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  November 4, 4831

  Kasterborous System (Rim Region)

  Gallifrey

  Aaron-010 casually woke up in his bed. There was no alarm or any sign of trouble, but as per his habit he immediately stretched out his Ikrid to its limits and got pings from the various minds around him in the quartary all the way to the outer walls where his telepathy ended. His range was greater than that, but the walls had been rebuilt with psionic blocks in them after several Zen’zat stealth teams had attacked those sleeping without even entering the building.

  They’d used their Pefbar/Lachka to crush the brains of 38 individuals in one night, then accumulated another 137 more, including 2 Archons, before heavy patrols were enacted around the quataries with Archons and Arc Knights. That act alone had pulled so many off other duties that the Zen’zat had managed to hit other locations and set up two raids by the larger V’kit’no’sat camped out under their single captured shield generator. Now that the quartaries had been secured against psionic attacks while people slept the psionically-capable Clansmen were back on the combat front around the captured foothold.

  But knowing that there were walls the Zen’zat could not see or reach through didn’t totally put Aaron at ease. He’d trained himself to relax when he did go to sleep, but once he woke up he wanted to pull a quick check and make sure everything was alright within his quartary where over 8,000 Clan members slept.

  Not all of their quarters were filled, for they had to take shifts, but even trailblazers had to sleep during combat and the siege of Gallifrey was already nearing 3 years in length. Using their Ghostbane technology the Zen’zat had infiltrated the planet en mass and seized a single planetary shield generator along with 6 anti-orbital batteries on the Clan-only world, but before the invaders could be overwhelmed and the infrastructure retaken or destroyed, stealthed V’kit’no’sat ships began appearing in the atmosphere to reinforce them.

  Those delivered their regular ground troops, including Oso’lon, who had held the shield generator and 5 of the anti-orbital batteries. Star Force had taken back one of them, though the V’kit’no’sat had made sure to sabotage it before they lost it. Now there was a small window of clear airspace where V’kit’no’sat ships could operate, and many of them were packed in hover mode over top the shield generator itself, making it impossible for a counterattack without suffering massive losses.

  The fleet in orbit was the obvious choice to deal with the situation, but the V’kit’no’sat had Star Force’s own shield generator that they had to beat their way through and now 5 anti-orbital Ardent beam cannons. That wasn’t much compared to the size of the Clan fleet in orbit, but the V’kit’no’sat had also brought in a large fleet of their own that was keeping the Star Force fleet from hitting the ground foothold on Gallifrey…which was the largest and most heavily defended planet in the Rim Region and the current capitol of 17 different Clans including Aaron’s Nova Wolves.

  There were no civilians here. Every single one of the planet’s 18 billion people were Clan, meaning they were the best of the best from techs through Commandos, and the V’kit’no’sat had made almost no progress out from their foothold over the past 3 years. That said, Star Force hadn’t been able to remove them yet either, with both fleets in orbit playing cat and mouse games, knowing that a full fight would wipe out most of both fleets and neither side could afford those losses. Hence the Siege of Gallifrey had resulted in a stalled ground war to determine the fate of the planet, and not even the inclusion of 6 trailblazers had managed to break the stalemate as of yet.

  Aaron rolled out of bed after getting his Ikrid ‘all-clear’ scan, withdrawing his powerful psionic back into passive awareness mode where he could feel the mind locations of those nearest him in the other rooms and a few down in the cafeteria a few levels below him as he walked over to, but didn’t sit down at his quarters’ terminal. He checked for new messages using the telepathic interface, with a holographic screen rising up to his current eye level.

  There were several planetary updates and requests of moderate priority, but there was a non-priority message that got his immediate attention. It was from Master Medtech Vortison, and Aaron immediately pulled it up, resulting in a familiar hologram of a man with a none too pleased expression on his face.

  “I’ve reviewed the scan you sent and have come to the only conclusion possible. As we discussed previously, your Ikrid tissue cannot keep getting denser forever and I believe you have finally reached saturation point. Your cranial pressure has pegged out and none of your psionic tissue will increase in size because of that. I’ve analyzed every single cell in your Ikrid tissue and have confirmed they are all level 18 in density. Unless there is a level 19 that we haven’t discovered, which I doubt, you have now reached saturation point. You can no longer improve your raw power output. Your brain is simply too small.”

  “Fuck,” Aaron whispered.

  “Fine control is another issue that you may, and probably will, be able to continue improvement on, but you now have a power cap. Range will only increase if you are able to better funnel a directional scan, but spherical range is now also capped. I’m sorry, Aaron, but there is no way around this. No amount of training, as far as I can determine, will increase your power output further. I can tell you that your muscular development is nowhere near saturation, but there you have the option of adding more muscle tissue.”

  “The size of your skull limits the amount of brain tissue, and unless you want to go with the Knight size enhancements there is nothing else I can do. You’ve run out of room inside your cranium, and if not for the safety measures the V’kit’no’sat programmed in your Ikrid tissue density would start to crush weaker tissue in your brain as it increased.”

