Star Force #61-80
Author: Aer-Ki Jyr
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Anthology containing: Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (61-64) Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (65-68) Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (69-72) Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (73-76) Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (77-80)
Publisher: Archon Lore
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

Initiation

1

January 2, 2690

Macalania System (Tether)

Shiva

Orval woke up to his alarm, a soft tone beside his head in bed that gradually got louder until he finally woke or it elevated to ear piercing levels. He reached over and tagged the off button, then rolled out of his narrow bunk and stood up, stretching in the overly warm quarters. His muscles were tight after the last round of workouts, so he threw in some real stretches before he hit the lights and began to get ready for the day.

That meant shaving, showering, and heading over to the nearby cafeteria for some breakfast bars that would give him some extra energy without weighing him down when he hit the track for his morning run, further loosening up his body. After an easy 8 miles he accelerated and worked the last 2, then stopped by the equipment room where he rinsed off and changed into a skin-tight swimming suit that extended from elbows to knees. On top of it he picked out a breath mask then headed over to the underwater course rather than one of the standard training pools.

The difference was the course was more tunnel and terrain than a rectangular pool, with Orval slipping his mask on, checking the air reserves, then tagging the start pedestal and diving in. Once underwater there were light beacons everywhere to guide him and a narrow bubble tunnel at the top that contained air should his mask fail, but otherwise it was a totally submerged playground.

After about 20 seconds of swimming he came to a fork in the road, so to speak, with three possible paths to follow. He took the middle one and continued on his course, swimming through various obstacles and through small tubes that required him to move in all directions. It was an agility course, forcing him to maneuver in multiple ways, and halfway through his ‘run’ he was passed up by another swimmer.

Orval let her go, seeing that she was swimming with jets and he’d never keep pace with her. Trying to minimize the disruption he slid aside while still moving forward and let her pass him in the narrow tube, with her chest brushing against his arm as she likewise twisted to give him room on the pass. It was tight, but both swimmers were on the clock and didn’t want to be slowed down. These courses were usually underused, so occasional run-ins like this were tolerated and both swimmers got back to their pacing, with Orval seeing her using all four gauntlets as he clawed at the water with his bare hands and feet.

That meant she was probably working on skills rather than fitness, for each gauntlet was its own little jet engine. She had two on her ankles and two on her wrists, giving her considerable maneuvering capability. Orval’s had to come from his own body, making his course run a workout. While commandos and aquatics were different branches of Star Force, swimming scores were part of his levels rank and they were one of his weaker areas that he was trying to focus on during this new assignment.

It was guard duty, boring as could be, but within Star Force that meant an opportunity for virtually uninterrupted training. His assignment didn’t have him standing guard over any particular facility, but rather stationed on planet for response to potential hostiles or unknown circumstances…which meant he was going to be left alone to train his heart out, for Shiva was in the middle of nowhere.

The ice world was currently the furthest tip of Star Force’s ‘tether’ territory, which was what the long string of breadcrumb outposts leading out towards the rim was called by those who knew it existed. Orval had been looking for a training assignment for a while and when this one had opened up he immediately put in for reassignment. His commando ranking of level 254 gave him the priority pick, not that there was a lot of demand for the slot. Some people liked exploration outposts, but most preferred to remain in the ADZ or on combat missions, leaving only a small pool of individuals to compete with for these far out there slots.

Star Force usually filled them with low level personnel, but in their wisdom they required some ‘senior’ slots along with what were usually filled by newbs. Orval’s presence here wasn’t superfluous, for if the small colony came under attack he and the others would be their only line of defense, hence the need for at least some seasoned personnel in the mix, but the whole point of creating the tether worlds was to quietly establish a presence heading out towards the rim and not to attract a lot of attention.

Some of the colonies were more public, but this one was meant to be secret…in so much that it was in a system that nobody wanted. The only habitable planet was Shiva, and it was covered pole to pole with ice and snow fields. Nothing living had been found on the planet, making it a prime spot for Star Force to establish their own Hoth base and put down another foothold that would eventually grow into a breadcrumb that would then be leapfrogged even further out by another expansion.

As it was, Shiva was the furthest out with the majority of their cargo fleet taking more than a year to reach the ADZ. Some ships were faster than that, but the system was some 3,490 lightyears from Sol and in the nearer edge of the gap between the Orion and Perseus galactic arms. That ‘gap’ still had star systems, but the density of them diminished in various spots making for a pseudo-geographical border. The denser regions in between the two arms acted like land bridges with the most traffic and civilizations present, according to the Nexus information.

Technically they were within the Nexus domain now, but all that really meant was they were in the neighborhood. The nearest Nexus world was some 680 lightyears away, leaving the local region in what would be considered ‘fly over’ territory. The jumplines between systems out here were longer, with fewer options, and that kept less advanced races from moving through the area or colonizing it. Furthermore the lack of habitable worlds was significant, with only a few well outfitted races/factions cherry-picking the available ones and leaving the rest untouched.

That was why Star Force had chosen to reach their tether out through this region in order to get to the Perseus Arm. They were nowhere close to that, but this was the first good step out into the ocean of emptiness between the two, and the less attention drawn the better. There were plans to establish other branches within the tether, but those would be constructed later off the main route, which Shiva was on and had been the tip of for some 14 years.

Other colonies would have been much further along after a similar period of time, but Shiva had been visited by only a single convoy and exploration team that had done well to set up operations. Yet given the insanely long supply routes virtually everything had to be built locally and the other nearby links in the tether chain weren’t in a position to offer up exports just yet either.

That said, scouting teams were already searching for where to establish the next link in the chain while Shiva grew to a prerequisite level of infrastructure…a tenuous hold, but the Archons knew that so long as they could maintain anonymity they could stretch the chain out fast and far, while letting outposts like this develop into colonies at their own pace instead of waiting for them to become full blown civilizations.

So as it was, Orval was one of some 72,000 people on the planet that were busy digging new tunnels down through the usually 2 mile thick ice and into the sandy crust of the planet. The mining probes had to go down even further to get to the actual rock layer, and then even further to get to the limited geothermal heat the Mars-sized planet produced. That’s where the bulk of their mining operations were taking place, with both crust harvesting and magma siphoning being utilized, though the latter had only come online in the past 6 months.

But that’s not where he and the bulk of the colony was located. They were up in the ice layer, with a few spires poking up through to the open air…which for a world this small was extremely thick. The CO2 levels were a bit high, but tolerable if you could stand the cold. The atmosphere was habitable, meaning you could walk up top without any breathing gear, but with temperatures never getting above the melting point aside on some freaky occasions Shiva definitely earned its nickname of Hoth, save for there wasn’t a lick of wind on the planet…nor wampas.

Orval spent his days inside, only rarely going up on the surface in armor just to get a feel for the planet. Today wasn’t going to be one of those days, for he was in strict training mode and volume protocol…which had him doing virtually nonstop training at lower intensity levels. If a problem arose he’d drop what he was doing and deal with it, but ever since he’d arrived on Shiva he hadn’t known of a single ship to pass through the system aside from their own. Star Force had chosen their location for this little breadcrumb extremely well.

And the commando enjoyed the anonymity, for while the interior of the colony looked the same as any other Star Force city this one felt different. He knew that was because of their distance from the rest of Star Force and how exposed they were out here, but it also had something to do with the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere. This was definitely a frontier outpost, but it felt like as much of an exploration mission as a foothold grab. That technically didn’t involve him since he was just here as a military babysitter, but it definitely felt like they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

And no matter what the internal temperature of the city was, he always felt cold. The water he was swimming through was mildly warm, but when he finished his course and came to the finish/start area on the opposite end he pulled himself up into the air and felt a mostly psychological chill. He pulled his mask off and took a few normal breaths, letting the small cell recharge fully pulling oxygen from the air to replenish what he’d burnt off during the swim. It did the same when underwater, but at the moment there was no need to be breathing the supply when he was taking a momentary rest.

The room temperature was fine, but just knowing he was on an ice world made him subconsciously aware that he was wet and his mind told him that wasn’t a good thing, so after a few minutes he jumped back into the water, starting the timer for a reverse swim down a separate group of tunnels and feeling ‘safe’ back in the water as his skin was no longer chilling.

When he finished up his swimming workout he walked through the chilly air over to the equipment room and got dressed in a casual uniform before heading back to the cafeteria for a larger second breakfast. Getting that food down him was necessary but he knew he’d need a bit of time to digest it, so as usual he went to one of the targeting ranges where he wouldn’t need to move around too much. His focus right now was straight up fitness, but taking breaks with skill work kept him from having to wait between workouts and he’d found it better that if once his mind got going in the morning he never stopped till he went to bed, in order to keep the low level fatigue from nudging him into nap mode.

On the way to the targeting ranges he hopped into a skybridge that connected two of the surface towers, with him feeling absolutely chilly the moment he stepped out into the clear tunnel. Aside from the footpath the circular tube he was walking through didn’t appear to be there at all and gave him an awe-inspiring view of the surface ice sheets. They weren’t smooth, but rather ragged and sometimes spikey giving the illusions of topography when in reality there wasn’t a bit of rock, dirt, or sand anywhere near the surface.

But ice was hard enough, especially at these temperatures. The twin suns in the sky didn’t produce enough combined heat to melt more than just a tiny layer on the surface, giving numerous gleaming mirrors to reflect the light into his eyes as he walked across. Fortunately there was recent snow on the ground which cut down on the blinding light, but in many places where there were vertical faces the mix of yellow and blue light bounced off and gave the surrounding landscape the look of being decorated with Christmas lights from afar.

Most of the reflections were a mix of sunlight, but get one sun shadowed and the other not and the colors would become evident, making it hard to look at sometimes with Orval’s eyes yearning for something nongleaming to lock onto…which they did when a speck of dullness caught his attention below him to the right. It was moving across the surface on its metallic biped legs, with the mech following a faint path of footprints in the snow as it moved about doing what the commando didn’t know.

Feeling considerably chilly just by looking at all the ice, he walked across the long straight bridge until he entered the nearby building and his eyes readjusted to normal light levels, then he headed down to the range which was built just below the ice layer and picked up a sniper rifle in the nearby equipment room. It was one of the new sammies, which had replaced the well-established lachars, but for the purpose of target shooting the intensity was dialed down so he wouldn’t melt the targets. That said, if he accidentally shot someone it would still do damage akin to sticking your hand in an open flame.

Stepping out into the gunnery circle he started the automated practice program and began tracking targets within a 30 degree cone ahead of him. He couldn’t brace the rifle on anything other than his arms, which made the really long shots difficult. That said, the sniper weapon was capable of shooting further than the range, so he wasn’t going to have to get super steady to hit the furthest targets…in theory.

His sniper skills weren’t quite that good, but like any proper commando he was up to the challenge. Besides, this was just an ‘extra’ challenge to kill time while his food digested, so he didn’t put much mental effort into it. Relaxing, he fired off round after round, lightly goosing his accuracy without picking any of the robust targeting drills. This was one of the perks he had for getting a ground assignment, and even if he wasn’t going to go all in on it today he was definitely going to avail himself of the range.

In recent years he’d been fighting lizards, which meant he’d spent a considerable amount of time onboard jumpships. All Star Force ships had training facilities on them, but they were nothing compared to what planetside facilities contained. Basic sanctums had shooting ranges, but nothing as large as this. Nor did they have underwater swimming courses. At best they’d have 2 or 3 pools for lap swimming and that was it. The volume of a ship, even one as large as a jumpship, had its limitations…and over the years Star Force had come up with an insane number of training chambers and drills that could be built.

This training facility was a tier 2, the second highest of all and he’d been told that was deliberate given how far away they were from any other facilities. That meant that even thought Orval was out in the middle of nowhere he had one of the best locations to train in. The tier 2 facility was even good enough for the Archons on Shiva to use, for there hadn’t been a separate sanctum built for them yet. That virtually never happened, underscoring just how impressive this training facility was.

Orval knew fighting the lizards was important, but after so many years of doing so he’d seen his skills begin to plateau and that wasn’t a good thing. There was word coming down through the ranks of a major crusade in the planning stages, and when/if that actually happened he wanted to be ready…not burnt out and stagnant. That’s why he’d taken this assignment, to get his combat mojo recharged and to grab another few levels of advancement before it was time to do whatever the Archons were planning.

But he also didn’t like sitting back and doing nothing to help out, so this assignment was about damn near perfect. He wouldn’t have to do anything if there was no trouble, but he was here just in case something happened and that was an important function, especially considering all the low level commandos that he was surrounded with. For a few of them this was their first field assignment, and learning to train without the trials as motivation was a big hurdle that he was trying to help them overcome…along with a lot of other things.

They were capable, as all commandos were, but amongst the lot of them there was very little combat experience. That’s where he and a handful of others came in, for if they did come under attack it would be up to them to lead the defense and carry the rookies through it, making use of their limited skills while counteracting their lack of experience with his own.

Orval didn’t think that was going to happen, but someone had to be here just in case it did and that counted as doing something, for if he wasn’t assigned here then someone else would be. Right now that person was out there fighting, so his holding this position contributed and allowed him to train like he needed to…and that more than made up for the ever-present phantom chill that hounded him.

2

March 18, 2692

Jafat System (lizard territory)

Ulmed

With the Star Force fleet largely engaged over the inner planet of Irad, the lesser defense force around Ulmed was met with a handful of warships that preceded two large jumpships. With the lizard ships tied up in a battle that they were easily going to lose the massive transports began moving down near to the atmosphere with their defensive weaponry swatting a pair of enemy cruisers that tried to take poaching shots at them.

By the time they settled into as low of an orbit as they could half the lizard fleet was destroyed with the others soon to follow, so the defense shields on the jumpships were lowered and the four aquatics battleships were released. Their smooth hulls looked quite alien to space, but they were airtight and had gravity drives sufficient to lift themselves out of the water and to fly through atmosphere…and those same drives also allowed them to descend from orbit, with the large ships dropping below the jumpships and into the upper atmosphere where they began to bleed off orbital speed.

That friction slowly built into fireballs against the defense shields covering each of the ships that were decelerating from orbital speeds using their underpowered gravity drives. Slowly the turbulence around the meteors faded and their hulls reappeared, with them continuing to bleed off lateral speed. Two were deep blue colored with their telltale ridges running fore to aft with the thinner ‘wings’ spreading out on either side but the other two, while identical in shape, were colored aqua blue almost to the point of being neon.

All four ships came down together until they were halfway down to the surface of the mostly water-covered world, then they split apart so that they reached the ocean waves at different locations around where the lizards had established their primary aquatics colony. According to intelligence reports this world was the second one colonized in the system and as such hadn’t seen as much development as Irad, but the lizards had already begun building within the water in addition to on the small tracts of land. Those water-based troops had to be eliminated before Star Force could lay claim to the system, hence the inclusion of the rarely used aquatics division in this assault.

Four battleships for an assault against an entire world was light on the extreme but if the lizards had only one, or even a handful of fortified locations, it would be more than enough to break through their defenses…which were known to be formidable. Star Force and the lizards had tangled aquatically on a few worlds, but the largest conflict had been the initial one on Atlantica, during which both sides had learned much about their opponents. That said, Star Force’s aquatics division had been wholly revamped since then, and the two previous assaults that had taken place hadn’t left any lizard survivors to inform the others how they’d been defeated.

When the battleships hit the surface they came down gently, sinking into the water with their defense shields covering the hulls in a thin, protective layer that the enemy’s weapons would be hard pressed to penetrate. Of the four ships one of the dark blue ones came down directly over the location of the lizard colony, and as it pushed its hull into the water a swarm of missiles came up at it, hammering the shield.

That was part of the plan, for the ship was acting as a distraction and continued to descend down through the deep water until it reached weapons range, then a shield column extended down to the top of the base, which was made up of numerous domes built on the seafloor that covered all directions for miles. The tiny tendril of energy pushed through the water and contacted its lizard counterpart covering the largest central dome where Star Force knew they were building aquatics warships.

Those were in the water nearby, but not directly over the base for they had been out on patrol and not in position to defend against an overhead assault. Their firepower was significant, but it didn’t match the number of missiles coming up from below. The two combined would be enough to get through the battleship’s shields, so it only had a short window of opportunity before it would have to withdraw and recharge…but it wouldn’t need long to do damage.

The shield column made contact with the dome shield and immediately a blue streak flew down the vacuum and hit the opposing energy barrier, missing the sidewalls of the column by half a meter of clearance, else the mauler blast would have breached them instead of the lizards’ shield. The first blast destabilized a patch of the dome’s defensive layer, with the second punching through and allowing the shield column to dip down another few meters and touch the hull of the dome. The lizard shield reformed around and inside of it, for it was being emitted from within the base rather than a lateral generator.

The problem with that was the Star Force shield column, acting like a giant straw, wouldn’t allow lizard shield energy to flow into the breach from the surrounding areas to help counter weaknesses and breaches, leaving only a small patch inside that was recharging from direct transmission from the emitter. That was sufficient to reseal the shield over the light crater in the hull, but when the aquatic’s warship switched weaponry and the Ta’lin’yi firecracker beam came down with the white/gold pinpricks slamming into the shield patch, it punched through with only a slight hesitation.

Suddenly the base of the shield column broke contact, blowing apart along with that section of the dome as the talon cannon hit the matter of the hull and did what it did best. A shockwave rippled out through the water all the way back up to the battleship as another shield column tracked down into the now damaged and unshielded dome to deliver another huge punch, with a likewise impressive explosion when it contacted and sent an immediate talon blast down.

The battleship sat there and reached out into the lizard infrastructure, attacking it with impunity as the missile swarms continued to mount and drain shield strength. It wasn’t until they’d racked up sufficient energy loss and the lizard warships were nearing weapons range did the Star Force vessel begin sniping down the incoming missiles with its own intercepts. The tiny glowing ‘fish’ spit out of several holes in the hull and swam towards the missiles, knocking out several with a single hit and ‘popping’ the water around them out into short-lived voids.

That disruption not only allowed the secondary explosion to hit more of the clumped missiles but it knocked others askew and slowed their approach, with only a few making it through the counterattack to hit now that the ship was defending itself, which allowed the shield to begin to recharge a bit as more missiles from the nearby warships began shooting in laterally and a slew of hammerheads motored in as fast as they could, intent on ramming the sides of the Star Force battleship with their full array of plasma nubs.

Holding off on any return fire the battleship continued shooting out intercepts to lengthen the duration of its stay while it broke through dome after dome below. Some were air domes, others were water ones. Either way they were taking heavy damage and attracting a lot of attention while the other three battleships settled into the water at their more distant positions and began releasing the onboard craft and infantry that this one was holding onto as it played bait, soon to retreat to the atmosphere to recharge its shields and reposition to another location to continue the assault.

Davrel Stinson flexed a bit in the cockpit of his aquatic mech, still in the hold of the other Human battleship as he waited for the go order. Right now his body was strapped into the control harness similar to that in a neo, but his movements were not translated directly into this mech for his body didn’t match its configuration. The harness he was in was essentially a full body controller for the live videogame he was about to play.

It wasn’t a drone, as he was situated inside it, but the various arm, finger, leg, and even toe movements controlled a variety of functions in the mech…with him very eager to get the new prototype mental interface. Word was it was still experiencing glitches, but once they got it hammered out he could forgo the tricky harness that took such a long time to master. The up side was that aquatic mechs didn’t move as quickly as their ground-pounding cousins, but now with a heavy dose of Elarioni influence they no longer had the option of just walking around on the seafloor or motoring along as clinging brawlers.

Right now his mech was in transit mode, meaning its various arms and other protrusions were tucked into the hull in a little bit of a homage to Voku transforming tech. When Davrel finally got the go order he followed another mech out into the ocean water, passing through the shield that separated the bay from the exterior and feeling a bit more resistance as he passed through, for the ocean water was more compacted at this depth.

The mech looked like a finless dolphin, stretching out long with a narrow silhouette that allowed it to move through the water far faster than previous designs. Davrel had been one of the first aquatics regulars and stuck with the military ever since, hence he was one of the few capable of piloting these mechs that weren’t Archons given the intricate design interface that most of his peers hadn’t been able to pass the qualies on.

As soon as he was out into the ocean he directed towards one of the lizard destroyers nearby. It wasn’t on the seafloor, nor would his mech be. Now the mechs were full-fledged anti-ship weapons covered in armor more dense than what the battleships carried. It was rich in corovon, and therefore very expensive to produce, but it gave them extreme tankiness against the lizard weapons…so much so that he sped his mech towards the six distant warships with little worry. He was going after the largest one and knew the others wouldn’t be able to do much more than tickle him throughout the process.

A slew of missiles came his way as he got close, with the other mechs heading to different locations leaving Davrel on his own. His mech didn’t have any intercepts, for they wouldn’t fit in its tiny hull that was about twice the size of a thor, so he just let them hit the shields and explode, with the wall of water that he was pushing ahead of him helping to dampen the blows as he closed on the destroyer.

Before they could be stripped off his mech entirely he triggered a transformation with a combination of thumb button press and right leg extension. The smooth hull of the elongated mech bunched up, pulling its tail up and into the hull that then plumped out into what was more recognizable as a mech body…but one without legs, for he was well above the seafloor and didn’t need them.

Four arms did emerge, and as he got close to the destroyer he rammed into the side of it and latched on, extending ‘growths’ out from them that wrapped around the hull like the vines from a plant and allowed him to hold on despite the destroyer being covered by its own thin shield that soon snapped under the pressure. The Vel’koz-class mech then opened a port on its ‘head’ and pressed it up against the hull, firing through a short shield column a very thin mauler stream rather than a blast, with it cutting into the hull like a laser and blowing out a seam as Davrel moved the mech around a bit as it clung to the ship.

He rotated it around enough to cut out a badly shaped circular plug, then cut the beam out and loosened his grip on the ship with the backside of his mech getting hit with a few more missiles as one of their corvettes approached. The aquatic mechwarrior knew he still had some time so he pulled back one of the arms, retracting it into a stubby protrusion that he then pointed into the breach, ramming the ‘shoulder’ of the mech into it.

Once that connection was made he used a very tricky interface to control and ‘see’ the arm as it jutted out and, with a lot of sheer physical force, punched its way into the destroyer’s interior and began ripping it apart like the inside of a blender.

Then came the difficult part, for one of the big design advantages of this mech was its multi-tasking capability…which was quite a strain on a pilot who wasn’t used to seeing behind his back. As the corvette came in it extended its two large claws, which it obviously intended to latch onto the Star Force mech with and pull it off, or maybe to snip away the arms holding it to the hull. Either way the sheer crushing power they were capable of would do damage to his mech, though his armor and skeleton strength would keep it from being a one pinch kill.

Using an elbow bump he triggered the extension of another arm from the mech, this one much thicker and claw-like of its own. Davrel knew it was much more nimble, with the lizard corvette basically being a battering ram with two big scissors attached, so as it came within touching range he reached out with his own pincher and grabbed the port one on the enemy ship while gripping tighter with the three arms wrapped around the destroyer’s hull. Using the raw leverage power built into his mech he caught and halted the corvette’s momentum, then swung the ship around slowly until it banged against the side of the destroyer.

Davrel pushed it back, letting go his grip, then easing his hold on the destroyer enough to twist the ‘head’ of his mech around and point the mauler orifice towards the lizards’ version of a crawdad. A short shield column sprang out and briefly linked the two ships with a waterless corridor that the mech used to fire a full sized mauler blast through rather than the tiny cutting beam…all the while Davrel continued to lash his whip-like arm around inside the destroyer, further wrecking its interior.

That single mauler hit blew off the starboard arm of the corvette and left a huge chunk of its hull exposed to the ocean. Davrel reestablished the shield column again and hit it twice more before the enemy ship was out of the fight and quite literally in pieces, some of which floated up, others down in a drifting debris cloud.

Meanwhile Davrel’s cockpit was pinging with a collision warning as a hammerhead swung around and was headed directly towards him, apparently not caring about damaging the destroyer in the process. Watching the approach rate carefully the mechwarrior continued to wreck the inside of the bigger ship’s hull, then suddenly retracted the arm and disconnected from the ship. Waiting till the last moment, he used the tiny gravity drive inside to shoot him down through the water and avoided the plasma nub-covered head of the lizard ship by a few meters, expertly ducking beneath it.

A massive explosion of vaporized water and hull pushed him down even further as the hammerhead couldn’t slow in time and, failing to hit the Star Force mech, hit off center on the destroyer as it tried to veer off. Davrel immediately reversed course and reached out with his arms, which he was controlling with both of his and his legs to get the quartet to function in sync enough to grab the tree trunk of the hammerhead’s T-shaped design. A quick mauler kiss there followed by some ripping and tearing took out that ship, allowing him to move freely and get back to the destroyer that was limping off.

As soon as he got clear for a moment a wave of missiles hit him from the light destroyer nearby that finally took down his shields. The rest of the explosions barely scratched the hull as he veered off and headed towards the ship, knowing he could come back to the destroyer later. As soon as he made the course correction the lizard ship began extending its defensive ‘bush’ of thin tendrils covered with berry-like plasma nubs.

Davrel knew there was no way to get through them in order to grab onto the hull, and while he could have just pushed through he didn’t want to take the damage so he triggered the third of 4 transformations the Vel’koz was capable of. This one tucked the arms back in then pushed various segments of the body out like blocky pylons while the internal components rearranged, including his cockpit pod that was shuffled around near to the exterior but with at least a thin armor plate protecting it as the big gun within the mech assembled itself from various components.

The defensive bush around the light destroyer wouldn’t allow for a shield column to attach normally, but there were enough small holes in it for it to fire missiles out of, making for an odd turtle-like tactic that not only protected it but allowed it to become an offensive position, though more or less fixed to one spot for the bush couldn’t be dragged along with it at any respectable speed.

Fortunately the big gun didn’t require a shield column, and thanks to a little sharing on the part of the Elarioni only a handful of years ago Davrel had a Yor’vok that didn’t move the water out of the way as it fired, but rather simply vaporized it when the beam leapt out towards the light destroyer as the mech emptied its capacitor charge.

The silver beam quickly disappeared inside the vaporized water and Davrel’s targeting sensors became partially obscured along with his vision as the ultra-condense laser-like weapon burnt through the water, the tendrils surrounding the lizard ship, and then the hull plates in the equivalent of one big Kamehameha.

Once it finished its discharge Davrel transformed the mech back into phase 2, then headed off to get the wounded destroyer after seeing that the annoying bush was no longer sprouting missiles. Meanwhile the capacitor began recharging very slowly, with it taking upwards of half an hour to refill if he wasn’t using any of his other weapon systems. It was a big hit upgrade to the mech, which the Archons referred to as an ‘ult’ which, like a lot of their naming system, came from things he wasn’t familiar with and they didn’t always bother to explain. He guessed it was short for ‘ultimate’ weapon and he couldn’t disagree with the results…especially when he used it on land with no water in the way to diminish the beam.

The other light corvette that had been pacing the destroyer veered off, putting as much distance between itself and Davrel after seeing what had happened to the other ships. Usually the lizards fought it out, but apparently not this one. He would have let it go and finished off the destroyer, but there were infantry in the water as well and that ship could do them a whole lot of harm so he ignored the big target and switched back into phase one, swimming his mech after it before it got away, then he’d circle back and finish off the destroyer, which for good measure spat a few missiles Davrel’s way as he swam off after the corvette.

3

Jeimae swam through the interior of the battleship, racing towards the waiting room where the other Elarioni were just about to depart the ship. She’d had a defective shield and had to quickly swap it out for a new one in the equipment room, leaving her just enough time to swim through the corridors of the water-filled ship to meet up with the 22 others in this compartment. She bumped up against one of them, offering a distracted apology just before the outer door irised open and the Star Force aquatic infantry scurried out.

With her being the furthest back she exited last, transitioning through the force field covering the entrance and into the chillier ocean outside, following in the wake of the others as they moved down towards the wreckage of lizard infrastructure below. Her tail flicked rapidly, propelling her along with the jets located along either hip in her flexible armor as a slew of tiny green dots below marked the positions of the lizard infantry and their plasma rods.

Almost as soon as the dozens of lights began to grow into hundreds as the Elarioni were spotted the armored infantry fanned out in a spiral, making like a living tornado that fell down on the enemy troops. Jeimae swam quickly, her shield compacted and attached to her left arm. Her normally free flowing hair was pulled back into a tight helmet that transitioned into scale-like armor that wrapped around her entire body, making her unafraid of the plasma nubs below, knowing that she could take several hits before penetration…not that that was going to be an issue.

She and the other Star Force Elarioni were swimming so fast the lizards were practically frozen in place when they finally met. Jeimae was a few seconds delayed, but swooped down then made a tight arc, pulling into a lateral motion and jabbing her right arm into the nearest one of the four-legged monstrosities. They might be able to breath underwater, but they certainly didn’t belong in it.

The pylon on her arm extended on mental impulse, with a blue nub glowing to life just before impact. Her own plasma weapon hit the lizard in the side of its exposed head, discharging into its skin and eating all the way through to blow out the far side, killing it instantly as she swam by.

A quick redirect to the left brought her up against another lizard in the tightly packed swarm that was hovering a few dozen meters over their seafloor buildings. Jeimae popped out her shield, with the physical construction changing from a rod into a fully elongated oval nearly the size of her body. The water drag against it was significant, but the lizard’s jab with his plasma rod caught on it as planned, with her swimming herself and the shield into the enemy before reaching around the side with her arm and jabbing it with her own weapon.

A quick tap to the chest was all it took, then she retracted her shield in flash and swam a few more meters before popping it back out again and repeating the process. Her speed and agility within the water was beyond anything the lizards could manage, and the same went for their Human compatriots that were fighting not far away. Given that they breathed air they had their own aquatics warships, hard armor, and different tactics, but they were all on the same team…the Elarioni were just better, and should have been, given that the water was their natural environment.

That was why the Elarioni were being deployed against the heaviest infantry while the Humans were sent to take out key facilities that had less massed resistance, for their mobility was centered on jet propulsion and straight line trajectories. They couldn’t truly swim, and more often than not required arrowheads to be effective against lizard swarms. The little craft could move quickly and ram the enemy, racking up a lot of kills in a short amount of time, but the Human infantry being deployed were mostly in their armor and not the small craft, given that they intended to enter the buildings and clean them out.

They did have one advantage, and that was their armor. The Elarioni needed their speed and flexibility and weren’t about to give it up for the hard carapaces that the air breathers wore, but those defenses, which included an energy shield that the Elarioni lacked, allowed them to take many hits before penetration. She knew the Humans were more than a match for an equal, or even double number of lizards, but they weren’t in the Elarioni’s league…not even close.

Their addition to Star Force had taken a primitive aquatics division and amped it up to respectable levels in terms of infantry, and even made some decent addition to their ships that were respectable to begin with, but there was simply no getting around the fact that the Humans couldn’t swim worth crap, so whenever there was combat involved they played support and the Elarioni were the hunters.

Today was no exception and as Jeimae used her physical shield to knock a lizard’s legionnaire energy shield aside and slip through the small gap her agility and speed made it clear why they were superior. With a quick retraction of her own shield she swam inside the turtled-up formation of some 9 lizards and punched/blasted them from inches away as she slithered around and between them, demonstrating her flexibility and skill.

She took one hit to her tail armor before swimming out of the corpse ball and looking for the next closest target. A light telepathic prompting brought her attention to several of her sisters that had swam lower and were down near the buildings. They were being pursued by some type of craft that she’d never seen before, but it nearly matched their speed and was firing small projectiles at them.

Jeimae swam down after it immediately, as did several other Elarioni, bypassing lizards attempting to block or jab them as if they were little more than stationary objects. The lizard craft was about the length of five of them and was elongated like a fat sea snake, with the little projectiles firing out the front end only. Her fellow Elarioni were dodging about half of them as they shot by on their own little propulsion units while taking the hits from the others against their shields.

Those explosions were not small, and she knew their shields wouldn’t last against those weapons for long. The others sensed it as well and swam hard for the target, coming up alongside and behind it as they pulsed their armor jets for even more straight line speed. Jeimae got to the side of the dark craft along with one of her sisters on the other side and found nothing to hold onto, so she was forced to keep swimming fast beside it as she jabbed her right-arm mounted plasma gauntlet into the hull.

A tiny explosion of steam shot bubbles back and slightly up as the momentum dragged them away from the hit. When they cleared she saw a tiny divot in the craft and swung her arm again as more Elarioni caught up and they too began whacking at the craft with their weapons. It took Jeimae 8 hits before she made a small hole in the armor, then she slipped her fingers onto the edge and held on so she would no longer have to swim. With that finger hold she extended her gauntlet out into a short pike and jabbed it inside, seeing the glowing end disappear from view just as one of her sisters ahead got hit by one of the projectiles.

Grimacing with anger Jeimae jabbed and pumped blast after blast into whatever was inside, trying to sting the craft to death along with the others. It took far longer than it should have, but eventually the thing stopped firing and its speed slowed but the Elarioni didn’t stop there. They kept tearing at it until one of them got the cockpit open and killed the tightly packed pilot inside, insuring that the odd craft was truly dead in the water.

Jeimae pulled her arm out of the interior, for it had been fully buried inside trying to reach for more parts to trash, and swam clear looking for her next target. The battlemap inside her helmet gave her positions for the surrounding troops that she couldn’t all see, as well as priority and secondary targets. There were still a lot of lizards nearby, but she was more interested in finding any more of these new craft.

And there were several popping up on the battlemap as they rose up from buildings on the surface. Nearby one of her wounded sisters swam slowly with escort back up towards the huge battleship more than a kilometer away towards the west. A quick word and she knew she’d made it back, for her escort wasn’t going to let her get ambushed, nor would the rest of them. Once she was clear Jeimae swam down and killed three more lizards, with one of them actually giving her a bit of trouble with its own shield, causing her to take an extra six seconds before she made the kill.

That one was more skilled than the others, but it had only been delaying the inevitable. Even if Jeimae hadn’t had armor she and the others would have come out victorious simply for their superior swimming skills, but one thing they’d learned since their voluntary transfer to Star Force was that having the extra defense allowed you to fight more aggressively than normal in situations like this, and that was something she definitely liked. Especially so when there were Humans or other lesser warriors in the water fighting alongside her.

There weren’t any in the immediate vicinity, but there were two of those new enemy craft. Swimming off towards the nearest one she saw her sisters nearby giving it a wide berth, then the warning highlight on her battlemap caught her attention and she too stayed back, but still close enough that she’d be able to move in and help if/when they decided to attack it…which they had to. It was keeping them away from a larger infantry formation and peppering the shields of those closest. They couldn’t sustain that damage and the little weapons appeared too fast to dodge with certainty.

She waited in a holding pattern, swimming in a shallow circle while deciding whether or not to head off towards some of the scattered infantry nearby and help clean up when she spotted one of the Human arrowhead formations headed towards them. Jeimae smiled inside her helmet, realizing that they’d been holding off until they got the reinforcements. The Elarioni were dominant infantry, but going up against armored craft wasn’t in their skillset…nor did they have the right weapons.

She glanced up, seeing the shadow of a lizard aquatics cruiser exchanging fire with her battleship, shooting off swarms of missiles/torpedoes while the shield columns from the Star Force vessel flashed with light, making it look like a one sided battle. Her battlemap tagged the drones from the battleship and she saw that they were busy with a growing lizard fleet closing on the big ship, which was probably why the Humans were responding instead.

Jeimae and the infantry were low enough not to be effected by the war up top, but that could change in an instant if one of those ships moved down. Its missiles and especially the larger torpedoes wouldn’t be able to target them individually, but an area of effect detonation could cause them serious problems. At the moment the big ships seemed consumed with the battleship, and rightly so, leaving the infantry below to fight it out above the seafloor infrastructure on their own.

Three of the Human arrowheads shot through the water faster than even she could swim with her armor boost jets, with the trio breaking up prior to arrival at the first craft. Two went wide to go after other targets with Jeimae getting an attack prompt. As soon as it flashed on her battlemap she swam in a half circle and sprinted ahead, putting as much tail flip into her momentum as her adrenaline could produce.

When she was halfway to the target she saw the arrowhead take a hit from one of the small projectile just prior to the V-shaped personal craft ramming the lizard vessel. In the past the Humans had only stun weapons on the craft, but tech upgrades and some gentle head slapping by the Elarioni had them redesigned with a corrosive gel canister weapon system, so as the arrowhead grazed and bounced off the hull of the craft a line of material was painted onto it that flared into a bright green flame 2.7 seconds later.

That flame ate into the hull for a couple of heartbeats then went out, making it safe for the infantry to approach and touch. Jeimae wasn’t the first there, with her seeing two others swim up alongside the twisting lizard craft as it chased after the arrowhead and latch on with their armored fingers before taking their gauntlets and pushing them through the breach in the armor the gel had made.

She got up to it just in time to add a few shots of her own before the propulsion unit on the thing went out, then it was just a matter of time before they got the cockpit open and killed the pilot, which now seemed to be the ultimate objective being shared over the comm channels that periodically popped up with chatter. The Elarioni were professional enough to know not to spam the channels, leaving whatever was being said as important information that Jeimae listened to rather than toned out, regardless of how busy she was fighting.

With the lizard craft neutralized and the other one nearby suffering a similar fate the Elarioni moved on towards the nearest high priority target in the lizard infrastructure and the swarm of infantry guarding it, with Jeimae and the others swimming hard and then boosting forward with their hip jets. The living missiles shot directly into the swarm then curved around at sharp, impossible angles, not attacking any of the lizards at first and just throwing them into a frenzy before each finally chose a target and went in for the kill.

As the other Elarioni caught up the chaotic mess quickly became a kill zone, with the lizards no match for the fin-tailed infantry. They were the masters of the oceans for a reason and it was becoming quickly apparent as to why.

Once the swarm of enemy infantry was turned into a floating corpse field they moved down on the priority target and broke their way in through the available hatches before calling for support. The Elarioni held the entrances until Human infantry arrived and they let the more heavily armored troops take the lead, given that the tighter confines didn’t allow the Elarioni as much of an agility advantage.

That said, a few stayed with the Humans as they entered the facility while Jeimae and the others swam back up to a higher level and raced across the submerged cityscape with the battle between the Star Force battleship and the lizard fleet still ongoing overhead. The battlemap had another location for her and her sisters to go and secure, with multiple units, both friendly and enemy, moving about everywhere Jeimae looked.

This was no small-scale engagement, and the mix of adrenaline and fear inside the Elarioni made her feel more alive than she’d ever been before. Trusting in her skill and training, she swam on with her sisters, confident that if they kept their wits about them they’d win out and rid this planet of the lizards…but right now it was clear that a single misstep could get her killed. She was superior to the lizards, but that didn’t make her safe.

With one final glance at the huge ships overhead battling it out and the rain of debris slowly sinking all around her, Jeimae swam in information with four other Elarioni as they were just getting within vision range of the next lizard infantry group already engaged with a Human assault force. It looked to be more or less an even fight…but that wasn’t going to last for long.

4

March 19, 2692

Jafat System (lizard territory)

Ulmed

Trevor-52118 twisted aside, dodging the thrust of a lizard plasma rod towards his face. His movement was slower than it would have been on land, but he managed to get enough of a head start that the glowing green bulb of plasma missed his faceplate by an inch. As it passed he reached out with his right hand and grabbed the rod just below the tip, locking it in place so he could then spin the opposite direction, pressing his armored back against the exposed shoulder of the lizard and whacking it in the back of the neck with his left elbow.

That momentary blow was enough to stun it in place sufficient for Trevor to get spun completely around so he could jab his right gauntlet into its back and fire off his own plasma nub. When physical contact was made with the thin armor vest it wore the shield bubble containing the plasma breached and the superheated krypton burnt through the armor and into the lizard under enough pressure to carve out a hollow inside the enemy infantry while causing a flurry of bubbles to shoot up around the impact point where the water leaked in through the crude seam.

That made for a 1-hit kill, with Trevor leaving the isolated lizard where it floated in the hallway as it died over the next few seconds, stunned from the pain and destruction of its internal organs but taking some time for the blood loss to render its brain inoperable. The Archon moved on through the facility, not having expected to find this one here but patrolling none the less with his Ikrid stretched out to look for more ahead and through the walls.

His troops were back near the main entrance, with Elarioni skirmishers outside watching the other exits. The majority of the fighting was over, but there were handfuls of lizards moving about with considerable skill at evasion. Out in the open water they were vulnerable, but moving within the buildings or hopping from one dome to another across the seafloor they were being evasive and trying to stay ahead of the sweeper teams. The one he’d just killed had tried to ambush him as he swam by one of the rooms, coming down from above given that the hallways connected via both sides and from above and below.

Trevor had known he was coming at him and had been prepared, but he hadn’t expected such a forceful jab that had covered more distance than expected. The lizard hadn’t had sight on him, but had known exactly where to jut towards coming around the blind corner. It could have been luck, but based on the actions of a few others he was starting to think they were getting some kind of intel from security monitors. Each of the lizards had an earpiece comm, but there was no way to know if they were getting active intel or not.

The Archon arched his back and rolled over, forcing his line of movement down into a floor doorway as his armor’s jets trolled him along at a slow pace. Once inside the room he saw that it was another large hangar filled with workstations. These were industrial ones, similar to the others they’d been seeing in other domes, but the configurations were slightly altered. Techs would sort out exactly what it all did later, but Trevor got the feeling these were prefabricated domes specifically set up for mass production. The lizard colony wasn’t that old, so it made sense for these to be standard package for a startup.

Stretching out his Ikrid into spotlight mode he ignored the area behind and around him and used the wide beam to search the area section by section, eventually finding no minds present. He swam around a bit to have a further look at what was here, but with no enemy troops in the chamber there was no reason to stick around. He spotted another circular entryway on the floor and swam down, entering a horizontal hallway and swimming on until he came to a dead end.

There he found cutting gear and exposed bedrock, with this looking to be as deep as this dome’s structure went. Apparently they’d just begun cutting out the entryway when the attack arrived for the mostly handheld equipment was strewn over the floor as if it had just been dropped and left to float down to the ground.

Trevor backtracked to a different junction and moved on, with his battlemap logging and updating the structural map as he went, showing him and others where he had been as well as the blank areas that had yet to be searched. His connection to the grid was in and out, for the signals would only pass so far through the infrastructure, so it wasn’t surprising when a dot suddenly popped up ahead of him along with a whole new section of map filling in as one of his Elarioni swam towards him.

