Star Force: Perquisition (3 page)

Trey’s face blanked as he took a second look at those
deserts…realizing they weren’t natural. The pattern was recognizable to someone
who had seen the results of orbital bombardment on numerous occasions
throughout the lizard war, and whatever had hit the planet here had been
ordinance on a far greater magnitude than what Star Force used. So it wasn’t
with too much surprise when the Ma’kri crew told him that there were subsurface
traces of technology beneath those deserts.

Without any more evidence he could already guess what
had happened. Someone had blasted the hell out of these Protovic and only a few
managed to survive, with their civilization
regrowing
but in a very primitive fashion. When you lost your engineers, doctors,
scientists, and fabricators all your ‘common’ tech suddenly became out of reach
to the average person. Within a generation such things were lost from the
common cultural awareness, and when the originals died off the eradication of
the previous civilization was complete, leaving these roots to grow in whatever
fashion they could, in this case being a collection of small villages spread
across most of the planet but without even an attempt at a large city.

“Not what you were expecting?” the Captain asked.

“Another puzzle piece,” Trey commented. “And those
blast zones add another dimension to this mystery.”

“You think this was original damage or something later
on from the locals?”

“Good question. Whoever attacked here had one big
boomstick
at their disposal. Assemble a ground team and
keep constant scans going. I don’t know how long we’ll stick around, but I want
to give the analysts back home as much data to work with as we can.”

“I assume you’re going down as well?”

Trey gave him a dumb look, then pointed his thumb at
his chest. “Archon…duh.”

“With the collection team,” he amended.

“I may end up roaming, but we’re starting out together.”

“How big of a team?”

“Three dropships, with everyone that’s not ship’s
crew. I don’t think anyone wants to sit up here and twiddle their thumbs. They
came here to work, so let’s get to it.”

“As you wish,” the Captain said, turning around and typing
into a terminal attached to his own command chair.

Trey raised an eyebrow, not sure if that was random or
a Princess Bride reference, then headed back to his quarters to grab his armor.

3

Trey knelt on the surface of the planet feeling the
heavy gravity tugging on his muscles. 1.6g wasn’t something that was going to
stress him much, given the high gravity training that he was used to putting an
hour or two in at up to 5.5g, but his team he was worried about a bit. To that
end he put a time limit on their excursion and kept the dropships close by so
they could get a breather inside the regular gravity when needed.

Dipping a hand down into the sand, the Archon ran his
fingers through it and got a feel for the magnitude of the weapons damage to
the planet’s surface. This wasn’t ground up rock as much as it was vaporized
material flash frozen into particulates. A few weapon systems he knew of had
this result, and none of them were common within the galaxy. Hit a target with
enough power and you essentially got a bowl of confetti as a result, and given
the 160 miles of desert that he was kneeling in this place had been hit by
either something massive or a lot of smaller things in repetition…which he
assumed was the case given the lack of a single blast crater.

“Archon.”

“What is it, Captain?” Trey answered the
comm
call.

“We’ve currently got our sensors focused on your
location and have discovered an anomaly. Approximately two miles to the
northwest there are deep residue of what appears to be structures. Not much
left, but they stretch for miles.”

“How deep?”

“A little over 4 miles.”

Trey frowned. “I didn’t pack a shovel that big.”

“No. We’d need a proper digging team to get down
there. I just wanted to confirm that there was more than mud huts here in the
past.”

“Thank you…is it all sand that deep?”

“One moment,” he said, followed by a long pause.
“Difficult to tell, but our best guess is yes.”

“That’s a lot of city destroyed.”

“Adding in surface features.”

“You reading anything more than foundations?”

“Impossible to say without a closer scan.”

“I need to know. Bring her in low.”

“How low?”

“Close enough for me to toss pebbles at.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“The ship’s designed to do it.”

“But…”

“But what? Afraid the natives are going to shoot
arrows at you?”

“They have arrows?”

“No clue yet, there are none around here.”

“If we squash you, don’t blame me.”

“No promises,” Trey said, cutting the
comm
and standing up. A lot of naval officers didn’t like
bringing starships into atmosphere but Paul had proven long ago that it wasn’t
a big deal. The gravity at the surface was almost identical to that in orbit,
and unless you had hurricane-caliber winds or tried to descend too fast you
weren’t going to have trouble as long as you had a veteran pilot. Atmosphere
did cause random movements for a ship no matter how large where vacuum didn’t,
but it was more a fear thing than a real danger. Technically a seda could come
down and hover a meter off the ground if it wanted to, and a Ma’kri was much
more nimble than that.

