Star Force: Perquisition (5 page)

“Kind of counterintuitive there.”

“They’re ‘minor’ until they become ‘significant.’ I
think, and be aware I could be wrong again, that they’re a timelock. The Orange
variant samples that I was sent indicate that their lock has been opened, thus
activating physical upgrades. The Purple and Red variants have not been so
unlocked, but I have been able to identify that they are there and they are not
strength upgrades. Purple has a latent sensory package and Red has a higher
cognitive level akin to your
Sav
. Not anywhere in
that magnitude, but similar in structure. It’s hard to say without actually
having active samples to analyze, but the coding is similar enough to your
psionics tissue that I’m fairly certain I’m interpreting it correctly.”

“You’re saying they’ve got a suppressed version of
psionics?”

“On a much lesser level, yes. And each variant has
something different. Orange has increased strength, speed, flexibility…not
exactly a traditional psionic but somewhat similar to your
Kex
.”

“Not mine. You haven’t found the trigger for that one
yet,” Clark pointed out.

“
Your
in the
plural. They’re similar to V’kit’no’sat psionics in that they are enhancements,
so you might want to refer to them as such going forward.”

“What about the Shanplenix?”

“They have one too, but it’s too unfamiliar for me to
isolate…yet. It’s there and locked down, but I need more time to figure out
what it is.”

“And you’re sure it’s different from the others?”

“Positive.”

“Are these ‘enhancements’ shared once all the puzzle
pieces come together?”

Vortison shook his head with a rueful smile. “That’s
the curious thing. I have a hunch that the transformative code will give an
individual all of them in addition to other things, but as is they do not
factor in to it. This is code that is complete and present in each variant as
of now, and thanks to some of the medical scans made of the Orange variant I
can conclude that the enhancement comes along with the activation key.”

“Activation key?”

“Remember when I said that even if all the variants
came together there would have to be a means of sharing their code?”

Clark frowned. “Timelock or earned advancement?”

“An interesting point. Whatever the case, Orange has
achieved it and is spreading a virus-like key that will transfer to all other
Protovic that come in contact with them.”

“Do we need a quarantine?”

Vortison bit his lip as he thought. “No, I don’t think
so. Even if we had all 8 variants the transformation can’t trigger without them
all being active. Only Orange is so far, and we only have 4 of the 8 located.”

“Any problems with integrating Orange in with our
Protovic faction?”

“Other than them being stronger and faster than
average? No.”

“How much superior are they?”

“I don’t have enough data to say for sure, but I’d say
they might have 50 or 100 years head start on other Commandos if they chose to
train in that discipline...where base stats are concerned. Skills will be
unaffected, unless they have a greater aptitude. I’ll need training data on
them as soon as you have any.”

“You’ll get it. This mystery keeps getting deeper the
further we
dig
.”

“We’ve got something big here, Clark. Maybe not
V’kit’no’sat big, but in the ball park would be my bet.”

“Big good or big bad?”

Vortison shook his head. “There’s only one way to find
out.”

5

July 19, 2970

Aphat
System (Bsidd
Region)

Nym

Brad-050 sat in his tower-top office with his feet up
on his desk looking out the panoramic windows at the Protovic planet. It’d been
117 years since he’d taken on the task of building a Protovic faction within
Star Force, and in all that time he’d never left them. It had been his job to
get them started, but unlike the origin story of the other factions this one
had seen him continue to guide the Protovic forward personally rather than from
afar, such as Larissa had done with the Bsidd. They were pretty much
independent now, though she kept tabs on them and helped them out from time to
time.

The Protovic had developed quite far over the past
century, but Brad still felt like they weren’t out of the woods yet, and not
because of any lingering problems with the Veliquesh. That civilization and
culture had been destroyed completely, but his Protovic were still young
compared to the rest of Star Force and he never felt like he could leave them
on their own. He’d grown more attached to them than he had his own Clan Beyond,
which was about the same size to date. Unlike the Bsidd or Kiritas, the
Protovic didn’t reproduce annoyingly fast and the vast majority of the 3
trillion Veliquesh that were rescued and imprisoned in the
Broj
System had never left there, dying out within the prisons when they refused to
earn their freedom or attain their self-sufficiency.

Some that did had went to the ADZ, into Axius rather
than to
Aphat
and the new Protovic faction. None that
he knew of had gone to the independent Protovic, for they had wanted none of
the Veliquesh to coexist in their society given the horrors that had occurred.
A good number were still in
Broj
, on the Axius colony
on Onyx where the prisons had been built and then slowly dismantled as they were
no longer needed, leaving Brad with a far smaller population than most people
thought given how many Veliquesh had been captured and brought back from that
war.

