being so far away from Star Force territory her options for dealing with the
situation were limited. Had it been closer they could have just taken the
planet for themselves and cleaned it up properly.

Jenna wasn’t able to get anything more out of this
one, so she tracked down the third while Levi stayed on watch roaming the
building and keeping a close eye on the surface entrances. If people started to
come in he’d have to bag them before they could sound an alarm, and such things
couldn’t be concealed forever. Not to mention if people called in to the
command center and didn’t get a response. The Archons’ time here was limited,
but they could stretch it as much as needed if they felt like making a bit of
noise.

That wasn’t going to be necessary, for the third
target was the highest ranking individual on the planet…as well as one of the
shortest. It barely stood even with Jenna’s waist, but had as much mass as she
did, making it look almost like a black bowling ball given the odd clothing
that it wore. Its mind was less extreme and she was able to get a bit more
information on the
Trzzl
. Apparently it was a
king-like individual who controlled a large amount of territory spread out in
bits and pieces across a very wide region of space, avoiding the major powers
and picking on the primitive systems.

The
Trzzl
was on a quest to
uplift the lesser planets, as far as the publicity/propaganda was concerned,
and had contracted the Varshoo on four different occasions for their mercenary
talents. What was odd was in the payment, for it occurred in the form of tribute
from the conquered worlds. Foodstuffs, raw materials, and a limited amount of
industrial produce would be
percentaged
into an
annual shipment back to the Varshoo in lieu of a monetary payment.

It was then that Jenna realized the Varshoo were a
collection of needy factions that used their combined military power to supply
a good portion of what their planets lacked. That was the hint of fear the
other one had, for if they failed in a mission there would be no reward and
their people would suffer for it. Also, if they failed their reputation would
diminish, with future contracts of necessary size drying up.