What it did do was burn fuel at a constant rate. Not a
lot, but gravity drives were typically used in large bursts with lots of rest
time in between. Hover rates weren’t bad, but not knowing how long they’d be in
position left the crews unable to calculate fuel expenditure beforehand. The
Ma’kri had more than enough to accomplish this little shore visit, and getting
the sensors a bit closer to their target would enhance the accuracy, hopefully
enough to know whether or not a return trip with a digging crew was warranted.

“Archon,” one of the analysis team said, stepping up
beside him holding a satchel of equipment that was dragging on her shoulder
heavily. “The sand is partially organic in origin, but there are significant
traces of technological residue within it.”

“There also appears to be some foundations left buried
deep under the sand, according to orbital sensors.”

“Salvageable?”

“Don’t know yet. I’m having them take a closer look.
Anything on the weaponry used?”

“The damage is ancient, so we can only extrapolate,
but it appears to be similar to a
vertron
inhibitor.”

“Based on?”

“The crystallization patterns. There are defects that
time hasn’t completely washed away yet. This entire desert may have once been
lush forest, given the organic traces still present, but the more recent ones
concern me.”

“Oh?”

“There is non-crystalized organic traces, minute, but
probably from lifeforms inhabiting here after the planetary damage.”

“What kind?”

“The burrowing kind,” she said with a cringe, looking
up at his opaque golden faceplate.

He remained silent for a moment, then a head twitch
brought his vision back on her. “There’s nothing in the immediate area.”

“The compaction rates are all wrong. This sand has
been churned over the years, I’m almost sure of it.”

“So a lot of burrowers?”

“Or environment turbulence. We’ll have to compare to
bedrock scans to be sure.”

“How much more time do you need here?”

“Another hour should do. We want to be thorough.”

“Alright. Take your time and I’ll watch out for worm sign.”

“What?”

“Never mind. How you doing with the gravity?”

“Getting my workout in for the day. That’s another
thing, the gravity should be compacting the sand more than it is.”

“Add another mystery to the list.”

“We might be able to figure this one out,” she said,
spinning a circle in the sand with her heel as she turned around and walked
back towards one of the sample sites spread around a quarter mile perimeter
from the dropships.

Trey held position, watching with both his eyes and
his psionics to make sure his unarmored team came to no harm. They were
literally in the middle of nowhere with only some short dunes on the horizon
around them. The nearest village was over a hundred miles away on the outskirts
of the desert, leaving them alone on a cloudy day that would probably keep the
Ma’kri invisible despite its size.

Trey waited for it to come down, watching the
battlemap and his team for the moment when the clouds pushed down above them
like a wall of cotton candy headed for the ground. They never got there, with
the hull plates of the dark grey Ma’kri forcing the white puffs aside as the 6
kilometer long warship appeared to pancake the ground nearby them to the
immediate west with almost all of his team physically jerking as the sudden
arrival spooked them.

When they were finished collecting their samples the
Ma’kri had already returned to orbit, having confirmed at least a few levels of
infrastructure buried deep beneath the sands. What condition it was in was
unknown, but Trey hated to leave without finding out what it was. Coming back
on a second trip just for this might be a huge waste of time or a vital
discovery, he couldn’t be sure, but digging down to that level by hand wasn’t
going to happen either.

The three dropships stayed together rather than
splitting up so
Trey
could keep an eye on everyone,
which amounted to a 63 man team of techs and a couple of commandos. They could
have babysat the other dropships but right now the Archon didn’t want to let
anyone out of his sight until he got a feel for the planet. Primitive
civilizations weren’t the same as being safe, and he didn’t want to risk harm
to any of his team from unknown factors just yet. Once they got a feel for what
the planet had in store for them they’d split up, but right now they needed
eyes on the locals and at least one tissue
grab.

To that end he had the dropships skim the surface
behind a ridgeline all the way up to a nearby village where they were going to
land out of sight and head in on foot.

“Wait,” he said before they’d gotten to their landing
zone, a couple of kilometers out. “Full stop,” he ordered the pilots. “There’s
someone below us. Hover here until I say otherwise and open the rear hatch,” he
said, leaving the cockpit in a rush. Trey pushed by the others in the ship’s
corridors then ran out the hatch before it was even fully open, dropping a
dozen meters down into the treetops and letting the supple branches slow his
fall. He hit one not so supple one and tipped head over heels as he was
crashing through the leaves, but he managed to create a telekinetic ‘crash bag’
beneath him that cushioned his landing and let him twist over to land a knee on
the moist ground, sinking in a couple of inches before he was gone in a flash,
running through the forest in pursuit of the mental signature he’d detected.