“Any trouble?” he asked over the comm, with the computerized translation happening in realtime. The difference between Human and Elarioni vocal cords didn’t allow either one to mimic the other’s language so they either had to talk through translation or the backup hand signals they’d learned in case of equipment failure. The same was true of a few other races, most notably the Hycre, but the Elarioni were the only ones in Star Force who could not speak English…excluding a number of varied individuals within Axius.

“No casualties. 17 targets neutralized,” Kameena said within her own helmet. The mixture of high pitched warbles sounded like the aquatic version of R2D2, but Trevor didn’t hear them, only the synthesized voice…which ironically was still the Disney version from ‘The Little Mermaid,’ though Trevor and most others never caught the inside joke for they were too young to be familiar with the source material.

Trevor reached out a finger and pointed to a scorch mark on her tail armor. “How’d you get that?”

“I never said they went down without a fight.”

“Ambush?”

“They were near to triggering a large explosive. I had to act quickly before a section of the dome was destroyed. One of them got a hit in on me before I killed him.”

“Define ‘large,’” Trevor said, concerned.

“Look,” Kameena said, picturing it in her mind so the Archon ranger could easily see it. The pair had worked together for so long they’d established this type of shorthand, knowing that it’d be quicker than verbal explanation. Also, the Elarioni’s subconscious, primitive telepathy acted as a booster to let Trevor access her thoughts more easily than other races, given his limited skills in that department.

“They didn’t put that together from scratch. There’s got to be an armory or production facility nearby.”

“My thoughts as well, but I have not encountered any such placements within this dome and the search is nearly complete.”

Trevor thought quickly, floating mid hallway in front of the Elarioni who, in battle armor, didn’t glow with bioluminescence…a look that made her appear as formidable as the Archon knew her and the others to be. Many of the Elarioni were on the pacifistic side, or more accurately the ‘gentle’ side as far as their personalities, but there was a whole slew of them that were both active and eager to fight…and a lot of those had crossed over from the independent Elarioni to join Star Force for just that purpose.

“Come with me,” the Archon said, activating his jets to shoot him down the hallway towards the few unmapped sections of the dome. Kameena flicked her armored tail rhythmically beside him, not needing her booster jets to keep up. Her arms were tucked in closer to her sides and her whole body undulated, making her look like a metallic snake as she paced him unquestioningly.

Trevor led them into new hallways, skipping the few rooms adjacent to them when he scanned them with Ikrid. He was looking for something in particular and it wasn’t going to be in a room if he guessed right.

The pair came across another floor doorway…save that it and most of the others had no doors…and they swam down to another hallway that ran parallel some 10 meters lower, at the end of which he picked up a few lizard minds.

“Contacts.”

“Permission?” the Elarioni asked.

“Careful,” he said, with her sprinting ahead of him with a wicked tail kick. Trevor increased the speed of his jets a bit, but there was no catching her as she zoomed down the long hallway. There were tiny, dim lights built into the walls but suddenly there were additional green orbs lighting up in the distance just before Kameena got to them.

Careful with his aim, Trevor sent a Fornax blast low and sniped it past his friend, hitting a lizard a bit further down. The Archon didn’t even bother to pop out his gauntlet’s weapon, for by the time he arrived the Elarioni had already killed all 8 lizards that were guarding a vertical hallway that led down into the bedrock.

“More down there,” Trevor said, sensing hundreds of them within his limited range. “I think they wanted to collapse the dome to conceal them.”

“To what end?”

“Not sure, but I think we’ll get our answer down there.”

“Ready,” she said, twisting over and facing straight down.

“Not alone. There are a lot down there and I’m scanning first. Who knows what they might have waiting for us.”

“Your caution is admirable,” she said, with Trevor knowing that it was sarcasm. He tried to connect to the battlemap to send a signal but after three tries the only contact he could get was her.

“Go whistle up some support, I can’t get through.”

Without a word she spun about and swam by him so close he could have swore she’d touched him…but knowing her she’d done it on purpose just for the near miss.

With her petite form disappearing with distance Trevor swam down a meter and grabbed hold of the rim of the vertical shaft, keeping his body out of view but leaving his head where he could look down. There were no lights below, so all he could see with was his Pefbar. It didn’t reach very far, and the minds he was sensing were below it, meaning he’d just have to wait on this one. In order to take this planet they had to root out all lizard installations, and whatever was down there probably was something that could sustain a resistance group if allowed to go unnoticed.

It was a good thing Kameena had got to those explosives when she did…and not just because it would have brought a chunk of the dome down on top of them.

Two hours later Trevor swam up from the seafloor, having completed the destruction of the lizard growth pods that had contained thousands of new problems at varying stages of development. Back in the open ocean again he felt very tiny, especially with the giant markers on his HUD indicating the no go zone further to the south. Between that and him was his destination, a Star Force destroyer that had been dropped from orbit along with several other smaller aquatics warships.

The battleships were still nearby, with two visible in the distance. He wasn’t going to swim back all the way to them, plus he needed a more mobile vessel to move around the area in hence he was about to board the destroyer. Unlike the whale-inspired battleship design the destroyer had flat hulls and mathematically crisp angles ending in a blunt, but knife-like nose that the rest of the ship fanned out behind.

Trevor headed towards it like a tiny missile, his jets propelling him at speeds he could never have swam with only his arms and legs, no matter what size of fins he might have. The distance across the submerged city, now partly rubble beneath him, was disconcerting for while he was moving it looked like he wasn’t, with the destroyer floating midway between surface and seafloor appearing to be getting no closer.

But that was just a reality of aquatics, with Trevor reminding himself to be patient as the distance was gradually diminishing and the image of the destroyer slowly grew larger in front of him…but not before the giant no-go zone beyond suddenly was hit with an object from above. The Archon had seen it coming down on his battlemap before it hit the waves, but it was no less an impressive sight.

Moving slowly so to diminish disruptive currents from its bulk moving the water out of the way, the aquatics MCV easily outmassed all four battleships combined and made for an almost perfect rectangular footprint as it slowly eased down into the water. Trevor kept jetting forward as it sank in, feeling the small shock wave hit him just prior to him reaching the destroyer. Its shields were down and the one of the entry ports glowed with ringing lights to help direct him to it. Swimming like a missile to target he hit the bullseye head first, passing through the energy shield and into the conditioned water inside.

The pressure was lower, but he could only feel that through the lessening of resistance to his movement. The temperature and molecular content he couldn’t detect with his armor covering him, but the Elarioni inside most definitely could. Two of them were waiting for him inside the waterlock, neither of which wore armor. They were ship’s crew and glowed with bioluminescence on various parts of their naked bodies, but it was their eyes that stood out the most for they were glowing a Thrawn-esk gold.

“I need an air recharge,” he said, using his armor’s external speakers.

“Follow me,” one of them said, with his helmet doing the translating. The second Elarioni swam out of the way and let the clumsy armored Human jet past, then followed him with her tri-finned tail only lightly flapping to provide propulsion. That third fin was part of the reason why they were so mobile, with all three able to bend and twist into various configurations. Working out armor to accommodate that had been a headache for the techs, but now that they had it was more than worth the effort, with every additional upgrade making the Elarioni even more lethal in combat.

But inside the destroyer they were in their natural form and comprised the entire crew. All Star Force aquatics facilities and ships were now split into two varieties, internal air or water. This was a water destroyer, just like two of the battleships were water craft as well, but despite the Elarioni being far superior in terms of water movement and combat they still were commanded by the Archons and had a mixed relationship with them, for while the Humans were slower and all around newbs in the water they were also gifted strategists and came equipped with psionics that the Elarioni couldn’t match.

The differences between the two were so great that combining crews or infantry teams would have been detrimental so the binary design had been established, though every ship had facilities to accommodate the other that Trevor needed to replenish his oxygen supply which was now at 23%. It had been continually replenishing from oxygen in the seawater and some internal cycling, but the rate at which he’d been breathing it in had been greater than the resupply.

Knowing from experience it was better to be conservative with his air than reckless, he needed to top off before continuing with the oversight of the lizard colony security and beginning stages of reclamation. That and he knew he was going to have to pee before too long and he couldn’t just take his armor off mid ocean, especially with the pressure this far down.

Trevor swam through the Elarioni-designed corridors that kept a touch of overall Star Force motif to the infrastructure until he was led to a small area of the ship that was just a single room, but with adjacent water compartments that could be converted to air if necessary. It was located at the top of a corridor so no Elarioni could accidentally fall inside, and on top of that it was covered by a sealed door that the crewmember retracted so the Archon could enter.

His head pushed up through an energy field separating the air from water and he got his arms over the edge of the small pool and pulled himself up…feeling his own weight again as he got a knee underneath his torso and stood up. That was one of the challenges with aquatic field work, for even if he had been swimming around by hand and leg the entire time the neutral buoyancy would wreak havoc with an Archon’s training state. As it was, his legs were just beginning to remember their normal weight after floating around more or less effortlessly for many hours.

He walked aside and out of view of the small pool, finding several facets to the room that was much akin to a set of personal quarters/equipment room. There were foodstuffs without water, for the ship’s ‘atmosphere’ was drinkable, ambrosia, uniforms and armor replacements…and most importantly, after his oxygen resupply station, a restroom.

Trevor deactivated the safety interlock within his armor and had it begin peeling apart along the chest, then down the seams of the arms and legs, allowing him to step out of the single-piece suit while leaving the spread out monstrosity in place like a scarecrow. He didn’t bother bundling it up for he was going to be getting back inside it within minutes, but he did walk over and pull an oxygen line from the recharger and connect it to the suit before heading into the restroom to relieve his bladder.

He grabbed a few foodstuff ration bars to chew on and a cup from the storage compartment, then walked over and dipped it through the energy field and filled it up with water before sitting down next to the pool and having a snack. Some people thought that drinking water that Elarioni were swimming around in was gross, but he’d gotten used to it. Like on an air ship the ‘atmosphere’ was continually cycled and cleaned, making the water nearly pure. Plus the Elarioni didn’t produce any toxins as far as Humans were concerned, so he didn’t mind. Actually the water had a microscopic sweetness to it, though he’d been told that was just his imagination.

Trevor kept his break short and redonned his armor, now with an air supply back up to 100%, and jumped back into the pool letting his momentum carry him all the way down into the water. No Elarioni were waiting for him, which was proper given that he was a fellow member of Star Force and not a foreign guest who had to be watched at all times.

Getting his head oriented as to which way was which on the destroyer, he swam off through the corridors towards the bridge where he was going to get to work patrolling the extraneous facilities situated around the main lizard colony…which from now on was Star Force property, at least until the MCV got around to dismantling it all.

5

March 23, 2692

Jafat System (lizard territory)

Irad

Arvak sprinted across the dry, sandy ground of the wash and up to the tree line on the far side, tucking his arms in as the Bsidd pushed through the brush and under the forest canopy. He didn’t stop or look back, but kept running as fast as he could manage with a countdown indicator on his helmet prompting his speed. In less than 3 minutes he had to be in position and he still had a lot of ground to cover.

The trees weren’t helping, for they were more like bushes and had branches coming out of their trunks at all levels. With his armor protecting him from scrapes, thorns, and other concerns Arvak blew through the thinnest sections on as much of a straight line as he could but every now and then he’d hit branches that wouldn’t bend and he’d get stuck, with his 8 arms often getting tangled up and holding him back.

That was why he was tucking them in now as the theta variant pushed his way across terrain. He was approximately Archon-sized and the fastest of all the Bsidd varieties, making for good scouts and skirmishers, though today he was tasked as a sniper and had to get into position before the heavy infantry met up with the lizard army pushing their way.

This was the fourth day of ground battles on Irad in what looked to be at least a multi-month campaign. While the nearby planet of Ulmed was lightly inhabited this world was not. It was full of lizard colonies that the navy was still pounding on from orbit to break through their defense shields, but even when they did that there had to be ground ops to go in and clean up.

Arvak’s group hadn’t gotten any of those assignments yet, rather they were assaulting facilities outside the defense shields. Right now he was in mountainous, irregular terrain where the lizards had burrowed underground to build a series of bases, how many Star Force didn’t yet know, but they were virtually impervious to orbital bombardment. A Calavari unit had been sent into the region to establish a foothold and firebase, then through them the Bsidd were moving forward and flushing out every bit of lizard infrastructure they could find.

That had eventually resulted in the lizards coming aboveground and mounting a series of counterattacks, with the one about to go down being the largest yet. Arvak had been sent with a number of other scouts racing ahead to grab some valuable points of high ground that looked down on the dry riverbed that he’d just ran across, knowing that the lizards would have to pass through it and into the open briefly. If not they’d hold up short of it and give the Bsidd troops maneuvering options…which it didn’t appear was going to happen.

On his battlemap there were numerous reports of enemy movement through the trees, which was protecting them against air attacks, though there were reports of wisps starting to come up out of the ground in several nearby and previously unscouted locations, suggesting that they were going to buy the ground troops enough time to get to the Bsidd and potentially overrun the two forward staging bases they’d established.

Arvak didn’t intend to let that happen, so he ran on as fast as his two main legs could carry him and only popped out his other ‘arms’ for additional propulsion when he was going up inclines. Eventually he got to the rocky hillside that overlooked a portion of the dry riverbed from about 600 meters away and began scaling it where he could. There were no paths up so he just took his best guess and climbed through the overhanging vines and loose vegetation, finding rock where he could and leveraging himself up using various grip points on his appendages in lieu of the fingers his race didn’t have.

With only a handful of seconds left on his countdown he found a ledge that gave him a narrow slice of riverbed in view and decided that was going to have to be good enough, kneeling down and pulling his sniper rifle off his back. He synced it up with his battlemap and used the spotter data from others to align his targets, focusing on three points of the riverbank. Two of them were obscured from his position, but the third was not.

As he swung his sights around to cover that area he saw other icons imposed on his HUD indicating his fellow snipers. Some were in position already while others were still moving, with their ID tags making it clear that they were friendlies even if he couldn’t visually spot them. In contrast there were box-like warning markings indicating the approximate position of the enemy troops and within a few seconds the green-skinned lizards began pouring out of the forest and crossing the riverbed by the hundreds.

The bulk of the Bsidd army wasn’t close enough to engage them there, leaving it up to the snipers to thin the enemy down as much as they could. Taking to his task, Arvak and the other snipers in position began unleashing solid sammy beams down from elevation and onto the riverbed. Each was tinted blue, as most Star Force energy weapons were that could be modified as such, and lasted .62 seconds in duration. That gave the snipers enough kill power to take down even the mauler variants with one shot, punching straight through their armored vest, thick skin, and dense musculature to poke out the far side of their bodies and melt some sand behind them.

It also gave Arvak some sweeping capability, with him deliberately drifting his aim as he fired to catch two or three lizards with one hit, inflicting a cleansing beam-like gash across their bodies or even severing their heads completely off if the angle and beam path matched up with their necks. To be honest he wasn’t trying for any of that, he just needed to do damage to as many as he could before they crossed into cover again and there were so many it was hard not to hit them. With that in mind, wounding five or six with a quicker flick of his sights was preferable to a solid, clean kill on only one.

Most of the lizards he was seeing were standard variety, for the maulers didn’t work against Star Force troops given their armor. The lizards’ forearm blades were vicious against exposed lifeforms, and should the Bsidd have been engaging them hand to hand without armor they would have been a serious threat in groups, but their blades only tickled the purple/black battlecasts they were wearing.

The flexible, stretchable armor was unique to the Bsidd to accommodate their varying sizes and movement ranges during fitting, then it would harden into a form unique to that Bsidd on the portions of its body that didn’t move much. New armor suits were kept in gelatinous state, similar to a wet suit, so that when Arvak or another needed a new one they’d put it on then go through a minute long series of movement drills allowing the armor to adjust to the individual’s body before hardening where appropriate. After that it was more or less standard armor akin to what the other Star Force races wore.

His set was for thetas and wouldn’t work for any of the other Bsidd variants, but it would work for all thetas, meaning they didn’t have to get individual fittings and everyone could use stock units. He knew the Archons that were leading the Bsidd army had their armor personally molded to their bodies during fabrication. That was a perk of their superhard armor, and applicable due to the fact that there were so few of them. Star Force would never have been able to do the same with the Bsidd and their rapidly growing numbers.

Arvak kept popping out blue sammy beams along with a few others from nearby targeting the same patch of dry river that was quickly becoming wet with lizard blood. His shots only fell on a small section of it, with others having better angles and disappearing behind trees as they shot across his sights, but they were felling a good number of targets. It didn’t seem that way given how many were crossing the river, but every dozen that he mowed down was a dozen less for the infantry to deal with a few minutes from now.

Arvak had expected the river crossing to be quick, but as he stood his position and continued firing more and more lizards kept coming out of the forest in a long wave that seemed as if it would never end. Knowing that he had to keep focused and firing nonstop, else let a lizard past that he otherwise could have killed, Arvak forced himself to not think about the numbers but as he stayed within his mental sniper targeting zone his stomach clenched up with apprehension…for he’d never seen enemy numbers like this before, not even in training sims. They were literally everywhere, and armor advantage or not, the Bsidd could easily get overrun if they didn’t play this smart.

And even then he wasn’t sure how many would be too many to take down.

Tvey was waiting in formation with the other Bsidd betas as they jogged through the forest behind one of the mechs breaking a path through the tree branches. He was mid left in a row of four and six rows behind the pair of silver-clad Archons leading his group that stretched back in a line nearly 500 meters long, and there were other lines moving forward nearby like snakes through the thick trees. He knew from his battlemap that the enemy was close, and when they got to them they were going to be fighting the tree branches as much as the lizards, given their enemy’s smaller size.

Tvey stood taller than the Archons and even a bit taller than a Calavari, though he massed considerably less. His body resembled the trees around him, with numerous appendages sprouting out from a nonlinear central body, all of which was covered in armor that gave him some sense of security, knowing that both the shields and the hardened plates would protect him from numerous plasma blasts before they got through to his skin. It was the lack of movement in the trees that worried him.

As he ran forward, stepping over occasional limbs that the mech had snapped off, he got deployment orders on his HUD from the Archons and suddenly the long line began to split apart. Tvey went left along with a group of three others and headed to a random position in the forest, coming up on the waypoint then holding position with the others as he read the orders coming across in text.

The four Bsidd all activated their six appendages that held plasma rods, or more accurately were plasma gauntlets, for in lieu of any actual hands they were just a pole covering the ends of their appendages for approximately half a meter in length. The ‘lightsabers’ as they were commonly referred to operated the same as the plasma nubs that the aquatics division used, in that they held a contained amount of the destructive, superheated gas within a shield until physical contact was made. When it occurred the plasma would be released then replenished, giving them a melee weapon in addition to the gun-type weapons that Tvey and the others wore on additional appendages.

The orders that came across were to cut branches and create a kill zone for them to operate out of before the lizards got here, and the beta gladly lit up his six blue limbends and got to burning through the horizontal sticks. The smaller ones were clipped instantaneously, but the larger ones took several hits to get through, with a slight pause in between being required for the plasma to reform within its containment shield.

He and the other three hacked out as much room as they could around several trunks, then picked up the branches and piled them in three spots, pushing them down into a thick enough wad that they thought the enemy couldn’t crawl through. That would constrict their approaches but still give the Bsidd multiple options to reposition elsewhere if needed. All around them other small groups were doing the same thing, with the mech walking back and forth and plowing down roads along with breaking down some entire trees and positioning them as barricades using its six arms that did have hands…something the Bsidd pilots had to learn to use with a lot of practice.

Tvey heard/saw it crunching away ahead of him then saw the explosion nearby as it vaporized a tree trunk or two with a mauler blast…but it wasn’t aiming at the trees, rather the first of the lizards swarming around it. That mauler impact was followed by several others and an assortment of additional weapons, not only from the mech but from the surrounding Bsidd infantry.

Tvey hacked away a few more limbs then cleared them, with his other three fireteam members doing likewise as they set themselves and looked ahead, their plasma rods glowing ready and their pair of gauntlet rifles sticking out between the six blue lightsabers as they heard rocket impacts against the mech, indicating that the lizards were coming with more than just their standard plasma rifles.

Then suddenly they were upon them, with dozens appearing amongst the trees and running straight at the Bsidd, bypassing other groups nearby heading straight for Tvey. They started popping green plasma orbs a moment later as more of the lizards swarmed the other positions, but there were so many targets nearby that he couldn’t monitor them or even the mech, suddenly taking shield impacts and seeing the lizards stop just short of their little kill zone.

Tvey and the others fired back with their rifles, popping blue plasma streaks that were far more lethal than the lizard versions. The type of weapon dated back to Star Force’s origins, and rather than replace it with orbs or another weapon system the Star Force techs had simply kept tweaking the design to its now extremely efficient and powerful concentration of plasma. One hit was all Tvey and the others needed, which was good, for it looked like they were going to exhaust their full ammo supplies if they lived long enough to use them all.

Frustrated with the lizards sticking in the trees to snipe from, the Bsidd next to Tvey ran forward, hacking a few more branches before wrapping some of his free appendages around a pair of lizards and throwing them back towards Tvey and the others.

A down thrust plasma rod hit one in the head, burning through its skull while Tvey shot the other at pointblank range before jumping over to one of the brush piles and circling around it, executing a backdoor on some of the other lizards massing up just beyond and filing into firing lines that would allow them to pepper the Bsidd with enough plasma hits to get through their defenses.

Tvey stabbed three of them with his plasma rods but didn’t bother shooting the others. Instead he pushed into the group with his rifles and other appendages forming a wireframe snowplow, hooking the ends to keep them contained, then rammed them forward into the kill zone depositing some 8 or 9 of them into view of the others while his back took numerous plasma strikes.

He didn’t stop his momentum, pushing through then stepping on and over the group until he got behind the others and into a bit of cover as they stepped forward and slaughtered the lizards. Tvey brought his rifles up as he turned around and fired off a few shots between them, seeing more and more enemy infantry moving through the trees towards them and the others, so many that they seemed to be a living tidal wave coming forward to wrap around their legs.

Superior as they were, Tvey began to fear for their lives until he caught a glimpse of silver streaking through the forest nearby and lizards dropping all around it.

They had Archons with them, and so long as they said to fight Tvey and the others would, knowing that they wouldn’t be left here to die. If a retreat was needed the Archons would order it, but up until that happened it was slaughtering time.

With that thought banishing his fear, Tvey went left and started another backdoor run around a brush pile, finding plenty of lizards nearby to grab and shove into their kill zone.

6

Krissy ducked her skeet under a wisp to avoid three others coming in so close she was sure they meant to ram her. The sky was dotted with clusters of them, all of which were trying to either shoot the Star Force fighters down or keep them distracted and away from the ground troops that were in need of air support. Reports were they were holding their own, but as typical the lizards were spamming them with insane numbers that her scattergun was fated for.

Getting to them was difficult, but she was almost through the wisp formations and dipping down to tree level to get under this one. A few more threw down green plasma orbs around her, two of which hit her right side engine but the shields covering it held and she accelerated hard to try and lose her pursuit. Other skeets were scattered around, far too few to take down all the wisps in time, so she and a number of them were tasked with getting through while the others went for kills.

She wasn’t near any of the others and that isolation drew a lot of attention to her, for as soon as she zipped away from the group peppering her from above two more formations angled in on her and forced the Star Force regular to bank up and away from the forest, allowing them to come at her from all sides and not seeming to care about friendly fire.

Her shields were dipping lower and lower and it was just a matter of time before these gnats stung her to death. She wasn’t going to let that happen and would pull up and head for orbit if need be, for there was no way the wisps could keep pace when she entered super pursuit mode, though that required a clear line ahead and a bit of prep. Unfortunately Krissy couldn’t use that speed here because it was straight line and she was having to maneuver like crazy to even get close to the ground battle ahead.

The moment of choice was nearly on her, when she would have to choose to head out of the mess of fighters or keep on pushing forward. Problem was the armor on her skeet was thin in order to afford her the movement capability that was more desperately needed. It would take some plasma hits and keep her flying, but it wasn’t tank armor by any stretch of the imagination. The fighter’s shields were its primary defense and they were slowly being whittled away.

A signal from another nearby skeet also pushing its way through the mess of wisps prompter her to turn hard left and head for the source of the brief comm signal. The lizard fighters around her changed course to follow and soon she saw the tiny dot that was the other skeet highlighted on her HUD ahead, with her dipping down slightly for what was going to be a passby. She readied her scattergun and waited for the skeet to wink past, taking a few more hits as she flew a straight line towards the rendezvous.

When the two fighters nearly rammed each other they both opened fire on the other side, targeting the wisps directly following their twin. The plasma scattergun fired off numerous little potent packets of plasma in a cone rather than at a specific target, catching numerous wisps as both pilots held in on the trigger and fanned the area ahead for a couple of seconds before banking hard and coming back around towards the center point.

The unshielded wisps took hits, some going down to crash in the forest below and others moving off with damage, unable to keep pace with the maneuvering skeets that now linked up in paired mode and aggressively attacked the wisps swirling around them. Whenever one of the enemy fighters would align on a skeet the other would hit or scare it off, and between the two of them they took down some 14 fighters before returning to their primary objective with more wisps moving in to fill the void of those they’d just shot down.

Krissy and the other pilot stayed together but with enough space to allow each to maneuver in a wavy line as they dodged some of the incoming fire. Plasma traveling through air diminished more rapidly than through a vacuum, which meant shorter effective range and the lizard wisps exclusively used plasma. The skeets had longer range weapons that they could use to skillfully poach them, but right now that wasn’t the point…getting to the ground troops was.

That meant punching through and trying not to get hit as much as the wisps would like. Those that were further away were firing ahead of the skeets, hoping they’d fly into the bands of plasma rain and it was those that the Star Force pilots were weaving around, for it was almost impossible to dodge a single plasma shot. While they didn’t fire at lightspeed, nor close to it, they were not slow through the air and aside from a slight twitch of the flight controls there wasn’t much you could do against a well-aimed shot.

The trick was in getting the wisps to make bad shots, but to get to the mission point as quickly as possible you needed to fly a direct line…which was predictable as hell. That was the conundrum Krissy faced, but now with two skeets together the enemy had twice the number of targets to shoot at and that actually diminished the number of hits her fighter was taking.

That convinced Krissy to risk it and she continued forward, with the other pilot eventually comming with a strategy and telling her to go low to the riverbed. She agreed and the other skeet flew directly overtop of hers, with their silhouettes matching up from top view, then Krissy dove down as the other skeet went aggressive and tried to draw as much attention to him as possible.

She took her skeet back down to the forest and angle/braked hard to turn her momentum into the twisty line of the river, flying so low that there were trees to either side of her as she skimmed the dry wash. There were no lizards here, but a couple of kilometers ahead there were, crossing into the open en mass and just begging to get hit.

The wisp pilots knew that too and some came after her with a vengeance, but she ignored them and stuck to the river bed pulling some Mario Kart worthy skid turns to keep from careening into the tree walls as numerous plasma blasts rained down around her and kicked up dust plumes from where they hit dirt and rocks.

Krissy’s course kept whipping back and forth, then suddenly there was a sea of green heads and she hit the brakes, using her gravity drives to slow her forward momentum down to a slow flyby as she tilted the scattergun firing angle down and unleashed her blue rain onto the riverbed.

Burnt flesh flew everywhere like confetti and dozens of lizards fell per heartbeat as she made her way up the river with the overhead plasma blasts still coming down and hitting the lizard troops with the misses. Apparently they felt it was worth the tradeoff if they could kill her, and they were probably right mathematically speaking, but shooting your own troops to kill a target was colder than cold and just one more reason why these dishonorable bastards had to die.

Krissy pushed through the river for more than half a mile before the stream of lizard infantry ended. When it did she pulled up, intent on making a loop and dogfighting for a handful of seconds before heading back down for another pass for the disruption she’d made in the troop flow was already disappearing as more came out of the forest to cross, erasing the gaps she’d made in their fleshy flood of slowly moving bodies.

When she got back to decent altitude she had to linger longer than she’d liked, for her shields were near to breaching. Going evasive she avoided fire long enough for them to start ticking up a bit with recharge, then she engaged and killed three more wisps before heading back down for another pass just in time to see the other pilot strafing a section of forest nearby. Krissy didn’t know what that was about and was going to shoot the targets out in the open, but there were three more skeets headed their way and they were dragging a lot of wisps with them…meaning her time here was going to be short, for she couldn’t sustain much more plasma fire, no matter how bad of shots the lizard pilots were at speed.

Knowing that, Krissy ignored the incoming fire and dove back down to make one more pass, intending to bug out as soon as she’d completed it. Her topside shields got hammered as she flew through a few meters over the riverbed, but the carnage her scattergun was unleashing more than made up for it. When the other side of the flood came into view she was just about to make for the sky when a request for fire support came in from an Archon on the ground.

Krissy shot off across the empty riverbed and weaved between the tree walls, seeing if the lizards would still follow her…which they did, but two or three wisps peeled off as she got further away from the ground troops. Biting her lip, she decided to do something stupid and pulled up just enough to get over the treetops and turned back, heading for the location for the air support request that was a few kilometers away. She’d be damned if she left an Archon hanging, and was going to risk some hull damage to give him some help…then she’d bug out.

With a plasma hit to her tail that flashed a 7% warning for that section of shield Krissy got mad and flicked her skeet up through as tight of a backwards loop as she could, with the wisp following her through it given the craft’s nimble nature. What it couldn’t cover was the hover twist she put her skeet through, spinning it around and flying backwards long enough to fire two small mauler blasts, one of which hit the wisp and blew apart half its hull.

That enemy fighter dropped to the forest as Krissy accelerated forward and nulled out her backwards momentum, redirecting in a way that caused the other wisps to loop around to pursue her…and that gave her a moment’s reprieve from their hounding fire.

A slight turn to the right brought her into line with the waypoint marker indicating where the Archon wanted the incoming air support. She asked for a confirmation with a simple button press rather than the tedious nature of comming that particular Archon. In the seconds that had elapsed something on the ground might have changed, but she got the confirmation almost immediately and set herself, for it was a single point in the forest and a flyby wasn’t going to be good enough. If the Archon wanted it pounded, then she was going to level it.

Krissy flew across the treetops, now seeing flashes of light from down inside the forest but unable to make out who was who for more than a fleeting moment here and there. Trusting in the waypoint she hit the brakes hard and flipped up on her nose as she gained a little bit of altitude, pointing the long tail of the T-shaped craft towards the sky as she came into a hover over the location and fired every weapon that she had down into the forest.

Both mauler cannons obliterated the trees below when they hit, throwing out wooden shrapnel like bombs as her scattergun shredded the leaves and branches. Her long range sammie she fired off as well, hoping for a little more damage. Each weapon had its own cycle time, so she just held in the triggers for all of them and cringed against the plasma damage she was taking from the wisps, for as long as she held still those dumbass pilots didn’t have any trouble hitting her.

Her shield indicator flashed red, then several spots on her hull armor lit up with damage warnings. Biting her lip again she waved her firing line back and forth a bit, then stopped firing and punched the acceleration of her gravity drive as fast as she dared, shooting her fighter straight up tail-first. As she gained altitude she spun it around her center axis so she faced forward, just in time to see a flash of hull as she clipped one of the wisps.

A huge gash formed in the schematic representing her fighter that ran nearly half the length of her port side, having punched through the armor and hit numerous internal systems…but all three engines were still there and had partial power, though her sammy and scattergun were completely dead.

That didn’t matter now, for she was just clawing for distance skyward as several wisps followed her up and more at altitude angled down towards her. Getting her skeet reset from the deviation that the collision had caused, Krissy continued to accelerate, but without her shields super pursuit mode wasn’t possible anyway, let alone with the power drain for at least one of her six redundant generators had to have been disabled in the collision.

All showed operational on her display, which meant that a connecting line must have been severed. Either way that generator or two was out of order and she didn’t have time to do a diagnostic to see what was out. All she had time to do was climb and glance at the displays before angling 30 degrees to the east and continuing to accelerate slowly, trying to put some distance between her and the thickest regions of wisps.

Some continued to follow her, at a distance, but they weren’t behind, rather ahead and lateral giving them opportunities for intercept unless she could get clear and up to speed…which didn’t look likely. The more momentum she built the faster she would go, but without her shields cutting the wind her aerodynamics were limited. That combined with the power drain was going to make this dicey.

She wasn’t going to call for help though, because that meant a skeet or two would have to leave the ground troops hanging and she wasn’t going to have that. If necessary she could crash land and get picked up later, knowing that her pilot’s cocoon would make it very hard for the lizards to kill her even if they finished off her skeet.

Still mentally cursing herself for running into one of them, she test fired the maulers to make sure they were actually still functional. Both fired off normally and their recharge rate was diminished but present, so she could fight a bit if she had to…and it looked like that was going to be necessary.

Krissy counted 13 wisps in total that had broken off from various formations and were chasing her. They weren’t all together, nor would they reach her at the same time, with her seeing that she was in fact going to have to deal with at least 6 of them if she stayed on her present course, and the moment she went evasive the others would then have a chance to catch up from the lead she’d built on them.

She had about 10 more seconds to make a decision before the first wisp got within firing range and Krissy realized she didn’t have a choice. She waited a few more heartbeats then spun the skeet around, facing back and to port she hit the brakes and brought herself even closer to the nearest wisp. She wished she had her scattergun, for even a few small hits would be enough to hurt the shieldless enemy, but she’d have to make do with her maulers. They required more skill to hit with, but Krissy wasn’t lacking in that department.

The wisp did go evasive, however, making her first five shots miss, but as she turned her skeet to follow its line of flight she caught a hit with the sixth, then punched what acceleration she had to move away from it as two more came in. A heartbeat later her shields began to reform at low strength but she didn’t wait to try and let them rebuild, knowing that she had to make these kills quick while there were only one or two wisps nearby. Wait and let them bunch up and she’d be down before she had time to properly cuss them out.

Moving into an aggressive evasion pattern that had her cutting back on her flight path as often as she could, she set herself to the task of using her superior skill to overcome the disadvantage…or at least take a few more of the bastards down before she was out of the fight.

An hour and a half later one of the Star Force surface bases saw a smoking skeet approach from the west and set down in the middle of one of the open landing pads as if there was nothing at all wrong or unusual about it. There were no calls for emergency assistance or any alarm in the pilots voice as she signaled for pad allotment, but once seeing the state of her ship the deck chief got an emergency crew of techs rushing out to the skeet to deal with any potential mechanical explosions that might result from the damage and endanger the surrounding ships/personnel…as well as to see to the pilot.

But when Krissy landed she popped the armored hatch and slid down the angled side of the skeet, for its port landing leg had never deployed. Her light combat suit protected her leg and elbow from the heat on the hull as she dropped to the ground and casually walked off, satisfied and relieved that she hadn’t been stuck in the forest.

The pilot waved off the medtech in the emergency team and let them deal with her wreck of a skeet as she headed indoors to find out the status of the ongoing battles and how long it would take to get her a replacement fighter.

7

Niken-401229 fired his plasma pistol twice, hitting a couple of lizards that were heading towards a Bsidd that was carrying another wounded one back out of the battle, dropping both as he ran in a wide arc around several trees then headed back into the fray once they were clear. So far he’d had 19 casualties, all non-fatal and successfully evacuated from the heaviest fighting. Beyond that he didn’t know what had happened to them, but the troops still in the field under his and Jayce’s command were all still alive and fighting, though near to the breaking point.

The lizards were throwing so many infantry at them and the other Star Force units nearby that they’d had to relocate 8 times to keep from tripping over the bodies. Each time the lizards kept pursuing them with an unending wave of standard variants moving through the trees like they were ants and constantly trying to flank their grouping and cut off the evacuation routes that Niken was using to get his seriously injured out.

The rest of his troops had injuries, and he would have been surprised if any more than a handful were fighting with their shields up. His were currently recharging at 18% and had gone down more times than he could count, but he was quicker than the Bsidd and could run away from a lot of fire coming in on him. They didn’t have that luxury and were resorting to picking up and piling the lizard corpses to provide some barricades to fight behind when there weren’t enough trees or time to fell them.

In fact Jayce had recently ordered them to stop doing that in order to conserve ammo. Already a lot of the Bsidd had empty rifles and were resorting to hand to hand with their plasma rods. If they used those to cut more branches they’d run out of power quicker, and already as Niken ran back in towards his troops he saw Bsidd with only 3 or 4 glowing appendages when there should have been six, telling him that they were close to having to fight this out weaponless.

He only had 19 rounds left himself, and as he got back to the nearest group of Bsidd he cut right and flanked the lizards shooting at them, blowing through half those rounds in a matter of seconds but taking that point of danger off their mental map. The lizards had been trying for hours to get around to the back of them and force the Bsidd into a situation where they would have to fight it out. Niken had been able to keep pulling his injured out before they could get hammered to death, but only because they kept a route of retreat intact and still the lizards were determined to flank and cut them off.

The only reason the Archons hadn’t ordered a full retreat was because the end of the lizard wave had been reported some kilometers away, meaning that this endless battle was coming to a conclusion in their favor if they could just hold out a bit longer…and even if he did order a full retreat they’d have to fight their way back, for the lizards were hell bent on killing them and were just as fast as the Bsidd through forest, if not faster.

That meant they were kind of stuck, but if they needed to retreat he could have made it happen in an orderly fashion. The skies overhead were still cluttered with wisps, though many of them were now junk piles in the forest. Given that present air cover he wondered if there wasn’t a second wave of infantry coming behind this one, but right now there was none reported so he was going to fight this out here and now without losing any more ground. They’d already retreated several additional kilometers away from their targets, and if this was the end of the major resistance they needed to get to them with what troops were able sooner rather than later, and it looked like flying dropships in wasn’t going to be an option.

Weaving his way between trees Niken ran toward the next bit of trouble he saw, sniping down three lizards as he passed, then he was back into the heavy flow of incoming amongst knotted up groups of Bsidd acting as lethal islands amongst the flood and dropping lizard bodies everywhere, now almost exclusively through hand to hand combat.

A few more shots and Niken was out of ammo as well, but knowing that they only had to kill a few thousand more he pulled up a rare command in his HUD and triggered his armor rack to release from his back. He caught it in his right hand as it slid off and whipped it around in front of him, reattaching the dead pistol next to his other depleted weapons and grabbing the two short cylinders off it that he carried for good measure.

Dropping the weapon rack into a bush he carried a cylinder in each hand and ran on, now lighter and more agile than before but with a silver-armored body that was showing numerous melted spots from plasma damage. His shields took another hit as the lizards saw and focused their fire on him, and Niken knew that as long as they did so his troops would have a little more breathing room to work with.

The Archon ran towards the thickest group of the lizards as they continued to run forward in tightly packed lines through the trees, bottling up near the Bsidd as their forwardmost infantry were cut down by plasma rods or knocked through the air by physical blows. Some of the Bsidd were picking up the enemies as they shot into their armor and hurling them like rocks back towards the others and bowling them over, for without their rifles they were having trouble keeping the lizards from grouping up in too large of numbers and pumping plasma into their already beaten and often broken armor, with many of the Bsidd visually bleeding out through burn marks.

Niken jumped as high as he could after pushing his way through the scattering of lizards in the front, then did a half flip in the air that brought his feet around over his head and into a lateral battering ram that smashed one of the lizards back into the others as the Archon fell to the ground amongst them, opening a small space for him to stand up in. As he did the cylinders extended out with a button press and formed two stun swords, one in each hand, that he whipped around before they were even charged and knocked several lizards in their small heads.

The next few started dropping to the ground with even small hits as the Archon ran through the horde. He knew they weren’t dead, and while he could pick up the lizard plasma rifles and use them against their makers the Bsidd couldn’t for their lack of fingers. They were the kill power and he needed to be the distraction…and right now he could take more lizards out of the fight with a stun sword than he could with one of their rifles, for even the slightest brush of the blade at full power would knock one out, even if he only caught them in the wrist.

Niken began downing them at 5 or 6 times the firing rate of one of their rifles on one side, but with two swords he was mowing them down on both wings as he ran, cutting a huge swath out of the horde and drawing a lot of attention his way, causing some of the lizards up front who weren’t totally engaged to turn back and throw their plasma fire at him when they could, though they were having trouble doing so without shooting each other.

Enough lizards were close enough to get off at least one shot before he poked or whacked them unconscious, with his shields going down not long after he jumped into the fray. Though he didn’t have time to notice, a group of Bsidd followed him in through the path of unconscious bodies, jumping into those around them and letting others trailing them poke and jab most of the unconscious ones with their plasma rods as they passed over them.

Before he knew it Jayce was in front of him, having beaten his way through from the other side and signaled to him with a simple telepathic touch. Niken retracted his left stun sword into its hilt and tossed it to the other acolyte, whom he saw had been reduced to using a lizard rifle. Jayce fired one more pointblank shot into a lizard’s chest, then he caught the sword out of the air and opened it up in a roundhouse twirl that ended with the tip cracking a lizard’s neck from the physical impact.

Switching to a two-handed grip Niken added more power and precision to his blows and the pair of acolytes drifted their way through the lizards, making sure not to get tripped up by those they were downing and to keep moving fast enough that they were hard to target. Green plasma was flying everywhere and more than once Niken felt a heat bloom on an arm or leg but nothing bad enough to slow him down. He was a blur of motion, caught up in sighting, moving towards, and making contact with the closest lizard…then he’d turn and repeat while mentally keeping track of where Jayce was beside him.

The lizards having two Archons to shoot at helped spread out the damage they were taking, prolonging their ability to fight, but by the time Niken got to jabbing one of the rare maulers that lunged at him swinging its forearm blades his stun sword had ran out of power. The poke merely knocked the lizard off course and dropped it beside the Archon, who then twirled the sword around and smacked it in the head as hard as he could, rendering it unconscious through blunt impact.

He would have grabbed a lizard rifle if he had time, but there were so many enemies around him he had to keep dodging and hitting them with the sword to keep them from lining up easy shots on him. The weapon, while unpowered, was still a heavy metal rod and that could do plenty of damage on its own, so Niken kept swinging and keeping close to Jayce until a blur of purple armor jumped into his view and grabbed three lizards up simultaneously…then sent them flying back through the air like they were mere toys.

Two glowing plasma rods jabbed into the nearest others, then Niken had more Bsidd swarm around him and run over the lizards in what amounted to a stampede of purple armor and too many limbs to count. Taking a moment the Archon spotted a lizard rifle and telekinetically pulled on it, moving it a half meter across the ground as he ran forward and reached down to pick it up in hand, discarding the dead stun sword.

