Gauntlet Wars: House Phoenix (Star Force Gauntlet Wars Book 3), page 11
We are three parts, Paul began. Our body, our mind, and our Core, but in truth we are only one, our Core. We are melded with our body and mind, but they are just a machine. When they are melded with us, they become an extension of us, and when they are damaged, we feel it. We are damaged as well, because we are one with our body and mind, and the more they are damaged the more our Core becomes blind to the universe.
We are like an island in the ocean, he said, with ‘ocean’ being easy to translate as space, except for the waves part that Saul and Jinni were having a little trouble explaining, but they were managing. The ocean is the environment that we live in and it washes up on our beach every second, changing it. Each wave that crashes onto the sand alters the sand. What you built there a moment ago is destroyed, just as destruction can be replaced with a new sandcastle. It is constantly changing. This is our Ring 10. Our ‘moment.’ Right now your moment, your Ring 10, your ‘beach’ has been altered by our arrival and us speaking to you. It has been altered in a good way, but the rest of your beach is still a mess. Further up from the water is Rings 9 and 8. Those three rings are your beach, and the bigger waves hit all of them, eroding what was there before.
We are such a wave. We are the outside environment, but coming into contact with us does not hurt you. It helps you. It helps build a temporary construct, the sandcastle, on your beach. It starts out near the water, then extends up the beach higher into Ring 9. This ring also changes rapidly, but not moment to moment. The moments build it, but it takes an hour or so to change. Ring 8 even more so, for it takes multiple hours. Both of these are said to be your ‘mood,’ and it resets as the waves crash into it, eating away at what was there before. Nothing permanent can be built on the beach. Nothing good there is permanent, nothing bad there is permanent. So some of your current sorrow is being washed away already, but beyond the beach there are forests of it that you have accumulated over the past, and they will not be altered quickly.
Your beach resets each day when you sleep, Paul said, knowing that was going to be hard to translate when there was no day and night in space, but the two Wranglers were also teaching the nightcrawler some concepts as they went, and he felt from them that Paul hadn’t thrown anything too hard at them yet, so he kept going as he had numerous times before explaining this to younglings and others.
Beyond the beach is a ‘forest,’ and its roots grow from the sand and the water that the ocean provide, but the waves never reach it. The waves only touch the beach, soaking the sand, and then the water in the sand leaches into the forest slowly nourishing or poisoning it, depending on what the ocean washes onto the beach. The trees that grow there are vastly different depending upon what the ocean has provided them. The sandcastles that grow high enough are knocked into the edge of the forest by the waves and provide nourishment, but only the highest sandcastles, and they only grow high when the ocean repeats the same waves again and again, creating stacks. Stacks of sand into sandcastles, and they get knocked into the edge of the trees along with the water in them.
The type of sandcastle, the type of water, determine how the trees grow. There are no big trees along the edge of the beach, only small ones. Temporary ones. And it is in Ring 7 that touches the beach that we have the temporary trees. They grow small when needed, then die off when not. This is how we become ‘rusty’ in a skill. The temporary trees are our ‘edge,’ our edge of the forest. When it decays from bad waves, or contrary waves, we lose our edge and become rusty, but if we have developed skills deeply, the forest beyond is still there to reseed our Ring 7, and from those seeds the beach can regrow it quickly with the right nourishment.
That nourishment is your daily actions and inaction. And when it is random we call it the environment. But when we control the environment, we call it training. We create specific waves at specific heights at specific intervals to move the sand around on the beach as we want. We move it to nourish certain trees and not others. We push healing water onto the shore rather than toxic water. We can do in a very short amount of time with training what would otherwise take years to accidentally occur through the natural environment. This is why the huge amount of damage you have sustained so far will not be healing quickly, but it will be healed faster than it was accumulated, because we are masters of training, and we will not abandon you. Even if you no longer want to live, we will push you on as the environment has pushed you around for so long. But when we push, it will be in the direction you need to go but are blind to because you have grown a forest that is not healthy.
Rings 4, 5, and 6 are a stable forest. They are not temporary like Ring 7, and large trees grow here. Rather than dying and being removed when the ocean turns against their nature, they simply go dormant until it changes to their favor. Then they grow more, taking nourishment slowly leeching through the soil from the beach. If another spell of bad weather hits the beach, they go dormant again waiting to be awoken by a good beach day.
This is your good beach day. You have many trees inside you, what we call programs, waiting to be activated when they sense the presence of those like your old masters. Now that we are here, these trees will begin to bloom again, coming out of their dormancy, and you will sense much conflict within you…for there are trees in your forest that do not belong there. Bad trees that have grown from the toxic waters and poison sand. And while your good trees went dormant, these bad trees flourished throughout your forests, and you have a big problem.
But, when your beach turns good, these bad trees go dormant as well. That, however, is not good enough. They need to be removed. How do you do this? By creating waves through training…or if they should accidentally occur…that are exact opposites of the waves that created the tree. Exact opposites of the waves that created the sandcastles that fed the temporary trees and then leached further into your permanent ones. If you do the exact opposite, instead of growing a new tree alongside the existing one, you will shrink and eventually remove the existing one and grow a new one in its place.