  “I know you don’t want to increase your body size to Zen’zat levels, and I would advise against only a cranial enlargement, for it would seriously throw you out of balance, but unless you get more room inside your head your Ikrid tissue cannot increase in volume and the density level cannot go any further by my analysis. As you’ve stated before we don’t know if there is another level or not until we hit it, but not a single one of your cells is showing anything beyond level 18 density. You’ve either hit a plateau or a dead end, and I’m betting on a dead end. Let me know how you want to proceed.”

  The hologram froze on its last frame, awaiting replay or banishment, but Aaron just let it linger and stared at it. He’d known this moment might be coming, and the research being done with the Elves was partly to probe what happened when one’s brain was allowed extra Ikrid tissue in place of other psionics that the Elves would never have. The results so far were impressive, but no matter how many revisions one made they’d never touch the Ikrid levels of the Oso’lon simply due to their much greater brain size.

  Aaron and the trailblazers had constantly been pushing the training element as a way to partially make up for that, but now it looked like Aaron had tapped out. He’d hit the highest level of Ikrid power his body frame would allow, and any further training past this point would result in no power upgrades.

  That was the theory anyway, and he’d come up against plateaus before that had eventually resulted in new and unexpected advancement when a way was found to break through, but this was probably not one of them. You could only pack so many molecules together before they became non-functional, and the cellular density the V’kit’no’sat had designed left little room for improvement. If Aaron had Vortison design a denser cell the efficiency level would probably drop, because the components would literally be getting in the way of each other. A level 18 cell was theoretically the best possible, and a few centuries ago it had likewise seemed impossible until Aaron had started spawning them in response to his excessive training.

  But according to Vortison no level 19s were manifesting themselves, and despite the ongoing war Aaron was getting in very good and lengthy workouts. If he had nothing but free time to train…which he was tempted to go for simply out of spite…he didn’t expect to make any headway in terms of raw power. He’d studied the microbiology on this issue so much he almost knew as much as Vortison, and he was forced to concur. His cells simply couldn’t get any more dense without losing efficiency.

  Bottom line was, after all these centuries of continual advancement, his Ikrid progress…in terms of raw power at least…had finally hit the ceiling for his body size.

  That meant the Archon levels they’d design for beyond this point were flawed. Aaron couldn’t reach them, and Archons with a slightly smaller head size than him couldn’t reach his Goku-411 Ikrid level. In theory Arc Knights could, but none of them were even near a Goku Ikrid level. The highest of them was only at Mage 329, for they were hand to hand specialists and only spent time training on things that helped them in that capacity. Most Arc Knights only had Striker-level Ikrid skills and developed them exclusively for ranged tracking and combat within a few meters radius.

  And they’d gotten good at that, causing Aaron some unique challenges when he’d sparred with them, but nothing that he couldn’t handle. His Ikrid skills were so far beyond theirs that their larger Ikrid tissue wasn’t a threat. He had more power with his smaller cranial volume, but the Arc Knights had developed a few new tricks stemming from their specialty that he’d gladly learned from.

  But even they’d have limits eventually, though it’d take them a lot longer to get to them even if they worked as hard as Aaron at it. The same went for every race, but the larger V’kit’no’sat ones, he doubted, woul
d ever reach their peak. They had so much tissue to pull on their cells wouldn’t densify unless a need was continually present, and he doubted they would put themselves through that kind of training unless a threat arose that required it of them.

  There were aspects of Ikrid that involved getting inside another’s head and engaging in combat in a virtual sense…and that was an area that Aaron could still improve on, so not all of the planned Ikrid levels beyond his current position would have to be junked, but they’d definitely have to be reworked. This was the first time any psionic had reached saturation point, but the trailblazers had been aware of the possibility for a while now.

  And not just for psionics. A Human couldn’t keep getting faster and faster in terms of running. Aaron had gotten his max speed under standard gravity up to 71 miles per hour. That was his best sprint, but the length of his legs was a limiting factor even if you ignored his muscles. An Era’tran could travel much further with a single step than he could, and they typically could run around 100 miles per hour if they were in decent shape…though they should be able to get a lot faster.

  There were limits on the trailblazers’ horizon, and that ran counter to everything that they’d based themselves on. They were literally married to the concept of continual improvement, so the idea of a firm ceiling on even one ability really left a bad taste in their mouths. Their initial reaction was to disbelieve it, and after years of breaking through other barriers they were right to do so, but this one, Aaron admitted, looked to be the real deal and not just an illusion.

  His head was only so big, and for that matter his body. Unless he wanted to increase his size there was going to come a point where he couldn’t improve raw power anymore.

  But that didn’t mean he was done. Trailblazers were problem solvers, and they’d chart a way forward for the Archons before the mass of them even approached this level. He wasn’t sure how they were going to rework the Archon levels yet, but they’d figure it out eventually.

  Frustrated, Aaron dismissed the message and ran through the others quickly before heading down to the cafeteria and filling up on food before donning his armor and running the stairs up to the roof. There he took off in flight, using his Yen’mer tissue that, thankfully, was amongst the newest in his body and had a long, long, long way to go before even thinking about hitting a limit.