He fell in with the Bsidd and ran amongst them, weaving his way between them as they ran and fought their way through the lizards, many of whom were now turning to run before they literally got stomped on. Niken shot targets of opportunity but kept trying to make his way to the front, hopping over one Bsidd that was down on the ground but still standing on one knee. He was hit, bad, but wasn’t dead…so Niken flashed a ‘recover’ marker onto his position via his helmet controls as he ran by. There was no time to stop and deal with him in person, for there were more enemies around to kill.

Then suddenly they were at the wall of them, lizards stacked together shoulder to shoulder and firing through the gaps in the trees directly into the Bsidd. Several of Niken’s troops went down, and he fired a pair of shots into the line, dropping a piece of it as suddenly he got a ‘no-go’ warning flashed on his HUD. The other Bsidd stopped immediately, taking partial cover behind trees and baiting the lizards to come to them, but the Archon kept shooting and running forward until he noticed a new group of dots on the battlemap.

He fired three more times then ducked behind a tree as a plasma blast hit his helmet, failing to penetrate the silver armor but melting a small rivulet of it off. It ran down an inch over his visor and resolidified, sticking in place as his view filled with tree bark. Looking to his right he saw and telekinetically pulled another lizard rifle to him, dragging it across the ground as it was too heavy for him to fully lift, then grabbed it in his other hand, dual wielding as he turned around the far side of the thick tree trunk and opened fire again.

He checked up after five shots when two yellow-armored blurs appeared in the air behind the lizard line, falling in amongst them and throwing the enemy into havoc. Several more jump/lunged from their flanking position, then Niken ran out of cover towards the brawl and fired on the lizards that the Scionate had pushed out towards him.

Firing off the green plasma blasts into the nearest ones, he saw the ambush group mow down the others with blue streaks seeming to come out of their mouths, though their helmets were fully sealed just as his was. In addition to shooting they were jumping on and knocking down the lizards, stunning some of them with the ‘gloves’ that their armor contained and just physically beating others down with their impacts.

When the Bsidd saw the Scionate hit the lizards they came out of cover and rushed forward, picking apart the survivors along with Niken until they pushed through the group and saw clear forest on the other side…the end of the lizard wave, finally.

But there were many more lizards nearby and across the battlefield, so the Archon kept on the move even as others took a breather. In the breaks he had he consulted the battlemap as he ran, heading towards where there was still fighting with several Scionate catching up to and pacing him as an escort. He hadn’t known there were any of the rare units even engaged in this fight, let alone close to his position, but he didn’t have time to ask where they’d come from. He was just glad they were here.

Jumping over corpse after corpse Niken’s luck eventually ran out and his fatigue + speed saw his foot catch on one, dumping him to the ground where he rolled into a tree, banging his head. He shook it off quickly and got back to his feet, never minding the looks from the Scionate around him who’d stopped alongside. He was beyond exhausted and knew the Bsidd were the same, so he didn’t feel any shame, he just needed to get moving again so he could kill the remaining lizards before they took the slackening battle as an opportunity to hit some of his vulnerable troops.

When he got to another group of lizards fighting hand to hand with a trio of Bsidd the Scionate didn’t wait for orders and sprinted ahead, jumping some 10 meters through the air to land on their targets and crush them into the ground. One shot the one he’d landed on, but the others bounced off them, knocking others down and keeping them from firing on the wounded Bsidd as they poked and picked up the lizards with no glowing appendages among them.

Niken followed up and shot the lizards that some of the Scionate had knocked down and between the three races they finished off the enemies in that spot quickly. With a glance at the Bsidd he signaled for them to stay put and ran off with the Scionate following, headed towards more little lingering engagements.

It would be another 13 minutes before his unit was fully disengaged, then he was busy organizing what armed Bsidd he had left into kill parties to go around and finish off any surviving lizards, whether they be stunned or wounded, when he got a comm call from an Archon in another unit a few kilometers off.

“Still here,” he answered.

“The road ahead is clear. Proceed to the base entrances with what able troops you have, I’ll meet you there with mine,” the ranger said.

“Sorry, Roy. Aside from the Scionate I’ve got nothing to offer. Right now a stiff breeze would kill half my Bsidd.”

“What Scionate?”

“Hold a moment,” he said, looking at one of them nearby him. “Where did you come from?”

“Aerial drop. Trailblazer Jason’s orders.”

“Are you ready for some more action?”

“Always,” the Scionate said with an energetic growl.

“Take your men and proceed to these coordinates,” Niken said, giving him a waypoint that would link up with the other Star Force troops getting ready to assault the subsurface base. He’d expected to be among them, but the lizards had thrown far more infantry at his unit than they’d expected. “They’re going to need all the help they can get. And thanks.”

“No debt,” he said before turning and running off with the rest of his armored kitties going with him. The phrase had become popular amongst the Scionate, for it meant that there was no error on Niken’s part that had made the rescue necessary, nor did Star Force troops typically owe each other. They were all family on the battlefield and didn’t keep score, something that had been hard for the Scionate to come to grips with after all Star Force had done training them and rebuilding their society.

Now that they had the opportunity to return the gratitude, ‘no debt’ was a way of them saying they’d owed you anyway, and was a version of saying ‘you’re welcome’ or ‘don’t mention it.’

Niken looked around visually, then on his battlemap trying to get a feel for where all his troops were. He spotted the injured, marked with a special icon until they were recovered, and headed to one nearby. He got to it to find one of the bigger Bsidd kneeling on the ground with both knees and missing one of its appendages…which was lying beside it next to several lizard corpses, having been melted off his body with pinpoint or just unlucky plasma hits.

“You with me?” Niken asked, running up beside him and placing an armored hand on its head.

“I am…here,” the Bsidd answered in obvious pain and shock.

“When we get you back to a medical facility they’ll regrow it, so just hang tight until I can get you out of here. I don’t know about dropships yet, so we may have to go overland. Can you walk?”

The Bsidd stood up, as if finally having an order to follow allowed it to focus past the pain.

“Good. Come with me,” he said, stepping ahead of him and leading the Bsidd towards one of the medtechs that had been brought in within the past few minutes now that the lizard threat was over. He’d come by speeder, rather than aerial drop, and a few more were also on their way according to the battlemap, coming through the trees along with some other small vehicles while the fighters continued their game of cat and mouse overhead.

So long as one of them didn’t crash down on top of them, Niken figured he and the others were going to be alright…and checking his battlemap totals he saw that as of yet there were no Bsidd fatalities listed. Numerous casualties, but no fatalities, and that let the Archon release a very slow, relieved breath knowing that his decision to stay and fight it out hadn’t cost him any of his men. Those like the Bsidd with him had been badly wounded, but they’d recover so long as the medtechs did their job.

To that end he picked up the pace a little, comming one of them to head his direction, fearing that this Bsidd might bleed out, for his wound hadn’t cauterized completely and he was leaking a steady trail of purple/black blood from the severed limb.

8

Jason-025 input the deployment order for the Scionate detachment into the HUD on his helmet a moment before he hit the power on the jump pack to slow his descent. He’d just leapt out of a dropship at extreme high altitude in order to get in over the wisp cloud surrounding one of their mountain strongholds and had some time to kill as he fell so he’d dug into the battlemap to monitor the other assaults taking place on Irad.

He hadn’t expected to need to issue any orders, but when he saw the extraordinary amount of resistance the Bsidd were going up against he knew they were near the tipping point and had located a reserve unit on standby and sent the order while adjusting his fall to miss the enemy fighters as he passed through their swirling formations. There were skeets on the edges, poking some of them down, but directly over the stronghold there were only wisps that were sniping the ground troops when they could, but the terrain was hiding both sides’ units well and leaving the fighter cover primary to keep Star Force air assets at bay.

The ground teams had already took out the perimeter defense stations, but the twists and turns of the nearly vertical canyons made the approach a maze of ambush points. The Calavari and Humans assaulting the base were being patient and not overworking the problem, but the lizards pretty much had them tied up and unable to advance…hence the need for a bit of a push. Jason had been holding back, waiting to see which combat zones were having the most trouble before deploying himself, though had he waited a bit longer he would have gone to the Bsidd.

Falling through the air didn’t give him the option of redeploying so he’d sent the Scionate instead, but now he had to forget the bigger strategic picture and focus on not getting shot down. To that end he reached out his mind to the pair of lizard fighters angling towards him now that he was slowing down and veering to the south. When he could feel them he locked onto their minds and froze their bodies, with both wisps flying on their previous courses with no additional input to the controls.

Both were flying towards the ground and remained so, with Jason adjusting his fall a bit to stay well wide of them. The wisps flashed by some 900 meters away and continued to descend until they got out of the trailblazer’s Ikrid range. One pulled up and avoided crashing into the ground, but the other wasn’t so lucky. It came down into a lizard-filled section of forest and took out a few of them on impact, with the Star Force front better than a mile away.

Jason continued his fall, now too far ahead of the other wisps for them to get within firing range in time. With his landing options diminishing with altitude, he spied a few shards of plasma headed his way from a tower just poking up above the treetops. It was anti-air fire and he immediately got clipped with two hits, but like the fighters he was able to reach out, locate, and cripple the minds at the firing controls, shutting the turret down temporarily and allowing him to come down safely into the treetops nearby.

Jason braked hard, but let his excess momentum tear him through the canopy. He deactivated his shields so not to drain them further with the physical impacts, letting his armor take the hits and scrapes as he slowed to a slight hop that barely had his footprints pressing into the ground when he finally got to the surface.

Shutting the jump pack off he ran through the trees over to the defense tower, finding and crippling the minds around him to clear a path rather than fighting it out. He got to the entrance and opened the door with the guards falling unconscious by his mere presence. The same effect occurred to those inside, with none of the lizards able to even fire at shot at him as he connected to and rendered each one unresponsive by literally putting them to sleep.

Jason worked his way up the tower until he got to the technological guts of the turret, then he found a sweet spot and pulled an explosive out of his pack and set it inside on a timer before heading down and out back into the forest, dropping more lizards unconscious around him. He got 300 meters away before he heard the boom that rendered the anti-air tower unuseable, then a few steps later he came up on the edge of one of the many ravines in the area.

Below there were more lizards hidden in various places with bits of infrastructure here and there. He’d seen some of what they had waiting for them from orbital scans, but now that he was here on the ground Jason could see a lot more laterally that they’d been hiding in the walls and under the trees. It looked like a Halo multiplayer map, there were so many cover points and trails running through the ravine, not to mention stairways built inside the rocky walls for the lizards to use to get up and down, forcing the attackers to hack their way up the ravine or get air support to pick them up.

The air support wasn’t an option, so it was either go by foot or jump pack, and get close enough to one of those anti-air towers with the jump packs and you were going to be toast. From his vantage point he could see several smaller versions dotting the ravine as they stuck out from high points on the walls or on the edges up top, making this and probably a lot of other locations around the base killing zones.

Star Force liked a challenge, but the longer the lizards held this base the less troops he’d have to hit other targets so Jason was going to start clearing the roadblocks ahead his troops’ advance…or at least reducing them, for there was a lot to get to and only so many explosives in his pack, not to mention far too many lizards for him to take out with the limited ammo he had.

But he had psionics, not to mention his physical strength and a forest canopy that more or less put the wisp air cover out of the game. He’d have to be careful not to hang out anywhere in the open or predictably hold to a single location beneath the trees that they could target, but this looked like it was going to be an all-ground affair and that was something he could handle solo so long as he didn’t get too many enemy firing lines on him simultaneously. If he could buy time between bouts for his shields to recharge he could stay out here kicking ass indefinitely.

Leaning against a thick tree at the top of the ravine he was about to make for one of the anti-air protrusions a quarter mile down the eastern edge when a familiar sound stopped him from moving. He looked around suspiciously, then a few moments later one of the lizards’ tanks moved through the ravine, hovering over the trees and trails. Fixed emplacements Jason could handle, but with that kind of mobile firepower and no fighters to take it out he’d be a sitting duck above the tree line.

Jason lost sight of it again as it moved to the left and behind a rocky outcropping two meters ahead of him, so he ran to the left and meandered along the choppy ravine edge until he had a good vantage point. Given that there were none of his troops nearby he had a second option and fixed a beacon onto the tank virtually using the tracking software in his helmet. A pointed polygon appeared over top of it along with concentric circles emanating out from the anti-vehicle ‘shade.’

Those circles moved with it as it progressed up the ravine at a snail’s pace on patrol. Jason knew he was within the outermost of those circles but he had to keep a line of sight on the tank in order for this to work. Opening up his comm for unstealthed transmission he sent a continuous signal to orbit, knowing that the lizards might be able to backtrack it to his location. That wasn’t important right now given that they’d just seen him drop from the sky and blow up a turret…what was important was that his luck held up, and the clear sky was going to help.

A firing button appeared on his HUD and Jason dropped as low to the ground as he could, tree hugging with his left shoulder as he kept his eyes on the tank as it continued to creep left and would be out of view in less than 30 seconds. Taking a deep breath he looked at the button, closed his right eye, then blinked three times with his left. That ‘pressed’ the button with the necessary safety interlocks, resulting in a beam of insanely white light coming down from the sky within an instant and drowning out the tank and everything else in the ravine as his visor tried to adjust to the brightness.

It didn’t fully work and Jason was left stunned as he was forcefully knocked back by the concussion wave. His hands dug into the dirt to try to slow and ground him as the trees cracked and burnt all around him. It took a moment for his eyes to start to clear, then a lesser blowback pulled him forward a few inches and brought debris with it, covering him in bits of leaf and limbs, half of which were charred and smoking.

Jason held his eyes shut, knowing that was the best way to get them to process out the excess light. Had he not been wearing a helmet the glare from the cleansing beam would have blinded him for well over a minute, but thanks to his visor it only took a few seconds before he could see the glowing indicators on his HUD, then a handful more before the ravine started to come back into distinction. A couple of kill tags were updated where nearby turret emplacements in the walls had been knocked offline, and in one case Jason saw a tree trunk impaling it, but most of the emplacements below him were still intact…though the lizards manning them were not.

He couldn’t take a headcount, but nearly all of the minds he had previously been sensing below were now gone around the blast radius. He searched for the tank and saw it flipped over and lying against the nearer ravine wall…half of it missing and apparently scattered elsewhere amongst the tree mash. A deep hole had been blow out in the center of it all, some 30 meters away from where the tank had been. Firing from orbit wasn’t the most precise thing, and sniping tanks was almost impossible even with the cleansing beams, but this one had gotten close enough to do the job with the plasma wave resulting from the beam colliding with the air and dirt. And fortunately it hadn’t hit near Jason.

He knew the odds of it missing that badly were low, but it wasn’t something he was going to repeat often. Doing so was something he could have ordered prior to the attack to just lay waste to everything in the ravines, but the lizards knew Star Force had that capability and had constructed this base and its defenses mostly underground. There was no way to get at all of it with orbital bombardment and the downside was the mess he now saw below him. Fighting in that burning mash of trees would be difficult for him, but even more so for a unit of troops.

No, he wasn’t going to spam the area with cleansing beams and then expect his troops to fight through the rubble. Better to use the forest to their advantage, but in this case he needed the tank gone, and gone now it was.

Standing up and walking to the edge of the ravine he tapped his jump pack controls and slid off the side. The angle was steep, but the vegetation covering it had mostly been stripped off in the fiery concussion wave. His feet hit knobby rocks and patches of loose dirt, making his descent awkward but manageable. When he was halfway down he planted a foot on a stable-looking rock and jumped to the left, launching himself with an anti-grav push into one of the side niches that had a topside overhang and that he hadn’t seen from above.

He missed low, but got a handhold on the rim and pulled himself up into the little porch, seeing the body of a lizard with a head wound…as well as the patch of blood on the nearby wall where it had bounced off. There was a small doorway that led inside the ravine wall and Jason could feel minds inside. Pulling out his plasma rifle he headed in and began cleaning out the narrow corridors and stairs, first mentally disabling the lizards then coming up on them and killing them with single shots to conserve ammunition.

Jason moved between three different hidden emplacements before he ran out of tunnel. To get to the others he had to move across trails that no longer existed around the blast radius, and some of the automated turrets were up high and fixed to sheer rock…probably with power cables running through drilled holes. There was no physical access to them for enemy troops to take over and utilize, so Jason had to take those down from the outside or disable the controllers wherever they were hiding nearby.

If Jason were setting these up he’d have relays in place to allow remote control from far distances, so he didn’t bother looking for a nearby bunker and headed out across and under the remains of the trees that had been burnt and bent over, yet not totally destroyed, until he got underneath one of the turrets…with it firing rifle-sized plasma blasts down towards him the moment he came out from under one of the tree mashes.

This was where the tank would have been a particularly bad neighbor to have, but since it was now gone Jason took a few plasma blasts by not dodging, rather he dropped down onto his ankles and did his best impression of a Jedi jump as he activated his jump pack. His trajectory moved him at an angle, bringing him up to a narrow ledge that he managed to get a foot onto. The jump pack held him up long enough to get steadied as he continued to get hit with plasma blasts and the misses blowing out tiny bits of rock shrapnel all around him.

Repeating the process he jumped again, this time getting up to the height of the turret and taking one shot directly in the faceplate. His diminishing shields held up and Jason grabbed hold of one of the multiple barrels sticking out from the boxy turret. He held on and dangled from it underneath, squeezing his mechanical hand as tightly as the mental controls in his armor would allow and locking it in place so his muscles wouldn’t have to. He nearly slid off anyway, but the mechanical grip put a little bit of a dent in the barrel, allowing for some additional grip as he pulled out his plasma pistol from his lower back and pumped multiple rounds into the turret, breaking through the armored casing and exposing the inside.

He took another shot to his shoulder, but most of the barrels couldn’t target him in so close. Tucking his pistol away he reached up and got a hand on the hole he’d just made, gripping the interior before letting go of the barrel. He reached in with the second hand, feet dangling below him over the ravine below, and pried open the turret enough for him to half climb inside. He was going to shoot the vital components but accidentally pulled one out when he was just trying to get a grip.

He nearly fell, but his left hand held firm as he tossed the power conduit out beneath him with it dropping like a rope for a few meters. Jason climbed up and into the turret as much as he could, then ripped out more and more of the guts until he was sure that he’d fatally wounded the turret…and given its placement the lizards wouldn’t be making repairs any time soon.

The Archon grabbed the power conduit and slid down the makeshift rope before letting go at the end and falling down to the ravine wall some 20 meters below and braking with his jump pack before kicking of the angled sidewall and drifting himself out enough to land in the flat bottom.

“One down,” he said, looking ahead at the next one in the green vegetation outside the blast radius, “a million to go.”

9

March 24, 2692

Jafat System (lizard territory)

Irad

Provchad shot one lizard in the chest as it and several others were rushing the Calavari, then he reached down with his lower left hand and grabbed its corpse as it fell, still firing his rifle at the others swarming around him and his brothers. He flung the lizard back into the flow, knocking down several before jumping ahead to land on the body and the small island it made amongst the rest. From there he proceeded to punch, grab, and kick every lizard within arms range, making himself a decoy and taking a lot of plasma hits while the others stayed put as gunners and picked off the nearest targets.

Provchad knew he couldn’t stay out amongst them forever, but his shields were strong and his arms even stronger, though he was kicking as many of the short, scrawny enemies as he was hitting them. Unfortunately that left his upper body as an easy target and his helmet was more often than not the source of the plasma hits, each of which momentarily blinded him as the superheated glowing gas washed over his faceplate.

With the distraction provided, the other Calavari held their position and began creeping forward, firing as they went, and followed Provchad forward until they got to a pass in a small hillside that the lizards were flowing through. Once there two others came forward and relieved him, allowing the Calavari to retreat behind the others and start recharging his shields while they punched and kicked those coming through the gap while pulling and tossing a few further in where the others shot them down.

Provchad inspected his armor, seeing a lot of small divots in the orange plates as a tiny shimmer covered his body when the shield matrix reformed at low strength. Pulling a pack of ammo out of his backpack he began to reload his weapons when he visually spotted something running along the top of the hillside underneath the trees. There hadn’t been any lizards up there and he thought the rocky walls were too steep for them to easily climb, but given the firing angle they had Provchad flicked a pistol up to target the blur before it could fire down on them.

He pulled back when he saw a large black/gold mass running at a speed the lizards could never match, but kept his attention up there trying to make out what he was seeing. It was a Human, obviously, and by the size he’d say a Knight but it wasn’t wearing Knight armor, which was typically bright white. It also didn’t have a shield.

Provchad checked his battlemap to see who/what it was, finding an ID tag but before he had time to check an explosion knocked him down to a knee as the two Calavari at the front were thrown through the air as a det pack went off in their face. With no time to lose Provchad took his ammo and stuffed it back in his pack, then ran up behind the others ready to fight more lizards whether or not his shields were recharged.

Behind the det pack explosion the infantry flooded in through the gap again and Provchad found himself back in a firing line, mowing down as many as they could but with too many tiny bodies running at them for the Star Force troops to shoot them all. The lizards came right up to the big Calavari in their orange armor and fired their plasma weapons into their larger hulks at pointblank range, whittling down their shield strength with every hit.

Suddenly the black blur dropped down directly into the gap in the hillside and every lizard within 10 meters of it fell to the ground. When Provchad saw that he knew that the Human had to be an Archon, for no weapon had been used to take the lizards down, but rather their infamous psionics. As the Calavari continued to shoot the ones in between the Archon and their line he saw the black/gold two-armed ally shoot those lizards on the ground as they were helpless to do anything other than twitch.

Suddenly two more black blurs dropped down from the hillside and fell into the lizards near Provchad, punching them away from where they landed with bright lights on their fists. When they hit they had the distinctive sound of plasma, but the Calavari had never seen such weapons before. They glowed white rather than Star Force standard blue, but he was sure it was a plasma weapon of some kind.

With one holding the choke point with his psionics the oversized Archons helped the Calavari clean out the rest of the lizards on this side then ran towards their twin, disappearing through the gap to the other side and going after the lizards there.

Provchad knew better than to follow, for his shields were down again, so he moved over to the two Calavari that had been hit by the det pack as the others slowly advanced to hold the choke point against any more enemies coming through. When he got over to one he saw a huge hole in his armor that ran from upper right arm down across the chest plate to his left hip. Orange blood was flowing everywhere, but another goo-like substance was eeking out from around the edges of the armor and slowly stopping the blood loss like an instant bandage.

Provchad tapped on the Calavari’s helmet, trying to see if he was still conscious, and got a slight hand wave in response. He didn’t know how bad the wound really was, but he was alive for the moment. Knowing that he couldn’t walk on his own, Provchad grabbed a pistol while putting his rifle back onto his rack, then used his three free hands to lift his badly wounded brother up into a carry position up over his right shoulder.

With his weapon ready to respond if anyone tried to jump them, Provchad began walking the wounded one back the way they’d advanced, hoping to get him to safety before he bled out or got jumped by any roaming lizards, for there were so many corpses littering the ground there was no way to be sure that they were all completely dead. If they weren’t, Provchad was going to finish them with his pistol.

Setting a repeated ‘wounded ally’ signal on the battlemap, he walked his passenger off, knowing that someone could up to take him eventually, then Provchad would return to the front lines.

Darius punched the lizard jumping for his neck with his left fist, knocking it back without delivering a plasma blast. That setting only had a limited number of shots and he didn’t want to waste one now so he kept to traditional hand to hand and broke bone with blunt force rather than burning the lizards with plasma. The other two Arc Knights with him were using plasma, both in the form of pistols, as the trio fought their way through the pool of lizards that had collected on the other side of the hillside.

The Calavari had followed them through, fortunately, for there were too many here for even them to take down head on and they didn’t have time to be coy about this. They had less than 20 minutes to push this line up to a convergence point with another assault group before a reinforcement of lizard tanks beat them to the riverbank. They needed to get across in order to take down a turret tower that was keeping nearby units well away from a firebase that the lizards were literally spewing out of.

Star Force had a mech star moving up the river to try and get close enough to the turret to take it out through the cover of the forest, but they were pinned in close and half submerged in water walking single file in order to make it through the narrow gap in this ravine bottom. That would put them in a bad position if those tanks got to them and it was up to Darius to make sure they never got that far.

He wanted to run ahead and take the tanks on without the Calavari, but there was way too many enemy infantry out and about to contend with while they were assaulting the tanks. They were going to be a handful as it was, and they couldn’t have dozens of plasma blasts hitting them per second when they went after them.

So they needed the Calavari there to deal with the infantry and cover them while they took to the tanks…but the lizards had the Calavari essentially pinned down, meaning the Arc Knights had to move the line up and they didn’t have time to be careful about it. In typical Knight tradition they ran straight into the heart of the enemy and took it to them like a punch to the face.

Their armor was more advanced than standard Knight equipment, but they weren’t carrying any physical shields due to them needing to move fast through the forest and the big barriers weren’t designed for that. Each of them had an assortment of firearms and swords with them, plus their glove augments, which contained both plasma and stun options, but for right now Darius was going to use his natural strength to save ammo as long as he could.

To that end he punched two more back before telekinetically picking up a pair of lizard plasma pistols and dual wielded them as he ran forward shooting and knocking down more infantry, not caring how many hits he took. He had to disrupt the lizards in order for the Calavari to follow up and shoot them down, and to do that the best he needed to be in the middle of them.

Once he got far enough inside the pool of enemies waiting to go through the hillside gap he summoned up his mental strength and emitted as large a Fornax field as he could, dropping well over 100 of the lizards to the ground like an invisible blast had hit them from above. The plasma blasts coming towards him stopped for a moment, then as he held them down shooting the nearest ones around him the lizards outside the radius of the fallen ones saw him and took aim, resuming the plasma barrage on him and ratcheting it up now that he didn’t have a shield of lizards around him blocking far-ranging shots.

Knowing he couldn’t take that much plasma and survive for long he released the Fornax field and the lizards began standing up, some of them right into the path of plasma and taking the friendly fire while the other two Arc Knights pushed through other areas of the assembly pool, one of which had brandished a plasma sword for the occasion. Darius hadn’t used his, for he knew it didn’t hold that many charges, but the extendable blade would be wrapped in plasma that would partially discharge on physical contact akin to a pistol blast. With skill, one could deliver far more plasma strikes with a sword than a firearm and that’s exactly what the Arc Knight had in mind.

He tore through the lizards around him, poking, slashing and kicking them aside in a flurry of movement that even a Jedi would have been hard pressed to match, for the 7 foot tall Human didn’t suffer the typical ‘big guy’ slowness that the Calavari were clearly demonstrating, though some of them were upwards of 8 foot tall.

No, the Knights were fast and the Arc Knights even faster, akin to Archon speed and faster than many of them. Personally trained by the original badass himself, the Black Knight, the Arc Knights suffered nothing in movement when compared to the lizards and were able to outmaneuver and outfight the tiny infantry with ease…there were just so many of them and they had a deadline to meet.

Realizing that the other Arc Knight was right, Darius pulled out his own plasma sword from his back rack and triggered the blade extension. The stubby cylinder sprang out a meter and a half long blade that was bathed in plasma with a second button press, held close and contained by patches of smart shield that would only release with a prerequisite amount of physical pressure. That amount was high enough that a mere brush wouldn’t trigger a ‘shot’ but with the sheer power the Knights had in their arms, let alone before the powered armor enhancements, there was no chance of the blades not discharging when they meant them to.

Darius whipped his sword around and hit two lizards with it in sequence, discharging a couple of shots into the first then hitting the second with the tip. That half of the blade lost its glow for a split second then returned to pure white a moment later. The Arc Knight didn’t try to count the hits, but he knew that if he went hard at the swarm of lizards he’d expend its charge within a minute…but right now that’s what had to be done in order to get to the tanks in time.

Sending a Fornax wave out behind him to diminish the shots into his back, he dashed forward swinging and hacking the glowing blade around and dropping bodies in his wake. The blade didn’t sever limbs like a lightsaber, but it was capable of delivering multiple plasma hits per swing if he wiped the blade across a target…which was more than enough to kill them in a heartbeat.

Darius didn’t look back, fighting his way forward and throwing in a few punches on the way, trusting the Calavari to follow him up and knowing the other two Arc Knights would be doing the same. Sooner than he expected the sword went out, leaving him with a metal rod that he continued to hit lizards with, though he had to amp up the strength of his blows to do enough damage that the lizards stayed down when hit.

Nearly to the far side of the pool he retracted the blade and stuck the hilt back on his rack as he telekinetically grabbed two more lizard rifles and fought his way forward with them and a mix of psionics, eventually getting to the other side and a trail that a scattering of additional lizards were running down to join the others.

He held position there, shooting them and those behind him while the other Arc Knights and Calavari fought their way up to him. Darius didn’t have time to look, but the sea of trees behind him where the lizards had been gathering was quickly turning into a corpse-filled park so thick that the Calavari were actually having to pick up and throw bodies aside to make paths for them to walk through.

Darius waited for the other Arc Knights to catch up to him, then he tossed the lizard weapons aside and grabbed new ones, not knowing what their charge level was, and followed the pair as they passed him on the run. Moving faster than the Calavari could, the threesome fought their way up the trail dropping bodies as they went and rushing towards the rendezvous point, with Darius seeing that the other Calavari unit was closer than them and already engaging infantry near to the waypoint on his battlemap.

That was good, for there were no Arc Knights with them and they’d need both Calavari groups to keep the enemy infantry busy when they hit the tanks, for the region around the turret was heavily defended.

10

March 29, 2692

Jafat System (lizard territory)

Irad

Jason jumped up to the edge of the hole that they’d blown into the roof of the lizard subsurface facility, grabbing the edge and hanging with his feet dangling. He pulled himself up and got an elbow on the edge then slowly wiggled his mass up over the tipping point and crawled along the dirty roof plate. It was melted in some places, jagged in others, but less than a meter away there was a wall of hardened dirt that he began scaling on all fours until he reached the top and could finally stand up.

He breathed a sigh of relief, now that the key facility had been taken and secured. This assault was over, but there were several others ongoing across the planet and many more to come. Taking a planet was not an easy task, especially one with this many enemies…but beyond that they had been dug in more than normal and it had been a very long past six days.

He’d cycled out twice for sleep, with his troops doing so more often than that, but they hadn’t let the lizards rest, keeping someone banging on the door nonstop as they fought their way through the ravines and down into the base. Now that he was topside again his battlemap began to update with information from other battlefronts and space, with him immediately noticing the arrivals in orbit.

There were no less than 8 full Voku conglomerates up there, ahead of schedule. They weren’t here to fight, but to use this system as a springboard for launching attacks into the surrounding area. He’d expected them to wait until Star Force had actually taken possession of the system, but apparently they were eager to get to work expanding their own empire.

The Jafat System was the furthest out into what had formerly been Calavari territory that Star Force had ventured short of a raid. This one they were keeping and would undoubtedly draw a strong reaction…which they were expecting. Irad itself hadn’t been Calavari, but rather belonged to a weak race known as the Bvdan, which were now extinct. The lizards had wiped them out long ago then only recently began heavily colonizing and fortifying this world, probably expecting an attack at some point from orbit, which this subsurface base and others would mostly have been immune to.

That was one thing about the lizards, no matter how cookie cutter their civilization was they always got around to adapting to what was beating them. They’d lost here and were going to lose in the other battles across the planet, but they’d set up their defenses in a way that had made it very difficult for Jason’s troops to root them out. If it hadn’t been for some very wise plays by his people they would have had massive casualties rather than the mere handful he saw tallied on his HUD.

The trailblazer had brought them up first thing along with similar reports from the other engagements. Most were injury reports, but amongst there were a scattering of fatalities. Jason cringed with each one he saw. The vast majority of the galaxy would have seen these reports as an impossibly dominate victory, but to him each individual lost was a defeat. Star Force didn’t assault any world where they expected to lose troops and did their best in defensive engagements to minimize losses, so losing even one meant they’d screwed up somehow…or the lizards had pulled some more trickery out of their butts.

13 deaths…to date. He’d lost 4 of those in this fight, a Calavari, two Scionate, and a commando. The Scionate had gotten overzealous and done something stupid, with Jason kicking himself for sending them in so green…but the others had fought well despite their youth, and if those two hadn’t gone off mission they’d probably still be alive. Jason didn’t like losing them, but he had to remind himself that he couldn’t babysit everyone and if they acted stupidly then there wasn’t much he could do to stop it from coming back to bite them.

What most people in the ADZ knew of the lizards came from these battle reports, for most of them had never seen them in person and those who had were dying off, replaced by younger generations. When landslide victory numbers like this were eventually relayed back to them they thought the lizards were numerically dominant pushovers…but that was not the case. The only reason Star Force had been able to take this base in the way it had was because they were damn good at what they did, but it had the side effect of making the enemy look weak when they were not.

The Calavari he’d lost had been caught up in an ambush and took so much armor damage that he’d been barely able to walk, but he and his unit had come out of it alive and were heading to the rear when a wisp was shot down overhead and fell to the ground. A proximity warning had been quickly issued from orbit, predicting the fall trajectory and the Calavari had managed to get out of the way just in time…save for the one who could barely move.

That was just pure bad luck, and he’d deserved better than that. To win out against an ambush then to die while in the clear was just plain wrong, but then again the galaxy was full of wrongs and try as they would Star Force couldn’t stop all of them. Two other Calavari had been hit with shrapnel from that fighter crash, but their armor had protected them enough to survive the spear-like impacts.

The commando had died in circumstances he hadn’t yet discovered, but it had been in a huge firefight. He’d review that later with those who had been on the ground at the time plus the vid logs once they compiled them all. He knew they had to learn from their mistakes, or their enemies’ ingenuity, in order to prevent deaths like this from occurring again, and Jason would be spending a lot of his future downtime reviewing everything that had taken place on this planet in detail.

That was the beauty of the battlemap and its recorders, which lifted the fog of war in the post analysis and helped to keep the realtime fighting coordinated and sane. If an enemy ever figured a way to compromise their low level communications it would hurt Star Force badly, which was why all their troops had trained to fight with jamming shutting it down and even to fight with a compromised system utilizing various checks and non-electronic hand signals.

But when the battlemap was working it gave them a huge advantage that the lizards didn’t have. The battlemap, their armor and shields, the advanced weaponry…each was a piece in the ever growing puzzle that allowed Star Force to fight and live to see tomorrow, with Jason never willing to tolerate the concept of ‘acceptable losses.’

A lizard might go into combat mere months after it was born, working off of genetic knowledge and its default strength, but in order for a Star Force soldier to get to the frontlines they had to put decades of training and trials in, making each one of them a veteran before they fired a single live plasma blast in battle. And not a veteran as in being on a warfront, but in knowing how to dominate it, when to attack and when to retreat. There were no newbs in Star Force’s assault groups, and because of everything they did in prep and tech, along with battlefield leadership from the Archons, almost everyone Jason had brought into this fight was walking out of it.

But it was the handful that weren’t that weighed on him.

He didn’t want to accept dumb luck, because that meant he couldn’t find a way to protect against it later. When the enemy came to your doorstep to fight, you didn’t have a choice of circumstances and had to work with what was present, but when you were the attacker you did have a choice, and every time someone died Jason wondered if he should have ordered the assault or not, for he was pressing his troops against some very dangerous enemies who had the advantage of terrain and prep time. On the whole he’d been correct about this base assault, but no mission was a complete success unless everyone on his team walked away from it afterwards.

Now that he was back in the open and could receive transmissions from afar an incoming comm icon lit up on his HUD which he activated with a telepathic thought.

“Jason, the Voku have arrived and will be staying insystem for several weeks prior to deployment. They’re asking if you want any assistance on the ground,” Admiral Petry said from the command ship in orbit.

“We’ve got things under control.”

“I think they’re eager to fight rather than questioning the eventual outcome.”

“Explain it to them, and if they are bored assemble them into hot drop response units so I can call them down when needed.”

“Will do. How much longer are you staying down there?”

“We’re finished underground so send a dropship. I need to recharge before the next assault.”

“On its way.”

“Thanks,” Jason said, walking along the burnt grass atop the base around the point where a cleansing beam had punched through the ground to give them a backdoor entrance. A little further off there were broken trees followed by whole forest, through which the mechs had cut several roads to get to makeshift spaceports situated wherever they could find some bits of flat terrain.

The trailblazer walked through the forest until he came to one of those roads then slowly made his way along the side of it. There wasn’t much traffic, but a passing speeder slowed and offered to give him a lift but he waved it off. The driver nodded and zipped on ahead, taking the pair of wounded commandos with him back to the modular medical station they’d brought in from orbit so they could treat nearly all injuries on the surface rather than have them wait to get back onboard a ship in orbit.

But that wasn’t why he’d waved the speeder off. He wasn’t exhausted but needed the break just to clear his thoughts and settle his mood, which was accomplished best when he had some low level activity to do, which made walking preferable to sitting at the moment. He pulled one of the last senzu beans out of its slot within the interior of his helmet and telekinetically steered it around his cheekbone to his mouth where he bit off a tiny slice.

That he swallowed while returning the rest of the bean to its holding spot, not wanting an overdose right now that taking the whole thing would have resulted in. Jason was feeling a bit deplenished and just wanted to top off. He also felt like pulling his helmet off and getting some fresh air on his head, but knew better than to do so in what was still enemy territory. One little lucky plasma shot by a roaming lizard to the head and he’d be dead…and after over 600 years of training he wasn’t going to risk squandering it all for a bit of fresh air.

So he just walked and let the responsibilities for the troops below his feet rest with someone else for the time being. There was no more fighting going on in the base, for they’d cleared it all out, but there were housekeeping duties that required an army of techs that he’d ordered to start coming down a little over half an hour ago. After a few minutes of walking a larger speed passed him carrying the first of them, with his troops staying in and around the base to guard them just in case they’d missed a lizard or two.

With them mostly off his mind Jason tried to relax and let the combat emotions flow out of him…which had become easy after so many years of training and fighting. Rarely did anything spook him enough that he couldn’t transit back and forth between emotional modes within a handful of seconds, but the deaths of his men were always something that stuck with him. Even though they were gone he still couldn’t accept it, for accepting it would be condoning it and that could never be allowed to happen.

So what he did instead was accept the anger but let his body relax. There would be more fighting to come and they’d need him there, in one fashion or another, so it was necessary that he was awake and alert, and right now he was pushing 48 hours of activity. Inas aside, that was pushing it for Jason considering how much ambrosia he’d been pumping through his body. The physical combat was less intense than his normal training, but his psionic usage combined with the ever present need to be alert, both for his sake and others, had taken its toll on him.

He wasn’t near the dropping point, nor anywhere close to it, but he was close to getting his mind hazy and his reflexes sluggish and that was something he couldn’t tolerate. He’d head back up to the command ship, take care of some duties there and begin organizing the next big assault while his troops likewise began transferring back up to orbit or some of the secure bases they’d established on the planet for a brief rest and recovery.

Meanwhile other battles were ongoing and Jason would pick through those from the command ship briefly, but what he needed right now the most was rest, meaning it was time for a crash nap then some light training to get his mojo back in order before a good long sleep.

But right now he was just walking along the crudely cut out road and hopping over an occasional limb that had fallen out into the clearing or over the small puddles that mech footprints had created with a recent rain. With each step he took he seemed to process out more of the stress flowing through him and by the time he reached the end of the road and the edge of the makeshift clearing that had dropships coming down like an orderly flock of birds he was feeling good enough that he was tempted to redeploy out to one of the ongoing battles.

He knew he had to stay ahead of the fatigue rather than fight it head on, so he stuck with the plan and found the dropship that the Admiral had sent for him as the techs unloaded from the others nearby. With them came loads of equipment and some fresh troops that would start relieving the ones below. All of the techs wore light armor, despite their dislike for it, and would continue to do so until this area was completely safed. Couldn’t afford to lose one of them either with sloppiness.

More speeders zipped off down the road, taking them over to one of several base entrances where they would begin itemizing the contents for decommission and removal. They weren’t going to take the time to destroy and remove the entire base given that it was built underground, but they were going to gut it, do some patchwork repairs, then seal it up for either future use or reclamation…which would see the lizard structures broken down piece by piece and replaced with Star Force ones without caving in the ground over your head.

That would be long into the future, for most of the techs would be busy building Star Force structures on the surface and tearing apart the lizard bases that orbital bombardment had wrecked while safing others like this that were below ground. Star Force was keeping this system and building up this planet into a fortress world…or so was the plan, and that wasn’t something that happened overnight.

This was the beginning of the big push into lizard territory, not merely for raids to ‘mow the grass’ but to start taking back systems by the dozens and call the enemy’s bluff. Jason knew it wasn’t a true bluff and they’d be in for a big counterattack at some point but now was the time to do it before they grew any stronger. They were committing so many resources to Skarron space he wasn’t sure what kind of a hit the lizard would or could throw at them, but he doubted they’d just be left alone. The design of this planet’s infrastructure told him that the lizards were gearing up to defend against Star Force and he doubted that they wouldn’t have another surprise or two waiting for them.

Jason still had numerous sites on this planet to take, plus the waterworld that was reporting continuous small-scale fighting. It would be a while before both were securely in Star Force hands, then even longer for them to get truly secure, though a few Sentinels were already on their way here from the ADZ. Those combined with the fleets heading this way, of which the Voku were only one, would be able to hold this system while Star Force built it up along with a few other guests.

Once they had it secured they’d begin funneling all resupply through the system and branch out as they began the long crusade towards the Pagalis System, sweeping up the systems in between and along the Zeta Region border as they began returning the Calavari to their former worlds.

Hamoriti

1

March 2, 1203559 BC

Prenthor System

Qitor

“How much time do we have?”

“The Oracle estimates no more than 3 days, and should we pass that line there will be little for us to do to stop it. We must have your machines now.”

The Trinx shook its headtails in dismay. “You may well have doomed us all.”

“Can you not get them here in time? Your colony is less than 2 lightyears away.”

“I have brought them with me, and more are on their way, but if greater numbers are required they may not arrive in time.”

The Sety twisted its branch-like neck and adjusted its breath mask when it slipped ajar. “How many have you brought?”

“I have brought all that I could. Let us hope it is enough,” the biped said as he and the wooden quadruped stepped into a secure lift that would take them to the provisional command center 90 kilometers away from the excavation site. “70,000 are on their way now.”

“To where? They cannot come within close proximity…”

“To the rendezvous point, I am no fool. You and your clumsy people have claimed that title.”

“The Oracle had not deciphered our language in time to give a proper warning. There was no way for us to know.”

“If you had waited for The Nine this would not have occurred.”

“We are allies, not blood brothers…and this was our find.”

“And yet here we are.”

