Star Force: Sav (SF51) (6 page)

“I like the sound of that,” Emily added. “Except we
can’t share and don’t know how to use them yet.”

“Work in progress, like always,” Paul said, going a
step further. “We’ve also got to make this level more than 100…or make each
more difficult. A hundred years on average seems like a long time, but from the
Zen’zat’s
point of view we’re still young. We need to
structure our levels thinking far ahead of now.”

“That had crossed my mind,” Greg admitted. “But we
can’t design levels that far ahead of our current abilities.”

“I know, but I meant between status changes. I also think
it’s time we diversified the armor.
I’m liking
the
heavier version, but some are wanting to go in Kara’s direction to maximize
agility. I think we should have two options available at Apprentice while
us
Masters get more choices…after we design them.”

“We’re going to run into the problem of getting too
big of a skill gap,” Bo warned. “Right now the second gen isn’t that far behind
us. But 1000 years from now it’s going to be like bringing your kid brother
along and
I
for one am not going to be too into that.
Well, maybe once or twice but not as a regular thing.”

Greg nodded. “We also need elite pairings.”

Paul raised and pointed a finger at Greg. “Good idea.”

“Are we going to give them the telepathic armor too?”
Emily asked. “Or save that for the ‘Masters?’”

“I don’t know,” Paul said, knowing that it was in
prototype stage at the moment. “What we give ourselves isn’t the same, and we
can’t overload the others with a lot of changes all on the same level.”

“They’re going to have their hands full with the psionics
if we can learn to share them,” Greg pointed out. “That and a choice in armor
should be all we throw at them.”

“Agreed,” Bo said, now with a clean plate, “but are we
renaming it?”

“Mage fits with the psionics being added, in theory,”
Greg said. “Not sure exactly how that will work. The requirements might need to
be easy just to get them all up and going.”

Emily nodded, thinking along the same lines. “Mage
should be the hard hitting psionic requirements. We can keep the current level
progression we’ve mapped out, that way you and Morgan don’t get in a hissy fit
by resetting them,
then
add the new ones when we get
access to them.”

Bo shook his head. “We really need them all unlocked
first,
otherwise we’re going to have people marked ahead of
where they should be.”

“Can’t be helped at the moment,” Greg said, “but we
can get the armor mod going.”

“Work on it, guys,” Paul said as he stood up and Bo
followed suit. “Right now it’s time for training.”

“Isn’t it always,” Emily said, getting up as well.

“I’ll get back to you later today,” Greg told Paul.
“Already starting to get some ideas.”

“I thought you might,” he said as the four of them
abandoned the table and returned their trays before splitting up and heading
off to various training facilities within Atlantis. Paul and Bo went together,
but he made a mental note to stop by and have a chat with Wilson later in the
day and see if he could offer any insights as to how they might progress
forward. Even though he wasn’t an Archon he had always been the training
master, more often than not cluing them in to new ways to approach problems that
they then expanded upon.

If you were ever stuck he was the go to guy for help
with training issues or all around advice.

6

“Ready?” Paul asked.

“Whenever you are,” Bo answered, toeing the starting
line next to Paul while Jason watched from behind.

With the slap of the starting pedestal Paul took off
with Bo matching him stride for stride up to the first barrier and both of them
jumping up on top of it and walking across three narrow beams only 2 inches
wide. Paul took the middle lane and Bo the right, with numerous thud launchers
activating and targeting the two of them from above, ahead, behind, and from
underneath. As per the rules of the course Paul couldn’t use his bioshield and
neither of the Archons could create a telekinetic field to deflect the thuds
with. They had to intercept each one individually, catching, bouncing, or
deflecting them in order to keep their balance.

As he walked, Paul sensed the incoming thuds with his
Pefbar extended out nearly to its limits, giving him a split second warning for
each which was just enough time to create a hand-sized Lachka field that he
placed in their path, knocking down each one individually as he cycled about
mentally from point to point. There were dozens coming in at once, forcing him
to have to create multiple fields simultaneously and each on their own timing,
but he managed well enough. Only a few thuds made it through to hit him and it
wasn’t enough to throw off his balance and dump him into the disqualification
pit below.

He made steady progress across, one step at a time and
wobbling here and there when he did get hit…but Bo had already made it across.
He’d never stopped to walk, and though Paul couldn’t pay attention to what he
was doing he noticed a hail of deflections coming off him as he got pelted
repeatedly.

Jason had a better view from the starting area, in
which he saw Paul slow up and work his way across the rail gradually while Bo
didn’t slow at all. He ran right across, with all the thuds just bouncing off
his Lachka fields as if it was no trouble at all. That was the first sign that
something was considerably different between the two, but it was only the start
of the course and arguably the easiest section.