  Aaron flew off over the building tops as he scanned downward using his massive Ikrid range now that he was outside the building, looking for stealthed Zen’zat infiltrators as he headed for a nearby spaceport. When he got there he jumped into a skeet and flew off with a squadron of regulars across the landscape towards the distant V’kit’no’sat zone where both sides were continually probing one another in a tedious chess match.

  The enemy couldn’t get far from its shield generator without getting pounded from the sky, so they had been bringing in smaller V’kit’no’sat generators, ill-prepared to defend against orbital bombardment but more than adequate to blunt most aerial strikes. If the enemy took another building or block of buildings they’d bring them in and creep out their lines…with Star Force counter attacking and trying to take these little footholds back.

  But they couldn’t push too far or the parked warships underneath the primary shield would pound them with naval weaponry. Aaron and his squadron couldn’t go anywhere near them, hence the stalemate. Unless the V’kit’no’sat started to win and win big they were going nowhere, and he didn’t understand why they were sticking this out in this manner. They should either cut and run…which was unlikely…or bring in more ships and hammer the breach their stealth infiltrators had created for them.

  Their empire had more than enough ships to wipe Star Force off the map if they wanted to, and Aaron knew it was only a matter of time before they sent more, but he was wondering why they weren’t here already. The V’kit’no’sat were stuck, and he and the other 5 trailblazers on planet were going to make sure they stayed stuck, so what angle were they playing? Was it pure ego that they didn’t want to retreat, or were they hoping Star Force would pull in more ships to remove them and leave other systems temporarily exposed?

  Aaron didn’t know at this point, but his duties here were clear. The stealth infiltrators had done more damage than anything, and he was the best Star Force had at sniffing them out. Last night another team had been detected but not caught, some 900 miles inside the border, and that’s where he was heading now. He’d get in the vicinity and start mentally scanning, then if and when he got a hit he’d go to ground and his squadron would provide fire support from the sky. They were all Regulars and didn’t have Ikrid, but he could use his own to interface with their minds almost as well as if they had battlemeld, allowing him to call in air strikes with a thought during hand to hand combat.

  Aaron had killed thousands of Zen’zat in this manner already, but he couldn’t be everywhere at the same time and the V’kit’no’sat kept spending their little infantry to make hits across the planet while Star Force continually kept reworking its infrastructure with more protection and detection against such strikes.

  Others were handling the mech combat on the main front lines, but it was these clandestine strikes that Aaron had been requested to come in and handle personally…and the fact that he could no longer get a power upgrade on his Ikrid through further training was a gut punch as he flew with his squadron across the planet. It wasn’t going to affect his combat today, but down the road he needed every advantage he could get…and according to Vortison he wasn’t going to be creating any more through training.

  He was either going to go Knight size or face the limitation, and Aaron wasn’t going to accept that. He needed a third option. Star Force had to continue to grow bigger, better, and stronger if they were going to have a chance against the V’kit’no’sat in the long term. He didn’t doubt Vortison’s analysis, but he knew that just because the medtech was right didn’t meant there wasn’t another route forward. He and the other trailblazers just had to find it.

  That was a burden others didn’t understand. Standing and facing an uncertain future. Was there a way or would they just be wasting their time chasing the impossible? One didn’t know until they tried, and tried, and tried. But Aaron knew they were going to have to try something different here.

  He didn’t figure it out by the time they got to the target zone, and once he got his first Zen’zat mental ping all thoughts of psionic advancement got pushed to the back of his mind. He went into hunter mode, jumping out of his skeet while in flight and falling to the ground where he angled into a superman-like streak that ended with him head-butting one of the cloaked infiltrators…starting the fight that would leave another 9 Zen’zat dead plus two injured and captured.

  Those he would interrogate and find out what their target had been, then chase down more teams he discovered had been assigned to different targets. As large as they were, these Zen’zat couldn’t stop his mind from getting into theirs and picking it apart with remarkable speed…after which they’d be stripped of their remaining armor and dumped back near the V’kit’no’sat lines.

  Star Force didn’t kill prisoners, but he knew these would just gear up again and get back into the fight later…but that was a fair enough price for the intel he got. Plus a reminder to the V’kit’no’sat that Star Force didn’t fight their way and never would. This was more than just a war of survival…it was the lightside vs those that believed they were in the right no matter what. Whether or not that made the V’kit’no’sat evil was a matter of opinion, but it definitely meant they were not lightside.

  Becoming the enemy to win was not a victory, and all of the trailblazers would rather be killed than go to the darkside.

  So the prisoners would be released and Star Force would probably kill them in combat later…but they’d have a choice. The people the V’kit’no’sat were killing in these invasions had no choice, and if and when Star Force ever got around to invading V’kit’no’sat worlds they’d make sure to do so honorably rather than slaughter everyone on sight.

  That was the V’kit’no’sat way, and would never be Star Force protocol. It was death before dishonor…rather than dishonor before defeat.