Star Force: Internecine (SF55) Read Free

a
medtech that had been in the same facility and overseeing the creation of the
contaminated gel in a small test set. The full creation had happened in another
facility that Donn and his team had found earlier, but it was here that they’d
been given the tools and instructions necessary in order to complete production
in a ‘safe’ external site.
    That medtech was a Gnar, and given the memories Donn
was reviewing it had also been the bacteria’s creator…or at least involved in
the creation and not just a handler, given the snippets of verbal chitchat he
was recovering. Not all of it was there to be found and Donn knew he wasn’t
getting a full picture because of his limited skills, but because he had two
minds to search through who had overseen the same instructions he was able to
gleam a lot more detail with the binary pull than otherwise, giving him
information about the Gnar that hopefully would be able to lead them to him.
    That information, coupled with security footage
recovered from the area surrounding the complex and local city eventually gave
the Star Force analysts a potential identity, which they sent over to Donn’s team a couple of weeks later after an extensive
electronic hunt.
    The Gnar’s name was Yeveni Sammish Veen , and she was not only a medtech but one of the senior
experts on the ADZ’s ‘Expeditionary Medical Team’ or EMTs, which was not a Star
Force-led organization, but one put together by a number of other races to
track down and combat various diseases and conditions resulting from the
abnormally high mixing of the races that was having the downside of
transferring one race’s ‘germs’ to the others and often with unpredictable
results, some of which were lethal.
    The EMTs sought out such cases and developed
countermeasures, essentially being a good will effort that Star Force approved
of without any interaction, and one which contained some of the most experienced
medical professionals outside of Star Force.
    Donn didn’t know what that meant in terms of the big
picture, but to have someone so noteworthy involved in this sent up a warning
flag in his mind, along with the feeling that they were about to get to the bottom
of this…so long as he could get to Veen before she
had a chance to disappear.

 
 
    2

 
 
    April 19, 2553
    Solar System
    Earth

 
    Jason woke up…and immediately wished he hadn’t. His
head as pounding but it was the rest of his body that was on fire. He’d had Bo
stun him so he could get some rest, but now that he’d come out of it the pain
hadn’t subsided and for a moment it seemed worse…but that was just because he
wasn’t mentally fighting it. As soon as he fully woke up everything got back in
line and his internal defenses reestablished, with him weathering the pain like
a champ…and it was that internal clenching up that he had been trying to
circumvent with the stun, for while it was active he couldn’t sleep…at all.
    Jason rolled out of bed, feeling every fiber of his
body complaining loudly and with needles, and looked at the clock.
    Two hours and 18 minutes…that was better than nothing,
but not nearly the sleep he needed. Deciding to take what progress had
hopefully been made and put it to use he stood up and walked over to the nearby
mirror and stared at his short blonde hair and ran his fingers through it,
undoing a smashed section from his pillow. His gaze dropped down to his own
eyes and he stared at his reflection, reminding himself that the pain was worth
it as the twinkling grey of his irises attested to his recent ascension to tier
3…and not just tier 3, but one of the abilities that the V’kit’no’sat Zen’zat had never discovered…at least not by the
point when the pyramid lost contact with their data network.
    Kex was an ability that the V’kit’no’sat knew of, one
of the mysterious 5 that the Zen’zat had never
achieved and as such there was no data on it in the pyramid, leaving only
Kara’s dragon