When Bo finished getting across he had to climb a
ladder, still under thud assault that would last through the entire course. He
scurried up the ladder like he had gone across the beam, almost as if the thuds
being stopped a few inches from his body were nothing more than holograms and
couldn’t touch him. In fact Jason hadn’t seen a single one hit him, while several
had gotten through to Paul.

At the top of the ladders were three circles, into
which Bo stepped and activated the timer. He held position as 5 times as many
thuds shot at him, literally throwing about 30 per second from multiple angles,
but the trailblazer just settled in and blocked them all. First he caught and
dropped them,
then
he began deflecting them back
towards various targets near the turrets and racking up some bonus points. He
could have grabbed one and threw it back, but Jason noticed he wasn’t doing
that. He was actually bouncing them in the direction he wanted…which was when
Jason finally realized he was just showing off.

When the timer expired and Paul was just getting to
the base of the ladder the floor opened up beneath Bo and dropped him down
through a short tunnel and rounded a curve, sliding him out to a lower section
of the course that had two different sizes of thuds…one tiny and one large,
both of which were being first at him at different speeds and with different
kinetic loads. Trick of this section was to probe his differentiation skills
and see just how aware he was of what he was doing.

Again, Bo surprised Jason. He traced a line on the
floor that had a holographic beacon through a complicated series of twists and
turns around an otherwise open square area the size of a basketball court,
getting hammered the entire time he had to stay inside a two meter perimeter of
the glowing ‘mist’ that was guiding him erratically. Adjusting to it and
maneuvering as he was should have been a problem, but Bo handled it with ease
and continued to rack up bonus points by deflecting thuds towards nearby
targets…and doing so individually, because Jason could see his Lachka fields
thanks to his Rentar ability, and he was in fact creating tiny fields to
intercept each…and much smaller fields than Paul was using.

The smaller the field the more accurate the trajectory
trace you had to pull, and given that this was all happening in a split second
you had to create wider fields the less sure you were of their exact position.
With Bo’s fields being so tiny it was almost as if he could see them coming
with ease…which shouldn’t have been possible with so many being fired at him
nonstop.

Jason was already impressed, but it only got better
the further Bo worked around the course. Eventually the thuds increased speed,
size, and diversity…setting up a final gauntlet run down a meter wide elevated
‘sidewalk’ with disqualification pits on either side and a hailstorm of thuds.
The ceiling and nearby walls were literally covered with launchers, some of
which were sending out baseball sized projectiles while others were spraying
him with pebbles in shotgun sprays.

Those Bo did take with single fields, which Jason
wasn’t sure was within the rules or not, but it was how he also would have
reacted had he been running it. The normal-sized thuds and larger he kept
deflecting singly,
then
he started grabbing them in
the air and holding them up in a halo around him to use as a shield as he ran
down the long hallway.

Jason couldn’t see most of him for the rain was too
heavy, but some 18 seconds later he emerged past the line that deactivated the
launchers and walked up next to the starting platform as he dropped the 200+
thuds he had suspended around his body at once, with them bouncing and rolling
off as he casually reached out and pressed the finish button.

Some of the thuds rolled over to Jason and hit him in
the feet, with the trailblazer just looking at his peer and shaking his head.

“I want one,” he said pithily, drawing a smirk from
Bo.

“How’s Paul been doing?” he said, looking back.

Jason had forgotten to look when Bo was going through
the final gauntlet, and as he scanned the course for Paul he couldn’t find him.
He reached out with is Ikrid and found his mind’s location…in the bottom of a
disqualification pit.

“Not good,” Jason summed up. “You were ahead of him
right from the start.”

“I’d hope so. I want to go again. Now that I’ve got a
handle on what I can do I think I can manage more speed and I know I can rack
up more bonus points.”

Jason looked at the score floating in the air nearby,
seeing a mark of 132 bonus points that added to his time score for a total of
1032. “Somehow I think that basic mark is going to be virtually unobtainable
for the rest of us.”

“How about you two tandem it this
time?”

Jason smiled as Paul finally got back up to the start
area, having walked through the corridors of shame below that linked the pits
to the start area. “You’re on.”

Bo walked back over to the start pedestal as the other
two had a brief telepathic conversation, then they lined up beside him and Paul
tagged the button, sending all three off…with Bo coming out the easy winner
once again, but at least Jason and Paul did manage to get to the finish with
the help of a battlemeld link and staying close enough together to help block
for one another, coming up with a finish score of 208.

They tried once again while Bo made half a dozen more
runs, bumping his score up to 1321 and demonstrating several weaknesses in the
challenge. They’d keep it as is, but if they were going to push his new ability
they were going to have to design something…harder, which Jason and Paul got to
work on later that day, turning in the schematics to the techs before evening
so they could get it built as quickly as possible.