Clan Beyond currently had a mixed population of 5
billion and was one of the midlevel Clans as far as numbers went. Clan Star Fox
was the true juggernaut, with over half a trillion members at present and
rising fast, made up mostly of Kiritas, while the overall Human population in
Star Force had only risen to 23 trillion. They were still the minority within
the empire, with the Kiritas outside the Clans numbering 189 trillion, the
Kiritak at 237 trillion, Axius at 431 trillion and the Bsidd at 598 trillion,
who were growing more rapidly than any other faction with resources from across
the empire being funneled into creating the infrastructure to hold them all.

Growth within the ADZ had been moving at a furious
pace the last 200 years for both Star Force and others, with a decent
percentage of that still being made up by immigrants fleeing the lizards and
other dangers. How Davis had managed to keep the cities building fast enough to
hold them all was still a mystery to Brad, but he knew that the Kiritas/Kiritak
populations, along with the Bsidd, were handled in a nonrandom fashion, meaning
that all reproduction occurred under controlled situations and the number of
eggs fertilized was the exact number that Star Force wanted, else those two
races would have spread beyond the empire’s ability to feed and house.

Other populations like Humans, Calavari, and the
Protovic reproduced randomly. All infants, or in the case of Protovic egg
sacks, were taken into maturias but no population control was in effect. Sexual
excursions and the choice of individuals wanting to reproduce dictated those
numbers, meaning that Brad’s Protovic population 4.8 billion wasn’t going to be
expanding rapidly. They weren’t a powerhouse in the empire and wouldn’t be in
the foreseeable future, definitely not population wise, but Brad wanted to
carve them out a niche of their own and still felt like the task was undone,
hence his staying in direct control of them longer than even he had initially
anticipated.

But today he was glad he was still here, for there was
an issue on the horizon that required a trailblazer’s touch. Trey had reported
back the situation the Protovic civilization he’d found in The Nexus was in and
that he wanted them all moved into Star Force. 428,000 wasn’t a small number,
but given the populations both he and Star Force were used to dealing with it
was almost an afterthought. Fortunately not all of the facilities in
Broj
were dismantled, and he’d already ordered some of them
to be prepped for the incoming ‘Oranges’ but with a different indoctrination
program that he was still in the process of making.

These Protovic weren’t prisoners, but they did have a
culture that needed eliminating…that being of the primitive mindset. Without a
full linguistic write up that Trey had said would be forthcoming it was going
to be difficult, if not impossible to fashion a full program, but he knew from
his experience with the Veliquesh what the first few necessary steps would be.

Instead of isolation, these Protovic were going to be
kept together in small groups for the duration of their indoctrination, save
for those labeled troublesome. Brad was keeping some of the isolation wings as
is in case they needed to be sent there, for he wouldn’t have one person
holding up another’s progress if they proved disruptive. That said, if a group
was committed to making the transition it would sometimes be preferable to have
them move through the process together…in theory anyway. That was something
he’d never been able to experiment with during the Veliquesh indoctrination,
though in their case it was more about unlearning what they’d already learned.

For these Protovic primitives he figured it would
mostly be a matter of teaching them what they’d never been exposed to and Trey
said efforts to do that on site were already going well with a good portion of
them, so he’d let them keep familiar faces around while they learned of Star
Force and the way they lived, for that was what indoctrination was. Without it
they’d be fish out of a barrel if they were just thrown into the Protovic
society here on
Nym
.

Brad was willing and a bit eager to get his hands on
another group of Protovic and to meet the challenge of bringing them into the
fold, but it also opened up a larger question, and that was about their race in
general. He’d been following the discoveries and questions flowing out of the
research being done in Sol but the biggest question for him was whether or not
they were going to start collection Protovic from across the galaxy and
bringing them into Star Force?

Groups like the Shanplenix weren’t joining, though a
small delegation had been sent to learn about Star Force via becoming residents
in an Axius colony. More like obvious spies than anything, Star Force had
welcome them in like many other refugees but Brad had no doubt they’d be filing
reports about everything and everyone Star Force had access to and filling out
more regions on the Shanplenix maps than they’d had to date.

That wasn’t a problem, for Star Force and the ADZ in
general was an open society where information wasn’t withheld, but as of yet
there were no actual migrations coming from the Shanplenix and he didn’t think
there would be going forward, though he hadn’t written it off entirely.
Immigrants from the independent Protovic had come over to join the Star Force
faction in a continuous trickle of numbers, some coming through Axius first,
but others specifically requesting to be allowed to join his people here on
Nym
.

They all had their own indoctrinations to come
through, even those coming out of Axius that already were part of Star Force.
What Brad had built here was unique, as was each faction, so he had a playbook
already written as how to send people through their indoctrination cycle and
get them up to speed so they could hit the ground running when they arrived
here. All indoctrination facilities were in other systems, mainly
Broj
, and he intended that to remain a constant, meaning
that only full Protovic citizens were allowed on
Nym
so there would be no ‘
newbs
’ around to slow things
down.