It was also running, probably scared out of its mind,
but Trey figured the first meet and greet would go better with a single
individual than with a crowd whose paranoia could feed off of each other’s.
Running in the high gravity slowed Trey a bit, but he was surprised at how fast
this individual was moving. Terror-inspired adrenaline aside, they weren’t
letting the Archon catch up as rapidly as he hoped, with him having to
eventually use his Ikrid to get the person to slow down before they made it all
the way back to the village.

He’d hoped to just cause a sense of fatigue, but given
the distance and his own physical effort apparently he doped the person up too
much, for they fell down and didn’t get back up. That allowed him to catch up
quickly, but it wasn’t what he intended.

When he did finally get to their position the person
still wasn’t moving, and he began to sense pain before he got within Pefbar
range and could see through the brush. The person was on the ground with their
ankle wedged between two roots. Rather than burst through the leaves and freak
them out even more, he put the person to sleep then walked up into view,
pushing a branch aside and seeing a glowing orange/green Protovic female
dressed in a short skirt and bandoleer top…with her ankle bent in an unnatural
angle.

“Ah crap,” Trey said, walking over to her in his
golden armor and using a combination of fingers and telekinesis to pull the
roots apart and release her foot that was wrapped up in a sandal that was more
straps than anything. Definitely not a running shoe, which made her speed even
more impressive.

Trey disconnected his left glove, taking it off and
making skin to skin contact with her ankle. Hacking into her nervous system he
got a better feel for the injury and was able to confirm a broken bone. More of
a crack than a clean break, but not good regardless. Feeling like a moron, he
checked the perimeter and ensured that they were alone, then focused on a
seldom used psionic that had been a pain in the butt to acquire called Haemra.

Kip had been the first one to achieve it, and it
hadn’t been training related. The ascension prompt only triggered when one was
trying to heal an injury, so whenever someone wanted to share the ability with
another they had to give themselves at least a long, nasty knife blade cut on
their arm or plasma burn. Then while healing it they had to get to the proper
ascension prompt that would trigger the other person in the ‘share’ to ascend.
And while that was bad enough, if you missed it the first time you had to
repeat injuring yourself until they got it.

It was a Tier 2 ability and not that catastrophic with
regards to cascade issues. Trey had got it on the first try and only missed a
day of training. He made that choice rather than put Aaron through an extra
injury to share it with him. Hurting yourself like that was basically against
everything that Star Force operated off of, but since this was a cheat process
they couldn’t blame the V’kit’no’sat for it. Sharing had never been intended,
so the Archons made the gruesome choice to inflict the injuries in order to
share the ability that was a much more powerful version of Sesspik.

Haemra could be used on yourself for rapid healing, as
Aaron had done when he’d triggered Trey’s ascension, or it could be used on
someone else to heal them in a lesser fashion. Skill work was huge with this
one, and if you weren’t getting injured or helping with other people’s injuries
you couldn’t train it. That said, it was extremely valuable to have and Trey
was glad for it in this circumstance, otherwise he would have had to take this
native all the way back up to the Ma’kri for several days to get this break
healed up properly.

Using the physical contact, Trey took control of the
Protovic’s
body and essentially ordered it to start
regrowing
in the proper places. Since she wasn’t Human the
control was less, because Trey was less familiar with their physiology, but
they were among the closest to Humans out of all the races Star Force had and
he was able to trigger the necessary grow process…which was incredibly painful
at the rate he was pressing it. It was a form of flash tissue growth, like his
own ascensions, though slower and in this case not much additional material was
needed to reseal the break.

That said, it was preferable that she be unconscious
during the process…else it’d feel like he was doing anything but fixing her
ankle.

It took him and his feeble skills more than half an
hour to fix her up, during which he ordered the dropships to set down nearby
wherever they could find a gap in the trees. One of the medtechs came out and
took a tissue sample from the woman, several actually and Trey healed the not
so small one on her arm. He glared at the tech who’d taken it, but didn’t say
anything as she retreated back to the dropship. Another 8 minutes and that bloody
spot was healed up and he brought her back to a semi-conscious state,
attempting to get some information from her mind before waking her up entirely.

The rest of the analysis team was restricted to the
dropships for this meet and greet, but Trey did have one commando with him
watching his back while he did his mind meld thing. He wasn’t surprised to find
that these natives didn’t speak any language that he was familiar with, so he
was going to have to try and piece together some form of communication starting
with mental assurances that he wasn’t an enemy.