“I do not deny that the Sety cracked the case, but had any of you been here I do not believe circumstances would have been any different. It is at this moment irrelevant. If we do not sedate and reseal we are as good as dead.”

“That I have been made well aware, and not just because of your clumsy attempts prior to my arrival,” the Trinx said as the doors on the lift opened and the pair walked into the medium-sized circular room that held the other expedition leaders from The Nine. They were an old alliance that kept mostly to themselves unless great danger befell one of the others, then all would rally without question and come to the besieged’s aid…as they were now, though the threat was not only to them but the whole of the galaxy.

“Finally,” the Bpret said, shifting from a biped form and into a quadruped as it walked a few steps towards the arriving pair, with its almost clear gelatinous form causing the holograms behind it to bend as the light passed through the tall creature, the largest of the group. “Did you bring them?”

“They are on the ships heading across the surface now,” the Trinx said, stepping around the shapeshifter to get a look at the master holo in clarity. “Have you produced sufficient chemical?”

“We are not producing it, the Oracle is,” another of The Nine said, this one a cyborg. “We are merely supplying the rare materials. It has been costly, but the Oracle has assured us that we have enough, it is the delivery mechanism that we are lacking.”

“Your people were killed on approach?” the Trinx asked, looking at the hologram of the huge excavation site buried deep below the planet’s surface. A vertical shaft ran straight down to it with a series of spiral infrastructure platforms meandering down the chasm like a staircase, on top of which a large number of icons were emblazoned.

“We don’t know,” the Sety answered. “When they pass within range their minds betray them. They drop the canisters and stand still as statues. The people we sent to assist them suffered the same fate.”

“What range?”

“It was 2.3 kilometers at the outset, but it has grown to 2.8 at present. The more the creature wakes the greater the field.”

“What type of field are we talking about? Latku stun or verisas?”

“Neither,” another of The Nine said. “We have sensed a massive telepathic aura around the god. We think it is taking control of their minds rather than emitting a biological stun. That is why we need your machines.”

“Psionic?” the Trinx asked in disbelief. “Why was I not told this before?”

“We were not sure. We are still not sure, but recently have made several deductions.”

“The Yisv only arrived two days ago,” the Sety said defensively.

“Why haven’t you simply launched a missile?”

“Do you think we haven’t tried? Any fast moving objects are intercepted. The Oracle says it’s a primitive defense mechanism,” the Sety half argued. He was filled with a mixture of shame and fear, but the Trinx’s criticism wasn’t helping and only wasting time. “The slow moving attempts we made were equally blocked with some form of point defense, but the Oracle assures us that with sufficient numbers it can be overcome.”

“Is there enough chemical to survive those losses?”

“Unknown,” the cyborg answered. “We have encased them in protective shells that must be opened manually upon arrival. Our remote signals are not penetrating to the surface of the creature. There is a jamming field that is likewise expanding.”

“The Oracle says it is a shield, but one that physical matter can pass through. If it wakes up any further that shield will become a barrier that we will not be able to breach short of weaponsfire on a level that the Oracle assures us will be enough to fully awaken the creature, so we must sedate it now or we will lose our only chance of redeeming this mistake. You must send your machines with the canisters immediately, there is no more time for talk.”

“You are putting a lot of faith in this Oracle.”

“Should we not?” the Sety questioned. “The Ancients left it here to safeguard against a breach and to teach others how to continue to subdue the beast. I see no reason not to trust the program at its word.”

“I know a bit more about software than you do,” the Trinx scoffed, for their entire army was made up of drone warriors. They could be ordered to act remotely, but they could also follow scripts that in this case would be necessary if there was a jamming field around the body.

“We also concur with the Oracle,” the cyborg agreed, trumping the software experience tenfold.

“Very well, I just hope it will be enough.”

“You must order your machines not to return fire,” another of The Nine cautioned. “Any attack will hasten the awakening.”

“So noted,” the Trinx acknowledged. “Where do we stand on repairs to the containment shell?”

“78% complete,” the cyborg answered.

“Will that be enough if we deliver the sedative now?”

“We have no choice but to deliver it now,” the Sety argued.

The Trinx held up warning finger towards the walking tree. “I need to know if we’re going to have to fight multiple runs to continue sedating the creature or if this will be a single endeavor.”

“A partially successful sedative attack will delay the awakening,” the smallest of The Nine said, walking around the rim of the hologram where the 13 inch tall triped perched. “A full dose should return it to slumber sufficient for the shell to keep it subdued long enough for full repairs to be made. So even if we fail, so long as we get some sedative to it we will extend our timeframe.”

The Trinx nodded his thanks for a pithy answer. “Very well, I will throw everything we have at them. Let us hope it is enough to at least delay this catastrophe until more of our forces arrive.”

Deep inside the chasm the Sety had excavated down to the shell, there was an aperture that allowed access to the inner shell, and it was there that the rendezvous point was. That gap between the two was a mix of empty space and the machinery that made up the containment device that kept the massive creature dormant, for it was so powerful that the Ancients had not been able to destroy it. They had managed to subdue it with a chemical, but any attempts to kill it once sedated only canceled the effect, waking it up again to the demise of any around.

Not finding a way to kill the creature, they had chosen to imprison it here and built the shell to both maintain the sedation through a continuous dosage as well as to inform anyone who found it of the dangers and how to keep the creature dormant. The Sety had uncovered the Ancient artifact and entered in exploration, encountering the Oracle who had tried to prevent them from access. Thinking it was merely a test the Sety had broken through the walls preventing them from reaching the huge internal region that the inner shell protected.

There was no door there that they could find, so the Sety had cut through a section of the 60 kilometer wide ‘egg’ and entered, crossing over to the centerpiece only to be rebuffed and ill from the attempt. A few died shortly thereafter but all made it out, after which they began to study what was inside from afar and set up an observation post at the breach point, keeping themselves far from the creature at the center that at first appeared to be a massive stone.

Whatever was making them sick had occurred within a hundred meters of it, but now the landscape around the creature in the center was littered with a living forest of mostly Sety, but a few other races were there as well from those who later had sent teams in only to have them get caught up in the paralytic psionic field that was continually expanding outward.

The Yisv were monitoring its size and strength with their own psionics, and were the only race within The Nine that possessed that ability. They were situated far from the field, knowing not to risk closure, for the intensity was so massive that a mere brush with it could kill them on contact. They knew little about it, but the Oracle had been forthcoming with a great deal of knowledge…yet most of it was far beyond their understanding.

What the program was clear about was the timetable, for the longer they delayed the quicker the creature would wake up, for the damage the Sety had done when cracking the inner shell had diminished the ability of the facility to continually sedate the monster. Once sedated again by a massive dose, the Oracle would be able to use the raw materials that were being provided to it to fully repair the shell, as the Ancients had designed the program to be able to do, and keep the unkillable threat contained even in their absence.

What had happened to the Ancients was a mystery that not even the Oracle knew, but their relics were highly valued amongst The Nine and others. They took the warning from them at face value, for an enemy too powerful for the Ancients to defeat was one that they could not begin to handle themselves. So it was with little skepticism that The Nine followed the instructions of the Oracle to the letter, though while it was able to answer questions and offer warnings, it did not have a method of delivery for the chemical beyond the slow continual dispersion that was now inadequate, leaving it up to The Nine to come through in that regard.

Had they acted sooner they could have walked right up to the side of the living mountain and applied the chemical, but the Sety had wasted so much time floundering around that the Ancients’ bane had woken sufficiently to begin throwing up subconscious defenses…and the limited weaponsfire the Sety had applied before the Oracle warned them off had only hastened the reawakening.

The reprogramming of the Trinx troops hadn’t taken long to accomplish, so the bipedal machines standing approximately 3 meters in height entered the inner shell through the shrinking breach point as the Oracle’s army of tiny technomites gradually rebuilt the machinery that the Sety had unwittingly damaged. The Trinx ‘vassals’ each carried in their arms a container of orbs, which were akin to a squishy seed about the size of a melon, and marched them out onto the large plain around the creature, not in a column, but in a wide line on the counsel of the Oracle.

When they reached the invisible barrier they passed through it, subsequently losing their telemetry link back to the Trinx controllers and leaving them to operate entirely on their own internal programming now.

A bit closer the tiny specs of the vassals came under attack from various points on the mountainside of the sleeping creature. Reacting to the movement small deformations appeared and sprouted sporadic nubs that charged up with energy and began emitting a few lightning strikes out at the vassals, hitting two or three with each attack. The machines literally disintegrated with the hits, dropping the canisters that hadn’t been blown apart with them, who fell like baskets of apples, spilling the seeds across the synthetic ground.

The rest of the vassals marched onward, taking hits but advancing their line continually until they finally reached the side of the creature. There they opened the baskets and began picking out individual seeds to hurl at the beast, breaking their soft shells and spilling the semi-liquid onto the creature’s rock-hard skin. Somehow the substance that the Oracle had produced soaked into and was almost consumed by the rock, disappearing entirely after lingering a handful of seconds.

More and more of the vassals were cut down hurling the seeds at the creature, whose return fire was diminishing in response, but after a lengthy fight the vassals were all destroyed leaving their baskets half full and mostly spilled over the floor surrounding the monster.

The Sety in the control room got a brief message from another of its race in the Oracle chamber, relying the wisdom from the Ancient program. The tree-like quadruped disconnected the private comm and looked at the other 8 leaders. “It wasn’t enough, the creature is still waking. We have slowed it, but nearly all the chemical is still lying on the floor and now out of our range until we can get more vassals here.”

“How much time do we have?” the cyborg asked.

“The Oracle says no more than 4 days.”

The Trinx shook its head again in dismay. “We cannot have more here before then, not in the number we need.”

“What do we do?” the Yisv asked, having studied the warnings from the Oracle in detail. It had been insistent that their only hope came from immediate action, else the waking creature would scale beyond their ability to contain.

“The Sety have killed us all,” the Trinx said, realizing that it was lost.

“No,” the cyborg said before the panicked bickering could begin. “There is another way.”

“What have we not considered?” the Sety asked, desperate for even the slightest glimmer of hope.

The cyborg reached a thick finger up and tapped the side of its head, then ran out of the room knowing that every second he delayed the creature would grow stronger. They had to stop this thing now, no matter what the sacrifice.

Those thoughts were transmitted out to the other Chamra on the planet instantaneously, with them understanding and agreeing without argument or dissent. All of them, no matter where they were, began heading towards the shell and gathering around the inner breach point. They didn’t bother to enlighten the others of The Nine about what they were doing for there was no point and no time, they had to get the sedatives deployed immediately, for even when the Oracle got the repairs completed the creature could not be in an agitated state, else it would overwhelm the machinery in the shell.

The Chamra leader met the others and waited for them all to arrive, then as a group they took off running towards the spilt chemical seeds, moving far faster than the bigger vassals had traveled but not fast enough to trigger the physical defense barrier that had stopped any missile attempts. When the cyborgs hit the psionic field their brains were compromised, immediately stunned into a trance…but their technological components were not and acted as a counterbalance, running security checks on all impulses and weeding out the interference. It was labor intensive calculations, but it allowed the Chamra to continue functioning on a low level as they ran by the Sety statues that were gradually starving to death where they stood.

There was no time to save them, and as the cyborgs came closer to the creature a few lightning arcs emerged, not so many as before, but enough to begin killing them by the handful as those that were not immediately hit were starting to get to the spilt chemical seeds. They picked them up individually and ran forward, smashing chemical packets against the side of the creature then retreating to pick up more. Moving with an enhanced speed that was typical of cyborgs, they rushed to deliver as many chemical seeds as possible before they were cut down.

The other 8 leaders watched from the control room as thousands of Chamra sacrificed themselves to deliver the last of the chemical…coming up just short before all of them were killed, but the Yisv quickly confirmed that the psionic field had shrunk, and if it was as low as it was when the Sety first breached the shell then the sickness should have replaced it.

Desperate to finish the task the Sety, Trinx, Yisv, and every other race of The Nine pulled all personnel on site and sent them into the shell, with many taking sick the moment they got near the creature. Many dropped to the ground within a few seconds, with the Yisv being completely compromised and catatonic, but some stronger willed individuals in the other races persisted long enough to get to the seeds and smash a few more, though often it took two weakened individuals combining their strength to break one open.

Most of the individuals in that assault lived through the next hour then died over the coming days, but the Oracle was quick to inform them when sufficient chemical had been applied and the suicidal charge was recalled. Those Sety that had been turned into living statues did not make it out, dying from the sickness within minutes, but their bodies were dragged out all the same and the Oracle oversaw the final stages of the repairs, finally resealing the monster to its fully dormant state.

Of the leaders of The Nine on planet, none survived, for they had gone in the final wave as well to maximize their window of opportunity, but those who were left alive in the aftermath reported what had happened and relayed the warnings of the Oracle to their distant leadership while continuing to ply it with questions. Coming to grasp the horror they had narrowly avoided The Nine immediately took up custody of the planet and quarantined it under heavy guard to ensure that no one could intentionally or accidentally breach the shell again.

The galaxy had been spared a fateful blow, and The Nine intended to protect the work of the Ancients indefinitely, no matter what the future costs, for they would be nil if the creature was ever to wake again.

2

May 3, 2723

Haphchap System (lizard territory)

Unnamed planet

Four Li’vorkrachnika rushed down one of their angled tunnels, descending lower into the bedrock as the three standard variants escorted a larger ‘tech’ that had approximately the same body type but was reserved for dealing with scientific matters. It had been grown along with a few others when the highly dense corovon deposit that they’d located deep underground had been found to be housed within an artificial construct of unknown origin.

The tech variants had been analyzing it and given the go ahead to begin cannibalizing a section of the outer hull, for while it wasn’t the source of the majority of the corovon readings it still held an unusually high concentration of the valuable element. As it was, there were three different breaches in the hull that were being expanded upon as an army of lizards were surveying the interior, learning and collecting whatever bits of technology they could get their hands on.

Another team had been delving deeper trying to get to the source of the insanely high corovon readings, which required breaking through a secondary internal hull. A defense program had been hindering their progress for months, but finally they’d been able to shut it down via some well-placed explosives and burn their way through the inner hull to get their first look at the corovon deposit.

It wasn’t as large as the interior, rather just a ‘small’ object laying inside the 10 kilometer-wide empty internal cavern. Whatever it was wasn’t pure corovon, that was obvious by the dirty blue coloration, but it was giving off such high readings that even a tiny piece of the mile long object would be invaluable to their operations on the planet…let alone what the entire mass would do for the lizard empire as a whole once they got to the point of sending out exports.

But apparently there had been some sort of chemical contamination, for the workers on the collection efforts had begun reporting illnesses as they tried in vain to chip off even a small portion of what appeared to be a massive statue. The high levels of corovon were obviously responsible for that and it would take some time to break it down into transportable chunks for processing, but if there was a contaminate in or around the object the tech lizard was going to be the one to ascertain what it was.

To that end it was carrying an array of gear strapped to its body on top of the envirosuit it wore. The three standard variants wore no protection, nor did the others still working in the massive artifact, but if this one was to leave for further analysis of any samples collected it couldn’t risk bringing the contamination out in its own body so protocol dictated that it err on the side of caution.

When they came out of the descending tunnels they passed through the original breach point in the artifact and were met with reports of additional illness, though it had escalated to onsite incapacitation rather than the mobile and conscious patients that had been examined previously by standard variant medics. If this was a disease locked away for who knew how long then it could very well wreak havoc with the Li’vorkrachnika population on the planet.

Before it went any further the tech relayed an order to seal the shafts at the surface. If they couldn’t contain this then they’d die here rather than risk spreading it to the others, but if they were going to die he’d need to gather information to send to the others up top so they could devise a cure or countermeasure because this corovon find was by far the largest ever recorded, and even if it meant the deaths of billions of his kin it would be worth it to the empire once harvested.

Knowing what his duty was, the tech variant hurried forward with its assistants/escorts through the outer ring of compartments until they got to the inner breach site and found a mass of their kin waiting there. They were stopped immediately, then the tech variant was allowed to pass to the front of the crowd where he was pointed towards the sea of tiny dots ahead that were the other Li’vorkrachnika that had been affected.

A standard variant passed him a magnifying scope and the tech placed it over his left eye, allowing him to see in more detail those who had fallen ill…except they hadn’t fallen. They were standing perfectly still, every last one of them.

A perplexed expression crossed the tech’s face, then the others pointed out the approximate boundary of the affected region, citing that when they’d sent another team in they’d become affected almost immediately. The tech turned his attention to that location and saw the 18 Li’vorkrachnika there, all standing still like statues.

He took a moment to think through the possibilities, in a way that only his scientifically engineered mind could, then told the standard variants to stay put while he investigated, given that he was the only one with a body suit. So he began the long, multiple kilometer trek alone and by foot, not using any of the vehicles nearby and taking atmospheric readings every step of the way…yet finding nothing out of the ordinary.

The tech variant was pondering what could possibly be going on that would cause the ill to stand erect rather than fall as he got within 200 meters of the most recently effected, then suddenly his mind started to blur and he stumbled forward a few more steps before his momentum stopped. He moved his scanner so he could get a better view of it, but it was his eyes that were beginning to go out rather than the position of his head or the device.

Before he realized what was going on the majority of his brain locked up into a kind of active stasis, with ‘holding’ input signals going out to every part of his body, fixing it rigidly in place and maintaining his last stance, adding the tech variant to the growing number of statues around the object.

Three days later the ‘freezing field’ had extended out to the breach in the inner hull, with many of the bodies trapped inside it having fallen to the ground from exhaustion or death from the illness that had first afflicted them. New ones had been added to them around the edges as Li’vorkrachnika were sent in wearing biomonitors so they could try and ascertain how they were being affected and by what, but their readings were inconclusive right up until a tremor tripled through the artifact and toppled half of the remaining living statues to the ground.

Pushed back beyond the entryway, there were no free Li’vorkrachnika to witness the twitch of movement in the object, but had they been there they wouldn’t have known what to make of it anyway. The large stone statue bent slightly, and that motion was enough to cause a chain reaction within it, clearing out more of the lingering sedative and partially awakening the beast from its artificially induced slumber.

With the surrounding array no longer capable of keeping it sedate, the enormous hexaped pushed its left rear leg out, scraping it along the floor and gouging out a deep furrow on the pedestal that held it in the center of the array. With every movement that followed the pedestal broke and tore as if it was merely loose dirt being moved aside until the creature finally rose up on all six legs, each more than 300 meters wide, and released a roar that coincided with a telekinetic wave that hit and ripped apart everything around it.

The pedestal crumbled further beneath its feet, sinking it down some 30 more meters, but the array above the creature didn’t fare nearly as well and was almost instantaneously disabled from the invisible impact, leaving only that part beneath the false ground to continue transmitting the restraint psionic that worked in conjunction with the chemical to keep the living mountain incapacitated.

As the thing woke further it released more psionic energy in a series of angry tantrums, slowly breaking apart its cage as the lizards in the outer ring of the artifact ran up their tunnels towards the surface…only to be blocked by the quarantine and locked inside to their imminent deaths.

2 months later…

“Easy helm, let’s not get too close,” Gosfu said, watching their scout ship’s position on the system map relative to the large Li’vorkrachnika warfleet they’d run across.

“Easing off, though we’re well within sensor tolerance.”

“Best to be overly cautious where stealth is concerned,” the Trinx commander said, watching the ships as they repositioned from jumppoint to jumppoint across the orbital arc of the main star. To date the Li’vorkrachnika had only assaulted his homeworld once, in pathetic fashion, but since then their scout fleet had been given orders to survey the surrounding region that the reptilian race had encroached upon.

They were spreading out far and wide, as opposed to the Trinx who inhabited only one system and chose to keep it that way. This primitive race was no real threat to them, but their other neighbors were not so secure and succumbing rapidly as this juggernaut continued to roll forward. The Trinx were not interested in fighting other people’s wars, but they did want to keep appraised of what was going on around them.

Ever since the territory around the Trinx homeworld had been overrun and the Li’vorkrachnika’s attempt to conquer them had failed without prompting a counterattack, their empire had been more or less quiet in this region, slowly building up their worlds and producing more ships to send off in small groups to the ever moving fronts. So when this convoy had crossed their paths it took Gosfu’s attention, in so much that he was curious about where exactly it was headed.

He wasn’t worried about it being sent to attack them, for such a fleet, while overpowering to others, was no match for even a handful of Trinx ships. His scout ship alone could destroy more than a quarter of them, so his curiosity was based not in self-preservation but in adding to the Trinx situational awareness. As far as they knew there was no one else in the region worthy of this level of Li’vorkrachnika attention, nor were there any primary shipping lanes passing through it.

“Stay well clear until the last one jumps, then take us with them at a discrete distance.”

“We’re following?” the helmsman asked, his headtails flipping aside as his face spun around.

“A hunch,” the commander explained.

“As you will. How far do you plan on following them?”

“Until my curiosity is sated.”

“How discrete would you like?”

“Calculate their jump vector and speed, then mimic out of sensor range. Their redeployment speed is pitiful. We can reacquire on the far end.”

“What are you expecting to find?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m curious.”

The Trinx scout ship dogged the Li’vorkrachnika through six additional jumps before they finally arrived in the Haphchap System, a location known to be under their control but otherwise uninteresting. The last intelligence data they had on it was the existence of a small startup colony like hundreds of others were being seeded throughout the region, but upon deceleration into the system they discovered a great deal more.

The warfleet they had been following was only a small fraction of the total number of ships present in the system, all of whom were located in orbit around a single planet.

“What’s going on here?” Gosfu wondered aloud, looking at the thousands of warships in orbit as they approached, following the last bits of the convoy as it moved in to join them…then as they got within proximity of the planet the sensor panel lit up with a preprogrammed alarm that shot a mixture of adrenaline, shock, and horror throughout the Trinx crew.

The sensor officer literally knocked herself out of her seat as she reflexively jerked back from the screen, landing on her butt and turning to face the commander. “Hamoriti,” she whispered.

“Recheck all systems,” he said immediately, hoping like hell this was a mistake. “Bring us out of stealth mode and give me full sensor scan…and get us closer. I don’t care about that fleet. We have to confirm this one way or another.”

The Trinx scout ship, about the length of three Li’vorkrachnika cruisers, dropped its camouflage shields and accelerated towards the planet, bypassing the last of the convoy and flying straight down to upper low orbit. They all knew they had to keep their distance, for the stories they learned as children taught them as much, but they needed to get within better sensor range to confirm the psionic signature they were picking up from afar.

The scout ship decelerated in the blink of an eye, with the orbital fleet moving slowly to chase it and the commander not caring. His eyes were on the holographic displays before him as they were updating and centering on a surface location that had several hundred Li’vorkrachnika cruisers surrounding a mass even larger than one of them. They were firing on it from multiple angles with weapons that were not plasma-based, which was totally foreign to their design motif, but they had to or their ships would be caught up in the paralysis field if they didn’t use long range ordinance.

That thought barely registered to the commander as he stared at the blue, six-legged mass not believing it was really here. This planet was not one of the seven, and there were only 7 Hamoriti the Ancients had trapped. One of them sat below his homeworld, with the Trinx as its self-appointed guardian and keeper. The others in The Nine were doing likewise with four more. The remaining two were beyond their reach, sitting buried beneath planets in enemy territory where they could not presently reach.

This planet was far from either of those locations. Furthermore, this Hamoriti didn’t match the descriptions of the others. Each was unique and this monster was something altogether new.

“How can this be?” the helmsman asked, not even caring about the proximity reports as several Li’vorkrachnika ships were closing to weapons range.

Gosfu ignored the question, but he was thinking the same thing as he watched one of the cruisers down on the planet get hit with a beam of pure blue fire emitting from the Hamoriti’s head. It passed through the ship like it wasn’t even there, puffing out a huge explosion when the material vaporized, leaving only bits and pieces to fall to the ground afterward.

The other Li’vorkrachnika ships continued firing some form of physical slugs at the mass that exploded on contact, but Gosfu knew how futile that was. The Hamoriti ate corovon, with their bodies being the most potent armor the galaxy had ever known…but what he didn’t understand was why this one hadn’t killed all the enemy ships attacking it. After the single blue beam it did nothing for a long time, then seeming to summon up a great effort, it released another beam that hit a second cruiser.

This wasn’t right, for a Hamoriti should have been capable of destroying all of them on a whim.

“Is there an Ancient facility on the planet?” he finally asked, knowing what this meant for the galaxy if his eyes weren’t truly deceiving him.

“There’s a subsurface structure similar to the one on Vikod, but I can’t confirm make from this distance.”

Gosfu lowered his head, trying to quiet his nerves. “Take us into the atmosphere and do a close scan of both the creature and the cavern.”

All the bridge crew turned from the live images being displayed and stared at him, knowing that such a thing was a death sentence.

“There is something not right here,” he explained, wondering if this was the right course of action or not. “It is fighting the Li’vorkrachnika but only tentatively, almost as if it is weak. If it is not destroying them quickly, then we should be able to get in and out with the information we need.”

Gosfu looked up at them, pleading in his eyes. “We have to know if there is an Ancient shell down there.”

“We’re dead anyway,” the helmsman said, turning back to his controls with a flurry of headtails spinning about. “Might as well know the particulars.”

“No!” one of the other crewers yelled as he stood up. “Go near that thing and we’re dead! You know we will be. This is suicide!”

Gosfu jabbed a finger at the image of the Li’vorkrachnika ships surrounding the creature, though the vast majority of their fleet was still in orbit, some of which were even now shooting on the scout ship with their primitive plasma weapons. “They’re not dead. Not yet. And if we have a window of opportunity I am not going to waste it!” he yelled ever louder than the other had. “We have to give our people as much information as we can. If this one is weak, or a cousin to the others, or what I don’t care, but if there’s even the smallest chance of surviving it we need information and I’m not going to waste this. Do you understand me? We cannot waste this!”

The other Trinx shook its head adamantly, not listening to the logic and consumed by the fear instilled in them since birth. “No, no we can’t!”

“Helm, get us moving,” Gosfu ordered, feeling the same fear but not letting it totally consume him. “Get every bit of data we can on one pass. We’re not going to risk two,” he said, pointing at the vocal crewmember before the next scream of protest came. “And you will be silent…or removed.”

Two others nearby walked up next to the Trinx and stared at it, not saying a word, then it finally buckled and sat down, holding its head in its hands and muttering to itself how they were all going to die.

3

August 24, 2723

Paquat System

Vikod (Trinx homeworld)

Nesfa walked with a trio of Regents, each a longtime guardian tasked with defending and monitoring the sleeping beast hidden beneath the surface of their capitol. There were other inhabited planets in the system, but Vikod was the most densely populated and heaviest defended of them all to insure that no one could gain access to the Ancient shell. The native population knew it was there but only a handful actually had access to it and this was the first time that Nesfa had gone in person to the location.

The artifact was buried deep within the planet, with the Trinx learning that was by design to supply it with continuous geothermal power in case its own power reserves ever failed, as well as to continually recharge them as time passed. The shell also gathered resources from the surrounding rock layers that were partially molten, which had made the facility difficult to access initially when the Trinx took possession of this planet, but their technology had advanced so far in the millennia that had passed that the conduit they’d built down to reach it was in no danger of breaching.

The main shaft didn’t lead directly to the artifact, but rather to a small city they’d built adjacent to it. There they kept a permanent staff ensuring that any minute twitch from either the machinery or the beast would be measured and an alarm sounded, but in all the recorded history of the Trinx guarding this Hamoriti there had not been one such occurrence. The Ancients had constructed their prisons well, and so long as the Trinx kept outsiders from interfering it was believed that the beast could be kept safely sedated for all of time.

As the Prefect walked through the monitoring facility he got reports of no activity from this shell. That shouldn’t have surprised him, but he half-expected this one to be waking up too. He didn’t know why, because they were completely disconnected from one another and spread out across different star systems with no interlinking communication functions, but never in recorded history had anything like this happened aside from the initial incident with the Sety’s Hamoriti. They’d barely been able to contain it then, and it hadn’t so much as twitched.

Now there was one free of its prison and doing battle with the Li’vorkrachnika that had awoken it…but it shouldn’t have even existed. Everything the Oracle had told them indicated that there were 7 Hamoriti. The only possible explanation was that one of the two that The Nine didn’t have guardianship over had been moved, but even that wasn’t possible. The descriptions of all of them were vivid in the Prefect’s memory, and the newly discovered one was unlike any of the others.

Nesfa didn’t know what was going on, and fearing the doomsday warned against he was going to the only source of knowledge on the Hamoriti that The Nine had ever had. That being the Oracles.

The quartet walked through guard station after guard station, with a formidable amount of weaponry set up should any outsider make it this far underground in the unlikely circumstance that someone got by their surface defenses. A direct attack had been unlikely, but what had worried the Trinx more was an infiltrator sneaking past and gaining access to the artifact, with these weapons emplacements, troops, and sealed doors intending to deny them even sight of the Ancient prison.

There were a number of procedures to pass through, time locks and such that prevented any quick access, with Nesfa waiting patiently while the Regents handled all that was required. Once the last measure had been passed the doors behind them closed, obscuring the final defensive emplacements from view, before the much smaller opposite single hatch pulled open revealing one of the actual entrances on the shell’s surface. Initially they had been nearly impossible to find, but after the Sety had unwittingly damaged theirs when trying to cut their way in the Trinx had made sure not to make that mistake again and had spent many centuries looking for a proper way inside before finally finding one.

Two of the Regents stayed in the defense cupola while Nesfa and the other walked inside, transitioning off of Trinx infrastructure to the floor built by the Ancients so long ago. In all this time no one had learned what had happened to them, and the Oracles only possessed knowledge regarding the Hamoriti and their imprisonment. They had not tried to directly access the Ancient computer systems for fear of unwittingly releasing the creature, so it was possible that the Oracles knew more than they said. Nesfa wasn’t going to risk unleashing this monster, but he was going to try and get whatever shreds of an answer he could out of this one.

A short hallway led to a series of maintenance shafts that spurred off a central command area, with other redundant structures spread around the gap between shells. The Oracle could be accessed at any of them and many other smaller stations, and as the pair of Trinx approached its hologram appeared in the center of the chamber and ‘flew’ towards them, speaking in the native Trinx language that it had deciphered long ago.

“Greetings, Regent and guest,” the tri-tipped icon said aloud, with all three spurs spinning around their focal point and looking like an eviscerated pyramid. “This facility’s status remains unchanged since your last visit.”

“I am Prefect of the Trinx,” Nesfa identified himself, “and I have questions.”

“You may ask.”

“How many Hamoriti are there?”

“Seven. All were neutralized and imprisoned in separate facilities,” it said, flashing up a slice of the galactic map beneath it with seven pinpricks pulsing with a pink glow. “This one is known as Rigall and is unique from the others. They are called…”

“Only seven?” Nesfa repeated, cutting off the long spiel that they’d heard many times before.

“Correct in number, but not significance. A single Hamoriti is powerful enough to decimate the galaxy if unchecked.”

“We have discovered another, and it has been released from its shell. How is this possible?”

“Location please,” the Oracle said, creating a solid holographic control board in front of Nesfa for him to manipulate the map with.

The Trinx set its two-fingered hands onto the energy-based floating panels and worked the Ancient coordinate system, first identifying the local region and scaling the map down to it, then manually picking out the correct system by sight rather than imputing the long numerical code.

“There is no facility located in this system, nor is it a possession of the Ancients.”

“Mere months ago a Hamoriti was released from a prison built akin to this one, though of smaller size. The Hamoriti is also smaller and of a shape unlike the seven you have shown us.”

“There are no other Hamoriti beyond the seven.”

Nesfa glanced at the Regent, who took the data device he was carrying and walked it over to a station in the command center. It had taken a very long time to be able to build a device that could interact directly with the Ancient technology, but the Oracle program had been designed to be intuitive regarding new races and had accepted data in many other forms previously, but at a slow and often tedious pace.

The device the Regent plugged in delivered the full intelligence packet within a tenth of a second and the Oracle updated the map accordingly.

“This is indeed a Hamoriti. Like the others it is of unique composition and therefore I have no records of it or its abilities, but I can deduce a fair amount given the recordings you have made of it.”

“How can there be an 8th that you didn’t know about?” Nesfa asked. “We could have safeguarded it easily if we’d only known of its existence!”

“I have no data regarding this Hamoriti. Speculation indicates that either the seven Hamoriti imprisoned were able to reproduce another in secret before their capture or that there were other Hamoriti not accounted for when these facilities were created.”

“This one was contained within an Ancient shell. How could you not know of it?”

“Confirmed. The prisoner structure that previously held this Hamoriti is of Ancient design, but specifications are not identical. Speculation suggests that this prison facility was built in a time period after the original 7 and that this program was not updated with such knowledge.”

“Is this new one weaker than the others?”

“Speculation again, but no. Not in terms of ability strength, however if this one is younger than the others it may not have the battle experience to fully utilize its strengths. The more you fight it however, the quicker it will learn.”

“Why is it so much smaller?”

“Size of Hamoriti is due to developmental choice. They can grow to any given size, but if nutrients are scarce such size will require weaker bodily structures. If this is a younger Hamoriti it may not yet have gathered the necessary elements to achieve greater size.”

“But it is weaker because of its smaller size? How could it not be?”

“Capabilities of Hamoriti are judged by external observation. The truth behind their inner workings are unknown. The combat data you have provided is minimal. No such judgements as to capabilities can be made, and as prudence dictates we do not risk understatement.”

“Is there a way we can recapture this one? And if we can, can you show us how to build or repair the existing shell?”

“Doubtful and no. If the damage to the other shell is not critical the Oracle, if it has one, should be able to make repairs if provided with the necessary raw materials. Based off the data you have supplied, I estimate a 6% probability of the Oracle maintaining sufficient machinery to execute such repairs.”

“Speculate on the odds of us being able to destroy it if it is young and weaker than the others.”

“None. Your technology is inferior to that of the Ancients. If they could have destroyed it they would not have imprisoned it.”

“Could it be weaker from the imprisonment itself?” Nesfa asked, grasping at straws.

“The Hamoriti will not have an army of minions, but the creature itself will not be weakened. The prison facilities are constructed to supply it with necessary nutrients, else any such withering effect will cause a reflexive awakening. No amount of sedative will counteract this. Assuming this undocumented prison functions under the same principles, this Hamoriti will have emerged at the full strength that it was captured at.”

“What can we do then?”

“Maintain the dormancy of the Hamoriti here. The undocumented Hamoriti is beyond your control.”

“We have to do something,” Nesfa insisted.

“Unless the Ancients can be located, or another race with equal or greater power, all you can hope to do is delay the Hamoriti’s expansion. You cannot stop it.”

18 days later a massive Trinx fleet arrived in the Haphchap System and moved to the planet that was ground zero for the Hamoriti’s emergence. There they found a much smaller Li’vorkrachnika fleet in middle orbit and the scattered remains of the rest showing up in pieces on the surface. Not wasting any time the Trinx attacked and destroyed the Li’vorkrachnika, securing the system against further outside influence and establishing a loose blockade/monitoring spherical formation around the planet.

On the surface the Hamoriti had moved off from the much more shallower shell and the crude conduit that the Li’vorkrachnika had dug down to it. That hallow had been expanded upon when the Hamoriti had come up, but it was still within 1000 kilometers of the Hamoriti’s present location and it being deemed too dangerous to attempt an insertion. The Trinx doubted enough would be left of the shredded Ancient facility, but given they had no hope of victory they were going to press every lead they had.

While they waited for the Hamoriti to move further off around the curvature of the planet before attempting an orbital insertion, they monitored closely what was happening, seeing several large holes in the path the creature had taken. Presently it was walking across the forested landscape leaving lake-sized footprints in a trail easily visible from orbit. The large holes, however, had burrowed down into the bedrock and were now covered at the base by formerly molten rock that had resolidified.

Though it wasn’t doing so now, the Trinx knew from the Oracle that the Hamoriti had the ability to externally digest rock in its molten state, essentially soaking in the various elements they required while leaving the excess material outside its body. Each of the big holes in the ground were burrowing points where it had been going after something it sensed below the surface, possibly corovon or other raw materials that it required.

As such, any potential physical restraints on the beast would likewise melt off when it activated this ability, with it also possessing the means to disrupt any energy based alternatives. The Hamoriti were mountain-sized juggernauts that you couldn’t stop no matter how hard you tried…and they contained biological anti-grav, meaning they could fly across terrain if needed, and even through space.

The Trinx knew that they couldn’t keep the Hamoriti on planet or even in the system if it wanted to leave, so their mission here was to observe and then attack any minions it produced before they could snowball out of control. Those minions were biological technology that the Hamoriti produced, and even now there were a few sites along the Hamoriti’s trail that were showing positive contacts on the Trinx sensors.

They were defensive growths, essentially a turret covering seeds that would begin harvesting surrounding resources and producing the mobile minions. If they were allowed to continue unchecked they’d become a huge problem even if the Hamoriti didn’t spawn any more. The problem was they were still within the firing radius of the Hamoriti, and unless it got very sloppy it wouldn’t move off until they’d developed further.

That meant the Trinx had a choice to make. Sit and watch while their long held nightmare’s forces took root and began to multiply…or go in to eliminate them and hope to weather the Hamoriti’s firepower long enough to accomplish their mission, at which point the monster would begin spawning new seeds again, starting an endless war that they could never win.

If for no other reason than to buy time they made the strike, sending a portion of their fleet into extreme weapons range where they began firing down on the planet from low orbit with pinpoint accurate energy beams, hitting and vaporizing the growing biomatter in all the various locations simultaneously as patches on the Hamoriti began to form on its ‘skin’ and charge with energy. As they did the Trinx, knowing they were going to have to sacrifice themselves to take out their targets, held position and continued firing with their helmsmen ready to make an emergency jump out the moment they had the word that the targets had been destroyed.

But they weren’t even close to achieving that when the spherical burst came, rushing out so fast from the Hamoriti that the atmosphere around it literally caught on fire. The binary pulse came first with an invisible field that almost instantaneously reached out and rendered all the ships inert, disrupting their internal mechanisms in an almost magical fashion and leaving the ships falling from orbit when the physical disruptions hit them, dragging the burning atmosphere behind it.

The Trinx ships were destroyed within a second, but what was left of the biological seeds on the surface partially survived, though the forest they were in did not. Now visually exposed amongst the instantaneous char, they rode out the hurricane of atmospheric restabilization as another group of Trinx ships made microjumps down into the plume of atmosphere bulging up into lower orbit.

Their shields nearly collapsed under the physical strain as they braked into firing position, then as the Hamoriti took a moment to recharge they continued the orbital bombardment that their fellow ships had started, barely finishing in time before the second blast wave came. Better than half of them managed to jump out in time, with the rest succumbing to the disabling wave and being left helpless as the next fire plume visibly reached up to devour them.

The Trinx had accomplished their mission, but at a cost. Then, as if in spite to their sacrificial actions, the Hamoriti was seen spawning another seed at its current location. First forming as a tiny pinprick of a lump on its body, then dropping off onto the ground where it dug roots into the charred soil and began to grow like a plant on the devastated landscape.

The Trinx had bought some time, though not much, and they’d have to do the same thing again and again else let the Hamoriti’s minions grow to consume the planet, then transition out into the galaxy.

4

September 22, 2723

Prenthor System (Sety capitol)

Qitor

“We have to have your assistance,” Nesfa said, pounding his angular fist on the railing before him in the council chamber. “You know the strength of the Hamoriti as well as any of us, and if we are to have a chance of accomplishing anything it is in this moment, when the beast is at its weakest. My people are dying to preserve this window of opportunity and I will not let you or the others waste it through speculation or diplomacy.”

“It is not that simple,” Ivvit said, being the only other representative from The Nine that had been able to make the trip to Prenthor before the Trinx arrived. “We must develop a plan of action before we start sending troops. I will not sacrifice my people against the Hamoriti to buy time unless that time is of value. We have no known means of defeating them, and according to the Oracles we also do not have the ability to return them to their confinement…so I ask you, what choice do we have besides dying now and dying later?”

“I do not know,” Nesfa answered the cyborg honestly, “but I do know, what we all know, is that the Hamoriti’s minions will grow and spread. They are formidable enough without the Hamoriti’s presence and they will begin claiming worlds on their own. I do not suggest assaulting the beast, but in containing the minions before they grow and spread out of control.”

“The Hamoriti can build up the minions around it, then leave to do the same elsewhere,” one of the six Sety in the chamber pointed out. “In order to strike at the minions to prevent their growth we must strike near the Hamoriti, and we cannot do that without massive casualties.”

“I know that,” Nesfa growled, frustrated. “But I also know that if we devise a way to combat the Hamoriti down the road that we will look back on this moment in regret if we did not deal with the threat when it was at its weakest. I will not allow this to become a lost opportunity. My people are presently dying to preserve it, and while I do not expect us to devise a solution overnight, we must have your help to contain the spread before it truly begins.”

“To what end?” Ivvit reiterated. “Even the Ancients could not kill them.”

“Despite what the Oracles say, this one is smaller and must be lesser in some degree. We need to learn about it before the minions spread out of control.”

“How?” another of the Sety asked, standing on a pedestal and looking like a leafless tree rooted in place with its 4 legs twisted about one another forming a pseudo trunk.

“With blood,” Nesfa said, his mind going dark at the sacrifices that would be required. “We attack with multiple weapons and defenses, each time trying to adapt and provoke different responses. As we die we will learn the capabilities and limitations of this Hamoriti…and with luck we will find a weakness to exploit.”

“So you are suggesting we assault it?” Ivvit pointed out.

“Not now,” Nesfa said, becoming irritated with the lack of insight he was getting from the Sety and Chamra. “We must focus on the minions while we devise tests to probe the Hamoriti. When those have been constructed we attack, die, and learn in our failure. I see no other way to proceed, and waiting only allows the Hamoriti’s minions to grow in number.”

“We have responsibilities within Nexus territory to see to,” Mafrin said, reluctantly having to disagree with his Trinx peer. “The Sety may have a larger military than yours, but ours is not as free to redeploy. We are 92% tethered to current assignments. Even if I agreed with your assessment we do not have the strength to aid you, not in the numbers required. At best a single fleet could be mustered, but I will not send them to their deaths just to buy us a few years.”

Nesfa threw his arms up in the air in frustrated defeat. “Then we just let the Hamoriti consume the galaxy.”

