Star Force: Evacuation (SF50) by Aer-ki Jyr Read Free Book Online Page A

on
your own figuring things out through trial and error.
    Which was why she wanted to come here to learn from
Paul, knowing that he’d cut years off her own learning curve while remaining
ahead of her the entire time. For bioshield he was the trailblazer, and she was
immensely glad that he was still here pressing his abilities and developing
others rather than out fighting in the field. She needed and wanted a
teacher…not to mention the chance to get to know him better. Normally the
trailblazers kept to themselves as far as any close personal bonds went, but
that was to be expected. She was just a ‘second gen’ and they all outranked
her.
    But now that she had something to offer Paul she was
eager to help out, and despite the fact that he had years of training ahead of
her in this discipline she now had something the other trailblazers didn’t,
making her a ‘peer’ despite the fact that she’d been an Archon almost exactly
as long as they had been.
    To her it felt like she’d just been bumped up to the
big leagues, and now she felt different. The slight resentment towards the
trailblazers was gone, now that she felt she was on par with them.
    Actually, she kicked herself for having felt the
resentment in the first place. It was childish and, now seeing it from a
different perspective, admitted that instead of being their equal they’d
‘believed’ they were their equal, which involved more whining than doing. Now
that she suddenly found herself on the other side of the line, even slightly
so, it was an epiphany moment, feeling like she’d all of a sudden experienced
another upgrade.
    “Time to get to work,” she told herself, letting go of
the last feelings of resentment and the ‘second gen’ label she’d worn with a
mix of pride and embarrassment for centuries. She was an Archon, pure and simple,
and it was her skills that defined her, not her birthdate.

 
 
    5

 
 
    September 13, 2536
    Solar System
    Earth

 
    Smooth , Paul
reminded her as his thoughts transmitted through the battlemeld telling her
exactly what she needed to do through memory rather than words.
    Trying ,
Riona responded, summoning up another weak shield in front of her and barely
holding the effort. Manifesting the barrier around her body was easy compared
to creating an independent wall not locked into a specific distance from her
frame. With the invisible barrier visible to her senses, and Paul’s as well
through the link, she held it in place and slowly began to walk a circle around
it, forcing her to maintain its position while altering hers.
    The effort was intense, but not something she could
achieve through raw power. Push too hard and her ‘grip’ would slip, which was
what Paul was trying to teach her. Drawing on his experiences, memories, and
realtime guidance, she soaked his skill in through the battlemeld and held up
the shield for the complete walk-around, then took up a position behind it as
the thud shooters in the walls warmed up.
    Or rather one did, placed directly in front of her
while Paul was sitting with his back to the wall just underneath it and
telekinetically adjusting the control panel from afar, which she could also
feel through the battlemeld. He specifically wasn’t using any other psionics,
such as Pefbar, so Riona couldn’t draw on those. Rather, he was letting her
‘pick his brain’ as to how her own abilities worked as the first tiny
projectile shot out and hit her shield wall.
    It nearly overloaded it, and when she tried to repair
it she suddenly got a lot of intricate instructions from Paul, again, not in
words, but in raw mental images that essentially guided her with a level of
knowledge she did not currently possess. This was Paul’s choice of instruction,
and Riona had to admit she was making far more progress than she’d expected. He
was showing her things above her level, almost like a cheat, and as a result
was helping her level up much faster than had she been doing this