The System by Skyler Grant

Author:Skyler Grant [Grant, Skyler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

20

I had Sylax held in a testing cell. It was safest until I could be certain she wouldn't detonate. It was difficult to know what would happen with her.

Anna, Caya, and Hot Stuff had all possessed a power crystal when they'd absorbed one of the greater crystals. The greater crystal amplified the effects of their natural powers enormously, an exponential effect in Anna's case as one of her recently absorbed crystals had been an amplification crystal that already magnified her other abilities.

Sylax didn't have a power crystal of her own. Instead she was one of Anna's lieutenants and she had a secondary diluted version of Anna's power. That meant sharing a lesser version of her power, in this case the mingling of her power crystals along with the greater crystal.

Normally when someone was a lieutenant and they gained a power crystal of their own, they lost that original ability. The greater crystals didn't seem to have abilities of their own however, so what exactly it would do to Sylax's powers was unknown.

The battle logs retrieved from the ships hadn't recorded anything before arriving in the system. There was a lot of footage of them jumping in by way of singularity drives and laying waste to much of the planet before the crystal ships launched and devastated their fleet.

The world below reminded me of Earth in some ways, various zones of starkly different architecture and technology. Only one continent had housed crystal towers and ships. The caverns were beneath it.

Caya was dissecting a body from one of the destroyed ships. The fourth such one she'd gone through.

"My autosurgeons can do that, and with steadier hands," I said.

"Not as steady as mine," Caya said. Irritatingly enough, she was correct.

"Finding anything interesting?"

"Four bodies, three different species. None of them in the galactic archives—at least, those we have access to," Caya said.

That was interesting. Galactic civilization didn't know everything, but they were the best record they had.

"Any signs of genetic construction?" I asked.

"I had the same thought," Caya said, as she tapped a few keys and allowed me access to her findings. "While distinctly different builds, they each have a very uniform framework with a lack of excess data."

Evolution was a messy process. By default humans carried in their cells the debris of a million failed experiments. A lack of junk in one’s genetic code was a sign that a life-form hadn't crawled its way out of the muck. My own genetic lines were sleek works of art. I was a self-made machine.

These samples were all from a single ship.

"I wonder why they wanted such a diverse crew? I'd have reproduced some variant of the original species who built the ships and therefore would best be able to operate the controls," I said.

"The body dimensions are similar. Either someone was testing multiple builds simultaneously, or they were showing off, or perhaps they'd been in a rush and had to include earlier models?" Caya asked.

Of those options I found the rush most likely. The last time a council ship had passed through this region the people of it had still been gone.

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