Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) Read Free Page B

know we can do better than that with a direct
mental link.”
    “Illusions are not a good thing, youngling. They mess
with our senses and dull our reflexes. Learning to see through them is
valuable, not embracing them.”
    “Is that your way of trying to get me into bed?” he
countered.
    “I’m still trying to understand where you’re going
with this.”
    “Sometimes you need to lose in order to reevaluate the
enemy. Take yourself out of the picture and just see it for what it is, not how
you match up to it.”
    Jenna considered that. “You’ve been working me over
pretty hard. Not sure I’m missing that much. You’d have other girls lying in a
pool of drool on the floor by now.”
    “Maybe you need to be…maybe we both need to be, at
least once, to see it clearly.”
    “You want me to work you over?”
    “That’s why I didn’t bring this up before. But if you
really want to develop a defense against this type of attack, it seems logical.
And I’m willing to bet that you’re hesitant to actually let yourself like it,
the same as me.”
    “If you go down that road it’ll mess with your head,”
Jenna reminded him, which was basically Archon 101.
    “Yeah it will, but we know we can reset ourselves
afterward.”
    “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.
You’re lustdrunk .”
    “You tell me then,” he said, with Jenna feeling the
prompt for a battlemeld link.
    She accepted it, and suddenly her thoughts were his,
and vice versa, along with their bodies in so far as they could sense what each
other felt, though they couldn’t control one another. In what would have taken
a long time to explain verbally, Jenna realized that he wasn’t lustdrunk . He was onto something, sniffing out a weakness,
and belatedly she realized they were both going about this sheepishly.
    Jenna broke the battlemeld link, but maintained their
physical contact so they could access each other’s mind. “I don’t like this.”
    “And we shouldn’t.”
    “But if we’re going to get to the root of this…I guess
we’re going to have to take a moment and be stupid.”
    “Better to do it on our terms than have an enemy force
us there later, even though the odds of that happening are slim.”
    Jenna shook her head. “No, you don’t play the odds. If
there’s a weakness you go after it, whether or not you think anyone can expose
it. The odds of anyone getting to us outside our armor and getting past our
mental blocks is slim, and even slimmer that they would take this track, but I
don’t like carrying around Kryptonite.”
    “To be fair, you’ve reduced it considerably.”
    “But it’s still there, and I think you’ve hit on the
piece of it that I’ve been missing. Because I’ve been resisting there’s a piece
of me that you haven’t been able to prod. And without that bit getting hit, I
can’t learn how to defend it.”
    “It would take a totally different mindset from what
we want,” Levi cautioned, “and it would leave you vulnerable for, I don’t know,
a day or so afterward. But as long as we’re mid jump I don’t know of a safer
time to try it.”
    “Damn it,” she whispered. “You’re right, but my gut
still says no.”
    “That’s what’s been bothering me too, which was why I
didn’t mention it. But look at it this way, if it is stupid we’ll learn why. If
we don’t go there, we’ll keep wondering.”
    “Ok, fine. But we work through this together and don’t
tell anyone until we figure it out. If this ends up just being stupid gratuity
then we don’t mention it to anyone. If there’s something valuable we figure out,
then we share.”
    “So, we’re calling a mulligan before it’s needed?”
    Jenna smiled. “Well put.”
    “So…you first, I assume?”
    “You have to promise me one thing, Levi.”
    “What?”
    “Damn…I hate even saying this.”
    “Suck it up cupcake, and just spit it out.”
    Jenna knew he said that just to goad her, but like all
Archons it