Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64)

1

September 30, 2735

Ma’kri
Jor
-El

Mid Jump

Jenna and Levi sat in one of the sanctum’s meditation
rooms, both on nearby cushioned pedestals with their arms interlocked at the
wrists. Jenna held Levi’s right in her left, with a symmetrically reversed hold
on the other. Both Archons were motionless, eyes closed, but with a flurry of
brain activity that would have pegged out the old neural scanners that had been
used to monitor training drills such as this. Archon psionics had come so far
since those early days that a whole new generation of monitoring equipment had
to be created to keep up with them.

And the more they advanced the more they realized that
a hugely disproportional part of psionics was Ikrid. Originally they had
dismissed the non-physical skills as secondary, but there was so much that one
could do with basic Ikrid that it hadn’t become apparent until they’d leveled
up that Tier 1 ability. There were literally over 500 different applications
logged in the V’kit’no’sat database, some of which even the trailblazers hadn’t
achieved yet due to lack of prerequisites…and that wasn’t even counting the
Tier 2 upgrades.

At the moment Levi was using Orren, a Tier 2 Ikrid
modifier that gave him additional invasive power when trying to actively press
into and hack another mind. It wasn’t something that could be practiced against
a machine, like some of the other Ikrid applications that the techs and Archons
had gotten innovative on to find ways to train in isolation, but rather had to
have an active mind to access, and in this case Levi needed a strong one to
probe.

Using non-psionic volunteers didn’t offer more than a
bit of exploration and light practice, and even going up against lower level
Archons didn’t offer the necessary resistance to really push your abilities…but
Levi had all the challenge he could ever have wanted from Jenna, whose mind was
far stronger than his even without the Farchor ability upgrade, which added
additional defensive mechanisms to prevent the type of tampering that he was
attempting.

Jenna wasn’t counterattacking him, rather just trying
to block his intrusion. Physical contact had to be maintained for them to get
around the Ikrid blocks, but with the flesh to flesh connection established her
mind was open to his ‘sight’ and directly accessible. Biological as they were,
each Archon’s brain was essentially just a computer with an immense amount of
automated processes. Numerous programs were operating within the mage’s mind
without her conscious effort, such as her breathing and heartbeat. If an
opponent was strong enough, they could hack into her mind and manually shut
them down…essentially killing her with a thought.

And where the power of the mind was concerned, amount
of tissue was a huge deal, just as it was with muscles. A small opponent might
have stronger muscle fibers than a large one, but add up all the weak fibers
and you could possess a greater strength than the more developed individual
simply because of your size. That was a big disadvantage for the Zen’zat
against the rest of the V’kit’no’sat, and even more so for the Archons since
they didn’t use the Zen’zat physical upgrades that the Knights did. Even that
bit of additional brain tissue was useful, in that it gave you more processing
power and additional transmission capability.

The Ikrid blocks had been designed to essentially give
the Zen’zat an immunity to that so long as they could stay out of touching
range, and with their armor blocking physical contact it wasn’t an issue so
long as they weren’t captured and interrogated, but it didn’t allow for a
Zen’zat to hack into the minds of the larger V’kit’no’sat races very well.
That, in turn, offered the other races some comfort, but with everything
V’kit’no’sat there was an upgrade to make you better, which is where Orren came
in.

It took the size issue and basically threw it aside by
giving the individual specially designed tools for accessing another mind and
bypassing the natural defenses with guile rather than brute force. Often an
opponent wouldn’t even feel the presence of another mind when Orren was used,
for it was so low in terms of pressure that only an active monitoring of one’s
status would reveal the incursion.

Only a handful of V’kit’no’sat races were permitted
Orren, and none of them had it by default. Individuals had to earn it through a
variety of means that were similar, but not identical between the races. It was
too powerful a tool to just hand out to someone who hadn’t proven themselves,
for even a sloppy attempt could succeed against an experienced opponent, and
that type of vulnerability would have upset the powerbase within the
V’kit’no’sat that was very delicately maintained.

That powerbase was one of their few weaknesses, for
none of the races had all of the psionics that the Zen’zat did. They didn’t trust
each other that far, and the
Zak’de’ron
having too
many was one of the reasons that they didn’t fit in with the ‘equity’ that
developed over time. Zen’zat were so small and pathetic that they weren’t seen
as a threat, particularly because they didn’t have a race. They were created
from
Ter’nat
and became Zen’zat after having proven
themselves to have some merit in becoming useful tools to the V’kit’no’sat
rather than a member race.

And they’d wanted their Zen’zat to be powerful enough to
compensate for their small size and be of use to the other races, hence they
got above and beyond what the other races possessed, with a caveat. All of
their psionics after the basic 7 had to be ascended to, whereas most of the
other V’kit’no’sat psionics were a default from birth. Orren was one of the few
that was not, due to the unique power it gave an individual over others.

But where Orren was the mental sword of psionics,
Farchor was the shield. About a third of the V’kit’no’sat races had it as
default, with the others all having the trigger woven into their genetic makeup
to allow them to gain the defense if they were skilled enough. It wasn’t an immunity
to Orren, but rather a counter-intrusion program that ran constantly. In
addition to throwing up red flags for the conscious mind to see, it essentially
worked like a drone army in the battle against the intrusion, able to fight the
hacking on its own without conscious effort.

How it fought was customizable, which had to be
tailored with time and training, but even the default basics made it very
difficult for an opponent to be able to take remote control over the
individual. More than likely a disruption or a few memories gleaned would be
the result, and the ‘kill thought’ ability was shut out entirely, for the basic
life functions were so armored with redundancies that there was no way an
outside ‘signal’ could override them.