This is how a messed-up forest can be slowly revitalized. Both by waking up the dormant good trees, and by replacing the bad ones. If you don’t know how to train, you can’t replace the bad ones other than through luck. This is why your forest feels like it can never be made right again. You feel the bad trees choking you out, and as the good ones wake up, you have much conflict in you, because the trees are incompatible with each other, and in some ways it is easier on your Core to just leave one type of them dormant. But if the trees do not match your Core, they will always torment you.
Your Core is at the center of your island. It is not made by the ocean, it is you, and it is like a mini-ocean of its own, pushing waves outward into Ring 1 and heavily influencing it. It is hard to get water and sand in from the ocean to Ring 1, but it does happen very gradually. A strong Core will grow massive trees in Ring 1 to match its nature, even if the exterior ocean conflicts with hit. But the ocean has more control over Ring 10 than the Core does. It is a neverending battle between the two, and your Core has lost control of your forests. You have been beaten and corrupted by a bad ocean. But now, that bad ocean is gone, replaced by friends who are going to help you, but the bad trees in your forest remain, and it will take time to remove them.
Your Core can remove some of them on its own if given a chance. It will wither and remove trees that are not compatible with it, and in this way it is not just training that defines your forest, but the nature of your Core. Who you are, not who you are told to be or the experiences of your lifetime. I, for example, am a warrior. My Core has grown many tall trees that allow me to fight in different ways in my forest, and they are thriving because they fit me, and I feed them with training from the ocean beyond as well. I am also a builder, and my Core has nourished useful temporary trees that accidentally formed from the environment in Ring 7, growing them into seeds that then created temporary trees in the inner rings.
In this way, the nature of your Core latches onto things in the environment, claiming them as its own and incorporating them into the forest while trying to wither those that pop up from the environment that do not match the Core. But sometimes the ocean is so strong it nourishes these temporary trees despite the Core not wanting them, and in this way a forest can grow that is tormenting to the Core, for it does not match it.
And yet, there is one more factor involved. In the inner rings, 1, 2, and 3, you have default programs…trees that are there from the beginning, and not because of your Core or the ocean. They come with your genetics, and if they are incompatible with your Core, they will torment you until you make them go dormant…or until you remove them. These can be very tall and thick trees, but the Core is ever-present and constantly nourishing or withering the ones closest to it, which is why things like your reproductive drive and survival instincts will begin similar to those of others, but customize over time to closer match your Core. In my forest, my survival tree will not kill a friend so that I can survive, while other people’s will kill anyone in order to survive. The tree started out from identical seedlings, but grew differently over the course of my life than that of others.
You are tormented now because your forest is so thick with bad or incompatible trees that you cannot see clearly. It is blocking your view to many things. But as your dormant good trees wake up, you will be able to see some things through them…and over time, we will help you through training, by controlling your ocean’s waves, to slowly destroy the bad trees and help you grow new good ones. Your forest will be cleared in time, I promise you that. I can see clearly through my forest, all the way out to the ocean from my Core. It took a long time to manage my forest and grow it in the proper ways, but it can be done. There is no forest too corrupt to be revitalized and reworked, it is simply a matter of time and knowing how to make the alterations. Your Core will make alterations to the inner rings automatically, but to change the ocean waves on the outside, and attack the bad forest from both sides, you must know how to train.
We are experts at training, and we will guide you through what you need to do. Right now, all you have to do is keep on living. We will chart your path, and every day that goes by a little more of your nasty ass forest will be trimmed away and new seedlings planted alongside the good dormant trees that will be slowly reawakening. You will thrive once more. It will take a long time to get to that point, but we will not abandon you. Those that killed your masters seek to kill us as well, but we are in a much better position because your masters left behind information to warn us. We will not be destroyed, and we will not abandon you. You will always have masters from now on, as will your kin. One has already returned to us, and we have brought this dark vessel to carry you across the stars to meet with it and the others, then to a base where your training will grow. But the first thing I command you to do is eat. We have real food for you, like you once had. You will need it to start feeding the forest of your body, while the forest of your mind will be nourished by our knowledge and companionship.
The Progarren were your family before, and we are their cousins…that makes us family as well. Come with us, Paul said as he triggered the outer doors on the ship to slowly open, revealing the massive cavern that was inside and far larger than the nightcrawler, and we will lead you out of your blindness and despair. It will be a hard journey, but the hardest parts are already past. You survived. Now let us help you through the last leg of your journey back into your long lost family.
Paul could tell as he and the Wranglers were telling the very odd story from the heidoor’s point of view, but partway through it he could sense the despair crack open and a bit of hope return. As soon as Paul gave it an order to get in the ship, a lot of those dormant ‘trees’ suddenly started to come back to life and relief flowed through it.
It had been so long since it had an order to follow from its masters. And now the path before it was simple. No matter how much it hurt, no matter how much it was confused, all it had to do was obey and the masters would take care of it.