He didn’t know how long it would take for these
Oranges to get here, but he was certain they would and any stubborn ones would
be accommodated elsewhere. They would not be confined to the prisons that most
of the Veliquesh had lived out their lives in, but if there were some Oranges
that didn’t want to become part of Star Force he’d make sure they lived better
lives than they had back in their primitive villages. Brad would consider them
a ward of the Protovic faction and leave the door open for them joining the
rest of them on
Nym
at some point if they later made
the choice, but he expected most of them to be eager to learn, based on Trey’s
reports, and that meant a whole new avenue for population growth might be
knocking on the trailblazer’s door.

As the search for more Protovic continued Brad was
being fed the
intel
coming in even though he wasn’t
handling any aspect of the searches and he knew that the Protovic colonies were
starting to pop up like weeds on the map. There were at least rumors all the
way from the home Voku territory out to beyond the Preema, and the deeper they
dug, with currency rewards made public for any tips that resulted in a positive
find, the more they were beginning to realize that there were Protovic spread
all across this arm of the galaxy shotgun style.

Should they be inviting them to back to Star Force?
They certainly couldn’t extend their borders out to them, at least not without
creating supply problems. Yes, Star Force colonies were self-sufficient by
design, but Davis kept them reigned in for a reason with the exception of the
Tether. Star Force colonized regions rather than an individual system here and
there, and Trey’s planet was a good example as of why. It was located within
The Nexus’s domain, and Brad agreed they didn’t want to get into a potential
conflict out there with no backing. Bringing these Oranges back was a good
idea, but what about the others?

Should they offer it as an option? If they did he’d
have to come up with a much more robust indoctrination program, for he couldn’t
just let them move in here and make this into an Axius for the Protovic. That
would undo a lot of what he had built, for they were a single unified faction
with no exterior ties. Axius was a mix of more races and agendas than you could
count, though after living there long enough they all tended to
gel
together, due in no small part to the enforced maturia
system. Parents couldn’t raise their own offspring and pass on their bad
habits, so long term problems tended to dissolve within Axius.

Brad didn’t want any of those problems coming here,
but the more he learned about the Protovic the more he realized that they had
been genetically engineered specifically to be reunited someday down the road.
They still didn’t understand the particulars of that, but something big was
going on here and he was sure that each of these long lost Protovic colonies
were a seed put down to build or regenerate something very important sometime
in the future.

Star Force was going to find out what that was, no
matter how long the search took to find the other 4 variants. But even then,
what he did with the Protovic faction was another matter, and it was days like
today that he just sat in front of his office windows thinking for long blocks
of time trying to figure out what the best way forward was, and what he wanted
the Protovic to become within Star Force.

Right now they weren’t specialized. They had achieved
economic self-sufficiency for the most part. Arc elements, Solari, Corovon,
etc
were still having to be shipped in, though he was in
the process of locating a nearby system where he could put down a corovon mine.
There were a few sites available, but he was still looking for the
concentrations he wanted. There was none to be found on
Nym
,
and only the barest of traces elsewhere in the system. Too small to be worth
picking up, so he was going to need another source.

Right now he was importing it from the rest of Star
Force and exporting very little. He’d wanted to go broadband and built up
naval, aerial, mech, aquatic, and commando units of decent size from the get-go
and had done the same with their industry. They were a ‘jack of all trades’
right now with nothing special about their faction, save for the robust
commando tactics that their exoskeletons allowed. Other than that the rest of
the factions did everything better than them, making the Protovic the backup
band rather than a headliner.

Brad wanted to find them something to latch onto, but
so far he hadn’t discovered it. Whatever these upgrades were could be their
defining moment, but he wasn’t counting on that. It could also be something
nasty that Star Force would need to wipe from their genome, so he was looking
at it as a possible bonus rather than something he was planning on. Interesting
to no end, but he still wanted to build up the Protovic in another way that he
hadn’t quite put his finger on yet.

But regardless of what that path eventually became for
them, he did need a higher population. He’d been tempted to offer incentives
for reproduction, but didn’t want to reward such things. Getting laid and
giving birth, even if it was to a fleshy egg sack, wasn’t exactly something of
merit, just a function of biology. An important one for any civilization,
granted, but with all of Star Force geared towards earning advancements the
idea of giving rewards for reproduction didn’t feel right so he had never gone
down that path. One needed to train to improve themselves in order to achieve
and maintain self-sufficiency, not turn their body into a baby factory and
wreck it by pumping out too many too fast and precluding any long training
blocks.