Chapter 11 - First scene, the completed chapter will be published Sunday night! :-) (Patreon)

Chapter 11 –

Augment Gothic 5

Cargo Bay. The Flighty Temptress. Deep Space.

6 Months Since Risa

Raising both my hands slowly, palms up, close to my chest, fingers almost touching, I breathed in deeply through my nose, like I was bringing the air into my lungs by the movement of my hands alone. I then held my breath for several moments, then slowly pushed my hands down, like I was forcing the air in my lungs completely out, down through my hands, all the while clenching my muscles, while paying close attention to my breathing. An Augment’s lung capacity was a fearsome thing.

Bringing both my clenched fists to my hips, legs shoulder width apart, I ever so slowly punched forward while breathing out semi-loudly, all the muscles in my upper body trembling with the exertion, reached full extension, opened my fingers, rotated my hand up, then pulled back slowly, all the while tightening and coiling my muscles throughout. Then I did the same with the other hand, repeating the steps by punching with the other hand, rinse and repeat.

With my hands fisted at my sides, I slowly brought my knee up and put my left leg over my right knee, held for 3 seconds, then slowly bent closer to the ground and pushed my leg out into a horse stance. Then slowly back in and out again, over and over. These were the first of several increasingly more elaborate and intense internal muscle exercises invented by Shaolin monks millennia ago on Earth, to be used in conjunction with their martial arts.

The pace was slow, but the fine sheen of sweat on the uncovered skin of my chest told a different story; this was an intense internal exercise, it was also useful for stretching, though that wasn’t strictly necessary for me. My Augment physiology meant I had a much greater muscular density and elasticity, which meant stretching wasn’t really needed, but practice was perfect.

My body was always running hotter than normal these days, perfectly comfortable in extremely cold and hot temperatures, but the ship’s environmental controls meant my cargo bay was set to a pleasant 60-degree Fahrenheit for these sessions. It was the only truly open space on the ship with the required room for my daily practice, especially since I wasn’t carrying any overt cargo at the moment.

The floor was a little cold, but slightly springy and with a coating that made it almost feel soft on the soles of my bare feet. This was meant to protect cargo from impact force or vibrational damage from the ship’s engines or flight maneuvers that exceeded the ship’s inertial dampers. Frankly, I didn’t really care all that much about the technical details, at the moment I just knew it felt good on my feet.

“Computer, slowly adjust gravity in cargo bay to five times standard,” I called aloud. An answering beep indicated the computer acknowledged my order. I could already feel the power increasing to the gravity plating built into the deck of the cargo bay. A standard human would be in a world of hurt, even falling unconscious with prolonged exposure to this amount of gravity.

When I felt I had done enough of the Shaolin internal exercises, my body moved with a slow grace into the steps of a Tai Chi kata, kind of, one movement slowly and sinuously flowing into the next, making big circular movements with my hands. Of course, nothing here was pure to the originating martial art, as the many kicks and punches I mixed in attested to, some slow, some so fast that they literally displaced the air enough to cause a small crack, like a whip. Thrust kicks, front kicks, knife hands, backfists, wheel kicks, leg sweeps, arm bars, etc., I did them all.

Then came the more acrobatic maneuvers, like brake falls, and other combat rolls for evasion, coupled with something you’d see a professional gymnast do, like aerial cart wheels, front and back flips, handstands and handsprings that became two- and then one-handed pushups, kip ups, leaps of all types six or more feet into the air. Some of it was more akin to parkour in some respects, which I felt could be useful on a combat mission. Any similarities to the maneuvers you’d see in Assassin’s Creed, one of my favorite games from my old universe, were purely accidental.

A martial arts master from Earth would recognize the pieces and parts I’d shamelessly stolen from Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Silat, Wing Chun, and Krav Maga and many others to make up this hybrid, this scrappy mutt of a fighting style, but they’d only be partially right. I was in the 24th century Star Trek, part of a larger interstellar community of races, the vast majority of which were humanoid and thus something a human was capable of performing, so why the fuck would I ever limit myself to just human martial arts?

In my mind’s eye I was fighting a battle against multiple enemies’ intent on killing me. Enemies intent on ending my life and ending this great adventure I was on. We had no fancy energy weapons with which to kill each other this time, no remotely piloted weaponized drones, no missiles or bullets or even blades. No, we were limited to the first weapons virtually all humanoid species started their evolution with, our hands, and our feet, and our fingers, and our teeth, and our sheer will to survive even if we needed to bite and tear the throat out of our enemy with our bare teeth! Indeed, that was a technique practiced in Klingon martial arts. I always did feel a bit silly practicing that particular move during my sessions, though.