“I conferred with our Oracle, and it indicates that it will take a very long time for the Hamoriti to assert the kind of territorial domination that the Ancients faced. Even though we have not caught up to their technological level, we are not helpless. If we are to study the Hamoriti then let us do it from afar. The Li’vorkrachnika have already gone into combat with it. Let them continue to do so and we will watch. Sacrificing our troops before we have a plan of action is wasteful.”

“And how long did the Oracle predict it would take before the minions grew too strong for you to defeat, absent the Hamoriti?”

Mafrin stared back at the Trinx, wondering if he’d had a nearly identical conversation with their Oracle. “Concerning the Nexus alone, conservatively 300 years, though with this Hamoriti being a new one the estimates were labeled as being largely speculation rather than data-derived.”

“Have you been able to examine the shell?” Ivvit interjected.

Nesfa turned his attention to him, trying to let his anger with the Sety dissipate. “The Hamoriti moved off far enough that we were able to slip a small team inside. They confirmed it was Ancient technology and got a few generic schematics from the placement of the rubble before the minions within repelled them. They were not able to recover or locate the Oracle. Nearly the entire shell was destroyed by the Hamoriti as it left.”

“I still do not understand how there could be another Hamoriti,” one of the other Sety commented. “It makes no sense for the Ancients to build the Oracles with knowledge of the others and not include this one.”

“I agree, but it is here none the less,” Nesfa said, wondering if the others in The Nine would be equally obtuse to the situation when they arrived. He’d hoped to be returning with at least a Sety fleet by now, but these idiots appeared not to be able to grasp the obvious.

“Our task all these millennia has been to prevent the release of those imprisoned,” Mafrin stated evenly, “knowing that if even one were to escape captivity that the galaxy would be doomed. We have not failed in our duty, yet by events we do not understand a Hamoriti has been released. While it is unknown to us the simple fact is that our only hope was in containment. The Li’vorkrachnika unwittingly released it, much as we did here so long ago. I do not see that there is anything we can do at this point.”

“Short of locating the Ancients,” Ivvit threw out.

“They are most likely dead after all this time,” Nesfa said, once again pointing out the obvious.

“Then we need to find who killed him and ask their assistance.”

The Trinx glared at the cyborg. “Unless you have discovered something new, such thoughts are merely academic games.”

“The Oracles have made it clear that we cannot defeat the Hamoriti, and the fact that the Ancients could not find a way to destroy them either only underscores the fact that we cannot handle this. Thus we must consider alternate possibilities, no matter how remote.”

“Agreed, but what do you intend to do in the meantime?”

“If we had a viable strategy I would send every Chamra against it immediately, but given that we do not the logical path ahead is to conserve resources rather than to spend them without merit.”

“We do not wholly agree,” Mafrin differed. “The Sety may not have the strength to fight the Hamoriti, but we do have the strength to focus on lesser threats to the Nexus. Those must be priority. However, to let the minions spread to a second star system would be folly. The Hamoriti can only be in one place at one time, and we know this is the weakness that allowed the Ancients to dismantle their stranglehold on the galaxy. We will not waste our troops going up against it directly, but if we can strike at the minions and hinder their growth I feel we must, as Nesfa has said, to buy us time. I do not feel that we will find a solution, but we must try nonetheless.”

The Trinx shook its head adamantly, headtails flying back and forth behind it. “There are enough resources in that system to grow an army of minions that we will be hard pressed to counter. If we give the Hamoriti free reign it can fortify even a single planet to such levels that it will take all of The Nine’s combined might to cleanse it again if the Hamoriti leaves. We must work inside the system, and the mathematically prudent method is to sacrifice a few troops continuously to knock down the minions in their infancy.”

“If we had an objective to achieve and required a delay, then I would reluctantly agree,” Ivvit said. “But we have no objective. We will continue to lose troops until we are defenseless, then the Hamoriti will continue as it is now. If we can find a way to contain or destroy it, then we are obligated to do so. If we cannot, perhaps it is best to run, staying ahead of the expansion while looking for such a way, if it exists. If not, then our focus should be on survival.”

“While the galaxy slowly burns?” Nesfa asked angrily.

“If we cannot stop it, then we should at least try and survive it.”

“Nesfa is correct in that we must contain the spread of the minions for the time being,” Mafrin said, crackling with movement as he pointed an arm towards the Trinx. “We know from the Oracles how to fight them, and the damage they will cause if they are allowed to escalate. Containing the Hamoriti is impossible, but we can fight the minions and I believe that we must…even if only to give our people time to evacuate.”

“Evacuate to where?” Nesfa asked. “As dangerous as the Hamoriti is, it will not be able to spread quickly. But put that aside, there is a bigger problem we have to face. Where did this Hamoriti come from? The Oracles spoke of their reproduction as an unknown factor. Never did they witness or come to understand the origins of the Hamoriti. We now have one that appears to be younger, though we can’t be sure of that or much else at this point. Where did it come from if the 7 were imprisoned? They could not have reproduced it, at least not after their sedation.”

“Valid questions but I fail to see their consequence. If another Hamoriti were to emerge we would be equally helpless to defeat it.”

Nesfa pounded his two knuckle fist on the railing again. “How can you be this blind? Have you not been guarding a Hamoriti here as we have done? Have you not studied it intently? If this Hamoriti is younger then by studying it and feeding data to the Oracles they can compare it to the others and potentially gain insights that they do not currently possess. What the Ancients knew of this one they did not update the Oracles with, and that knowledge may be critical to finding a way to deal with this one.”

The cyborg twitched with understanding. “The Ancients used all of their power to contain the seven, and in doing so their civilization was nearly destroyed in the process. Yet they combated and contained another Hamoriti presumably afterwards, suggesting they either regained their strength or the task was easier with this one?”

“Exactly, and given that their civilization is now gone I would not bet on them having rebuilt their full strength.”

“That is warrantless speculation,” Ivvit cautioned.

“Speculation it may be, but this is an opportunity to gain additional data on the Hamoriti above and beyond what the Oracles presently possess. They have shown an ability to process new data, and how the Ancients wrote code that could do so is beyond me, but we should utilize this ability while we possess it. And the only way to do so is to attack the Hamoriti directly to trigger selected responses for analysis.”

“Costly lessons,” another voice said as a fog-like cloud moved through one of the three access doors. The Yisv’s ‘body’ took on more cohesion as it approached one of the empty podiums, eventually forming into the frail bipeds that they were in their solid state.

“You arrived quicker than expected,” Mafrin commented.

“Current events warrant expediency. Am I right in hearing that the Trinx want to attack the Hamoriti directly? The Oracles have told us repeatedly that it is suicide and I question the sanity of those suggesting it, for you are not ignorant. If the Ancients could not destroy them then neither can we, regardless of what we might learn. Such curiosity is not worth the lives of our people.”

“I concur,” Ivvit echoed.

“Those lives will be lost in time,” Nesfa reminded Sefib. “Better that their deaths serve a purpose in the here and now, regardless of whether or not the information proves to be strategically useful.”

“What of those who released them? Your packet said they were engaging the Hamoriti initially and were not overwhelmed.”

Nesfa shook his head again. “They are primitives that utilize plasma weapons. Why the Hamoriti didn’t strike them all down simultaneously is in question, but it may be that they simply weren’t a great enough threat to warrant the energy expenditure…or it could be weakened after its sedation. If that is the case it may not be fully recovered as of yet and our hesitancy to act may be costing us a moment of opportunity.”

“As we pointed out,” Mafrin added for the benefit of Sefib, “there is no point in acting if we do not know how to act. And according to the Oracles there is nothing that we can do to stop this one.”

“Despite its smaller size?”

“All the Oracles insisted that the size did not matter,” Nesfa said before Mafrin could answer, “but there has to be a difference. The capabilities of each of the 7 have been well documented, and even if this one was too strong for the Ancients to destroy it may well be weaker than the others and that is something we need to know. The Oracles are acting on speculation, not data, and we need to give it to them.”

“A fleeting hope,” Sefib said dismissively.

“What would your counsel be?” the Trinx asked.

“We have none. The Oracles said that if a Hamoriti awoke it would be the death of us all. I fail to see how we can overcome that, unless their assertions are incorrect. I don’t believe anyone is arguing that point?”

“Then why come here?”

“Because such a defeat will not occur swiftly. The galaxy is quite large and the Hamoriti is only one. Its minions may well grow to consume all, but it will be them that we fight, not the Hamoriti. We may be able to survive if we are savvy, and a joint effort by The Nine is more likely to succeed than independent ones.”

“While you ponder survival the Hamoriti grows in strength,” Nesfa pointed out. “I do not care about long term plans at this point, only in stopping the spread before it begins. Already the Trinx have devoted our full strength to this end, what will the Yisv contribute?”

“How will attacking the Hamoriti accomplish this?”

“I recommend attacks for study, not containment. To that end we must, and are, striking at the minions as the Hamoriti spawns them.”

“And how has it responded?”

“We lose ships with each raid, but the Hamoriti is forced to start over again.”

“Ah, now I see. You seek to freeze the moment before it escalates in the hope of finding a path ahead before the opportunity is lost to us.”

“Indeed.”

“If the inevitable is to come,” Ivvit argued, “then let it come and us face it. We will not spend our people’s lives to gain pointless time. If the Oracles say that we cannot destroy or sedate the Hamoriti, then we should not foolishly argue that point. The Hamoriti have returned to the galaxy whether we like it or not, now we must deal with the consequences of someone else’s error. We did not fail, but this doomsday has occurred none the less. The Oracles have a vast amount of information regarding the war the Ancients fought against the minions and in that lies the best hope for our survival, not in trying to deny that what is happening cannot be undone.”

“We will not go near nor contend with the god,” Sefib said softly, “but we are willing to fight its minions elsewhere. We must eventually, and we would choose to do so sooner rather than later in the hopes of shaping the landscape to our advantage going forward…or perhaps I should say to lessen our disadvantage going forward.”

“We are in agreement,” Ivvit said.

“The Sety will contribute what ships we can to the containment effort,” Mafrin said, speaking directly to Nesfa. “They will not be used against the Hamoriti itself, nor within its radius, but as the minions spread they will kill them when they are able. We will dispatch the fleet as soon as it can be gathered.”

“I would criticize the token gesture, but at this point every ship counts.”

“We have other responsibilities to attend to,” the Sety pointed out.

“They nor anything else matters at this point,” Nesfa said with a cool anger. “Whatever victories you win will be washed away in time. Let the rest of the galaxy fall into chaos while we fight to contain the Hamoriti. If by some miracle we succeed we can put it back together later. If we do not find a way to succeed, nothing else will matter.”

5

November 2, 2723

Prenthor System (Sety capitol)

Qitor

Nesfa walked out of another planning meeting with The Nine, utterly dejected at the lack of understanding the others were showing. They were going to allow the Hamoriti to claim the planet his people were dying to continually purge of minions, then try to intercept and destroy them when they attempted to leave. If the Hamoriti came after them they’d withdraw and concede it whatever location it went to, then move back to hit the minions it had abandoned.

It made a certain amount of sense at first glance, but Nesfa had studied the warnings and wisdom of the Oracle all his life and he knew the others in The Nine had done likewise, so there was no excuse for their lapse of judgement. Giving the minions a chance to spread, even on a single planet, was foolhardy. They didn’t need the Hamoriti to dominate once they reached certain numbers, and the sheer number of troops The Nine would have to commit to eliminate them would far outweigh what they’d spend in continuous suicide runs to prevent the minions from getting their foothold.

The Trinx had argued that point endlessly, with the rest of The Nine unwilling to accept his proposal and suggesting that if any attempt should be made in that regard that the Trinx should use their vassals in the form of warships to do the raiding rather than sacrificing ship crews.

The problem with that was the Trinx didn’t have any warship vassals, and while he’d ordered them to begin designing and producing them before he’d left for this summit there was no way they’d be ready in time, nor would the Trinx be able to build them fast enough to keep the minions suppressed. They had to have the support of The Nine or this wasn’t going to work…yet they wouldn’t give it to him.

He knew what he was asking was a tall order in blood, but nothing else mattered at this point. Let the Hamoriti get established and the timeline would escalate beyond their control quickly. The Ancients might have been able to succeed with The Nine’s current plan, but the Trinx and their allies were not on par with that mysterious race. No one disputed that, yet they would not take the one course of action that could forestall the coming disaster.

Nesfa was committed to keeping the minions suppressed with or without The Nine, realizing the duty he and his people had to keep this threat contained, but in doing so he was going to strip his military bare, then The Nine wouldn’t follow up and it will all have been for naught. They’ll have acquit their duty, but it won’t have mattered. The Hamoriti would spread its influence over the local region and slowly begin taking control of the galaxy.

Nesfa left the planning meeting and headed back to his ship, intending to stay on the Sety world no longer. While there was considerable more planning to do, it was planning for a course of action that the Trinx would not support. If the others wouldn’t do what was necessary they would, for as long as they could sustain the effort.

He knew that wasn’t going to be enough, so the Prefect had to find some other way to do what needed to be done.

“If we have to engage them,” Mafrin said, looking at a holographic star chart with the other seven members of The Nine, “it is best to do so after their seed ships have landed. The Oracle says there is a cannibalization process that occurs offering a window of opportunity during which the defenses will be minimal. Wait too long and they convert over into the fortifications we all know will be very hard to remove.”

“You want us to let them land?” Ivvit asked rudely.

“Those seed ships will be very hard to take out in space. That carapace is extremely formidable, but it will crack open when expanding on the surface. Time it right and we’ll poach it with a few well placed shots. Fight it in space or after it’s implanted itself and we face a hard and costly fight.”

“Letting them get to the surface is folly.” Maxep said, with the triped standing on a pedestal so to get to equal height with the others. “When they arrive insystem we must strike them immediately. If we let this become a ground fight we will lose badly. Even if we can destroy the seed ships once they land, the spore clouds will contaminate the planet and force us to keep hunting minions indefinitely. We cannot become tied to territory. Mobility is the entire purpose of the evacuations.”

“Their naval forces are equally robust,” Mafrin pointed out. “And if they wish they can send a ship directly into the atmosphere to distribute spores. It is doubtful we will ever be able to stop that from occurring. We cannot win this war, so stop thinking like we can. We need to do the most damage possible as the Hamoriti’s forces spread, and the best way to do that is to hit the seed ships when they’re vulnerable during their transition period.”

“Mafrin is correct,” Sefib said, her body undulating between solid and cloud, a sign of frustration. “We cannot let ourselves be drawn into even fights. We must hit them when and where they are weak, then flee retaining the majority, if not all of our forces. If we are goaded into a frontal engagement the Hamoriti will achieve through attrition what we seek to deny it…and easy victory.”

“When its minions can grow faster than we can build ships, I’m forced to concur,” another quadruped member of The Nine said, this one without arms and looking more like a horse. “We must pick our fights wisely and slow the spread. We cannot become fixed on holding any location. It must be a fighting retreat.”

“The best way to slow their advance is to deny them systems,” Ivvit reiterated. “We must have some hard battles to deny them entry, otherwise their numbers will scale too quickly and the evacuations will be compromised.”

“The Trinx are the closest,” Sefib pointed out. “And I do not believe they are going to evacuate, fearing the release of a second Hamoriti. They may very well fight until they are exterminated rather than give ground. If that comes to pass will we aid them or not?”

“The larger question in play is do the Hamoriti know of each other’s locations? Does this one know there are others imprisoned and where they are?”

“How could it know?” Mafrin asked.

“The Oracles have said that the Hamoriti may have collected information from the minds of those that came within range of its psionics,” Sefib added. “If we engage it we could be leading it directly to the others.”

“Or perhaps the Trinx have already done so,” Ivvit agreed.

Mafrin exchanged glances with the others. “Why have I never heard of this ability?”

“It is speculation on the Oracle’s part,” Sefib explained. “The Ancients never knew for sure.”

“Let’s assume it is true. Will the Hamoriti come directly here and the other locations, or spread out geographically around its current location?”

“There is nothing in the Ancients’ files that covers this eventuality,” Ivvit said. “They imprisoned the Hamoriti, so there’s no way of telling if one would care about the others or not. They always occupied different regions.”

“As to the evacuations,” Mafrin said, his fears amplifying with this new revelation. “We have to have compartmentalization as to the destination locations so the minions will not be able to follow. The troops we send into combat must not know where they are beyond a designated rendezvous point.”

“Agreed,” Praxma said, with the tanky biped speaking in almost mechanical tones.

“The Trinx vassals would be ideal to conceal this,” Ivvit noted.

“Yes they would be,” the Sety agreed. “But I do not believe there will be any of them available off their homeworld if Nesfa speaks the truth about their intentions.”

“I truly hope he does not,” Sefib said, unsure if the Trinx had been adamant out of certainty or stubbornness that might evaporate with time.

On the trip back to Vikod Nesfa racked his brain trying to find an alternative solution. He knew they had a limited opportunity to keep this disaster from becoming fatal, but no matter what he considered there was simply no way around the fact that a lot of people and resources were going to have to be expended in order to keep the Hamoriti’s minions suppressed.

The Nine had to see reason or else they were all doomed. The hopes that the Ancients could be found again were nothing more than reckless dreams, and the chance of finding another race that could at least contain a Hamoriti was likewise a waste of time, though possibly there was one out there somewhere. Problem was they had no time to look, and just for the sake of argument say that they did find one tomorrow…what were the odds of them even caring to fight a war far from their own borders?

No, if this containment was going to happen it had to be done now, before the spread began. Nesfa knew he had some time to work up a plan, for his people were paying for it in blood, but he feared the analysis teams he’d set to the task before leaving for the summit would likewise have nothing to offer.

It wasn’t until his ship had made the decel into their capitol system did a possible solution finally strike him. It was reckless, but at this point if they didn’t stop the minions from spreading nothing else mattered anyway. During the short trip in to the planet Nesfa thought through the various ways he could approach it, then went straight to his various ‘think tanks’ and had them begin chewing on the proposed plan.

Within a day they had a viable course of action laid out, with several contingencies in place should Nesfa need them. Knowing that time was of the essence the Prefect left the system again, this time taking with him a small warfleet from the local defense force. Most of their navy was in the Haphchap System surrounding the Hamoriti, but the 16 ships he brought with him in escort should be enough to make their point.

Jumping out immediately, Nesfa headed to the largest known Li’vorkrachnika world on their starcharts.

By the time Nesfa’s fleet reached one of their former enemy’s core worlds his linguists had finished writing the active translation program necessary for the Trinx to communicate directly with the representative he would be negotiating with. Their first meeting had gone amicably enough, with them only having to destroy a few hundred ships before the Li’vorkrachnika finally decided to let them talk. That talking had occurred over text transmissions using crude translations based off of a common language that both races spoke…one coming from a neighboring race that the Li’vorkrachnika had recently destroyed.

An agreement on the scale of what Nesfa was proposing was not something that could be handled locally, so arrangements had been made for his fleet’s passage to one of their core worlds where he would speak directly with someone that had the necessary authority. When the Trinx fleet arrived at the location it became clear that the Li’vorkrachnika were more numerous than their intelligence reports had indicated, for the system was filled with millions of ships and four ring-like constructs circling a pair of planets.

The technology they used was primitive in the extreme, but they were much more savvy than he’d anticipated with the implementation of it. As his fleet was recognized and given clearance to a rendezvous point in orbit around one of the planets, his people determined that the rings were in fact shipyards, and judging by the schematics they were capable of producing an insanely large number of ships.

That made Nesfa feel better about their chances, but it also underscored that even with the Trinx’s technological advantage his small fleet was vulnerable here. His ship commanders assured him that they could fight their way out if necessary, but there could be no direct engagements that would result in anything other than their deaths, primitive tech or not.

Once they arrived at the rendezvous point they were given instructions to meet with the representative onboard one of the Li’vorkrachnika stations. Nesfa’s fleet surrounded the station, then sent a heavily armed boarding craft full of guards and vassals to take the Prefect over to the meeting location. They set down inside a large hangar bay with the robotic bipeds filing out and creating a defensive perimeter around the ship, followed by some living Trinx troops, then the Prefect.

The air smelled badly, but it was breathable so he tried to push the foulness from his mind. He wasn’t here because he liked the Li’vorkrachnika, but because he and the galaxy needed them.

“I am Prefect Nesfa,” he said, softly, allowing the headband he wore to translate his words into the Li’vorkrachnika’s native language, with it likewise translating back anything that was spoken in it. He looked out at the sea of short, green reptilians, most of whom carried their primitive plasma weapons, but none had stepped forward to greet him. “Where is your Templar?”

“I am here,” a strangely soft voice said, with the more rigid translation occurring half a second delayed in Nesfa’s ear. A thicker and slightly taller version of their race moved out from the crowd towards him and the vassals, but brought no escorts with it, so long as you didn’t count the thousands in the bay.

“Have you reviewed the information I gave you?”

“Not completely. Your arrival was quicker than we anticipated. We have seen enough, however, to augment our own data on the creature. We recognize the threat it poses and our inability to counter it alone. For this purpose we are open to negotiation.”

“What I require of you is simple. In order to keep the Hamoriti from spreading its minions we must strike at the seeds as soon as they are produced. Such a task is a suicide mission that my people are currently undertaking, but without assistance we cannot keep up the necessary pace indefinitely. Our ships and population will expire in time, then the Hamoriti will be free to begin reclaiming the region around it, and in time the galaxy.”

“Your race,” Nesfa said pointedly, “while technologically inferior, operates on a turnover rate of both personnel and ships that can keep the Hamoriti’s minions suppressed indefinitely. We will search for a way to destroy the creature, if such a thing is possible, but I require you to make strikes against its minions continuously, no matter the resources required, for all of time if necessary. The Hamoriti cannot be allowed to gain a foothold, no matter what the cost.”

“Your information indicates that these ‘minions’ are too advanced for our technology to harm in any appreciable way. How do you suggest that we kill them?”

“With numbers and some help from us. We will be producing weapon patches that we will apply to the hulls of some of your ships to augment your firepower. These ships will most certainly be lost in the attacks, and we cannot produce enough patches for all of your vessels, but it will be enough to get the job done.”

“And in exchange for our never ending sacrifice you will gift us with what?”

“Technology upgrades. Small ones over the course of time, but beginning with a replacement for your plasma weapons. It is known as a Vichsam, and while primitive by our standards it will offer greater range and damage compared to your current plasma weapons while operating off of the same power requirements.”

“Will you also be producing these for us, or instructing us how to build them for ourselves.”

“All our resources will be going towards containing the Hamoriti. We will give you the knowledge necessary to construct the technology yourself.”

“We will need a demonstration of the weapon and the ability to analyze its functionality in order to determine the level of upgrade it offers us. We will also need a fixed timetable for future payments of technology. If we are to continuously engage this creature we will require continuous payment.”

“In principle we are in agreement,” Nesfa said, looking into the pure black eyes of the reptile that stood erect with its tail curled around its thick right leg.

“Furthermore, if we can come to terms on payment, we will also require security guarantees for the systems we devote to building the forces you require. We have many enemies, and they must not be allowed to strike at these worlds and disrupt the flow, for we may or may not be able to compensate from other locations. We will draw what is necessary for the time being, but new worlds will have to be acquired and constructed by us under your protection…and that protection must never expire.”

“If such systems are local, that is an acceptable addition.”

“How soon would these strikes be instigated?”

“We can have the first of the weapons patches available within 4 months, and we will modify your ships on site when they arrive. Do note that until your vessels begin carrying Vichsam more will be required to neutralize the minion seeds utilizing plasma alone.”

“What numbers do you estimate will be needed?”

“That depends on the Hamoriti. Right now we estimate no less than 200 of your warships per day and the addition of ground troops if needed.”

“We can draw that number from our existing fleets for a time, but in order to provide a steady flow of ships we will need additional raw materials in order to construct the designated supply worlds quickly enough.”

“I can offer assistance in acquiring materials from those sites, but not from Trinx stockpiles.”

“We are in principle agreement then, but must demand one additional caveat before we begin negotiating payment terms. Your guarantee not to interfere in our expansion. We will respect your worlds, but will be unchained from assaulting any others, regardless of your associations with them.”

Nesfa smiled ironically. “If you try to assault any of our associates, I wish you luck. You will suffer a quick death.”

“But you must agree not to interfere even if we should try.”

“Agreed. The threat of the Hamoriti trumps all other concerns. Proceed as you like so long as you hold to the agreement without fail. Even a slight pause will allow the minion seeds to gain a foothold, and that cannot be allowed to happen.”

“We will supply all that are necessary without fail, so long as you continue to deliver the technology upgrades as promised.”

“Let us begin working through that timetable then,” Nesfa said, pulling out a palm-sized holographic generator and setting it on the floor where it created a virtual workstation between the two of them. The Trinx tapped on one of the solid holograms, bringing up a timeline matrix that they would begin to fill in. He wasn’t going to give them any advanced tech, but there was plenty of valuable improvements he could offer short of that. How much the Li’vorkrachnika would demand was a question mark, but he intended to broker a limited deal and not let them gouge tech out of him.

Containing the Hamoriti was worth any amount, but he wasn’t a reckless negotiator and would haggle until they reached an amicable agreement no matter how long it took. His fleets would buy them enough time for that, now that they had a viable plan for which to sacrifice and stall for.

6

March 18, 2724

Haphchap System (Hamoriti location)

Unnamed planet

The Sety fleet was mostly stationed in middle orbit around the star, with a handful of ships scattered elsewhere within the system for observational reasons, but none anywhere near the surface of the planet. The closest was in a high elliptical orbit so it could stay in position over the Hamoriti and observe the continuing Trinx suicide runs in to eliminate the minion seeds within a few hours of their spawning. Each time they did nearly all their ships were lost, and the Sety were not about to contribute to such sacrifice when all it did was buy them a few more days.

The Hamoriti didn’t seem to care about the situation and merely continued with its seed laying attempts, further trashing the surface with its weaponized tsunamis each time the Trinx ships came down low enough to shoot the minions. They were waiting, however, until the Hamoriti moved off from those it dropped beneath its mass, for they couldn’t be targeted well from orbit. Some side shots were possible, but knowing how many ships would be lost the Trinx were not making any attacks that they weren’t fairly sure they could pull off in one strike.

The Hamoriti didn’t stay parked over a single position to shield them. Instead it kept moving, sinking into the surface periodically to feed on the rock beneath. The surface soil had been stripped down with multiple tsunamis, with hillsides having been shaved off and bare rock exposed, for each time one of the massive blasts leapt out from the creature a cascade of damage would touch everything around the Hamoriti, but for the ground at least it appeared to be spread out whereas anything in the atmosphere was literally vaporized on contact.

On closer inspection of the surveillance data the Sety were gathering from afar, it seemed the tsunamis were hemispherical rather than truly omni-directional. None the less, the sheer amount of power the Hamoriti had to be generating to affect an area with a radius in excess of 1000 miles was beyond fathoming. What would occur on one of the Nexus worlds from such a blast would be nothing short of utter devastation, even if surface structures ate up and spread out the damage as the topography here appeared to be doing.

There had to be a limit to what the Hamoriti was capable of emitting, and while the original 7’s limitations had been explored and documented the Oracles had no data on this one. While the Trinx were wrong in their approach, they had been correct about the need to gather intel, so as long as they were making their strategically pointless suicide runs there might as well be someone here to document it.

The Trinx fleet, hundreds of thousands strong, sat in orbit around a nearby planet and continually fed ships over to the danger zone as needed, but they didn’t leave them parked nearby just in case the Hamoriti took flight. It might be slow in terms of starship standards, but two of the other Hamoriti had pinpoint weapons that were able to reach much farther than the tsunami. It wasn’t known yet if this one did or not, for its skin/hull defied inspection, but there was no point in risking the majority of the fleet by keeping them so close.

The Sety were here to take the opportunity to strike at the minions if the Hamoriti left the planet, or to strike at the minions if they tried to leave the planet. So far they hadn’t been allowed to develop even close to that level, but if/when the Trinx finally failed to prevent their growth the Sety were going to diminish their numbers as much as they could short of sacrificing themselves. They needed to preserve their warfleet, small as it was here, and had been ordered only to engage when they had the advantage.

And to stay the hell away from the Hamoriti no matter what the circumstances.

The other members of The Nine were gathering their fleets in the neighboring systems, not risking to bring them directly here and relying on the Sety to stay in contact with them. If there was a move by the Hamoriti or the minions they would respond to it, hopefully heading off any minion seed ships and getting to the destination systems ahead of them. If the Hamoriti moved, then they could come in to the present system and see what damage they could do to the minions here

But without the Sety or Trinx insystem there was no way for them to know what was occurring, for they were so twitchy about being near the beast that they wouldn’t even send a ship to drop a probe in the area.

Each race of The Nine was comprised of widely varying civilizations, but all were presently developing plans for evacuating their populations and heading off far into the galaxy, intent to stay ahead of the Hamoriti spread rather than to stay and watch their people get annihilated. That was why they were willing to fight the minion spread, to buy time for evacuation ships to be built and scouts to be sent out searching for uninhabited worlds to use as waypoints. Every year they could delay the Hamoriti, the greater the chance of preserving their populations, but sacrificing their ships as the Trinx were doing was counterproductive.

The Sety were not expecting any other fleets to arrive, so when hundreds of jumpships began braking into the system they did not know what was going on. As soon as they identified them as Li’vorkrachnika they immediately began to deploy into strike groups to go after them and kill the meddlesome idiots who’d released the Hamoriti in the first place.

Before the Sety warships, each shaped like a globe with root-like tendrils growing out from it by the dozens, could get into firing range the handful of Trinx vessels waiting near the star signaled them to fall back, heading into the enemy fleet themselves and pacing alongside them as escorts. The Sety fleet commander didn’t know what was going on, then an explanation came from the Trinx indicating that they had invited them here to help fight the Hamoriti.

A short but fiery exchange occurred between both fleet commanders, for the Li’vorkrachnika were an enemy of the Nexus and the Trinx themselves had wiped out what was left of their fleet that had awakened the Hamoriti. Furthermore the Trinx hadn’t informed The Nine of this plan of theirs, but the Sety eventually decided to just sit back and watch, as they’d been sent to do, while sending a courier ship out to get to a system within range of one of the Nexus receivers so it could transmit the news back to Qitor.

With the Sety successfully backed off, the Trinx ships escorted the fleet of jumpships to the nearby planet where their own fleet waited, then the Li’vorkrachnika began undocking their cruisers and spamming orbit with them. The jumpships then left, heading back to wherever they’d come from to pick up more cruisers and ferry them here. Those that they left behind numbered in excess of 10,000, but were all equipped with their primitive plasma weapons as no upgrade patches were available yet.

That didn’t matter, for the minion seeds had to be destroyed. The Li’vorkrachnika fleet commander conferred with the Trinx and was remarkably agreeable in terms of letting them make strategy. He knew his ships were going to be sacrificed, and seemed only to care about them being able to accomplish the task as efficiently as possible. There was no concern for his crews evident in their conversations, only a focus on accomplishing the mission…which was something the Trinx responded to well.

The first attack the Li’vorkrachnika were involved in came two days later, with the Trinx continuing to carry the burden until then. At first there was only a single Li’vorkrachnika cruiser sent down to the planet, and it was allowed to enter the atmosphere and move about. No tsunami followed, so it crept closer and closer, trying to prompt a reaction, but none came. Eventually it came to one of the minion seeds that the Hamoriti had moved on from and came under fire from the seed itself, getting hit and destroyed within 30 seconds, but not before landing some plasma blasts and one well aimed streamer onto the target.

It damaged the growing minion structure, lightly, but it was enough for the fleet commanders to analyze to determine how many ships would be needed.

Next they sent in 8 cruisers, again not drawing a tsunami from the Hamoriti that was some 200 miles off. They attacked the seed and badly damaged it before 4 of the ships were destroyed, then inexplicably the other four turned and began firing on each other. It took a while for the Li’vorkrachnika ships to kill themselves, for the minion seed stopped firing as they did so, returning its internal energy to healing and growth as the remaining enemy ships no longer were shooting at it.

That put this Hamoriti’s psionic control range at 200 miles minimum. Another data point that the Trinx hadn’t been able to collect. Committed to the mission as they were, they weren’t going to send their own ships and men to their deaths in such an experiment. They would fight and die and learn from the defeat, but the Trinx weren’t going to meekly walk up to the Hamoriti so they could be killed. However, they didn’t care what happened to the Li’vorkrachnika, and oddly neither did they, so the Trinx began using their allies in a lot more extreme experiments than they’d previously considered.

A small Trinx fleet was sent in to clean up, hitting the damaged minion seed along with three others the Hamoriti had dropped. When they started firing on them from orbit with their brilliant green energy beams the tsunami followed, knocking those beams out as the ships were disabled by the precursor wave, then the shieldless ships were torn apart in the blast that followed.

Once the atmospheric bubble resettled onto the planet, an analysis of the surface indicated that the minion seeds had been destroyed, perhaps not entirely by the Trinx, but whatever had been left undamaged had probably been incinerated by the tsunami itself. The minions were resistant to it, in a way that the Ancients had never fully understood, but they were not completely immune.

With this minion seed set destroyed, the Trinx and Li’vorkrachnika returned to planning their next test.

A month later, when the upgrade patches gave the Li’vorkrachnika ships a variety of combat options, including orbital strike range, they began almost exclusively to carry the burden of destroying the minion seeds while the Trinx kept their fleet nearby in reserve, with their commander coordinating every attack and the Li’vorkrachnika complying without complaint. On more than one occasion they actually suggested additional caveats, finding ways to probe the minions and the Hamoriti that even the Trinx had not thought of, proving their reputation for adaptability was not over exaggerated.

Eventually a few small, prototype warship vassals arrived and one was sent in as a test. When inserted individually they drew no tsunami, for it seemed the Hamoriti didn’t want the energy expenditure or it felt the minion seeds could defend themselves. That wasn’t the case, for the first one the vassal encountered it destroyed. When it traveled to the next the Hamoriti released the equivalent of biological drones that pursued it and eventually took it down, preserving the other minion seeds that the Li’vorkrachnika were then sent in to destroy.

A tsunami hit and destroyed them, prompting a second wave to clean up what was left, who were likewise destroyed, resetting the doomsday clock to 0:00 with the Hamoriti continuing its trek across the planet and dropping more minion seeds as it went.

The vassal test hadn’t been to see if it could destroy the minion seeds, but rather if the Hamoriti had a way in which to disable it. There were no crew onboard that it could affect psionically, and even though communications with the vassal were severed during the combat, ostensibly by some type of jamming field the Hamoriti threw up, the internal programming followed procedure and fought how it had been taught to, meaning that the Trinx now had a way to get up close to the Hamoriti if need be, whereas all crewed ships that came anywhere close to it ran the risk of becoming unwilling thralls.

And if they managed to get up real close to it, the freezing aura would disable them automatically without any directed effort on the part of the Hamoriti. The vassals being immune to both gave the Trinx a valuable option, for what they weren’t sure just yet, but if they were ever to discover a way to attack the beast itself, then getting within touching range could very well be the delivery mechanism required.

The Ancients had accomplished similar attacks, all of which ultimately failed. They’d even detonated huge explosives beneath the creatures, leaving broken continents and intact Hamoriti. However they managed it, the beasts were able to absorb energy, with some analysis from the Oracles suggesting that they even fed upon it, which was why later in the war the Ancients didn’t even bother firing on the Hamoriti and focused all of their efforts on the minions until they were wiped out, then they moved to sedate their targets rather than try to futilely damage them again.

More days passed, with most seeing at least one sacrificial attack by the Li’vorkrachnika as the Trinx fleet strength began to increase again, both in terms of manned ships and a growing fleet of vassals with progressively larger ships as the prototypes were scrutinized and the next phase of development continued. Rather than building a handful of ships to test the Trinx were building hundreds of them before moving on to newer designs, getting both scientific and tactical usefulness out of them.

The Hamoriti continued its seed laying without pause, leaving more than a third of the planet dotted with craters before it finally had enough. A year and a half after it first awoke and after yet another successful minion destruction on part of the Li’vorkrachnika, the Hamoriti sank down onto its huge legs, pulling them into its body and locking them in place while tucking its neck and head down into the nook next to the front pair, forming a rough egg-like shape. Using its biologically created anti-grav it rose up off the surface and very slowly headed out of the atmosphere.

Both the Sety and the Trinx fleets immediately began to redeploy, with the Li’vorkrachnika waiting for orders before they did so as well. All three fleets moved aside and kept well clear of the now living starship as it came up into orbit and transitioned around the planet to the stellar jumpline, where it accelerated in a slow lurch up to minimal microjump speeds and headed for the star.

At first they’d thought it was transitioning to one of the other planets in the system, but once it took off on the stellar jumpline the Sety cleared out of the star’s lowest orbits, wanting to be nowhere near the thing for fear of it unleashing some unknown weapon against them. They did drop a few probes in their wake and observed closely as the Hamoriti arrived at the star, then moved around it until it came to the jumpline that it wanted.

With a not so subtle lurch the creature executed an interstellar jump, heading out of the system at a speed far less than either the Sety or the Trinx were capable of, but still faster than the primitive Li’vorkrachnika ships.

With it passing out of monitoring range the Sety calculated its path and speed, then transmitted that information to the fleets of The Nine waiting in nearby star systems, giving them a heads up as to where it was going and where they should not be five days from now.

7

December 9, 2725

Kilma System (lizard territory)

Nesmi

A trio of maulers were packed into a kirby full of standard variants lizards, all of whom were equipped with the new vichsam rifles, but they were unarmed, so to speak. They were pure brawlers, with two long blades extending from their arms that were presently pulled back inside bone sheaths. In fact, the standard variants in the kirby with them were specifically here to escort the maulers and get them to their target, for the fleshy minions the Hamoriti produced responded well to the blades.

The kirby was flying along with 129 others across the war torn landscape of the lizard planet, with virtually every colony in the southern hemisphere having been at least damaged. Several had been obliterated completely in the first days after the Hamoriti had arrived and released its enormous cascading weapon, destroying everything within radius. Fortunately it had only detonated three such attacks before burrowing underground and digging deep into the core of the planet.

That had given the lizards and the Trinx some time without having to deal with minions, but as they monitored the movement of the creature in the molten core, or rather the Trinx did, they saw it eventually come back up into the crust in another location. There it began spawning minions below ground and out of range of the orbital bombardment that had been picking them off with regularity for the past 2 years.

Immediately the Trinx had responded by burrowing holes down into the crust at nearby locations. They lost a handful of ships initially when the Hamoriti reached out from below and took control of them, but realizing their mistake they sent vassal warships in to destroy their own kin, then had those ships continue with the coring efforts. Their smaller size meant less weaponry, which delayed the process considerably giving the Hamoriti’s minions time to grow and spread below ground as it moved around carving out tunnels and hollows in the bedrock.

Once they had access points the Trinx send down an army of vassals, ferried by some hastily modified cargo ships to remove the need for living pilots. Programming both the ships and the vassals as best they could, the Trinx sent them down to the holes in the crust they’d bored and waited. The jamming field from the Hamoriti crept up again, keeping the Trinx blind as to what was happening as the robotic soldiers deployed into the underground caverns to hunt down and destroy the minions hand to hand.

Up until recently no one had known how effective they had been, but then the Hamoriti had dropped its jamming as it decided to move down through the core and over to the opposite side of the planet where it again began burrowing into the crust. That put it outside the mental control range of the first set of subsurface minions that were still engaging the few vassals that remained, prompting the Trinx to order the lizard troops from the planet down into the tunnels to fight hand to hand along with another batch of vassals they sent down to augment their limited fighting capability.

As with every superior opponent, the lizard way to beating them was to spam them with numbers and this reinforcement group was no exception. They were headed to a small minion facility situated below ground, and even though it wasn’t a seed structure it was a factory that was growing something of importance and had to be destroyed. All the maulers knew was that there were enemy troops there that they had to engage, and they were eager to get their blades into the enemy flesh.

When the kirby eventually landed, the bay door opened up on the starboard side and the standard variants poured out into the nearly dark cavern. Daylight was not visible, for they had flown down into the crust and were well away from the coring point now. The only light available came from the kirbies and the standard bearers, which were standard variant lizards carrying light poles. That gave the others just enough to see by, in addition to the bright pink vichsam flares.

Those were visible ahead through a sea of bodies, with the trio of maulers hopping out of the kirby a few seconds before it lifted off and left the small landing area as more of the lizard transports came down and delivered additional troops in a never ending flow that would sooner or later overwhelm the minions. How much blood it would require didn’t matter, they would get the job done so long as each of them did at least a little bit of damage to the enemy.

And with their forearm blades the maulers would be doing more than a little.

The trio held together, knowing they had a better chance of taking down one of the minion soldiers in concert than solo, and followed the standard variants as they fought their way forward, blocking return fire with their bodies. That enemy weaponsfire couldn’t be seen, for it didn’t produce any light. How the other lizards were being killed the maulers didn’t know, but all they could see was the pink of the vichsam and the yellow of the light rods marking the progression of various groups forward down the nearly half mile-wide tunnel that the Hamoriti had previously carved out.

That left an enormous about of ‘land’ area, with varied terrain rather than a smooth cut, for it seemed the beast had melted its way through the rock and its massive footprints had made craters in the molten material before it finished solidifying. Several of those craters were where the minion structures were located, while others had been carved into the sidewalls by the minions themselves.

These three maulers and the others the kirbies were unloading were headed for one of the wall niches. They were almost there by the time they reached the front lines, with the last two standard variants proceeding them being dropped by high pierced ‘zips’ that ripped right through their armored vests and detonated inside them, blowing the two bipeds apart into a fleshy shrapnel spray.

The maulers didn’t hesitate, sprinting forward and looking for an enemy to kill. They didn’t have to go far, for there were several just ahead behind a carpet of lizard bodies. The headless, four-legged walkers were three times taller than the maulers and appeared to be living tanks, each of which had an orifice between their front legs that was shooting out something that couldn’t be seen well in the dark, but everywhere one hit a lizard would blow apart.

The minions were bleeding, that much was easy to see because the blood was bioluminescent. Each time one of the little pink energy packets hit the flesh of the creatures it would only do a pinprick of damage, but the trickle of blood showing put a glowing target on the enemy for the lizards to shoot at.

Or in the case of the maulers, to lunge for.

Already there were a few visible hacking away at two of the minions, so this trio ran over the bodies of their fellow lizards and jumped onto the legs of the closest one, extending their forearm blades in midair and sinking them into the enemy on contact. They slid in surprisingly well, but seemed to make no noticeable change to the minion’s movements, as if while they were doing damage it was inconsequential.