It swam through space, producing an energy trail that ship sensors were not designed to detect, and on that ‘train track’ it crawled…which was the way darklight creatures moved in the absence of gravity fields. The nightcrawler slid through the darkness of the asteroid belt, ramming into and pushing aside some tiny chunks of rock in the process as Saul had one of the food pellets floated into the now open doorway, with the nightcrawler ramming into it and beginning to absorb the nutrients immediately as they stuck to its outer hull like a piece of gum by design.
It ’swam’ on in further and the outer doors were closed, keeping it in near darkness other than for a few frequencies that had been designed into the nightcrawler to not be harmful and allow the Progarren to ‘see’ them on sensors.
The Wranglers and Paul could now see it in the massive hangar as it tucked into a docking port, designed to be identical to the ones the Progarren had used, and snuggled up against a slow-dispensing nutrient frame that would deliver not just food, but specialized materials that were the equivalent of medicine for its varying problems…and it had many based off the diagnostic reading they were getting from the Empire’s copy and paste recreation of the Progarren technology that had been left for them in the Legacy Repository.
The telepathic waves coming from the nightcrawler were strong, but no longer entirely ugly, and as the ship began to move out of the asteroid field and back towards the black hole to jump off towards the location of the next nightcrawler in this galaxy, this one even began to ‘purr’ slightly, telepathically speaking anyway…
10
EG29
October 1, 158438
MILKY WAY GALAXY
Lorichar Kingdom
Idfadar System
Interplanetary Space
Ni’chi’ko sat with his appendages draped around the command stool upon which he directed bridge operations from in the heart of the Bsidd Hijaro-class jumpship Tani’shew. It looked a lot like the other warship/carriers in Star Force, but each Faction of the Empire had their own unique design flares though the purpose was the same. The Tani’shew was a drone carrier that had its own weaponry, notably the bloon launchers that were a favorite of the Archons and could deliver a massive amount of destructive energy in a giant glob to stationary or near stationary targets.
Ni’chi’ko’s mission now wasn’t to attack anything, but rather escort another convoy of supply ships heading into the Asferja war zone. He had 178 cargo vessels of various makes, but all were Bsidd ships and carrying a combination of food, water, prefab structures, replacement drones, and multiple passengers, most of whom were either construction workers or security forces.
They were headed to a planet where a large number of prisoners had been taken, and the supplies were going to be used to help construct a proper prison that other planets could send their prisoners to, thus freeing up the combat forces from babysitting duties. So far not many Asferja had surrendered, but given how many of them there were, if even 0.1% surrendered or were rendered unconscious and didn’t have a choice in the matter, that equated to millions upon millions as this war progressed, and Star Force needed someplace local to put them.
Rather than bring them into an existing world, they were using one of the destroyed ones the Asferja had taken from a primitive Star Force neighbor. And if the Asferja wanted to hit it again, well, Ni’chi’ko had been assured there was a trap waiting for them if they did, so the planet wouldn’t be just a weak penal colony easy to hit.
He’d also been told that the Asferja might just kill the prisoners rather than rescue them, and Star Force couldn’t allow that either.
But Ni’chi’ko could do math well. No naval Captain would achieve their position if they could not, and given the swarm-like nature of the Asferja, there was going to come a time soon where Star Force simply wouldn’t be able to take prisoners from a logistical standpoint. It was early now, but if they kept sending reinforcements through the Galactic Threads, it was going to turn into a pure and simple bloodfest with only one survivor left standing. He was sure that was going to be Star Force, and while the Empire had their invasion corridor mostly bottled up and contained for now, he knew that soon the Empire would have to stop holding back and trying to play nice with the bad guys and simply laying them all to waste before they did the same in reverse.
He'd been hatched from his egg sack during the war with the lizards, and that’s exactly what Star Force had been forced to do then, and the few prisoners they took killed themselves anyway. It was a hard lesson for the Empire to learn, but they’d learned it, and he knew they weren’t going to stupidly keep spending resources on the Asferja prisoners for too much longer, but right now they were still in the dominant position, and as he’d been taught during his Maturia training, ‘Mercy was a luxury of the dominant.’
But if Prince Karthen wanted the Bsidd to start building these camps, then Ni’chi’ko wasn’t going to argue. The Human had guided his race for a long time and grown them into the most populated Faction within the Empire, and given what the Archons had done with the lizards…turning some of them into Paladin and making them part of the Empire…he figured something similar might be in the works for the Asferja. They were always thinking ten steps ahead of everyone else, but right now Ni’chi’ko would rather have been fighting the Asferja rather than escorting cargo ships.
As he sat with his multiple purple appendages draped around his mostly hollow torso, he was mentally linked in with the ship’s systems so he didn’t need one of the bridge crew to tell him when a proximity alarm went off a split second before a ship decloaked alongside them and began firing into their long hull.
The shields were already up, and had been ever since they left the planet of Tyren further out in this system where they had to stop and pick up a few more ships in the convoy. Now halfway back to the star this was happening, and he could tell instantly it was not an Asferja ship…it was one of the new arrivals, the Bru’son, and Star Force’s limited data on them had not indicated they had cloaking technology or were anywhere near the convoy route.