As an Augment I had many, many physical advantages over the normal examples of my race, a default, foundational strength, speed, and flexibility that I had not otherwise earned through hard work and practice. Of course, the levels I had were also impossible for a human to achieve normally. As I was few could match me, but god given talent---in this case rather literal—could only take you so far, and I knew that. That was why I spent so much of my time in this dimension expanding my skill set, learning everything I could, and practicing like if I didn’t, this grand adventure I was on was going to end in some bloody, horrific, and ignominious way.

In some ways, yes, fear was driving me, but the arrogance of my fellow Augments had led to their downfall and that was not the way I was going to meet my end. Some things were inevitable; you could do everything right and still lose. I knew that. So be it. That was life! But a lot was still in my control and my arrogance was one of them.

These few hours I spent on practicing my hand-to-hand combat skills was useful for other things too. I once heard it said that martial arts was almost like a moving meditation and that’s how I tried to use it. The mind and body needed to be in synch to be the most effective, so while my body went through the deadly motions of crushing throats, stopping hearts, and breaking bones, my mind was going over the many events of the past, examining them closely, rotating them around, tasting the essence of them in a sense.

It sounded almost silly, but I was essentially doing what the Ancients of the Stargate universe did on their path to ascension, and what the magicals of the Harry Potter universe did when practicing their occlumency. Both were mental disciplines, of a sort. The Vulcans had their own advanced mental disciplines which had given me the idea and the starting point for this. If the Star Trek universe was real, and not fictional, who’s to say those other universes weren’t real too. Maybe there was something to learn and take away from them too.

So far, I had made limited progress with either, but being an Augment meant I was far more in tune with my body, far more capable of recognizing when progress was actually being made. And that could make all the difference, as blind faith was not actually required. Indeed, my thoughts felt slightly more efficient, my recall slightly faster, and the way my mind correlated and connected disparate ideas felt slightly more robust. I was happy, several ‘slightlys’ could add up to something amazing in time.

It was during one of my earliest sessions like this, in a far better and well-appointed gym/meditation space on Risa, that I recognized I had been unconsciously avoiding certain ideas out of fear. I was an outsider to this universe, ignorant of many things when I arrived, but I also possessed a lot of extremely valuable knowledge from the shows and movies. Knowledge that many would kill for.

In my past life I has seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise. I had knowledge of this universe’s past, present, and future. That meant a lot of valuable foreknowledge, like the location of hidden and advanced societies, knowledge of the existence and location of a Dyson’s sphere, even the location of two working Iconian Gateways. That technology was basically a sophisticated transporter, but one that would allow instantaneous travel over vast distances, reaching as far as 70,000 light years some thought. That was a technology well beyond Federation science, indeed beyond most of the known alpha quadrant races.

It was so tempting to just go out and grab all these choice prizes, prizes just waiting for a guy like me to come around and seize them when no one else knew about them yet. The two Iconian Gateways, for example, would both be destroyed in a struggle with other races. The problem with was that I wasn’t the only one who would want such a thing. Every great power in this quadrant would want these things too. If they learned I had them, they’d stop at nothing to take it from me. Even Section 31, who I was useful to at the moment, would gleefully kill me for these choice prizes. And what could I do to stop them at this point? I had my ship, of course, my scrappy little ship, and I had myself and my wits. But that was about it. I had no planet full of people to rely upon for protection, no super powerful allies, no truly supernatural cosmic powers like the Q. I would be easy pickings.

The urge to loot like a greedy mother fucker in an RPG was strong, but my survival instincts had been stronger, thank my patron.

Then I realized that I didn’t have to go for the top prize (at least not yet), that I could go for a softer target, one perhaps not so sought after or well known, from one of the many one-off, throwaway episodes from TNG. Fans of the show had practically pulled their hair out at some of these episodes, seeing so many wasted opportunities in the events of an episode that never got mentioned again, like it had never happened, like it had not influenced the characters or their futures in any way.

During that deep dive in my mind on Risa, my body flowing through a deadly dance of death with an imaginary enemy, I remembered an early episode of TNG named the “Arsenal of Freedom.”

It represented a prize no one knew about, and hopefully never would if I was paranoid enough, so therefore no one would want to kill me for it.

At least that was the hope…

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