That didn’t matter to the maulers, who pulled out their blades and rammed them back in again, piercing hole after hole that saw rivers of neon gray goo seep out. It didn’t flow like a liquid, but dripped in globs that covered the maulers’ blades, making them appear like lightsabers as they continued stabbing away at the enemy without any regard for their own survival.

Suddenly the mauler on the left blew apart from an unseen weapon impact as the minion beside the one they were attacking turned and removed one of the gnats from its fellow living tank. The thick, hard biological armor on the maulers didn’t appear to even slow the enemy weapons down, but the minions were vulnerable to the blades and that was all that mattered. There would be more maulers to replace these three, so all the remaining two focused on was causing more damage, with each blade thrust doing the equivalent of 50+ vichsam shots.

For whatever reason the minions were more resistant to energy fire than physical force, hence the lizards pushing mauler units against them. The standard variants had done their job to get this trio to the minions without them getting sniped down first, despite most of the standards dying in the process, with the other few remaining drawing fire that would have gone to the maulers.

The second one got hit by another side shot, with each minion apparently not being able to shoot near its own legs. That was a weakness that they were covering for with overlapping fire, but if the lizards could isolate a minion then the maulers would own it.

That wasn’t for this one to worry about, for all it was doing and thinking was jab, withdraw, and jab again. Covered with the glowing blood it continued to do so until the minion’s leg finally gave out and it tipped over…but it caught itself from falling and moved into a tripod stance, with the limp leg hanging loosely between the other three.

The mauler sensed this and jumped from that leg to one of the sturdy ones, but before he could sink his blades in his chest was hit by a tiny, blurry energy packet that looked like little more than a wisp of wind, but it passed through and into his chest, causing little damage. Somewhere after entry that bit of energy altered into a vicious explosion, popping the mauler from the inside out and throwing one of its now severed arms out to the side where the forearm blade actually stuck into another minion’s torso like a piece of shrapnel.

That minion ignored it and kept on firing, even as more mauler trios were being escorted up into hacking range and tearing away at its legs.

Back on the wider plains of the tunnel metallic counterparts to the minions moved about along with the lizards, with the small, fleshy troops trying not to get stepped on by the bipedal giants. Most stood 4 meters tall and had two large arms with weapons mounted in the forearms, but they didn’t move like mechs or tanks. They moved like biologicals, the product of more than a million years of refinement in hardware and software, capable of operating without remote control but at the moment having that luxury since the Hamoriti’s jamming field was not within range.

The tank minions were no match for a vassal one on one, with their gix being stopped by intricate energy matrix that the Ancients had left behind instructions for with the Oracles. The Trinx version wasn’t as powerful, but it reduced the normally penetrative energy packets cold, and with only a small hit to shield strength. That gave them incredible longevity against the minions, though when the shields did finally go down the armor beneath them would breach after three consecutive hits in the same place.

The fourth would get through, then pop inside and wreck the interior of the vassals. Some would continue to operate while others would be taken out of the fight with one penetration. Regardless, the vassals were killing dozens, if not hundreds of minions each. Trouble was there were only a handful of them with this Li’vorkrachnika army, with the majority of the vassals being taken to the other side of the planet to engage the minions within range of the Hamoriti’s telepathy, to which they were immune.

Never the less, the few vassals were soaking up an inordinate amount of weaponsfire, allowing many more of the tiny infantry to get to their targets while also firing on and killing some of the tank minions themselves. They couldn’t one shot a minion, but came close with their klixon cannons. They were also a bit of tech left behind by the Ancients, and were an energy weapon that took on physical properties, applying kinetic damage on impact. That allowed a very high shot count without having to rely on ammunition rounds that would require replacement after limited engagements.

It took two or three hits square on the rounded body of the minions to take them down, and with a klixon in each arm with a cycling rate of .73 seconds the vassals could literally mow down the minions if given a chance. The problem was that, like the Li’vorkrachnika, the minions operated in a swarm mentality. So far the fighting hadn’t gotten out of hand, due to the limited number of minions being produced and the previous vassals having trimmed their numbers handily, but they were savaging the Li’vorkrachnika who, to no end, kept throwing more bodies at them in order to do even the slightest bits of damage.

Eventually one of the infantry pushes got a det pack to a minion, blowing a leg off and killing six maulers that were nearby in the process. That minion didn’t go down, rather moving to a tripod stance like so many of the others, but the nearest vassal turned and pumped two fairly long shots into the now stationary target. It didn’t explode, but rather got the innards scrambled by the entry wounds that failed to penetrate through and blow out the other side.

Gutted, but with the fleshy debris contained within, the minion’s legs went slack and it fell to the ground, one less biological turret for the allied infantry to deal with.

The Trinx controller who had altered the automated attack program to hit the wounded minion made a note that the Li’vorkrachnika needed to attach their explosives directly to the main body of the minions and not the legs, then he sent the message to his commander and continued to tweak the ongoing battle on his display where needed from orbit.

That suggestion was immediately considered by the fleet controllers and found to be sound, so they sent it over to the Li’vorkrachnika commander who likewise sent the information to the troops en route to the subsurface battles. Soon the new tactic made its way to the front as the uninformed troops died out and the new ones came in to replace them. The Trinx watched as their primitive allies adapted quickly, with the explosive satchels being given to the mauler variants who then ran underneath the minions and used their excessive musculature to jump up and jab their forearm blades into the underbelly, fixing them in place.

With the explosives pinned between the mauler’s and the minion’s bodies, it detonated the pack while holding it tight to the enemy flesh. The explosion ripped the mauler apart in a poof of green and tore through the underside of the minion, pushing it up a meter into the air from the concussion wave and landing it back on its legs that remained stiff for half a second as a waterfall of neon gray innards fell to the ground beneath it just ahead of the collapsing corpse.

The Li’vorkrachnika had just found their own one hit kill.

Slowly, with a mix of tactics and horrific sacrifice the Trinx’s primitive ally and the vassals pushed through the minion defenders and into the craters where their growing infrastructure was located. Each of their buildings was also biological, so when all of the defenders had been eliminated the vassals ordered the Li’vorkrachnika to pull back as they moved in and started pulverizing the buildings one at a time until there was nothing left but glowing, fleshy paste.

According to the Oracles there were certain structures that could spawn new ones, while others could regenerate themselves so long as key sections remained intact. With that being programmed into the vassals each of the robotic warriors continually scanned the biological debris and targeted those clusters, popping them like bonus points in a video game, until there were none left to regrow from.

One crater after another the vassals visited and wiped out, all the while the Li’vorkrachnika were spreading out searching for more enemies and occasionally stumbling across a fixed weapons platform, whether it be a freestanding turret or weapons mounted onto some of the structures. Those they either took out with det packs or one of the vassals would come around and eliminate the threat for them.

In the cases where no det packs were available or a vassal wasn’t nearby, the standard variants and maulers would rush the defensive emplacements, nicking them to death with bits of damage and often having to climb over their own dead to do it.

The Trinx controllers were surprised at the ferocity of their new ally, for up until now they’d only witnessed their navy in action. While a bit disturbing, it was also a welcome sight for how effectively they took down their targets. Committed as they were to victory, the Trinx appreciated having an ally that was equally so and unafraid to make necessary sacrifices.

And when you were as primitive as the Li’vorkrachnika were, you couldn’t make any gains without sacrifice. These bloodthirsty savages reveled in it, with no thoughts aside from winning the battle. They could always produce more troops to replace those that were lost, and given the minions vulnerability to physical weapons the Li’vorkrachnika were actually proving to be useful on their own merits even without vassal support.

That was good, for the Trinx could not stop the Hamoriti from spreading its minions underground on its own. They didn’t have nearly enough vassals for that, but they did have enough to augment their ally’s forces in the areas where the Hamoriti was not located, even if they couldn’t prevent the beast from seeding more directly around it.

Naval bombardment was highly preferred to this type of subsurface ground warfare, but with the Li’vorkrachnika willing to do whatever was required of them it looked like there might still be a way to halt the Hamoriti’s advance…though the cost involved was increasing rapidly.

8

May 21, 2729

Kilma System (Hamoriti location)

Nesmi

Situated high above the planet were six remote probes in orbit, each positioned so as to give the Chamra sight on the entirety of the surface simultaneously. The probes were passive sensors, very detailed but designed to operate in secrecy and equipped with camouflage systems to keep their existence from the Hamoriti, though whether or not the measures would be functional against the monster was anyone’s guess.

A Trinx and Sety fleet were both situated in various orbits around the planet, most up high and well outside what they knew the Hamoriti’s range to be, but the cyborgs were not so reckless. After several years of ‘containment’ on the part of the Trinx and their Li’vorkrachnika allies the cyborgs had decided to risk sending a single ship into the system to allow them to monitor events as they took place. That ship now sat near the system’s star, getting direct feeds from the probes so it wouldn’t have to risk sitting in orbit.

Thus far the Hamoriti had spent most of its time below ground, which had prompted the Trinx and Sety to move their fleets in closer. So far as the cyborgs could tell, the Sety hadn’t fired a single shot since they arrived. Their small fleet simply sat, watched, and waited for an opportunity to strike the minions when they weren’t protected by the Hamoriti itself. So far that hadn’t occurred, for all of the minions currently on the planet were subsurface and the Sety weren’t about to set foot on the planet, knowing how the Hamoriti could move around at will.

The Trinx were down there, with their vassals at least, and were aiding the Li’vorkrachnika as they shipped in millions of troops from other star systems to use as disposable weapons to hunt down and destroy the minions. The cyborgs had to admit that thus far the strategy was working, but there were at present seven different engagements taking place beneath the planet’s surface as the Hamoriti kept spawning minions in new locations. The strike teams had found some of them rather late, with them having grown to significant numbers, but they’d managed to successfully beat them down each time to date.

How long that could last no one knew, but the Trinx were adamant that they had to fight in the here and now before things had a chance to escalate further. The cyborgs didn’t disagree, they just saw no endgame, and as such weren’t going to throw away their people’s lives so casually as the Trinx were.

Their ally’s sacrifices paled in comparison to what the Li’vorkrachnika were doing. The primitive barbarians deserved some measure of respect for the way they accomplished what should not have been possible even with the minor tech upgrades the Trinx had given them. They did not fight like most civilizations would, and in this rare case it seemed that they were more effective for it. Every infantry unit they sent down beneath ground was destroyed, but they kept sending them, hurting the enemy and whittling them down until they finally made the kill. And given the size of their empire and their reputed growth rates, they could keep supplying these suicide armies indefinitely.

There had been a large squabble between the Trinx and the other members of The Nine over their choice of allies and the means they were employing, as well as the price being paid to garner their aid. The Sety especially were adamant that they not give the Li’vorkrachnika tech upgrades, seeing that given the size to which the primitive race had already grown, even small additions could have a snowball effect and come back to hurt them later on. Technically the Nexus was already at war with the Li’vorkrachnika, though while they were a large threat in number they were still a minor one as far as power was concerned.

But if the Trinx gave them even a piece of their own technological capability they’d become an enemy that the Nexus would be hard pressed to deal with even if it turned its full attention toward them.

The success of the Li’vorkrachnika in helping the Trinx keep the Hamoriti from spreading its minions had made several members of The Nine hesitant to complain further, but the Sety were adamant that they could not jeopardize the future in exchange for this stalemate. Technological superiority was not something that came easily, and the weapon upgrades the Trinx had given them were the equivalent of more than a millennium of research.

That was small for a race that had been around in prominence for over a million years, and in truth many races jumped the learning curve by acquiring tech from others, either through diplomacy, trade, or conquest, but the way the Li’vorkrachnika operated was so dangerously aggressive that arming them was a mistake that the Sety did not want to make, though the Trinx were beyond their control and would not alter their course of action.

The cyborg ship had been sent to the Hamoriti location to monitor exactly what was occurring, rather than relying on either Sety or Trinx reports. It was breaking with their ‘stay clear of the Hamoriti’ protocols, but by using the probes it was deemed an acceptable risk, for even if they were destroyed the ship itself would be outside the psionic range of the beast…though exactly what the safe distance was no one knew for certain.

Tracking the Hamoriti subsurface was difficult, even from low orbit, for scanning through solid rock was nearly impossible. The Sety and Trinx were both bombarding the planet with active sensors of a type that the probes could pick up the reflections from, hence they were also able to get a point position on the beast, though nothing more. That was due to the composition of the Hamoriti and it being somewhat more dense than the rock itself, for the energy beams being used were so nonreactive to matter they could only pick up huge variations.

Ships in orbit were invisible to them, for they didn’t produce a reflection unless they had shields up. The inner core of the planet also gave back a small variation, due to the increasing density of the molten material under such heavy pressure, but the Hamoriti’s bulk was so highly concentrated with corovon that it offered enough of a ‘ping’ on the sensors for the cyborgs to see where it was at all times.

Seeing what it was doing, however, was beyond them unless it came up into the crust and other more detailed sensors came into workable range.

It was those that had been failing the Trinx as of late, for the more rock between them and the target the less effective they were. Either the Hamoriti knew this or it was just getting lucky, for the more recent minion spawn points were deep enough to go unnoticed until they branched out through tunnels they dug themselves, heading closer to the surface. Events like this suggested that the Trinx’s hold on the Hamoriti’s progress was coming to an end sooner or later, but they stubbornly kept fighting the minions back with the never ending supply of Li’vorkrachnika available to them and, for the moment at least, seemed to be proving the Chamra and the rest of The Nine wrong.

Monitoring the activity on and in the planet was routine and boring, for the most part, but when the Hamoriti’s location began to drift towards the surface again the cyborg crew began taking notice, as did the Sety and Trinx fleets, for once it came within a few miles of the atmosphere they began moving out of planetary orbit. The Sety fleet retreated to another planet, with the bulk of the Trinx going with them and leaving only a small response task force behind.

The Li’vorkrachnika ships headed out too, pacing the main Trinx fleet that they were seemingly glued to, for they kept well away from the Sety at all times. The two races hadn’t fought before, but the Li’vorkrachnika knew the Sety were part of the Nexus and chose to give them plenty of space.

On the surface there wasn’t much left of what had once been a Li’vorkrachnika world. A few colonies had been partially rebuilt to serve as firebases for the incoming armies to cycle through as they headed below ground, but what had originally been on the surface had been eventually destroyed by the Hamoriti in one form or another, with the beast literally leaving its footprints everywhere across the planet.

When it finally reached the surface it broke through like a volcano erupting, ramming the rock out of the way and bringing a magma plume out behind it that shot out like a geyser and rained down on the surrounding area. In time that would cool and harden over, but the Hamoriti didn’t stick around for that to happen, rather, it headed straight for orbit.

That sent alarms off in all four races’ ships and they scrambled to reposition, tracking its trajectory and seeing that it was once against headed for the star. The cyborg ship quickly made a microjump out to one of the other planets, not wanting to be anywhere near low stellar orbit when it arrived. The ship dropped a probe in its wake, then sat back and watched from afar as the Hamoriti braked against the star and began to drift down into a low orbit, traveling around to what jumpline no one knew.

The fleets would have to reposition there again, and the cyborg ship would go with them, but there were still minions here that had to be eradicated, meaning that the Hamoriti had just won its first victory in that it was making The Nine fight in two locations simultaneously…or at least it would when it arrived at its next system.

Dropping into an extremely low orbit, the Hamoriti angled down near to the highly volatile stellar ‘atmosphere’ and the sensor readings began to diminish. A few moments later they lost all contact with the Hamoriti.

It hadn’t jumped out, that much the cyborgs knew and they reviewed recent telemetry to make sure. They conferred with the Trinx, who had sent ships in to the star behind the Hamoriti, and they too had lost contact with it, stating that the beast had gone too far down for them to be able to track, into the outermost layer of the star itself.

The first thought anyone had was that the Hamoriti was trying to hide its jumpline, circling around to a different position where it could sneak out unnoticed, so the Trinx deployed ships all around the star in a detection grid. They waited, but nothing came out, which had them wondering if it had somehow beaten them around to the backside and jumped away unnoticed, which would be a disaster. Without knowing where it had gone they couldn’t get to the minions in time to knock them down before they multiplied to dangerous levels.

The immediate talk was to get the rest of The Nine in the surrounding systems to start scouting and find it as quickly as possible, but after several hours of research on the star, for no one knew if the Hamoriti had left for sure or not, the cyborgs picked up on a tiny anomaly that they shared with the other two races.

There was a minor deviation in the stellar output, so small to easily go unnoticed, but with the right computerized screening it became reliably detectable, not so much in a solid position trace but a general area where there was less stellar output than there should be by a fraction of a percent. That would have been negligible, but the reduction didn’t fluctuate.

Their only conclusion could be that the Hamoriti had gone into the star itself and was creating a dead spot beneath the surface that ‘dimmed’ the surrounding area slightly.

The Sety immediately shot that theory down, for the Oracles had never said anything about the Hamoriti being able to travel inside stars. Coring into a planet was one thing, but burrowing into a star was quite another. It was certainly debatable whether or not a Hamoriti could survive it, or how long it could survive in there, but none of the others had ever done so as far as the Ancient records were concerned, so the Sety believed that it was either hiding in the atmosphere where they couldn’t see or it had indeed skirted surveillance and jumped out of the system.

The Trinx were unsure either way and suggested sending the scout order/request out anyway, citing that there was no time to figure out what had happened and that they had to pursue every possibility.

So the order went out, transmitted via interstellar comms that all three races had built into them. Those signals would then be picked up in nearby systems and retransmitted to others outside broadcast range, with each ship acting as a relay in regions where there was no such existing infrastructure.

Six days went by, with the cyborg ship returning to stellar orbit and monitoring the star’s output more closely, trying to determine what their ghost anomaly truly was. If the Hamoriti had made a jump, it might not even have reached its destination system yet, let alone have been found and reported. The comm signals still had a significant delay, so it could be weeks before it was found again under the best of circumstances.

But if it had months of anonymity to work with, the containment the Trinx had worked so hard to maintain would be all but impossible to regain. Then again, if the Li’vorkrachnika were willing to up their contribution the cyborgs weren’t going to write off the possibility completely. The more minions there were the greater their defensive ability became through overlapping cover, but it was still possible that, with enough numbers, they could be overwhelmed.

The math wasn’t good when you let the minions progress into phase 3, which saw the growth of much larger units. If it got that far the Li’vorkrachnika would be almost useless as far as their infantry was concerned, and only a series of major upgrades to their technology would bring them back into the fold, for their ability to fight came from being able to damage the enemy with each suicide wave. Reduce that damage down to a mere scratch and the primitives became virtually useless.

No matter how you looked at it, the present situation had gotten a lot worse.

But halfway through that sixth day the speculation ended as the Hamoriti rose back out from inside the star. The cyborg ship scrambled to get further away, making an immediate microjump, but the Hamoriti wasn’t nearby and didn’t care about the insignificant ship. It’s normally blue bulk was now glowing cherry red, like an ember pulled out of a fire, and it didn’t diminish with time as the Hamoriti gained more and more distance from the star, then made a microjump of its own.

It didn’t travel back to the planet, nor to any of the other planets. Where it went was…nowhere.

The Trinx and Sety fleets pursued it from a great distance, unsure of where it was going or if there was a hidden planet out there that for some reason they couldn’t detect. The odds of that were nil, but the Hamoriti was obviously traveling out away from the star for a reason and at a speed nowhere near sufficient to cross to another star.

In fact the Hamoriti began slowing after it got out past the orbit of the 3rd planet, with the star now being a small orb in the sky that paled in the distance compared to the red glow from the Hamoriti. When it eventually came to a stop, pulling on the star itself to slow down rather than braking against a destination gravity well, it held position for less than a minute, but long enough for the ships trailing it to realize that the creature had grown larger by approximately 20%.

As they began to theorize how that was possible and why the Oracles had never mentioned anything about stellar diving, a massive energy wave was emitted from the Hamoriti that traveled across the entire star system within a handful of seconds. Every sensor array that wasn’t shielded from line of sight was overloaded and knocked offline, blinding the fleets to what was happening to the Hamoriti and wrecking half of the internal systems within the Li’vorkrachnika ships.

When the cyborg ship finally rotated around to bring a few of its intact sensor arrays into alignment with the Hamoriti’s last known position they reacquired it, seeing that it was no longer glowing and had shrunken back down to its original size.

And it was moving again, heading into the star and subsequently making another microjump back to the planet. As it headed down to the surface it made a slight detour, traveling over to the position where the Li’vorkrachnika fleet now sat mostly helpless. The Trinx ships moved off, with only part of their sensors having been knocked out of order, but most of the more primitive ships were dead in the water.

Those that could still move did so, or tried. Only a handful were able to make microjumps out, and those were the ones who had been fortunate enough to be in the silhouette of others when the energy discharge came. They maneuvered around their incapacitated brethren and ran like hell as the Hamoriti moved right up into their fleet and emitted a tsunami discharge that, even without the added destructive power of the atmosphere, shredded every ship caught in the blast wave.

With that bit of cleanup done, the Hamoriti headed down into the atmosphere and sunk back into the planet’s surface, leaving the The Nine with no answers as to what had just happened.

9

May 23, 2729

Paquat System

Vikod (Trinx homeworld)

The Trinx Regent was standing inside the Ancient shell, plying the Oracle with further questions in a seemingly vain attempt to find some missed bit of information that the program held. Every question asked led to previously acquired answers, but the Regent refused to believe that the Ancients would have constructed an 8th prison and not have included it in the database. There had to be something else here to explain this, but after years of trying he and the others had not been able to discern anything new.

But the Regent kept trying anyway, for monitoring this Hamoriti was an endlessly boring job, though a vital one, given the stakes. A single misstep could see this Hamoriti released, and it was far larger than the one currently out in the galaxy. That one couldn’t be recaptured or killed, so it was unimaginable how much more dangerous this one would be if it escaped sedation…or perhaps it would be no different, for what did power levels matter when neither one could be defeated.

“Replay the events from timestamp 284 in the Descran System,” he told the Oracle, who complied with a slew of holograms that it began narrating.

“Minion incursion began with four seed ships dropping from orbit. Uncontested they set up…” the Oracle said, cutting off its sentence briefly before a loud, chilling sound rattled off in a 1.6 second duration that included 56 rapid fire beats. “Containment breach.”

The Regent froze, unable to think or move, but it wasn’t from the Hamoriti’s psionics. The shock of those two words stunned him into silence.

“Hamoriti internal activity spike detected, stimuli unknown. Automatic sedative increase…insufficient. Waking imminent. Recommend emergency sedation procedure, Regent.”

The Trinx shook itself from its haze and ran through the gap between shells, heading for the inner barrier and activating his wristbound comm. “Bring the vassals online immediately. Full emergency protocols and don’t wait for confirmation. Hit it as fast as you can.”

“Activating now, but we can’t identify the source.”

“I’m going to visually inspect the Hamoriti. If I’m compromised continue with full sedation measures until you run out of chemical. We cannot let this one escape.”

No further words were necessary on either end, with the Regent and others having trained for this day all of their lives, as had their forbearers. He didn’t know what was going on, but the Trinx knew they had to respond immediately. Any delay would allow the Hamoriti to wake further.

“Oracle, open the inner door,” he said to the air, with a hologram appearing beside him in the hallways as he ran through them.

“Opening. My internal sensors are clear. There is nothing within the chamber to have prompted this reaction. If you get too close to the Hamoriti you will succumb to its effects.”

“If there is an error in your sensors we have to know. My life is inconsequential compared to the deaths that will occur if Rigall is released,” he said, referring to the Ancient name given to this Hamoriti.

“I assure you, the chamber is clear,” the Oracle repeated. “Your machines are activating now.”

The Regent ran fast, faster than he’d ever run before, and arrived at the open doorway through the inner shell, stopping a few steps inside as the monster came into view. Its long tail was curled around its body just as it had been the last time he’d seen it, identical in position to every surveillance recording captured over the past million years. Whatever activity the Oracle’s sensors were detecting was purely internal at this point. The mountain of corovon-laced flesh hadn’t moved.

Situated several kilometers ahead were a sea of vassals moving about like ants around the base of the creature. They’d been put there long ago and were carrying no standard weapons, only containers of the chemical that they were now spraying on the Hamoriti from arm-launchers. Some were drenching the ‘skin’ at ground level with liquid streams while others were launching packets to impact higher up. All of the chemical goo absorbed on contact, but the Regent knew that if too much was applied to any one location the excess would slide off and fall to the floor, hence the need to spread it out.

The trouble was, the Hamoriti was huge and it took time for the chemical to cycle through its internal systems. The more active it became the faster it would circulate, but at its present state it would take minutes at the minimum for it to permeate throughout its body. On top of that there was no knowing what the stimuli was that was waking it, and without their being able to shut it down the chemical alone would not be enough.

“Status?” the Regent asked the hologram of the Oracle.

“Waking is continuing, but at a reduced ra…” the Regent heard, then suddenly there was a chorus of voices around him and he found himself laying on the ground staring up into several faces with the Oracle’s hologram hovering directly over him.

“He is regaining consciousness,” it said matter-of-factly.

“What…” he said, sitting up and looking around at the junior members of the monitoring team and one other Regent that had suddenly popped up all around him. “Status?”

“The Hamoriti is returning to slumber,” the other Regent answered. “The emergency procedures worked, but we have very little chemical remaining. If another instance occurs soon we will not be able to stop it.”

The Trinx tried to stand up but found his body unwilling to cooperate. He was stiff and feeling ill, with a massive headache pounding all the way down his headtails. His fellow Regent extended a hand over him and he took it, being pulled up to his feet painfully.

“You were caught in the freezing effect. Are you ill?”

“Yes, but not incapacitated. Oracle, have you determined the source of the breach?”

“None has been recorded. Method of stimuli remains unknown.”

“Check the recorders in the vassals.”

“We already have,” the other Regent said. “You’ve been frozen for two days.”

“How is that possible? I should have regained control of my body as soon as the Hamoriti’s effective radius diminished.”

“It only now did. The field expanded all the way out to the monitoring facility before receding. The Oracle says enough chemical has been applied, but it will take several more hours before the Hamoriti is fully dormant once again.”

“I do not understand,” the Regent said, looking at the Oracle’s hologram that had moved up above all of their heads. “The aura is not supposed to extend that far.”

“The Hamoriti’s passive aura does not. It awakened enough to put a small measure of conscious effort into the defense mechanism, then held the effort as it began returning to slumber. A delayed impulse, to be sure, and one that we have not recorded before. My analysis is ongoing and will continue through to full sedation.”

The Regent spun around, looking at the Hamoriti where the vassals were still surrounding it as tiny dots in the distance. The tail curl was still there, but it had changed position slightly.

“It moved?”

“For a period of 4 seconds, yes,” the Oracle confirmed. “A momentary stretch as it woke. Fortunately your emergency protocol was applied in time to prevent any further subconscious movement, else the motion would have added to the waking effect. Though the stimuli has not been detected, its effects are measureable. It occurred in a single moment, with a massive uptick in activity that began to spool on its own until the chemical surge took hold.”

“Are we producing more chemical?”

“We are now that the facility is no longer within the aura,” the other Regent explained.

“My replacement capabilities are operating at 100%,” the Oracle added. “Internal storage will be at full within 129 days, unless external materials are made available.”

“Do you have enough currently to maintain the sedation?”

“Remaining reserves are sufficient.”

“It’s almost over,” his peer said, placing a hand on his shaky shoulder. “We made it, barely.”

“Not until we know the source of the breach,” the Trinx said, swiping away a bit of blood on his lips, coming from somewhere in his mouth.

When the other Regent saw that he flicked a wrist in a gesture to his subordinates and two of them came forward. “I’ll stay until this is fully resolved. You have to get treatment now. Take him.”

“Find the breach,” he said as the pair of Trinx helped him walk on shaky legs with a support on each arm. “Nothing is safe until we do.”

Nesfa sat in his cubicle atop the command tower reading through the most recent batch of reports from the Hamoriti site, his dread growing by the day as the minion incursions subsurface were steadily increasing. His troops were hunting them down admirably, but the Hamoriti was growing more devious in its placement and putting them further and further underground, delaying the time of detection and often requiring the coring of new tunnels to get down to them.

The Li’vorkrachnika were still holding up their end of the agreement, devoting as many ground troops as necessary to suppress the minions and dying by the millions in order to accomplish it. That was their task, but Nesfa feared it was going to end up not being enough. By going underground the Hamoriti made it much harder to get at the minions, meaning that they were having to fight full battles against them, though the tradeoff was the Hamoriti itself wasn’t involved in those. Even its tsunami blast had its limits, and detonating it underground would surely destroy any minions it sought to protect, not to mention wouldn’t travel very far.

But it seemed to Nesfa that the Hamoriti, stalemated as it was, was slowly beginning to get the upper hand on them. The Trinx and Li’vorkrachnika were upping the pressure accordingly, but without assistance from The Nine he wasn’t sure how long they could maintain the current form of containment. If the Hamoriti didn’t change tactics again they had a chance, but Nesfa seriously doubted it would be so accommodating.

They really needed the Yisv down in those tunnels, for their close engagement skills would far surpass even the vassals against the minions, or so his analysis teams had told him. But no, the Yisv refused to come anywhere near the system the Hamoriti was currently in. Perhaps if it moved yet again they would offer to help clean up here, but that would still leave them losing ground and having to divide their forces up further. He needed the Yisv on the front lines, but their fear was holding them back, even with several years’ worth of information from the current battles to give them a feel for where they could safely insert themselves without having to go up against the Hamoriti itself.

But no, they and the others were basically conceding the spread of the minions. Vowed to reduce and slow their growth once it happened, but only to buy time for their races to pack up and run. The stupid fools. The Ancients had said if the Hamoriti were to get loose the entire galaxy would be in jeopardy. There was no safe place to run to, and even if they could make a jump to a nearby galaxy spur there was no guarantee that the Hamoriti couldn’t follow.

He appreciated the desire to survive, at least a bit longer, but he and the rest of the Trinx knew that the key to their continual survival was in stopping the minions from spreading in the first place, which was why his race was devoting their full resources to building vassals and feeding the Li’vorkrachnika the raw supplies they’d requested to help them build new worlds specifically for the production of ships and soldiers to devote to this fight.

For all they’d done, and proved they could do, the Trinx felt betrayed to still be the only race with the sense to do what was necessary. When would the others wake up and see what had to be done before it was too late?

The recent stirrings by the Hamoriti here had caused everything Nesfa was basing his containment efforts on to be questioned. How the beast had begun to wake up was still unknown, and worse yet the Oracle was unable to provide any data to corroborate with, for in all the history of this shell there had never been even the remotest glitch in the sedation. Had this been a technological malfunction he would have felt better, but both the Oracle and his own techs had confirmed that the shell was operating perfectly. What had awakened it was a mystery that was near to driving Nesfa mad, for it seemed like everything they had worked so hard for was being undercut, whether by The Nine or fate itself.

A message prompt pinged a priority alert and the Prefect pulled up the new file immediately, seeing that it was another status report from the Hamoriti site…though he wasn’t due to receive a transmission for several more days. Immediately fearing more bad news, the Prefect opened up the holographic document and began to read through it with his hearts beat increasing on reflex.

It had been routed to him immediately upon reception on Vikod, and his analysts hadn’t even gotten a chance to chew on it yet, but the Prefect knew instantly that the system-wide energy burst the Hamoriti had unleashed and used to disable the Li’vorkrachnika fleet was the cause of the disturbance here. Why the Oracles hadn’t been aware of this ability he didn’t know, and he was going to follow up on that immediately with another visit to the shell for a personal discussion with the Ancient program.

It was clear to him what had happened. The Hamoriti had sent out a call for help, or some other form of location ping, almost assuredly needing to soak up some kind of resource from the star in order to power a spherical emission potent enough to stretch across star systems. The power needed for that sort of thing was off the charts, for while a star produced an immense amount of stellar output every second, enough to fry an unshielded ship that got too close, when the same output was spread out across lightyears it was reduced down to a tiny pinprick of light.

The Hamoriti had to create something similar, and though he didn’t understand the dynamics of it the one here had received that call and begun to wake up.

As bad as that was, at least now they knew what they were dealing with. Assuming minimum range, Vikod was the only other Hamoriti location within transmission distance, but there was no way to know for sure how far that signal had reached. He doubted it could get all the way out to the others, but he immediately sent a communique to inquire as to the status of the other Hamoriti before finishing reading the report. That message was immediately sent out through an interstellar comm network linking the Trinx to The Nine, but it would take days to get a response and Nesfa needed information sooner rather than later.

If another Hamoriti had begun to awaken he didn’t know if they would be able to suppress it, for only this shell had vassals loaded with chemical as a backup plan in case the facility’s own measures failed. The others had their own systems in place, for The Nine had been too prudent to take chances after the near disaster with the Sety, but Nesfa’s people had only barely kept Rigall contained, so he feared for the others.

His gut told him the Hamoriti’s signal couldn’t travel that far, but with the way his luck was going he couldn’t count on anything. And what made him worry most was the possibility that there was a 9th shell out there somewhere within transmission range, one that wouldn’t have guardians in place with backup measures. They still hadn’t gotten any answers from the Oracles as to why there had been an unknown 8th, and when dealing with an enemy as insanely powerful as a Hamoriti, information was the only real weapon one had.

The Ancients had been wise to leave the Oracles behind with their knowledge of how to fight the minions, otherwise the Trinx would not have been prepared for this day. They’d been relying on the Ancients’ playbook in all of their preparations, trusting that they knew how to deal with this enemy, but these unknown factors that kept popping up, the latest being this interstellar transmission capability, made Nesfa wonder just how in the dark even the Ancients had been.

The Trinx weren’t their match, nor was the entirety of The Nine. How the hell were they expected to manage this disaster?

The fact that they still had the Hamoriti effectively contained to this point, as far as its minions were concerned, was shocking even to Nesfa, but they had been holding the line despite the assertions of hopelessness from the others. The Trinx hadn’t expected to actually stop the Hamoriti, but they had felt obligated to try and, as strange as the galaxy was, had somehow managed to do it up until this point. Every day hinged with uncertainty, and fate seemed determined to break them, but for the moment everything was holding together and he intended to make that last as long as possible.

When he finished reading the report he headed off to get transport over to the shaft that led down to the Ancient shell, taking the data file with him and hoping that the Oracle would be able to figure out how they could shield the facility from the Hamoriti’s transmissions before it happened again.

10

August 21, 2729

Pleissa System (Jonstar capitol)

Havbret

“I still don’t think this is a good idea,” Breeso said as he walked beside the war commander, with the pair of Jonstar headed to the exterior landing pad. “One misstep and you’ll be killed.”

“I am well aware of that,” Nicktori said evenly as the pair of quadrupeds came to an ascension ramp. They stepped on it and allowed themselves to be slowly dragged up to the higher levels of the military complex, giving the pair only a few minutes before the war commander would depart. “But the Trinx have proven that the Hamoriti can be contained. For how long I do not know, but every year we can buy gives our people more time to prepare for relocation…and if it is possible to maintain the containment indefinitely then it’s an avenue that we have to pursue.”

“I still say this is foolishness,” the civilian leader admitted, “but if anyone can make it work it’s you.”

“That’s why I’m going,” Nicktori said, sweeping his horse-like head to the left to throw Breeso a sarcastic look.

“We’re going to need you here, so don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“This entire mission is a risk.”

“Please don’t be difficult, I’m trying to instill some wisdom in you before you depart.”

“You have been trying for years, little brother, and still continue to fail because you do not realize that I am wiser than you.”

“Says the one going up against a Hamoriti.”

“It’s minions, not the Titan itself.”

“You think it’ll just stay put and let you trash its spawn points? It’s going to come after you.”

“If it does we will run. The Hamoriti have never been fast.”

“Their area of effect weaponry don’t require them to be. They just have to get close, and your Degars aren’t exactly nimble craft.”

“You are not telling me anything that I do not already know,” Nicktori said as they reached the top of the ramp and stepped off onto a wide promenade that had the exit doors to the landing pad on the far side. In between those and the two Jonstar were more than a dozen others, all of whom were security save for two, one of which was kin to them. “Final farewells?”

“If you can spare a moment?” their father and defacto ruler of the Jonstar asked, though most of the critical functions of running their empire fell to Breeso, Nicktori, and others.

“We can.”

“I hope this is not the last we see of one another, but if it is I want you to know that I will see to it that the time you buy us will not be squandered. Furthermore, there has been a small lead turned up. I am sending Yesvo to follow it. I do not hope, but it must be investigated regardless.”

“What kind of lead?” Breeso asked, this being the first he’d heard of it as well.

“Previously unknown coordinates of an Ancient world found in the local lore of a race that predates us. It was an obscure reference, but we’ve managed to calculate the system in question. It is in unclaimed space beyond the Frektordan. Perhaps we will discover something of use there, perhaps not.”

“Hopefully not another Hamoriti,” Nicktori said, glancing at his closest advisor who was waiting along with his father. “Are we set?”

“They need another hour and a half, then we’ll be fully provisioned.”

The war commander turned to his brother. “Make sure the supply convoy is assembled quickly. I do not know how rapidly we will expend our ammunition, and I know you have more pressing concerns to deal with here…”

“You’ll have what you need,” Breeso interrupted him. “Fire at will…and a keep a tally of the minion kills for your reports. The people need to see that we can indeed fight back, even if not against the Hamoriti itself. Please don’t make me have to tell them you died in a vain attempt.”

“Your confidence is underwhelming,” Nicktori said sarcastically.

“None since the Ancients have fought these beings,” their father said with caution. “Learn, adapt, and do not hesitate to fall back. An unfamiliar enemy can often win the day with the element of surprise…and we are also unknown to the Hamoriti.”

“Well said,” Nicktori agreed, lowering his head slightly. His father did likewise and they touched the thick, natural armor there in a quick gesture of respect and kinship. The war commander kicked his brother in the leg, then winked as he and his advisor walked the remaining steps to the doors that would take them outside to their waiting transport.

“I hope he knows what he’s doing,” Breeso said warily.

“With the Hamoriti loose there are no certainties anymore. He is playing a gamble, and even he does not know how it will turn out.”

A month and a half later...

A fleet of Li’vorkrachnika cruisers descended from orbit, passing through the still warm atmosphere from the latest tsunami attack. A third of the small firebases they’d set up on the surface to facilitate the teams fighting underground had just been taken out in a handful of seconds, but there was no time to waste with concern. The Hamoriti had gone back underground again and two of the as yet untouched minion spawn sites had grown to the point where they were building small connecting tunnels to the surface.

Out of those tunnels small minion flyers were emerging, even smaller than the Li’vorkrachnika wisps, but armed with a potent energy weapon that emitted from their heads. They had ambushed a few transports headed to ground with more troops, then the Trinx had ordered the continuous convoys pulled back just prior to the Hamoriti surfacing and toasting their bases in the southern hemisphere. With it now gone again, leaving a magma spewing geyser a half mile wide in its wake, the minion fliers had to be dealt with before the transports could fly troops in to the surface entrance to deal with the base itself.

At present there were 18 different minion spawn sites that were known about, with the Hamoriti spending most of its time deep within the planet and bouncing around from point to point, harvesting resources it was assumed, but other than a crude position fix they didn’t know what it was doing down there. Once Trinx and Li’vorkrachnika ground troops engaged a minion site the Hamoriti didn’t involve itself, probably for fear of damaging the minions at the same time, but if it could catch the invading troops on the surface it would do so, coming up anywhere within a thousand miles and releasing a tsunami.

That meant the troops heading down to fight below ground had to get there quickly, and without the firebases the Hamoriti had just wiped off the map that was going to be even more difficult. They hadn’t been situated near any of the minion sites, and to date that had kept them off the Hamoriti’s hit list, but apparently no longer. Every time they adapted to the creature the creature adapted back, turning this growing war into an unstable and unpredictable affair.

The Trinx campaign commander watched from orbit around another planet, feeding instructions to the ships on site and to the Li’vorkrachnika while staying safely away from the Hamoriti. Chosan was one of the wisest of the Trinx generals, and Nesfa had personally entrusted him with this never-ending task, but the Hamoriti was demonstrating considerable strategic skill. More so even than the Ancient records had indicated, though back in those days the minion swarms were the main nemesis they had fought, with the direct Hamoriti conflicts reserved for the last days of that great war.

As valuable as the insights were that the Ancients had left behind, Chosan was having to write a new book of engagement as time progressed, and he was afraid the learning curve was allowing the Hamoriti to gain ground. It wasn’t much, but whereas before they’d been dealing with one minion spawn site, now there were many. He was probing some of them with orbital fire, burning straight down through the rock with pinprick attacks, but those didn’t do much more than cut tunnels for his expeditionary vassals to move down through, and more often than not those had to cut out other tunnels to allow the Li’vorkrachnika down.

A quick look at the cruisers and Chosan ordered one of their few vassal warships to catch up to them before they engaged the flyers. Dropping like a rock it shot down from orbit and into the atmosphere, creating a fireball in the process that lit up the ashy sky in a long plume. When it eventually slowed the friction on its shields lessened and view of the red hull plates returned just in time for it to drop in above the cruisers as the minion flyers were coming up at them from below.

Little lines of blue energy, looking impossibly thin from a distance, began shooting up and hitting the cruisers as much larger green plasma orbs fired back down at them. Almost all of the Li’vorkrachnika ships sent to fight the minions were still equipped with their old weapons, but while the plasma was not as potent as the Vichsam it was still effective in such large amounts. One hit would have killed a wisp on contact, coming from a naval battery, but against the minions it would take five or six such hits to drop them out of the sky, making the tiny flyers extremely resilient.

The vassal warship was another matter. Its weaponry was varied and built specifically for killing minions in all their forms, including a large number of small klixon cannons that were one hitting the flyers and taking down dozens per second once the ship entered the fray and took point. The tiny blue beams from the minions only scratched its shields, but they racked up considerable damage to the cruisers’ protective energy barriers, eventually taking them down and slicing through the yellow/tan hull armor with each pinprick strike.

But the cruisers were warships, far outmassing the tiny flyers, and even as primitive as they were they did not go down quickly. That said, there were tens of thousands of the minions coming up out of the surface tunnels and heading towards them, with the first Li’vorkrachnika cruiser going down some 12 minutes into the fight. After that they began dropping like rocks as the attrition damage mounted, but they were likewise killing so many of the minions that the single vassal could handle the rest without being overwhelmed itself.