A mind was like a dart board, with a bullseye in the
center that was the conscious ‘core’ of the individual, then there were rings
expanding outward, with those closest to the core being the most fundamental
and hardest to access. Surface thoughts were in the outermost ring, with a
whole host of other functions in between. When an individual gained Farchor it
pretty much blocked out the inner two or three rings by default, leaving the
outer rings accessible but with increased resistance.

That resistance what was Levi was probing within
Jenna’s mind, with his master making a conscious choice not to press back into
his, but to try and block her apprentice’s attacks like they were tennis balls
being flung her way. His power level was too low for him to get very far with a
brute force attempt, but Orren made things tricky and offered her a decent
challenge when she opted not to respond. If she did she could shut down his
attempts quite quickly with a little disruptive pulse into his mind.

Levi was a level 23 padawan and hadn’t gotten Farchor
from Jenna yet. It was up to her which Tier 2 psionics she shared with him
first, and she’d wanted him to get used to Orren so he’d be able to understand
how an opponent was operating before he got Farchor. Jenna was far better at
defending because she had that perspective and ability to counterattack, so to
her it made sense to give him the offensive capability first.

That, and she wanted practice defending.

Outside the advanced training group there were
literally no opportunities to work on these type of psionics, and she was very
glad the trailblazers had come up with the ‘Jedi’ program of pairing a mage
with a padawan…or in some other rare cases that were beginning to pop up,
having two mages working together as a field unit pair. Most of the
trailblazers were too busy for that sort of thing, but Jason and Paul were
known to link up for a mission here and there. Then again, they’d always been a
pair since basic training.

Jenna was a level 107 mage and had moved through the
padawan ranks mostly in the advanced training group, never having a master of
her own. Some others were doing the same thing now, simply for the lack of
available mages. Some didn’t want an apprentice, but even if all of them did
there were so many Archons reaching padawan level that there simply weren’t
enough pairings. Down the road that would hopefully change, but for now they
were still in a transitional period headed into what Paul referred to as the
‘Jedi Order,’ which was their long term goal for restructuring the Archons.

The padawan levels 80-99 had been reworked to
accommodate each Tier 2 psionic that was unlocked, with several more to go that
hadn’t been discovered yet. As it was, Jenna felt it would take another 10-15
years before she got Levi to where he needed to be before transferring all of
her own psionics to him. There were four that she’d been holding off on, while
he currently possessed 16. She’d fed him each one individually rather than
having him unlock them all in the first year as some other masters did. It was
her prerogative how she had him progress, and he’d been open to doing it her
way in exchange for the ability to have a permanent training partner/teacher
while they moved about the Star Force empire doing field work.

Not all Archons preferred staying in the advanced
training group, which had grown to several levels. The inner circle was
inaccessible to even Jenna, with Vermaire and a few handpicked others pushing
the limits even further and trying to find the missing psionic triggers…as well
as working on a lot of other things that she and the others would only find out
about after the fact.

Currently the top Archon was, once again, Morgan-063.
She’d bounced in and out of that title a number of times, but she’d
eeked
out an 8 level lead at the moment and currently stood
at mage level 398 out of a total of 500 levels in what the trailblazers were
referring to as the first ‘adult’ rank. After all the centuries of training and
advancement that Jenna had gone through that almost seemed like an insult, but
after hearing their reasons and the continuous comparisons to the V’kit’no’sat
Zen’zat she reluctantly agreed that they were only now really on par when
reaching mage.

They weren’t inferior anymore, but they were far from
dominant. The mages could hold their own with the rank and file Zen’zat, and
probably defeat them given the extra psionics that they now possessed, but go
up the ability ladder above ‘average’ within the V’kit’no’sat and even the
trailblazers were quickly outclassed. Jenna didn’t know what the next Archon
rank would be after mage, but she had a long way to go to get there. Drills
like this with Levi were helping her level up her Ikrid skills, despite the
fact that the levels themselves couldn’t measure all of it.

That didn’t matter to her, for she wasn’t training
just to achieve a higher rank. Jenna was training for higher ability, in every
way, shape, and form regardless of whether or not it could be outwardly
measured. Many aspects of the mind couldn’t be, or at least not yet. That was
one of the projects going on in the advanced training group that she knew about,
with the techs trying to find more ways of measurement and the Archons taking
those and creating new challenges out of them.

Jenna figured they’d eventually get around to finding
a way to add more requirements to the levels, and she definitely wanted to
defend her ranking when they did, but in truth she just wanted to be as
prepared as possible to defend her mind if/when it ever came under attack. The
Ikrid block was a great comfort, but that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to
be able to resist a strong mind enough not to become a living thrall, and
according to Kara that was a distinct possibility with the higher level
V’kit’no’sat…and especially with the dragons.

If they could access her flesh and worm their way
inside her head, they could essentially rewrite part of her programming and
control her from afar even after breaking physical contact. She needed to be
able to resist that programming and even flush it out after the fact if it
happened, hence the need for practice defending, which was why she didn’t balk
at giving Levi ample opportunity to probe her mind.

Others, she knew, found it intrusive and kept their
efforts restricted to certain outer ‘rings’ but she did not. The type of
sparring she and Levi were doing was very intimate, given that he was able to
probe her thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. More often than not he even
tweaked her sexuality program in order to throw her off balance, and that alone
was enough to make some people recoil.

But not her, and it wasn’t because she liked him
either. He was attractive, and that was one of the big reasons she’d chosen him
out of the pool of available candidates, for if you were going to be traveling
and living together for multiple decades you might as well have someone you
wouldn’t mind getting locked in a closet with. Not that that would ever happen,
but it was a mental test she used when picking training partners and such, and
Levi had fit the bill there even though there was nothing romantic between
them. Casual flirting and sarcasm, sure. But the idea of ‘coupling’ was a
totally foreign concept for the Archon now.