Two weeks later a whole new wing of Atlantis had been
retrofitted into a Sav-specific training area. Paul and Jason couldn’t use it,
though they’d tried and failed miserably. They’d had to really jack up the
difficulty level in order to find Bo’s current limits, which they knew would
only grow with time and training. He could have designed them himself, but
given that he was the first to attain this ability they didn’t want him to have
to do that, instead they wanted him to focus on beating challenges rather than
creating them.

So they did it for him and got to analyze from afar
what he could and couldn’t do, making tweaks here and there and adding new
challenges as they thought them up…but there was one application they didn’t
understand the full implications of until Bo happened into a sparring match with
Vermaire one day…and beat him.

Fortunately they’d been recording that match in order
to study Bo, and he’d been wearing a monitoring headband at the time, as they
all did now. Between the two there was a lot of analysis going on, both from
the medtechs and the Archons, but it was Wilson who finally got the prize for
making the connection. He reviewed the records, along with those that Paul had
been feeding him of Bo’s other training activities, and sent a message to both
of them to stop by his ‘lair’ when they had a chance.

Both of them knew not to keep him waiting, for when he
had something he wanted to talk about with them, which was rare, it was usually
significant. His office complex within Atlantis, from where he ran the entire
Archon trainee program, wasn’t a typical office. Over the centuries he’d
reworked it into part combat operations center, part training facility of its
own, and when the two trailblazers got there he had a very young trainee going
through some null gravity training inside a containment cylinder…drawing
skeptical looks from both trailblazers.

“A bit of disorientation syndrome,” Wilson said as he
came out to meet them, holding up four fingers at the trainee inside, who
nodded…throwing off her balance and causing her to start twisting about until
her hand hit the sidewall of the shield that was keeping her inside. As she
continued to bounce around trying and failing to steady herself Wilson looked
on, knowing well that she had to learn to do things on her own without him
jumping in to help whenever one of them got into trouble. If they wanted to
become Archons they had to learn to improvise.

“Bad?” Paul asked.

“Very. Which is why I have her here every third day
for special sessions. Her mind doesn’t want to calibrate to the zero g. I’ve
seen this before and what is required is a lot of metaphorical face punching
before the subconscious finally catches on and makes the adjustment,” he said,
turning away from the trainee and pointing a finger at Bo. “You, on the other
hand, are something new. And I always like new challenges. Come with me.”

Wilson led the two trailblazers out of the main area
and into a side chamber, with Paul immediately recognizing V’kit’no’sat script
floating in holo above three different workstations in the moderately small room.
Wilson telekinetically shut the door behind them and the room’s lights dimmed
with him bringing up a central hologram depicting Bo’s fight with Vermaire.

“Nice piece of work, and far better than I could do,
but still very sloppy.”

Bo raised an eyebrow.
“How so?”

“I’ve been studying the V’kit’no’sat records in
detail, as I’m sure you have, but there are a lot more entries than those just
listed under psionics…which you know are not, given the lack of an organization
system to the database. I’ve come across numerous seemingly random entries with
training components, and the techs send any new ones they’ve translated my way,
but I make a habit to peruse the untranslated files and I’ve found bits and
pieces of information over the years that suggest a duality in the physiology
of combat…as far as the psionics engineers were concerned.”

“Go on,” Bo said, not insulted but rather intrigued by
whatever Wilson was getting at.

“The mind upgrades similar to the way the body does,
but a person can only fight as fast as the slowest portion. Your slowest
portion is now your body. Your processing power has risen beyond it, allowing
you to make more of your senses and leaving your muscle response speed lagging,
which is why you were fighting sloppy…though it was enough to outmatch
Vermaire. His strength is still beyond you, but he couldn’t handle your speed.
But then you already knew that or you wouldn’t have tackled him the way you
did.”

“Um, well…actually I was just trying to avoid getting
my ass kicked. I didn’t spot a
weakness,
I was just
staying ahead of his movements for the first time in my life.”

“Then you were even sloppier than I realized,” Wilson
continued, again without negativity and just coming with a fresh, honest, and
useful analysis. “Up until now your physical speed has been held back by your
mind’s ability to process, but freed of that you were still making
choppy/floppy attacks. I thought there had been some strategy in them.”

“Afraid not.
I was just
poking him where I could. He almost had me several times.”

“I noticed. What you need to do is retrain your body
to make use of your faster mind. I’m fairly sure you’ve got greater speed in
you already, just
uncalibrated
. After that you’ll
have to physically train for greater speed, but the first step is getting
yourself back in alignment. You’re off balance and while you’ve leveled up
considerably you’re still fighting sloppy.”

“Do you have any drill suggestions for calibration?”
Bo asked.

Wilson walked a step to his left and grabbed a
datachip. He input it into a slot on the console and had a new hologram pop up
alongside the fight with Vermaire, which was playing continuously and on a
loop. It was 8 minutes long and Wilson didn’t want to have to reload it every
time he
rewatched
it, with him going through it blow
by blow for several hours previously.