Chosan watched the battle along with reports coming in from others below ground, which was how he spent most of his days. He slept as little as possible, for fear of the Hamoriti pulling another bit of strategic magic and gaining an advantage. When he was out of touch with current events his juniors took over, and while he would have trusted them with virtually any other opponent, facing a Hamoriti was the stuff of legends and he couldn’t bring himself to relax even when he was attempting to rest.

That constant pressure was taking a toll on his body, but there was no way around it. This campaign had galaxy-spanning implications and, without hyperbole, was the most important duty his race had ever undertaken.

A signal from the Sety ships in stellar orbit informed him that there were incoming jumps to the star, which drew only minor attention, for the Li’vorkrachnika had jumpships coming and going constantly now that their planet had been effectively taken over by the Hamoriti. None of their people left on the surface were still alive, save for those currently fighting underground and stationed in the remaining firebases. How long those would stay operational Chosan didn’t know, for all it would take was the Hamoriti popping up and repeating the last attack. Why it didn’t take them out already might have been a question of resources, or maybe it just hadn’t noticed them there yet.

He doubted that, but without minion scouts across the planet there was a question as to how much sensing capability the Hamoriti had. Chosan chose to assume a lot, but he didn’t order the Li’vorkrachnika bases evacuated. So long as they were operational they were serving a purpose, with flocks of their little transports hauling troops over to the access shafts they’d cut to get down to the other minion sites.

When the information on the incoming fleet crossed his screen he didn’t even bother to look at it, focused as he was on the minion flyer battle that was costing the Li’vorkrachnika dearly. He was considering sending in another vassal, but since this was the first engagement against this new type of minion he didn’t want to risk a second one just yet. If there were to be any surprises, let the Li’vorkrachnika’s pathetic ships take the hit. His vassals were too rare and powerful to waste on uncertain strikes.

He’d only sent the one because he suspected the Li’vorkrachnika fleet couldn’t handle the task on its own…at least not without sending 20 times that number of ships, and he didn’t want to waste them in such a manner without sufficient cause. He knew well that only a joint war would be effective, and sending the Li’vorkrachnika in on their own in most cases would just end up with a no value slaughter. As it was they were dying left and right to accomplish even minor gains, but those gains were setting up the Trinx to accomplish the primary goals and root out the minion spawning sites, forcing the Hamoriti to begin them again and taking away their ability to reproduce on their own.

It wasn’t until Chosan received an incoming comm did he realize that the newly arrived fleet wasn’t Li’vorkrachnika.

“Commander,” a Jonstar said, with its large, intimidating eyes being a welcome comfort to his own. “I apologize for our lateness, but we stand ready to assist you.”

Chosan remained silent for a pair of seconds, feeling the first bit of relief in years, then he wasted no further time. “I need an immediate orbital strike on two minion locations. They have access tunnels reaching to the surface and I need you to target down them, maximum yield.”

“Gladly,” Nicktori said. “I presume the Hamoriti is below ground at present?”

“It is.”

“Do you have an estimate as to how quickly it can resurface?”

“Its speed varies, but at present,” Chosan said, checking his map screens, “estimate no less than 38 minutes from atmosphere. You should be able to strike before you have a chance to get caught out.”

“Has it demonstrated an ability to attack while below ground?”

“No.”

“Well enough. Send the coordinates.”

Chosan looked to one of his subordinates, who immediately sent the information to the Jonstar fleet. “Done.”

“Pull your ships back,” Nicktori said, seeing that there was a current engagement going on in the atmosphere nearby. “There’s going to be spillover, even if we directly hit the shaft.”

“They’ll be gone by the time you’re in position…and thank you.”

“We should have been here long before now,” the Jonstar admitted.

Chosan nodded, then cut the comm as he watched the newly arrived ships break up. There were six super-large ones, two of which began heading down towards the atmosphere while the others and the smaller support ships picked a holding orbit and moved towards it off the stellar jumpline they’d arrived on.

The two massive cone-shaped ships sank slowly down through the atmosphere over the pair of sites, eventually stalling out a handful of miles above each. The minion flyers, those few that were still coming up out of the tunnels after the vassal and Li’vorkrachnika had destroyed the others, shot directly up to target the huge ships, but their tiny weapons had no effect. They swirled about the point of the two cones, each of which was pointing down towards an individual tunnel shaft, and fired with impunity at the Jonstar vessels as both summoned up an internal charge that began to crackle around the exterior of the ship points in a fiery orange cascade.

The effect grew as the charge increased, turning the tip of each ship into an inverted Christmas tree of lethal lights that moved about in an unpredictable, chaotic pattern. It was all held against the ship’s surface until the southernmost vessel finally released its charge after a few minutes of building to maximum power, sending an intensely bright beam of orange straight down into the tunnel below.

The energy vaporized the surrounding rock and punched down with a kinetic tremor that rippled out across the landscape, followed immediately by a series of others, as if the ship was pounding the planet with an insanely big machine gun. A plume of debris built up around the tunnel shaft, expanding outward like a donut and mixed with stray orange energy arcs that bounced from one bit of rock to another, destroying everything on the surface within several miles around the impact site.

But the largest damage came down through the shaft, expanding on it and pumping raw destructive energy through into the minion spawning site miles below, burning out their cocooned flyers, tank minions, and every other type of living weapon they had begun to produce, as well as the biological factories that were growing them at an insanely rapid pace.

It took more than 8 seconds for the Jonstar weapon to release its full charge into the planet, with the second ship doing likewise over its minion site shortly thereafter and both ships immediately retreating to space to avoid any chance of being caught by the Hamoriti.

Chosan collapsed in his seat, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands as his fatigue seemed to catch up with him as his mind finally allowed itself to relax. While the Sety were here they were pretty much observers so long as the Hamoriti stayed on the same planet, but now that the Jonstar had arrived the Trinx no longer stood alone. Two of The Nine were here, with their unique tech complementing each other and giving Chosan some badly needed assets in this fight. Even if the Jonstar didn’t intend to send down any ground troops, their Degars’ colosat bombardment capability would allow them to take out minion sites near the surface, and any connecting tunnels they chose to build would just act as conduits to reach even deeper within the planet.

The Trinx looked at the present position of the Hamoriti, which was still meandering about near the planet’s core.

“Your move now.”

Marauders

1

August 3, 2734

Deeran System (Benoid)

Wexfa

Wixxi ran through the forest following the small trail that connected their frontier villages as she stared up into the sky where there was an occasional break in the yellow canopy. Up high there was a ship was descending, and it was Star Force. At first the Hevmaj thought it was right over their heads, but she didn’t grasp the size of the thing until a few aeroships passed underneath it. They were flying high already and the little fuzzball had thought they were going to pass over top of it, but when the reverse happened she realized that this was something bigger than big and had jumped out of the treehouse she was in and began running to the nearest village.

Wixxi’s stubby legs moved as rapidly as possible, hopping over a few puddles on the trail and otherwise trying to avoid the rocks and roots that had been exposed after the recent storm. It had dropped so much water that the rivers had flooded…something that hadn’t happened in more than a century.

The rain had very rarely used to come to her continent, with the forests being dry scrubs for the most part, but ever since the Hevmaj had joined Star Force things had changed rapidly. The rain was something new, and coming on the heels of several atmospheric adjustments that were being made. Though Wixxi didn’t fully understand what they were doing, she’d learned in the maturia that there were large pockets of water beneath the surface, and that Star Force was tapping those to create subsurface structures.

The water they took out was then being shunted up to the surface, with the humidity of the planet gradually increasing. That had produced an escalating climate change that was causing the forests covering her continent to grow rapidly, and even a few ‘lakes’ had been created. Previously all surface water had been located on other continents, but now the central landmass was beginning to become dotted with shimmering pools that many of the older Hevmaj still couldn’t believe were actually here.

Wixxi continued to run as the giant ship came closer to the surface, with her guessing it was headed for the large plain that had been cut out of the forest further to the south. There was no way she could run all the way there, but in the village there were high observation posts open to the public and that’s where she intended to go, hopefully being able to see what was happening before they got too crowded.

It took a few more minutes before she reached the edge of the village and the thick yellow trees disappeared, with her bare paws crossing over from dirt to synthetic paving stones. They were impossibly smooth, yet grippy, and covered the narrow walkways running between the 14 tree-like buildings that made up this village. Wixxi’s continent wasn’t densely inhabited like the others were, but rather dotted with tiny villages that allowed the large tracks of forest to be preserved rather than cut down and replaced with the magnificent cities that Star Force had taught the Hevmaj to build.

They’d been here all her life, and she’d grown up in one of their maturia, but now that she’d chosen to live on the frontier Wixxi had met many older Hevmaj that told her stories of the times before, and it seemed like most of them had chosen to migrate away from the magnificent cities and cluster here, where they could live in relative isolation, given that the Star Force empire was so different from what they’d originally known that they could never become completely comfortable with the changes, at least not in the major population centers.

They weren’t naysayers, fortunately, and Wixxi found that she rather liked the odd Hevmaj. She wasn’t one to work, rather simply living her life on the spur of the moment and doing what she liked. Most of that time was spent in the forest, exploring and just soaking in the natural environment that had been absent from her maturia training. What she would do tomorrow she didn’t know, nor care. All that concerned her was the moment, and right now there was something big going on that she wanted to see.

Wixxi ran through the narrow streets and darted inside one of the three tallest structures, heading up a stairwell with considerable effort and coming out on the top level breathless, sucking in heavy puffs of the argon-rich atmosphere that the Hevmaj breathed. The Star Force people didn’t, and had to wear masks whenever they went outside. Likewise the Hevmaj, if any of them were to go into the few oxygen-rich cities, had to wear their own else they’d take in the poison. Because of this there was a stark divide between the empire and the Hevmaj. They were part of Star Force, but a disconnected piece of it that could never fully integrate with the oxygen breathers.

The same was true of the other races in the Benoid, all of whom had also joined the empire. They could either breathe their air or at least exist in it, save for the Vonx, who were fully aquatic and couldn’t breathe atmosphere at all. Even within the Benoid the Hevmaj had been necessarily separated from the others, or so Wixxi had been told, but they’d always kept close ties with the others how and when they could. The same was true now that they were part of Star Force, yet the physical limitations of their race always kept them distant.

Which was why it was rare to see one of the Star Force ships on the surface of the planet. Normally they’d dock with starports in orbit and transfer supplies there that the Hevmaj ships would bring down, but this was even more rare, for her continent saw almost no traffic at all, and the size of the ship was so big that it could have held the population of the nearest 100 villages with ease.

When Wixxi finally got her breath she pushed her way through the other 8 Hevmaj and got a place on the window that stretched the entire length around the tower top, staring out silently with the others as they saw the giant ship finally touch down in the clearing. She’d come up here before, using a telescopic viewer to watch the clearing being cut so far away. She would have walked there to see it in person, but it was very far away. Fortunately, the building was taller than the forest by quite a bit and allowed enough of an angle to let her and the others see a great distance, including the tower tops of the nearby villages that all stuck up above the sea of yellow leaves that carpeted the landscape like a big, fluffy blanket.

But off in the distance the ship that had landed stood taller than even the towers, with its size almost fully encompassing the plain that had been cut by Hevmaj workers. Wixxi was pretty sure that there weren’t Hevmaj in this ship, and pulling her viewer out of a small pocket on her utility belt and used it to zoom in enough that she could pick out individual trees.

It took a while to find one of the entrances on the giant ship, but when she did she saw a ramp half lowered and disappearing below the tree line. Wixxi couldn’t see the ground, but she could see what was coming off the ship.

They were construction mechs, and there were a lot of them. She knew what they were based on her maturia training, but she’d never seen more than a handful in person. Some had been used to build a neighboring village two years ago, but these were much bigger and pouring out of the giant ship. Wixxi watched for several minutes before cargo crates and bundled machinery started to follow, being brought out on anti-grav sleds. The mechs would be using it to do what, the Hevmaj couldn’t make out. Until the machinery deployed she couldn’t tell what it was for, and unfortunately the tree line was in the way.

She couldn’t see anything below the ramp, and even the mechs were shorter than the trees…or at least most of them were. A few monster versions could be seen roaming around the ship, but other than a few meters of mech Wixxi couldn’t see anything.

That didn’t matter, for she and the others stayed there for a quite a while watching the offloading and trying to catch any glimpse of activity that they could. No one knew what was going on, but whatever it was it was big.

At least for their little corner of the frontier continent.

Mandy Garrison walked down one of the MCV’s many ramps, following the last of the mechs out of the atmospheric containment field that separated the ship’s interior from the oxygen-less atmosphere. The Human tech wore a full body suit of light armor that had an attached pack with enough air to last more than 24 hours.

The soft, wet ground past the ramp was now a mess of mud thanks to the mechs, but she didn’t care. Her armor was completely self-contained so, even as her dark green boots sank into the inch of muddy water and depressed twice that far, she pushed through and began following the mech trail not caring about how dirty she got. None of it would reach her skin, and she’d learned from many past construction missions that the grime was just part of the job. Once they got this site properly conditioned the wildness of it would be replaced with Star Force infrastructure.

Until then, she and the others got to play in the mud.

Mandy was the only Human on the MCV, with the rest of the crew and workers being comprised of Kiritak. Now that the trade route between the Benoid and the ADZ was up and running, a lot of new faces were showing up in the mini empire, herself included. Regular jumpship traffic was moving along the route, with citizens now able to book passage whenever they liked. The trade routes had even moved out past the Benoid now, with the cluster of systems becoming a central hub with four other spurs branching off of it out into the surrounding region, establishing a Star Force presence in the huge tract of stars that was many times the size of the ADZ and beyond their control.

Key to it all was their military, and the Benoid already had a sizeable fleet patrolling its 7 systems, plus a handful of Sentinels in each, but that was just the first few phases of development. Mandy had been sent here with her crew of Kiritak to begin carving out a subsurface military base that would be recovered with forest after construction was complete. Wexfa already had several military bases located on other continents, both made up of Hevmaj and mainline troops, but in order to more firmly secure this world there needed to be other bases, some of which were clandestine.

This project was for one such facility, and while they weren’t going to try and disguise the construction site, most of what they built would be below ground and therefore not visible for others to see. The location of this future base might become public knowledge, but such things often faded with time and the remoteness of this continent, which Star Force intended to keep remote and virtually unpopulated, would make it a different type of challenge for any invading army to overcome.

The more varied a planetary defense plan was, the greater longevity it would allow. Right now the planet was safe, but only with a couple of layers of protection. This base and others slated to be built in the coming decades would add another layer, though with resources always being a limitation this was a significant project that she’d been entrusted with.

Mandy had learned that a lot of races outside of Star Force only built what they thought they would need, and a lot of times that proved to be insufficient when the time of crisis came. Star Force built to be ready for more than they expected, and were always adding additional layers of defense, even on Earth, as time progressed. It could have been deemed as wasteful when these resources could have gone to establishing new colonies or additional habitats for the ever growing Hevmaj population, but when an attack came you didn’t want to be in the position of wishing for more military resources.

And those resources had to be built during times when they seemed extraneous.

The lizard front was still approaching, but its rapid progress had been reduced down to a creep thanks to Canderous’ activities within the region. That said, the lizards were still expanding elsewhere and flanking the protected region that Star Force was securing as much as it reasonably could. It was never enough, and lizard incursions were still occurring around the perimeter. Mandy didn’t know if they’d ever get this far, and if they did it would be after fighting through several other defense forces, but the key to holding territory was in the creation of strongholds that you could fall back to if things went poorly for you and good for the enemy.

This planet wasn’t a stronghold yet, though the Hevmaj and others might think so given the upgrades Star Force had made. The base Mandy and the Kiritak were about to build would be designed for the Bsidd, who would eventually be depositing a large amount of troops in the system. When they did the ‘stronghold’ status would ensue, but they couldn’t come until enough facilities were constructed, both on planet and in orbit, which was why Mandy and this MCV had been sent along with 9 others to the system.

The tech hopped out of the mech tracks and got to the short grass that had yet to be smashed into nonexistence. Staying on it she paralleled the mechs’ path and followed them out to the various depots they were creating with stacks of crates and equipment, ending up at the coring machine as it was set in place. The giant slab of machinery had been cobbled together from multiple sections and now stood like a thick, square brick that had squashed itself into the mud, but there was an access staircase on the near side and Mandy jogged across the mech ruts, getting to it and climbing up before the next one strode past.

There were no workers outside the ship save for those in the mechs as of yet, with Mandy being the only person on the ground. It would stay that way until she gave the order, and she was going to hold off on the heavy work until they got the site cleaned up a bit. The Kiritak were more mobile than she was, given their hopping ability, but she wasn’t going to have them moving around in the muck, which was damn distracting and tiresome.

Mandy got to the control station on the outside of the slab of machinery and confirmed that the various segments had been locked together into workable order. With a final check of the area to see if the mechs had retreated back far enough, which they had, she powered up the internal reactor and brought the mass to life.

With the press of a button several arms lifted out of the smooth surface as the machine began to transform, unfurling like a giant flower and sending various legs out to the sides that dove down into the muck and created grip points. About four minutes later the base of the machine lifted off the ground, pulling Mandy up into the air with it as some of the legs became rigid and inserted into the soil below as pylons, fixing the now elevated platform in place as various other arms and legs stretched out and created a perimeter around the dig site.

Energy shields colored to be visible to the workers snapped into place on the underside while extendable walkways formed outside, including an addition to the staircase that Mandy had climbed up. Once fully deployed, the mobile rig was set to begin cutting down into the muck and the bedrock beneath it. The tech held off on that, needing a crew onboard to handle the machine so that it didn’t eat out the very ground it stood on, but before that happened it was time to create some roads.

Mandy left the coring machine and walked across to several other packaged machines that needed activating while the mechs unloaded the last of the initial equipment, then they also went through a transformation, brandishing small scale digging equipment of their own which they began sinking into the muck at various points where the Human indicated, scooping it up and carrying it over to several dump sites around the perimeter, forming a ridge-like mound that started to stretch around the square edge of the clearing as they continued to add more and more material to it.

When they got a stretch of nearly half a mile long cleared out from the area in front of the ramp, Mandy ordered the next set of crews to come out. Several small hovering craft flew down carrying stacks of panels which they first deposited at the foot of the ramp. With the rest of the small convoy holding on the ramp and within, floating in place patiently, a few Kiritak clad in their own environmental armor unloaded and unfolded the ‘road’ plates, further scraping and smoothing the exposed areas of ground before laying down the first section, which was 12 meters square after unfolding and 1.3 meters thick.

When that one was set they added three more on the sides of it, excluding where the ramp now was, with the convoy beginning to come down and unload more plates as more and more workers were given workspace to use. They continued to add to the grid, locking them together like legos and creating an offloading plaza that they then began expanding into much narrower roads that stretched around the perimeter of the MCV and eventually connected to each piece of machinery that Mandy had went around and activated.

When a road spur finally connected, the Kiritak workers would come with it, traveling on the smooth paving stones and avoiding the mass of muck around them, with the ground water now leaking into the small trenches alongside and outlining the roads with tiny, muddy moats.

When the roads hit the coring machine Mandy returned along with the work crew, seeing to it that they got underway. She didn’t need to issue any orders other than to get to work, so the tech just watched from a distance, standing on the edge of the loading platform the road plates had made nearby as several mechs waited beside her.

With a huge lurch a drilling pylon dove down from the center of the machine like a spike and ate into the muck beneath. Within a few moments that material was shot out another arm on the machine where it fell into an open collection crate that was the equivalent of a huge bucket. Mandy watched it fill up, then the spout shut off and a mech walked up to remove it as the mud and dirt, soon to become mixed with rock from below, began flowing out another arm into more waiting crates so there would be no delay.

The mech behind Mandy picked up an empty crate and moved it into the open slot while the full one was carried away down the road then off it and onto the mech tracks that led to the perimeter mound. The Kiritak at the controls tipped the crate over and dumped the material on top of what was already there, piling it up higher in a wall that would eventually encircle the construction site.

Mandy liked how procedure had them build their own little fort out of the excess material, and this one was going to get some very high walls before they were done. Those walls would eventually be cannibalized by factories within the MCV and sorted into various useable materials, nearly all of which would be shipped elsewhere. Everything in this base was going to be built from parts shipped in, but the ground they were hollowing out had to go someplace.

Star Force would find a use for it somewhere on the planet, in one form or another. That wasn’t Mandy’s concern, she was just here to dig and build, which right now meant playing in the mud.

As one of the walkers came back by her it stomped on the road plates, leaving a trail of mud behind and smacking tiny bits of it up into the air with each step, some of which splattered Mandy’s faceplate. The energy shield covering it didn’t allow any of it to stick, but the rest of her green armor was already dotted with brown and she knew it’d get far worse as the day went on, especially given the rain clouds to the south that were slowly making their way closer.

The tech sighed. At least on the inside of her armor she was clean.

2

Garen-248 was reading the display holos over his desk, noting the update ping that the construction of the Bsidd base had just begun, when something hit him in the back of the head. He spun around in his chair and saw a food cube on the floor, as well as sensing a familiar mind in the doorway. Before even looking at her he telekinetically picked up the cookie and flew it into his mouth, then left the chair spinning as he stood up.

“Three second rule still applies, I assume?” he asked Victoria-243, who was holding and munching on a handful of the snacks.

“Not on a clean floor.”

“I wasn’t expecting you back. What’s up?”

“New assignment. Davis didn’t like what you’ve been doing so he’s giving you the boot.”

“If you’re going to lie at least make it sound genuine.”

“You sucking sounds genuine to me,” Victoria said, stepping forward and giving Garen a friendly hug while carefully cradling her stash in her hand. She hadn’t seen him in over two decades. “I’m passing through, just wanted to stop in and say hi.”

“Where to?”

“Taking a fleet up the trade routes to do some patrolling. No more empire building for me, just pirate hunting and shooting other types of bad guys. How are you doing?”

“You mean since I took over your job and all the others? Slow and steady progress.”

“I still think you should have come back with us. The hard work was over.”

“Some days I agree, but the Benoid is better off for me staying…and don’t argue that point. I know the Hevmaj better than anyone, and bringing in less familiar Archons to take the lead would have led to inefficiencies. We need the Benoid as a stronghold, both militarily and economically to stabilize this region, and the sooner the better, else the trade routes are going to get very dicey.”

“They already are, which is why I’m here. I assume you’ve read the reports?”

“The attempted hijackings? Yes.”

“No, the successful ones.”

Garen frowned. “When did we lose a ship?”

“Not us, our trading partners. Their ships have been getting hit after they leave the commerce planets and its diminishing the incentive of weaker races to do business with us. I’m here to hunt the hunters and restore peace and justice to the galaxy,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll be stopping in for resupply from time to time. This is going to be my fleet’s port of call, so make sure your appropriations adjust adequately.”

“Glad to have you in the neighborhood, but I don’t like the idea of you sucking up all my replacement drones.”

“I don’t plan on losing many, but I would suggest you enlarging your prison facilities. I don’t plan to shoot everyone.”

“Bringing some trophies back?”

“Who knows, but I need some place to stash them if I do. And so far your multi-racial facilities are minimal.”

“We only have one at present, and it barely gets any guests. Did Davis send you?”

“Steve did, but he said Davis was urging us to push the trade routes harder. He really wants a connection to the Voku, more so than branching out first.”

“We’re a long ways from that. What does he expect to get from them anyway?”

Victoria smiled. “That’s what you get for hiding out here. Paul and Cal-com are working some master strategy together, and Davis is in on it. Star Force and the Voku are unofficially joining each other.”

“Why hasn’t that been in any of the updates? I do monitor the boards you know, even if they are on a stupidly long delay.”

“This isn’t public knowledge yet.”

“We’re Archons.”

“This isn’t known to anyone yet, and is traveling through word of mouth. We’re kind of still feeling out what a merger would look like.”

“We?”

“The trailblazers are asking for suggestions.”

Garen huffed. “That’s a first.”

“Not so much. What they’re talking about is a lot of low level interaction with the Voku, the sort of stuff they’d never get involved with. Us lessers do, so they want to brainstorm. Nothing official, and it’s not like they’re taking a vote, but they’re quietly asking around and Steve wanted me to have a chat with you about the Benoid while I’m here.”

Garen looked over his shoulder and telekinetically dragged two chairs over, sliding one behind his fellow Archon. “We’re not talking militarily here, I assume,” he said, sitting down.

Victoria twirled her chair around and straddled it, resting her arms on the backrest. “Davis wants free flowing commerce and travel permits between the two empires, but we can’t really do that until we get a trade route linkage set up. The Voku’s own convoys are shipping out necessary equipment and personnel, but there’s no civilian angle as of yet.”

“I didn’t think the Voku had any civilians.”

“They don’t have lazy ass freeloaders, but they do have independent ventures. It seems only their top tier is dedicated to the empire round the clock, with the rest supporting it more like a hobby. That leaves a lot of down time that they fill with other things. And no, that’s not in the database, just word of mouth I’ve got from Steve. Davis wants the Voku to be able to access our transportation grid and involve themselves as much as they like within our society, and if we can do that the Benoid is going to be on the primary trade route connection.”

“What do the Voku want with this?”

“Their empire is split in two, and rather than try and colonize a string of worlds across the gap they’ll just use our infrastructure.”

“So we’re a rail link for them.”

“Will be, eventually. But Davis wants to make it more personal than that. ‘Teammates’ was the word that was used.”

“Territorial acquisition?”

Victoria shook her head. “I don’t think so. At least not within our borders, but you never know going forward. That’s why they’re looking for input from local commanders like you. I assume you’re still going to stick around here for a while?”

“I don’t like other people playing in my sandbox.”

“Star Force is our sandbox. You’re just sticking to a small corner of it.”

“Point taken. Other than self-defense, what is Davis looking to get from the Voku here?”

“Nothing specific. He just wants to open the link up and see what develops. But we’re all encouraged to make use of any opportunities that arise to include the Voku where beneficial.”

“So the Benoid is going to become a way station and you want to set up some stores to take advantage of the traffic?”

“Metaphorically speaking, yes.”

“And you’re here to plow the road for more colonies to be established.”

“I’m here to mow the weeds. Others will do the plowing.”

“Are we pulling back the extensions to the other trade route branches?”

“Not pulling back, but the Voku line is taking priority. Once we get that established we’ll branch off of it heavily.”

“That’s a change of procedure, and is going to hinder our ability to get out ahead of the lizard creep rimward of here.”

“I know. Steve thinks this is the better tradeoff.”

“Warship traffic?”

Victoria nodded. “Once we make a connection and Voku ships are moving along the route it’ll be a lot more secure than through just our own efforts. That’ll allow us to build it up faster…”

“…and then we branch out. I get it, but we’re still going to be losing systems to the lizards that otherwise we could have saved.”

“You think we shouldn’t then?”

“I think the Voku should build our way as well.”

“Not happening. They’re pouring their resources into what used to be Nestafar territory. Word has it they’re getting ready to hit Orica.”

“Ambitious bastards.”

“Their new toys are rather impressive. I’m told that most of them are staying in their home territory, but a few have made their way out with the reinforcements. They severely outclass us now.”

“What kind of toys are we talking about?”

“They’re still using the transformative tech, but the components have gotten smaller. The new ships and mechs have been dubbed ‘sandmen.’”

“Weaponry upgrade?”

“They have chimra now.”

Garen frowned. That sounded familiar.

“Look it up later,” Victoria said. “It’s in the database.”

“I know I’ve seen that word before,” Garen said impatiently, swinging his chair around and scooting it across the floor until he got back to his desk. He accessed the secure Archon files while Victoria rolled her eyes and scooted her chair as well, pushing it with her feet until she came up beside him.

“That’s right, ignore your guest.”

Garen typed in the word and it went straight to the V’kit’no’sat weapon system. It wasn’t one of their primaries, more like an older model they’d retired, but it was something that they’d used rather than just cataloged.

“Tri-beam?” he said, reading the statistics that were still listed in V’kit’no’sat. The Archons preferred them that way, not always trusting in a translation.  “That’s hard to target.”

“But incredibly damaging if you can,” Victoria added. “So far we haven’t seen them use it in combat, but I’d wager they know what they’re doing.”

“Where are they getting all this stuff anyway?” Garen wondered, for this was a huge step forward in their already impressive tech.

“The big shots are still mum on that.”

“Think they found their own V’kit’no’sat leftovers?”

“Not according to the map. They’re way outside the old borders.”

Garen stared at the database records a bit longer, getting a good grasp on the weapon system that he must have come across at least once earlier, then he spun around to face Victoria. “I can see why Davis wants to make friends.”

“We’re already friends. Steve says that they want us to become brothers.”

“Sharing brothers?”

“I doubt it. Not like we need it anyway.”

“In the short term we could.”

“Hardly. We already have the blueprints for the chimra, it’s the prerequisites we lack.”

“They could give us a few and we could glue them onto the hull,” Garen offered sarcastically.

“I think we’re doing well enough with our own tech, but if you can get them to sell you some then go for it.”

“How soon until I start seeing Voku on my doorstep?”

“The route they’re using now is more of a straight line to Achkor, but they’re having to convoy up heavily and only have so many ships available. If we can link in they can forego most of their military escorts and begin shipping cargo on our jumpships as well.”

“As strong and fast as they are, why the need for heavy escorts now? I know they’re brushing up against the Skarron advance but they shouldn’t have much trouble blowing through systems.”

“Would you send one of ours out without protection here?”

“Of course not, but I don’t see how a longer detour will be that much of an advantage to them.”

“I’m not completely sold on that either, but Davis is and that’s good enough for me.”

“Just wondering, or is Davis wanting me to head up this route expansion?”

“No, he just wants you to integrate with it as much as you can when it happens. Offer up any suggestions that come your way.”

“Keeping my ears and eyes open, check. Now tell me, what big baddies are floating around out there to warrant you getting the patrol assignment?”

“I spent a lot of time with the Denshur building up the Benoid too,” she reminded him. “I want to clean up the neighborhood so I volunteered.”

“Missed me that much, huh?”

“Actually, yeah, but I could have just visited. This needs done and I already know the region. Seemed like a good fit.”

“How long you staying?”

“A few years at least. There’s no fixed timetable, but I may end up roaming around the route endpoint as it extends toward the Voku. We only have their maps to rely on, and there are still a lot of uncharted systems with who knows what lurking out there.”

“I wasn’t aware of any holes in the map between us and the Voku?”

Victoria glared at him. “Not as in missing star systems, but as far as not knowing what’s in them. Damn, Garen, you sound like a newb.”

The Archon spun back around to his desk without saying a word, then pulled up a map of the huge region between the Benoid and Voku space, all of which sat below them on the galactic plane. He zoomed in on the area in question and gestured towards all of the system tags that highlighted where each race was located.

“Looks filled in to me.”

“What the hell?” Victoria said, scooting closer and taking over the controls. She’d just looked at the map three days ago.

“Seems you can’t read a map, newb.”

“Wait a second,” she said, pulling up a panel with map statistics. A moment later she turned and punched Garen in the shoulder. “These are unconfirmed.”

“So is most of the galaxy.”

“No, I mean these are traveler logs compiled by races we’ve had contact with. They’re unreliable.”

“Reliable enough to spot any big threats,” Garen countered.

“Not if those threats keep to themselves or a single star system.”

“If they keep to themselves they’re not going to be a threat to us.”

“Unknown means potentially dangerous. We can count on the Voku charts, but everyone else’s are suspect. Why do you use that map anyway?”

“Unconfirmed maps are more useful than blank ones, plus I don’t need them for anything here. The surrounding area has been confirmed, which you know.”

“Well, I do need to know if I’m chasing thugs in those areas. Don’t flash your junky maps at me again, boy. You can give a girl all kinds of wrong ideas.”

“Feel free to update them while you’re out there. Until then I’ll use what I’ve got instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.”

Victoria just shook her head. “Reckless is he.”

“Don’t quote Star Wars to me.”

“Surprised you caught the reference.”

“After spending all that time with Dennis how could I not?”

“True…”

“Ok, bottom line. If and when the Voku end up here I can give them a comfortable stay, but right now I’m not sure how to further integrate them if they’re only interested in passing through.”

“I don’t think anyone does right now. Davis is just looking for suggestions.”

“Why does he want us to bond with them anyway…other than the fact that they could kick our butts right now, technologically speaking?”

“Steve says they consider them to be worthy of a deeper alliance. Probably has something to do with Paul.”

“What’s the Grand Admiral up to nowadays?”

“I don’t know. He bounces around so much he’s practically a ghost. And what was that about making Star Wars references?”

“Don’t you get the feeling that there’s something bigger going on that we’re not being told about?”

“Yeah…I do.”

“Six years.”

“What?”

“Six years is all that separated me from the trailblazers.”

“Our class started 4 years after theirs.”

“I know, but most of them are 6 years older than me. If I’d been the same age then I’d have been one of them.”

“They’re also kicking our butts in the levels, so stop your whining.”

“I’m just saying, I wish they’d quit keeping secrets from us.”

“Like that’s ever going to happen,” Victoria scoffed.

3

December 9, 2734

Orica System (lizard territory)

Inner Zone

Gahmorn Pro-zel stood behind his command station on the oracle of the conglomerate he commanded. It was one of the older models, as were all of the 178 conglomerates currently under his command. The few new warships had gone with Cal-com, as they should, leaving him with the ‘secondary’ forces to deal with this lizard rabble.

His fleet was still emerging from their braking runs against the large red star in the binary pair, though this system actually sported three stars, with the third situated in a high orbit around the central two. Around them all was 134 planetoids, of which 83 were currently inhabited, making this one of those rare golden systems that contained a small empire’s worth of territory in a single location. Originally this had been the Nestafar’s capitol, which the old Human alliance had massacred in retaliation for the Nestafar’s betrayal to the lizards. Oddly, Star Force hadn’t been involved in that, yet the system had been wrecked regardless.

The Nestafar had begun to rebuild, only to have the Skarrons invade and take it from them…along with the rest of their territory. Knowing the value of such a location, the insanely vast empire poured significant resources into Orica to develop it into a stronghold of their own, only to have the lizards attack and a very long battle ensue that would see the system fall yet again.

And now it was going to fall to the Voku, but they intended to keep it and give the system a proper caretaker. Pro-zel’s task was just that, purge this system of the lizards and begin bringing in support convoys to establish a permanent presence. Orica was soon to become part of the Voku empire, and neither the lizards nor the distant Skarrons could do anything about it. ‘Old’ as their tech might be now, the ships and troops under Pro-zel’s command were still formidable and wholly outclassed those they were about to do battle with.

As the conglomerates waited around the red star for the remainder to join them, tiny pieces split off and shot out on microjumps to scout their targets. The last update they’d received was more than a decade old and had come from the Hycre, but with the way the lizards built a lot could have changed in that amount of time.

The first scouting reports came back as the last of the conglomerates arrived and a sea of lizard ships were waiting out of weapons range for them to make a move. They weren’t running straight at them to die easy deaths like many from this race typically did, which was a pity. It looked like the lizards were going to try and make them earn this system rather than just going out in a blaze of suicidal glory.

One after another the scout ships reported back infrastructure and defensive upgrades on the varying planetoids, with another 4 having been colonized since the last report. The largest of them all, population wise, even had large segments of a ring shipyard sitting in orbit. A closer evaluation saw that those segments were in fact operational and building ships even as they were being added to themselves. Pro-zel found that to be very industrious of them, but he was going to wreck it all the same.

Both the Voku and the enemy waited patiently as the scouts zipped around the system gathering intel, for the lizards couldn’t catch them and Pro-zel wasn’t going to give attack orders until he knew what he was up against. The awkward stalemate lasted several hours before the conglomerates finally moved out of their holding orbits and pushed towards the sea of cruisers nearby.

Those defense ships broke formation and retreated, giving Pro-zel’s ships clear jumplines that they then took to the various planetoids, splitting up and beginning their assault in earnest. With the invading fleet reduced in number at the various locations the lizards finally launched their counterattacks, with the Voku splitting up their massive ships into more agile ones and taking the fight to them head on across 54 different worlds.

As usual it was might versus mass, with the lizards possessing far more ships than the Voku had brought, but they didn’t have enough to compensate for the superior technology and tactics of the dominant race. They had been trained and equipped by the Elders themselves, and there was no way Pro-zel was going to lose to these primitive barbarians.

The orbital battles took quite a while to come to conclusion, with more than a week of fighting before all the ships and defense stations across the system had been taken out. Pro-zel had lost only 4% of his ships in the fighting, and acknowledged Cal-com’s wisdom in delaying this assault long enough to get a truly overpowering force assembled. With the Voku fleet mostly intact, they began moving around and taking out secondary targets, whether they be shipyards or cargo ships, while the first of the ground troops landed on three different planetoids.

Those troops were also equipped with the ‘old’ technology, but even given the lizards’ deviousness and inclination to build a mass of subsurface structures they weren’t going to be able to do more than slow the Voku down, for Pro-zel was spamming these three targets with his troops rather than spreading them out across the system piecemeal. He wanted clean, efficient battles rather than true contests. This wasn’t a mission to test one’s strength, but to clean out the vermin and take possession of the system.

And to do that Pro-zel had plenty of time, for there was no amount of reinforcements that the lizards could reasonably send that would alter the course of events here. The Voku were going to claim Orica for their own, it was just a matter of how and when. Given that almost guaranteed eventuality, the Voku commander chose to take the patient approach and clear out a few planetoids at a time, giving his forces a base of operations to work out of that wasn’t contested, while simultaneously sending word back for the supply convoys to start coming.

So long as the Voku had at least one planetoid that was solely theirs they could begin building, for their fleet would keep the lizards away even if they were still in the system…and the sooner they got construction efforts up and running the sooner they could start building their own defenses. Orica had to become an economic stronghold within the region and was key to Cal-com’s plans going forward.

And Pro-zel intended to take it with the minimum number of troops lost as he could manage. He didn’t like the lizards lingering nearby, but there was nothing they could do to stop the Voku, so he might as well put up with their presence for a while if it meant preserving personnel and equipment for later use down the line. Because old or not, this tech was still valuable, and would be used in forthcoming assaults in the surrounding region, for the Voku were going to carve out a piece of the new ‘border’ inside of what used to be Nestafar space and hold it against the lizards, Skarrons, or anyone else that came Star Force’s way.

But first the handful of chosen systems had to be taken from the enemy, then the other surrounding ones had to be cleansed even if the Voku weren’t going to set down roots there. It was a campaign that mirrored what was occurring back in their home territory, for per the Elders’ wishes they were expanding their borders and hacking a huge chunk out of Skarron territory, not to mention safeguarding other neighboring races that had previously been beyond their mandate.

Everywhere the Voku were expanding, making this an exciting and dangerous time for the empire, for there was a lot of work to do, and when you were pushing against opponents those opponents usually pushed back. Fortunately Cal-com had given him enough conglomerates for this mission to be one-sided enough not to be an issue, which had been the point. Orica had to fall and fall quickly to set up a chain of coming events, the most important of which was occurring simultaneously to this assault and other smaller ones.

For Cal-com would have been here, overseeing this massive campaign himself, if he didn’t have somewhere more important to go. Right now he and a much smaller fleet were traveling far beyond any world seen by the Voku before and headed for the Shaleth System, a target that Cal-com had said was chosen by the Elders themselves.

The Dafchor rarely confided in his senior commanders as to what the Elders had told him, for his orders were unquestionable, but Cal-com had explained the importance of this mission to him anyway, underscoring that while he was taking Orica, a vital piece in the ongoing strategic puzzle, he would be quietly taking a much more valuable one, from which he would be operating out of indefinitely. That meant Pro-zel and others would be out of contact with him for some time until a proper relay network could be established out to Shaleth.

Pro-zel didn’t understand why the Elders had instructed the Dafchor to take that seemingly insignificant world, but if they wanted it done then so be it. He and the other senior commanders could operate independently as long as needed, and Cal-com needed him here, in Orica, even after the last of the planetoids was cleansed of lizard presence. Pro-zel was to secure the foothold then organize the acquisition and defense of the Nestafar Region until he could receive further orders from the Dafchor, with a huge responsibility being put on his shoulders.

But that wasn’t anything new, for commanders all across the Empire were being given tasks that only the elite few would have been given previously. In a time of great expansion such as this, they were being called on to handle tasks far beyond their previous scope, and in Pro-zel’s opinion it was about damn time. If the Elders wanted them to sit and defend territory then he’d do it, but the Voku were a race bred for action, and it seemed fate had finally gotten around to allowing them their due.

Not in terms of territory or bounty, but in glory. The responsibility for such great tasks was what they craved more than anything, for the more they were asked to do the more valuable they were, and that put them one step closer to the Elders’ equals rather than being whimpering children begging for scraps of technology.

Pro-zel doubted they’d ever progress that far, but he liked the idea of being battlefield allies more than being inferior servants…and apparently the Elders agreed, else they wouldn’t have been asking so much of the Voku and giving them so much more technology to accommodate those requests.

No matter how you looked at it, this was an age of change and Pro-zel was eagerly anticipating the days ahead. These lizards were primitive, but given the scope of their empire and their ability to build replacements quickly, they were going to be a formidable challenge going forward, even if this current assault wasn’t.

Or rather the challenge wasn’t in achieving victory, but in doing so as efficiently as possible to give Cal-com more troops to work with going forward, and that was a responsibility that Pro-zel took very seriously, for the Dafchor had also confided in him that there were tasks ahead that may be impossible to achieve, but that the Elders had commanded them to try regardless.

That single bit of foresight made everything Pro-zel did now tinge with greater importance, for these missions were laying the groundwork for the impossible one yet to come.

When Cal-com’s fleet arrived in the Shaleth System they found themselves above a huge, dying star. It was a massive red giant whose internal fuel supply was nearing the end of days…but given how long stars typically persisted there was no danger of it ‘going out’ any time soon. That said, the radiation levels were considerably lower than they had once been, meaning the habitable planets in orbit were becoming less so over time. Already the outer two had been encased in an ice sheet that had killed off all the vegetation on the planet, with the innermost third still clinging to a narrow band around the equator, though it had been reduced to scrub brush in lieu of the massive forests it had once contained.

Cal-com didn’t know the history Shaleth, he just saw a slowly dying system that still held use for both the Voku and the lizards, for they had a sizeable colony on the inner planet. Far more so than it would have appeared to warrant, given that this location wasn’t on any of their known supply lines, but rather in a little nook of territory equating to a ‘filler’ system located in between the major ones.

Cal-com suspected that this one had been around far longer than those his forces were currently assaulting near Star Force territory, hence the greater size. Never the less, it was his target and he immediately dispatched one of his three conglomerates to neutralize the small defense fleet while he took the others and split them up into blockade groups, intent to keep all enemy presence contained to this location. Let a ship escape or an interstellar signal be transmitted and he’d lose the anonymity the Dafchor was hoping for, which was why he also sent a piece of his command conglomerate straight to the lizard colony.

