Point Zero by Aer-ki Jyr (christmas read aloud TXT) 📕

her dipped face and flexing her fingers slowly…and seeing the tiny digits again brought tears to her eyes. She had her body back instead of that super-sized monstrosity. “I think Ginsi could take me now.”

“A stiff wind could take you now,” Wilson said, walking around and kneeling next to her bed so he could look up into her face. “I’m serious about going slow. This isn’t Human you, it’s Furyan you, and that’s a new playbook you have to write.”

“I know. Thank you. My nightmare is over.”

“Was there a problem with your larger body I wasn’t aware of,” the head medtech asked.

“Yeah…it didn’t fit the person inside,” she said, wiggling her toes and finding that hurt more than anything, with shots of pain running up her legs each time she applied tendon pressure to those even shorter digits. “What shoe size am I now?”

“Furyan 7.”

“Furyan?” she asked.

“The foot pads altered the height of your feet, so we had to add a new race designation. If you put a Human shoe on that’s not custom fitted, it will be tight vertically.”

“I haven’t wore standard shoes since the V’kit’no’sat War,” she admitted, for everything provided to the Archons, and especially the trailblazers, was custom fitted for their exact body sizes.

“Still horny?” Wilson asked.

“Thankfully no.”

“It may come back later when the pain goes away. A lot of problems will. They’re just suppressed for now,” he warned.

“Noted,” she said, trying to wiggle her toes again and searching out the pain so she could manually target the Haemra on the issue…which she got after three more wiggles, and the pain in her right leg began to bleed away. “Give me some time alone.”

“Don’t fall,” Wilson warned, standing up and leaning over her head as the medtechs left the room. He kissed her on the forehead. “Welcome back, Number 1.”

A smile broke out on her face from ear to ear. “I’ve got a lot of work to do to earn that again.”

“Work yes,” Wilson agreed as he walked away. “I’ll have your first workouts ready when you are.”

He left her then, and Morgan was alone with a few empty beds and walls of equipment. That and her pale white body that she could barely move without racking herself in pain…but this is exactly where she wanted to be, rather than running around in someone else’s body and carrying that burden with her everywhere she went.

She might be back to newb status, but Morgan was Morgan again, and the rest could and would be taken care of with time and training.

And she had ample opportunity for both.

But that didn’t stop her from trying to swing her legs off the edge of the bed…resulting in a cascade of pain that made her jerk in response…and that jerk threw her off the edge and onto the floor.

Except she didn’t hit. She managed to activate her now Furyan Yen’mer, and while it also hurt, the pain was less than in her muscles, leaving her floating a few inches off the floor in a crumpled superman pose that she soon straightened out and just held the hover there, finding the lack of physical contact preferable to the pressure of the bed on her legs.

She closed her eyes again and triggered her Haemra everywhere she felt pain, and continued to wiggle here and there in naked flight searching out the points within her body that were waving the biggest warning flags...

9

October 18, 154931

Huev Lio System (Olloplo Kingdom)

Kikiko

In the outer region of the galaxy, in the gap between the Perseus and Cygnus galactic arms where the stellar density was very low, there were still a scattering of star systems with long jumplines between them, making them hard to get to unless you had the more advanced engines and navigational equipment. Within the Star Force network that wasn’t an issue, but the Heuv Lio System was not Star Force owned, rather a quiet neighbor that kept to itself and was so far out of the way that it barely ever saw a Star Force ship pass through, let alone come into orbit of the one and only inhabited planet in the system, the marginally habitable desert world of Kikiko.

All water on the planet was subsurface, as were most of the cities with little top portions poking up into the sandstorms and scorching heat like snorkels…and today those snorkels spotted not one, but 12 Star Force Warship-class starships arriving into low orbit disgorging a swarm of landing craft.

Those craft were escorted by aerial fighters and gunships all the way down to the snorkels of all 81 major cities on the planet as well as some of the minor ones. No return fire came until they were nearly to ground…and when it did, it wasn’t from the native Kiio population whose weaponry was minimal, but rather from one of the minor cities in the form of topaz-colored beam weaponry that burned through several of the Star Force dropships on approach before the others immediately broke off and ran for distance as more were targeted and downed.

But no one died, for the leading dropships were decoys being flown by remote to draw out any return fire that the Chixzon might have around one of their clandestine bases. One that Star Force had never even come close to finding, given how good they were at hiding, but the assault fleet had been given coordinates and the basic layout by an unidentified source whose information was now confirmed. Few in the galaxy had the technology to produce Ardent weapon batteries, and the Chixzon had acquired the technology from the V’kit’no’sat before they had joined Star Force.

It was assumed they’d stolen it rather than entered into any agreement, and for millennia the Chixzon had wheedled Star Force through intermediaries trying to weaken and take them down through