That piece flew ahead of the rest and dove into the atmosphere, coming down atop the section of the lizard infrastructure that held their interstellar transmitter. Three brilliant energy beams leapt out from the warship, nearly on parallel lines, but they actually converged at a given point several miles below the craft. At first the three beams hit the lizard defense shield 200 or so meters apart, but the green, blue, and orange beams refocused and moved towards each other until they overlapped on the same spot…

When they did the chimra effect occurred and the shield immediately breached, with the three beams spread out again beneath it and causing damage to separate locations.

The warship adjusted the targeting on the constant beams and brought the intersection point down to the transmitter. When it touched the beams no longer melted the infrastructure on contact, but they exploded it in such a magnitude of force that the entire assembly was junked instantly. The warship ceased fired when it was inoperable and flew back up to orbit, ignoring the ground defense batteries that were only tickling its shields.

Cal-com observed the attack from afar, intently monitoring the output from the enemy transmitter. As far as he could tell no signals had been sent, meaning their surprise attack was going to remain a secret for some time and he intended to keep it that way. With the blockade formation patrolling the area around the star, both to intercept ships trying to flee and to poach any that might come into the system in the coming days, the Dafchor expected to have a decent amount of time available to him before the lizards had a chance to respond…which he was going to need.

Once the system was cleared of enemy ships Cal-com ordered the first conglomerate and pieces of the second to head down to the surface and begin cleansing the planet. As they did so he took a chunk of his command conglomerate, which of the three was the only one comprised of the new technology the Elders had gifted the Voku, and flew to the outermost planet of the three in the system.

There he found an ice-covered world, but per the instructions given to him via his implant he searched a specific set of coordinates with the ship’s sensors until he found structures buried beneath the ice. He didn’t know what they were…until the implant suddenly released new data it had been withholding until this moment.

Cal-com suddenly understood why this system was important. Not only was it centrally located, offering him reach options to the other servants of the Elders, but it held the remains of another race that had died out long ago. One that also served the Elders up until they were overcome by an enemy too powerful for them to hold at bay.

That knowledge settled a question that had long been lingering in the core of his mind. Would the Elders intervene if the Voku faced annihilation?

Apparently they would not. Their servants had to learn to stand on their own, in victory or defeat. Help them the Elders might, but they would not carry them.

Then again, the Elders had only recently returned to the Voku. What they had been doing in the absence Cal-com did not know, but if this race, who had been called the Yampley, had been in a similar situation and not been able to survive in their absence as the Voku had…

The thought sickened Cal-com, for if the Yampley were as loyal as the Voku they did not deserve this fate. Powerful the Elders might be, but the remains on the planet below only underscored how vast and dangerous this galaxy truly was.

That thought made it all the more imperative for him to get to the other servants before it was too late for them. If he failed, this would be their fate at the hands of the lizards.

Giving the order without delay, even as the ground battles on the other planet were just getting underway, Cal-com had his conglomerate section disintegrate and break up into a number of protective warships and the Hatomek seed that subsequently plunged into the ice near to the ruins, burrowing its way down to the surface and beginning to locate and extract the necessary materials to grow itself into the world-building machine that would eventually create the defenses to hold this system against any lizard counterattack.

Cal-com noted with pride how much faster this seed worked than previous models, for it was constructed from the new technology as well, and took very little time digging its way into the bedrock and carving out a dome in the ice above for the Voku workers to begin grounding additional supplies within.

4

February 28, 2735

Numar System (lizard territory)

Sashneo

Tom-008 stood in the nexus onboard the Zeus, personally controlling the ultra-heavy cleansing beam that the command ship was using in low orbit to pulverize the lizard infrastructure on the planet below. The defense shields protecting the numerous colonies covering the planet couldn’t stand up against the beam for more than a handful of seconds, for it was a major upgrade over the previous versions, capable of delivering pinpoint destructive energy on a level that Star Force had never achieved before.

Tom and the other trailblazers knew the days of the cleansing beam were coming to an end, in light of higher end weapons projects coming down the research pipe, but that didn’t mean they’d given up on their current batch of tech. There were always improvements to be made, and the ‘ultras’ were one of them. Beam width was the same as a ‘heavy’ but the intensity was ratcheted up so much that only a very dense shield could hold up to it…or a different matrix that the lizards couldn’t yet produce.

Regardless, with the ultra onboard his command ship Tom was able to bust through lizard defenses that typically would have delayed a planetary assault such as this for days as orbital bombardment hammered each of the shields until they fell, then cleansing beams or rail guns would take out the exposed generators and primary defensive emplacements, opening up the bases or colonies to a ground attack or further obliteration from orbit.

Odd as it was, throwing a chunk of mass at an opponent never got old. The physics were simply undeniable, with the rail gun, a weapon that dated back to the very beginning of Star Force, slated to always be in the offensive bag of toys, right up to the day when they finally caught up with the most advanced tech the V’kit’no’sat had. They’d be highly modified rail guns by then, but the principle was sound and there was no easy way to kill the momentum they produced.

Ammo resupply was their weakness, and in a situation like this it made more sense to use the cleansing beams to knock down buildings along with a few Ka’sevron rounds thrown in by the Ma’kri. In the past Star Force would have tried to assault the lizard colonies with their buildings mostly intact, preferring a cleaner battlefield to work on, but the more time that went on the trailblazers had just gotten in the habit of obliterating them from orbit, then sending down skilled teams to deal with the rubble fighting and subsurface hunting.

They didn’t like fighting that way, but the lizards would never surrender. Even now Tom was issuing periodic calls down to the various colonies to see if they’d relent, but never once in his life had he gotten a reply. They were intent on fighting it out to the last scaly minion, and with this planet covered in numerous colonies and billions of lizards, it made more sense just to blast them from orbit than to go at it hand to hand, or even with the mechs and aerial craft.

Tom punched through another shield plate then fired a second short cleansing beam lance down and into the shield tower, blasting it apart with one hit as the internal components were vaporized along the beam’s path and the rapid expansion burst out laterally and popped the tower in the blink of an eye. The debris rain around the site was an added bonus, but the trailblazer turned his mental attention to another colony nearby as the regular cleansing beams began chewing up the now exposed one.

There were only so many he could hit with the ship in its current position, but he wanted to remove their defenses as quickly as possible to get this small region of the planet knocked down enough that the Zeus could move on to the next while leaving the drones and Ma’kri in place to really hammer it. He hated fighting like this, for it was almost exactly how the V’kit’no’sat would have gone about it, but with the lizards being totally intractable it was the quickest option to take the planet from them, especially considering that they didn’t intend to use any of the enemy’s infrastructure.

It would all get tore down and recycled, whether it be standing or rubble, so there was no disadvantage in taking it apart from orbit. Tom just hated such destruction, both in the lives and the equipment. When one conquered a planet the idea was to take over what was there. Wiping out a civilization was not conquering, that was annihilation. Star Force were definitely conquerors, but rarely were they annihilators.

The V’kit’no’sat were almost exclusively annihilators.

But the lizards couldn’t be conquered. They couldn’t be negotiated with. All you could do is fight and kill them…or be killed by them. That was their choice, and unless Star Force wanted to force them into imprisonment utilizing stun weapons and such, slaughtering them back was the only way to fight them.

Star Force had never gone that far, for they always gave the lizards an out. A chance to surrender, or sometimes retreat. The outcome was always the same, but it was by the lizards’ choosing, not Tom decrying they had to die.

But die they would, for the lizard civilization saw their personnel as expendable tools. They’d just grow more in a different location, hoping that these here would do at least some damage to the invaders before they died.

And that was the primary reason Tom and the others chose to use orbital bombardment to raze the surface…to give the devious bastards less opportunity to find ways to kill a few of his troops when they did go down to the planet.

Sashneo was not lightly populated either. A lot of the higher tier lizard infrastructure wasn’t present, but in the 221 years since Star Force abandoned this transitional world they’d filled it with low tech colonies, going for a massed approach rather than a fortified stronghold. With the fleet Tom had at his disposal, some 22 Warship-class jumpships and 4 Ma’kri in total, plus the Zeus, he was going to take the planet regardless of how much they’d built it up, but he found it odd that this planet had gone down a slightly different track than the others that Star Force was currently taking back.

Over the past few decades the map had been changing drastically. A huge swath of what had been lizard-occupied Calavari territory now gleamed Star Force blue, and ever since the massive pushback at Jafat had failed, barely, the local region had pretty much been free pickups for anyone that could overwhelm the local defense forces. No more were there reinforcement fleets perusing about ready to drop the hammer. Everything was now up for grabs, with Tom and a handful of other trailblazers pushing to grab up as much territory as they could before the lizards caught their industrial breath and started reinforcing their systems again.

Simultaneously the Voku were hitting the lizards hard in what had been Nestafar territory while Kerrie-057, Larissa-048, and the H’kar were pushing out from Alpha Region and securing another huge swath of territory that was slated to become property of the Bsidd as their explosive growth continued…aside from a few planets that would be returned to the refugees in the ADZ that had previously fled them.

Wes-049 was making a smaller push up the galactic plane beyond Delta Region with Axius, with the intent of adding more colonies in that region to house that growing population, both from internal reproduction and immigration. Axius was now tops within Star Force in terms of citizenry, but it was estimated that the Bsidd would pass them by at some point. Odd as it was, given how this had all begun, Humans were now a tiny minority within their own empire, despite a population that had recently passed 10 trillion.

Democracy would have put Humans in the backseat, had it still existed, but a beast such as Star Force was such a high level entity that it simply could not exist with such a simplistic design. Humans were the glue that held everything together, because they were better than everyone else. Not in birthright, though the Ikrid blocks and psionics were immensely useful, but because the most advanced individuals in every division within Star Force were Humans, from techs up to Archons. They had individually earned those positions, and acquitted the enormous responsibility for maintaining and advancing the empire.

That wasn’t something a popularity contest would result in. Star Force had to exist based on merit, else it would have collapsed long ago.

This next phase of advancement was a huge undertaking, and as such required an increasing level of skill to pull off, not just in taking worlds back from the lizards, but in expanding out to the new acquisitions without allowing Star Force to become too heavy to manage. Some people believed that a civilization could only expand so far before it lost coherency in a variety of fashions. Tom knew that wasn’t true, for there were ways to make it work if you were clever enough, but every empire that grew to significant size had to know what it was doing, else they’d self-destruct in a variety of ways.

That was true of the lizards, Voku, and even more so the Skarrons. The size of their empire was ghastly huge, and even with the lizards tearing huge chunks out of it the overall mass was unaffected. It was simply too huge to kill. Tom didn’t know how that fight would ultimately turn out, and whatever went down was going to occur on the other side of the ‘no-go’ line so it was probable that Star Force wouldn’t know, unless the Skarrons pushed the lizards back this far.

Respect was due to anyone who could assemble and maintain an empire of that size, and with the path that Davis had set Star Force on, it wasn’t going to back down from those challenges ahead. It was already proven that they could do things better than everyone else on a ‘small’ level, and now was the time to prove they could do it on a larger scope. V’kit’no’sat or no, they couldn’t hide and let the galaxy burn around them, and while there had been some hesitancy on that issue in the past, that was no longer the case.

Star Force was pushing hard into the lizards, using the window of opportunity that Paul had told Tom and the others about from the Dragon Forecast Bureau. And in truth, technological advancements aside, the only way to truly beat the lizards was for Star Force to grow insanely larger. They couldn’t do that purely with Humans, nor was Star Force really about just Humans. It was a set of principles, based on the sovereignty of the individual and not the race, that just happened to have rogue Zen’zat that came with a slew of genetic abilities that the others didn’t possess.

But as Tom and the others had learned over time, those abilities weren’t all encompassing, with other races holding single, or sometimes multiple abilities that could be used to enhance Star Force above and beyond what Humans alone could do. The Bsidd were the biggest case in point, but the Kiritak were the first major addition in that department and were still quietly forming the backbone of Star Force’s industry.

Add in the hundreds of other races that were part of Star Force, whether by group or individual, and on the whole they were stronger than ever. Now they needed to add more systems and more population to the mix. That, coupled with the continuing tech upgrades coming out of the pyramid and the way Star Force was now gobbling up lizard territory, had gently shifted the trailblazers’ focus from holding back the lizards to outright beating the bastards at their own game.

The no-go line kept a complete victory out of the question, for in order to defeat the lizards it seemed you had to annihilate them, and now they’d passed into a region where Star Force wouldn’t go. There were other races and factions out in the rim, like the Nexus, that were far more powerful and territorially large than Star Force and the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t bothered to notice them, so it was hoped that the same would be true of the Humans’ expansion. But going closer to the core would be akin to waving and shouting at them through the Skarron empire, so despite their newfound boldness Star Force was going to keep a safe distance, even though there would never be any guarantees of anonymity no matter how far they went rimward.

As Tom finished popping the shield plates over the last of the lizard colonies within range, he took a moment to run his fingers through his shock-white hair, rubbing a spot on his head that was still aching from his last ascension. Paul had brought it out to him a month ago, before Tom had left on this campaign, and still there was a lingering bit of friedness there.

He wasn’t complaining though, for the Sav ability was a tier 3, and had he wanted to he could have controlled all of the cleansing beams on the Zeus and half his drones simultaneously. The processing upgrade had been one that had long eluded them, save for Bo, but now that they’d finally cracked the trigger all the trailblazers were getting it and Tom didn’t mind the discomfort that came along for the ride. It was almost gone anyway, and more than worth the tradeoff.

He rubbed it a few more times through his genetically altered hair as he mentally checked on the locations and statuses of his entire fleet, which were currently assaulting three different positions on the planet. The flurry of indicators flooded through is mind within .4 seconds, and thanks to the Sav he comprehended it all with clarity. In truth he’d gotten good enough with the nexus interface that he’d already acquired some impressive skills in that regard, but the Sav had taken everything he’d built up and just multiplied it exponentially.

Incorporating it into his standard training was his next big challenge, for it literally changed everything as far as what he was capable of doing, but he’d have time for that later. Right now Sashneo needed his oversight, and he’d have plenty of breaks to train in over the coming weeks. While his fleet was fully capable of handling this invasion without him, he knew that him being linked into the system and making little tweaks here and there could have a cumulative effect going forward.

And with billions of lizards down there that needed killing, there were lots of opportunities for tweaks to be made and deviousness to be uprooted before it could kill his people. That was the biggest need for him and other Archons with the fleets across lizard territory…sniffing out traps and figuring out how best to hit the lizards when they were dug in underground. This planet wasn’t the biggest one he’d been involved in hitting to date, but it was the most populated, offering up a little bit more of a challenge.

At this point though, for a trailblazer, this was easy peasy. It was vitally important, but not a real stretch of Tom’s skills. From an outside perspective, what was taking place on Sashneo was armageddon. The operation was so huge it left any civilian awestruck, but after so many battles his troops had become seasoned fighting the lizards and didn’t hesitate when given a target of this size. There was an awful lot of work to do here, but they knew they could handle it, one piece at a time, with Tom handing out assignments as they moved forward.

Back in the day, when Tom had passed his test for the A7 program, he never could have comprehended doing something like this, let alone how routine it had become.

Then again, he’d never expected to be 700 years old either. That longevity of growth had to have an effect on people, Archon or not, but back on Earth when he was a kid such things were out of the societal viewpoint, deemed nothing more than myth, so it was understandable that he had no clue a person could rise to this level. Now he was focused on taking care of business and continuing to climb the improvement ladder, for he and the others knew the V’kit’no’sat were still well ahead of them.

Back in his basic days he thought he’d comprehended the threat they posed. Now he realized he hadn’t a clue what they were capable of, data files or no. And what was even scarier was the fact that while Tom was a couple centuries away from catching Yoda, there were V’kit’no’sat hundreds of thousands of years old…and more.

With his mind still linked in to the battlemap he looked down on the huge lizard civilization he was set to destroy, realizing that compared to the level of the V’kit’no’sat, this was still just child’s play.

5

May 4, 2735

Noop System (beyond Gamma Region)

Tieor

The Mandoshan freighter made its braking maneuver into the commerce system on an odd jumpline, but odder still was the fact that the ship’s deceleration track ran to a normal orbital depth, though with a much higher rate of transition. That indicated gravity drives far superior than what the Mandoshan built into their ships, but no one noticed, or had the technology to, for unlike the more impressive star systems, this one had no stellar tracking grid.

The freighter in question redirected to the only habitable world in the system without incident, making the microjump at a speed expected from such a lethargic craft. Hundreds of others of different makes and origins were transitioning to and from the star every minute, with this freighter just mixing in with the flow until it reached the planetary monitoring grid and was picked up by the local traffic control staff.

It was queried as to its destination, then given a route to take to get down to the atmosphere without bumping into anything else in the cluttered orbital space. Thousands of habitats orbited the planet, along with just as many parked ships offloading cargo or personnel into the various public terminals. The Mandoshan freighter wasn’t headed for any of those, but had a destination point marked on the planet’s surface in one of the less respectable spaceports.

It was one of 189 on the planet registered for regular traffic and saw a fair amount of lower level commerce, so when the freighter in question dropped into hover mode over the cityscape it had to wait for the choke point to clear as a pair of Gordin freighters, twice the Mandoshan’s size, came up out of the half mile wide opening and made for the clouds overhead.

When given the go ahead from bay control the Mandoshan freighter eased its more or less circular bulk down through the ‘tight’ opening and into the enclosed airspace below that stretched out in a radius of several miles. The covering was little more than a sturdy tent, with no armor or defensive value other than to keep the weather out, but visually at least it separated the bay landing pads from the rest of the city.

The freighter eased to the west and came down on the landing pad assign to it next to four other craft, parking next to a Vrax freighter of similar size, but when the Mandoshan ship set down it didn’t offload any cargo, just a group of passengers that walked to a nearby exit where they were met by a single individual that then led them out of the spaceport and through the city via less than savory routes.

All eight individuals wore grey robes with large hoods that covered most of their faces, keeping them out of sight as they meandered through the scattered crowds made up of numerous races. Tieor had no native population, and had begun as an entertainment resort complex for the wealthy travelers on an uninhabited world. Over time those operations expanded, and were still present in one small corner of the planet, but ancillary development had started up around servicing those high end customers, and now, thousands of years later, it was the lower end that dominated the planet with their economic presence dwarfing that of the privileged elite.

Tieor functioned as a way station for some 80 star systems in the local region and even had connections further out, with it being on one of the major trade routes connecting the three major powers in the expanded region, those being the Hershat, Zocktrel, and Worar. That fact alone attracted a lot of varied races, but the ones beneath these hoods had never been seen in this part of the galaxy before and preferred to keep it that way.

The guide was one of Tieor’s natives, a Donklap, who looked halfway between Ewok and monkey. He stood shoulder height to most of the robed individuals, but walked in a very peculiar way, with his arms lunging side to side rather than swinging front and back like most others. Even that didn’t stand out in the crowd, for there were other Donklap around, along with many other races that clashed so much that they all seemed to blend together into a mix-matched harmony.

The Donklap led the eight robed individuals to a location not far from the spaceport, bringing them inside a commercial district and into an alley between establishments. On the far end of it was a locked loading door for cargo arrivals, which the Donklap had a key for. He slid the two-pronged ‘C’ into the holes and rotated the mechanism around, popping the door locks and allowing it to slide into the wall to reveal the interior hall. All eight passengers slipped inside, then the Donklap shut and locked the door from the inside before ushering them on into the facility.

They passed several sealed doors, for these had been welded shut to keep anyone from the stores from accidently stumbling into the portions of the shared complex that didn’t belong to them. After passing through several ‘dead’ rooms they came to another locked door, which the Donklap knocked on three times, then stared up at the security camera above it. He reached a hand up and split his fingers apart in the secret sign, with the door opening a moment later.

A Protovic stood behind it with weapon in hand, stepping to the side to let them enter, but making sure no one else slipped through before he had a chance to shut the door again.

When he did the eight individuals pulled back their hoods and slipped off their robes, revealing themselves to be a mix of ADZ races. One was Critel, another two Protovic, a fourth was Bonpar, and the other four were Human…all ex-Star Force military, coming from Axius to the mainline branch and everything in between.

“Lieutenant,” the Protovic greeted one of the Humans, recognizing him but not the others. That wasn’t uncommon, for Brayden’s Marauders had over 12,000 regulars, with that number growing each decade.

“Le’han’trel,” the Human replied, knowing every one of the men under his command personally, not counting the affiliates like the Donklap, who were local hires. “Is the client here?”

“Not here as in the base, but he’s in a hotel nearby. I can arrange for you to meet with him whenever, wherever.”

“Arrange it,” Mason Harkor said, tossing his cloak bundle onto a nearby table with the others. “Somewhere private, but not here.”

The Protovic nodded then gestured to one of the six locals in the room, which doubled as their lounge/comms center, then rattled off instruction in a language that the Lieutenant couldn’t identify. A spindly creature that looked to be little more than bone with skin draped over responded and got on the comm, sending out a text transmission and nothing that would give anyone information as to the details or location of their outpost.

It was a legitimate business acquisition, for the Marauders were renting the facility, but as far as the landlords knew it was just a warehousing slot allotment, and as long as the demaks, their local currency, kept flowing in they never bothered to check up on the tenants. Similar arrangements were common on this part of the planet, and it gave the Marauders the anonymity they needed, for while mercenaries weren’t uncommon on Tieor they were something best kept out of sight.

Especially high level mercs that had better equipment than the local defense force.

“Alright guys, settle in. We’re going to be here at least a few days.”

“Left, then two rights,” Le’han’trel said, gesturing to a side door that led into other areas of the fairly large facility that housed and equipped a force of more than 200 on a regular basis, though at present less than 50 were currently on site. “Quartermaster is a Kiritak called Gargi, she’ll set you up.”

“What do we have in the mail bag?” Mason asked when the other 7 in his strike team had left the room and he had appropriated a nearby stool to sit on.

Le’han’trel grabbed a datapad off a shelf and tapped it on, pulling up an inventory list of all the requests coming in to the mercs for work, most of which they would have to turn down. The Marauders only did defensive work, and didn’t take any contracts that would conflict with Star Force standards. While they weren’t officially affiliated with them, the unit had been created by Brayden Yen, a high ranking commando in Clan Caitlyn that had ‘retired’ to civilian life.

Upon leaving the military he spent the next 60 years acquiring the credits he needed through a variety of work, all non-military, then recruited a handful of other former Star Force commandos to create the first of what would come to be called the Marauders. Mason was one of those originals, and spent the next few decades working security assignments in the undesirable sections of the ADZ where Star Force security had no presence and where businessmen were willing to pay for personal security.

Over time Brayden collected more exiting Star Force personnel, citing that he wanted to establish a unit that could go where Star Force couldn’t, into the darkest corners of the galaxy and root out the nastiness there, essentially doing the same sort of thing they’d always done, but doing so on their own volition and own orders. They would be free to act as they chose, but at the same time wouldn’t have any backup, for they weren’t part of Star Force anymore.

That changeup on an old priority appealed to a decent fraction of the retired personnel that Brayden solicited, coupled with the idea of getting paid for the fighting they did. They’d be serving Star Force indirectly, but getting rich at the same time. That alone was reason enough for many who got the invite to join up, and for the others it was Brayden’s future plans for the unit.

The former commando didn’t want to just hunt down trash in the dark corners of the ADZ, but he intended to go outside Star Force territory to the truly wild regions of the galaxy and bring a little civilization to the chaos. Nothing grandiose, just a mission here or there to get rid of some scumbag. Star Force had a huge territory, but the galaxy was far bigger, so after the Marauders were firmly established and making enough credits in the ADZ to support themselves, and then some, Brayden began pushing operations beyond the ever moving borders, staying a step or two ahead of Star Force’s creeping territorial lines…which were now surging head over heels outward.

The Marauders were still ahead of the curve, for the Noop System was way beyond the ADZ, but not so far that some of the races here hadn’t established diplomatic contact with Star Force. It was in that gray zone between known and unknown that they chose to work, banking on Star Force’s reputation to give them leverage and credibility while still operating outside their sphere of influence. This system and others weren’t too unimportant for them to care about, they simply couldn’t protect everyone, and it was those places that were beyond Star Force’s help that the Marauders chose to operate within.

“We’ve got four requests for assassinations,” Le’han’trel began to read off. “Two hijackings of freighters, sixteen requests for permanent defensive deployments ranging from a personal security guard to an entire moon, and an assortment of transport missions along with a few odds and ends. Mostly trash stuff that we’ve told people time and again that we won’t do, but they still ask anyway.”

“What about the moon?” Mason asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Not something we’d want. It’s a vice den and they want us to set up to keep any other merc units or law enforcement out.”

“Anything worthwhile?”

“Some small stuff, wouldn’t take more than a squad of three or four. Fuel costs in getting there would eat up most of the profit though, because none are local.”

“By local you mean on Tieor?”

“Yes.”

Mason waved his fingers in a ‘give me’ gesture and the Protovic tossed him the datapad. “Still haven’t got these guys up to speed on English yet?”

“Passable, but anything complex is better handled in Klixet. Between them all they know 19 other languages, so I’m not pressing too hard. The earpiece translators we’ve gotten configured to Klixet pretty well, so as long as they can translate into that we can manage with our clients…mostly. For a few we’ve had races that barely spoke Klixet, and didn’t know any of the others. This planet is a mess linguistically.”

“What isn’t out here?” Mason asked as he flagged three requests that he’d be willing to assign the Marauders to. One would make for a decent payday, the others would offer a slim profit margin. Normally they would be booked constantly, but at the moment they had a bit of flexibility and he intended to handle one of the small ones himself after he was done here.

“Log these,” he said, tossing the datapad back to the base chief, which the Marauders referred to as a ‘handler,’ for he handled all the local assignments and reported directly to the Lieutenant in charge of this Marauder sector, which was Mason.

“How are things back home?” Le’han’trel asked as he moved over to one of the suitcase-like computer stations.

“Seems like Star Force is taking a planet a day from the lizards,” Mason exaggerated. “They’re steamrolling them now, on multiple fronts.”

“Just not in this direction?”

“Fortunately there are no lizards down here, but no, this region isn’t a priority yet, and I doubt it will be for some time.”

“Good for business.”

“Bad for the galaxy. We can always move further as needed, and even a single Star Force ship in this system would do more good than we can.”

“I know, but we’ve still got bills to pay, my salary included, and a unit like ours has to go where the trouble is to cover our considerable overhead…and that’s just the small part that I’m number crunching.”

“Brayden knows what he’s doing,” Mason assured him. “He’s got enough resources put back to cover us if business suddenly dries up, so don’t worry about that.”

“Good to hear. Don’t want to get back to the ADZ and find out that I’m not getting paid.”

Mason laughed. “No worries there. Your account is kept separate from the general fund. We won’t be raiding it even if things go horrifically bad. You thinking of getting out?”

“And do what? Sit on a beach watching the sun rise and set along with 50 billion other people? No thanks. It may be scummy out here, but at least it’s not overcrowded. Axius worlds are too jam packed for my tastes.”

“There are a lot of other options. The Clans, for example.”

“Thought those were Human only.”

“They’re badass only. Get your skill scores high enough and they’ll let you in.”

“So I’m assuming you got kicked out then?”

Mason raised a finger and pointed it at the green and purple skinned Protovic. “Easy there. I’m still your commander.”

“Guess that’s just my question regarding why you left.”

“I didn’t come from the Clans. I was born on Earth.”

Le’han’trel frowned, with his glowing facial patches making the gestures stand out more than they would on a Human. “I thought you served with Clan Sangheili?”

“I did at the end. I spent most of my time in a mainline unit, then wanted to see something more specialized. The Clans offered a bit of that, but not enough, so I eventually quit.”

“Quit?”

Mason smiled. “I took a leave of absence to try and figure out what exactly I wanted to do, traveled around the ADZ, just lost myself in the crush of people that you were talking about. That was when Brayden found me and offered up the type of challenge I’d been needing. I was never going to go truly civie.”

“Good. Thought you lost your head there, and maybe your self-sufficiency at that. I could have swore I saw a gray hair or two.”

“Stop listening to rumors. Hairs can malfunction for a number of reasons, and they often fix themselves over time. It’s not a tell-tale sign of degradation, and no, you didn’t see any on me.”

The Protovic shrugged. “If you say so. Never could understand the hairy races.”

“At least we don’t shed skin layers.”

“Yes you do, just in tiny pieces constantly.”

“I guess, but you don’t see us doing it. First time I saw a Protovic pulling his skin off it nearly made me puke.”

“Why? It’s just a thin layer. Looks the same underneath.”

“It’s creepy. Like you’re a snake or something.”

“You don’t like snakes?”

“It’s just creepy,” Mason reiterated.

“So glad we could have this bonding moment,” Le’han’trel said as the affiliate at the comm station got his attention and the Protovic walked over to confer with him. “Mason, we’ve got confirmation. Tomorrow morning in a private lounge at what passes for a restaurant not too far from here. We’ve used that site before, and it offers some concealed cover for backup if you want it.”

“Translator?”

“I’ve got three that speak their language, or rather a communal one.”

“Good. We’ll take whoever’s the most reliable.”

“We?”

“You’re coming too.”

“Ok, but why?”

“Does he speak English?”

“Passable.”

“I’d like better than passable. Miscommunication has cost us one payday already, I don’t want to risk another.”

“Alright, I’ll translate the translator for you. But I’ll have to go in armor, unless you want a walking glowlamp drawing attention.”

“You can hide your ugly face, it won’t bother me,” Mason quipped.

Le’han’trel grimaced. “Next time we’re eating together, I think I’ll peel my arm just for fun.”

The Lieutenant stared at him for a long moment. “Hide your beautiful face, then.”

“That’s better,” he said, pointing to the doorway. “Don’t know when the last time you slept was, but tomorrow here begins in 4 hours, and our contact is set to meet us in just under 9.”

“I’d better catch a crash nap then. Do we have any donuts on hand?”

“If the rest of your guys haven’t eaten them all up, sure. If they have there’s more in packaging, but they’ll have to be baked.”

“Always the last one to the food,” Mason grumbled, getting up off his stool and heading for the cafeteria.

6

May 5, 2735

Noop System

Tieor

Mason, Le’han’trel, and a local named Varsa sat in a secluded booth listening to a potential client explain to them what was happening in a nearby star system. Coming through double translation, Mason wasn’t sure he was getting the gist of all of it, but from what he could tell the number of militants had doubled since the initial offer had been made that had prompted the Lieutenant to come out to Tieor. They were set up in a confiscated complex that had originally been a livestock processing plant, but had killed off the surrounding herds and were using it for their headquarters while they raped and pillaged, literally, the surrounding cities.

The local defense force had been killed earlier, having gone up against the militants and been beaten badly over four years ago. With no resolution to the matter and the militants gradually reaching out to more and more distant cities, the locals had put together a fund to hire someone to come in and clean up the mess before it got any worse.

Those mercs they hired, which were on the very low end of the respectability ladder, took their money and ran. It had been another two years since that point, with the militant base expanding and setting up the planet as a haven for more and more offworlders to come to, escalating to the point where they were running rough shot over most of the planet. The other cities’ civil defense forces couldn’t stop them for more than a single instance before the other militants would retaliate by blowing up a building or two, or perhaps just strafing the streets from the air with one of their aerofighters.

Eventually the entire planet had banded together and put together the funds necessary to hire a respectable mercenary agency, and had come all the way to Tieor to do it, which was how they’d found their way to the Marauders.

Mason had already known this wasn’t going to be a milk run, and through his double translators he pressed for more specific details. The Batarank that they were speaking to produced a series of plastic sheets of paper with information and images on them from a briefcase it was carrying, and Mason began to sort through it while Le’han’trel continued with the questioning on his behalf.

The militants were offworlders, but they didn’t belong to any faction known to the Marauders. They were collecting more and more personnel, including some tanks that were giving the locals all kinds of headaches. A few of the militants had been killed by vigilantes, who were striking back despite the reprisals, but they couldn’t scratch the tanks nor stop them when they often went in to wreck a local village.

They also had four aircraft. Two were shuttles, one was an orbital dropship, and the other was an aerofighter. Or at least as far as the Bataranks knew. They’d only seen one operating at a time, and from the markings it appeared to be the same craft, though Mason wasn’t going to assume that as confirmed. All in all, there were probably some 2,000+ militants on the ground, but with the more recent updates it seemed that several new ships had arrived to deposit more in the facility, of which the Bataranks had no knowledge or counts of.

Mason dismissed their guesses, knowing that he’d need to do a proper recon before committing any ground troops, but this didn’t sound like something the Marauders couldn’t handle. Which only left the question of payment remaining.

That wasn’t a straightforward deal, for there were numerous currencies that didn’t all transfer between worlds. Eventually Le’han’trel got it sorted out, using various materials in exchange for the currency, and gave Mason the approximate credit value, were it back in the ADZ. It added up to 12% above the posted rates that the Marauders advertised for an operation of this scale, and as long as there were no additional surprises they were set to go.

Normally, additional surprises included a surcharge, but the type of operation this job had been solicited as hadn’t changed, just the numbers involved and those were really inconsequential given the team he’d brought. They needed the money for operating expenses, but beyond that they weren’t going to try and squeeze more credits out of their clients as others might do. That was a decision made on principle, but it also worked as a good marketing rep as word of mouth got around.

A few more questions about the local geography and weapons capability of the locals, which was almost nonexistent, and Mason agreed to take the job. The Batarank was visibly relieved when they signed the operating contract, which was unnecessary in mercenary work, but Brayden wanted the agreements officialized if for no other reason than to have a record of what the deal actually was rather than relying on the clients’ memories in case something didn’t turn out as they’d hoped. It was rare, but sometimes they’d ask for a small task and expect you to fix other problems once you were on site, and the contract was good to have on hand to point out what you were actually getting paid to do.

After a few more unnecessary words that Le’han’trel didn’t bother to translate for Mason, the Batarank left in a hurry and the Protovic, clad in a full body suit and face mask underneath his robe-like garments, turned to the Lieutenant.

“We’re not sticking around to eat, are we?”

Mason glanced around outside the booth. “We’ll linger a bit. They have anything good here?”

“Not that I can eat.”

“Your problem,” he said, smiling at the faceplate. “Get us some snacks and whatever Varsa would like, but nothing that will take more than half an hour.”

“Get you some snacks you mean,” he said, running through the menu with Varsa.

Two weeks later the Mandoshan freighter arrived in the Dechma System, following the client’s ship by less than a day. Mason’s small jumpship was much faster and could have arrived within 34 hours, but he didn’t want to get there before the client did, which would make things awkward. This way the Bataranks would know that they’d been hired and weren’t here on some other action, and he hoped he might be able to pull some live intel from them during the operation, given that they had eyes and ears everywhere, and the Marauders needed to eliminate all of the militants and not leave so much as one around to cause trouble after they left.

That would be sloppy business, and if the Bataranks were going to scare off more poaching of their planet in the future by hiring the Marauders, they need a clean and efficient sweep of the malcontents to drum up the fear in anyone else that might think the planet an easy mark.

The jumpship was called the 17, which simply meant it was the 17th interstellar-capable ship that the Marauders had acquired. They didn’t name them like Star Force did, and this one had been bought from the local market to make it blend in with this region of the galaxy rather than bringing in an ADZ craft that would stand out like a sore thumb. If they wanted to attract attention and intimidate someone then that was the way to go, but more often than not the Marauders preferred a less than auspicious entrance.

That said, the Mandoshan freighter wasn’t really a Mandoshan freighter anymore. It had been hauled back to the ADZ and gutted, literally, with everything interior being junked and sold for spare parts while maintaining the outer shell. That shell had been used to build a new ship within, using ADZ technology that was far superior to what the locals here possessed. That meant the Marauders could use the Mandoshan freighter to move about anonymously, but still have the muscle necessary if they needed to fight their way out of a situation, or out run one. As far as they knew, their gravity drives were considerably better than anything the nearest 50 systems had to offer, meaning they could literally go where they wanted, when they wanted, without anyone able to follow them.

The Marauders didn’t make use of that function often, preferring to keep the capabilities of their ships a secret aside from the ‘foreign’ models they threw about every now and then, but this operation was small scale enough to fit everything they needed in this 620 meter long/wide freighter, though to make it a proper jumpship nearly a third of the internal volume had to be dedicated to housing the engines and power core.

Mason had brought a crew of 8 with him to Tieor, then grabbed another dozen or so personnel that were on station there, including Le’han’trel, leaving the base in the hands of Krivan, a junior but trustworthy member of the mercenary organization. With everyone originating from within Star Force, finding people that could be relied upon wasn’t a problem, plus they didn’t have local affiliations or history to muddy the waters like some of their competition did.

When they entered planetary orbit of Numchalla, they took their time and made a thorough scan of the surface using their own equipment before heading down to the largest spaceport on the somewhat backwater world. It boasted a population of 23 million, but saw those Bataranks scattered across numerous cities and villages, leaving them without any one stronghold to work out of. The city of Yiivala was the largest, and where their client had informed them that they should land their ship, for there were only a handful of slips large enough to accommodate their vessel on the surface.

As they queried the local controller during the atmospheric descent, they got a panicked message from their client indicating that the militants were currently in Yiivala and were demanding payment from the shippers coming and going. Mason replied that they’d take care of it, then he told the pilot to land them as if nothing were amiss before heading back to the equipment room via a detour through the lounge and training area.

“Change of plans,” he told Le’han’trel as he was working with a set of free weights. “There’s a reception committee at the spaceport, so gear up. We need to introduce ourselves.”

“Meaning?” the Protovic asked, his face aglow as he set the weights in their nearby storage rack as several other strike team members did likewise.

“Our quarry seem to be taxing the shipping traffic coming through the spaceport.”

“Ah,” he said, understanding. Le’han’trel was glad it wasn’t an actual reception committee. Those political shenanigans were boring as hell.

Mason led the way out and met up with the others in the equipment room where a few of the mercs were waiting rather than getting into their armor.

“You want all of us?” one of them asked.

“Better safe than sorry,” Mason said, opening his locker and pulling out the pieces of the Reen-made armor that had been custom fitted to his frame years ago. It wasn’t up to Star Force quality, but since they didn’t sell military equipment to civilians, others specialized in that market and the Reen had the best personal equipment available. Despite the fact that they themselves were huge quadrupeds, they knew how to make adequate armor for Humans and other bipeds. “And I don’t want any of them getting away, so be ready to run down multiple targets. Jackson, get the Valerie prepped. Their fighter is in the air to intimidate the shippers to pay the price.”

“You want that captured or scrapped?” the ex-Star Force Regular pilot asked.

“Preferably captured, so we can sell what’s left of it.”

“I’ll try and be gentle,” he said, pulling on a different set of armor than he would have worn had he been going in with the infantry.

Mason clicked the various pieces of armor onto his body, locking them in place then testing to make sure all the joints were secured. He pulled the helmet on last, finding the fit reassuring, for he’d spent hundreds of combat hours in this suit, and hadn’t yet had to replace the headgear.

The others dressed in similar armor, all of which was painted dark blue with red stripes going down the outside of the arms and legs. Their weapons had also been painted the same color of red, with the plasma rifles being custom fitted with an extra component slung under the barrel. A typical modification, but whereas most individuals would have added a rocket launcher, flame thrower, or some other type of area of effect weapon, the Marauders had purchased a stun mod that gave them the ability to take down targets without killing them, though it was nowhere near as effective as the stun weapons Star Force used, nor could it pass through armor.

That meant most enemies they faced had to be shot to be disabled, with the stun mostly being useful against unarmored opponents. Reports were that the militants wore a hodgepodge of armor, so it was likely that they were going to have to be taken down the hard way or forced to surrender…though without a translator handy during a firefight there wasn’t going to be much opportunity to offer one, unless they bad guys just threw their weapons down and their hands up.

Once he was fully equipped he and the others moved to the internal hangar and three auxiliary exits, one of which was on the top of the craft. They waited inside until the freighter had set down, then listened to the communal comm channel for Mason to give the word.

“I need a target count,” he said, looking at the vid screen next to the closed hatch that showed what was outside before you opened the opaque door. “I mark two to port.”

“Got another aft.”

“Three starboard fore.”

Mason waited a moment, then the pilot finally added, “Someone’s coming up to the ship, heading to the main bay doors.”

“Lower them, but stay out of sight inside. I need a team topside.”

“On it,” Ray’so’mal said.

“Le’han’trel, take the bay team. I’m flanking.”

“Copy.”

Two armored mercs, wearing full armor minus the helmets, escorted a third individual that wore casual clothes plus a hip-holstered pistol over to the ship’s lowering ramp as the apparent leader began speaking rapidly in Klixet, making demands for the crew to come out and them being given access to inspect the cargo, citing something about a maintenance fee when a flash of blue armor ran out from the left side and barreled down the ramp.

Le’han’trel rammed the merc on the left in an unarmed tackle before he could bring his weapon up, in typical Protovic fashion, then as the other two turned and backed away from the pair and tried to draw their weapons a slightly delayed pair of blurs followed him out and took them down, but not before the unarmored Selofan got a shot off into one of the Marauders.

The chest shield held up, barely, until physical contact was made and that ripped through what was left of the cheap energy barrier and the militant was knocked to the ground. The Marauder rolled off him, grabbing his pistol as he did so, then another Marauder followed him up and shot the leader with a stun blast of hazy green energy that left him groggy but still conscious. A second shot solved that problem, then the other Marauders coming out of the ship helped wrestle the armored mercs to the ground and disarm them as a few plasma shots were heard elsewhere around the bay.

Mason was the recipient of those shots, three of which missed but one hit him in the left pectoral, soaking into his energy shield as the militant shooting at him from afar turned and ran when he saw two more armored soldiers following. The Human swore and sprinted after him, ducking into a side doorway and trying to keep within sight. The pudgy alien was slow, but he had a head start through unfamiliar terrain.

After two fleeting glances through the confines of the spaceport Mason lost him, only to see pointing arms from the surrounding crowd telling him to go left. He didn’t know whether to trust them or not, but he figured why not and headed off that direction as opposed to just choosing one at random.

The hallway went through several curves, then quickly exited onto a city street where a blue plasma streak shot past him and hit a bystander. Mason visually tracked it back to the source and sprinted off after the militant again, this time with clear street to work with as the crowds backed away from the weaponsfire.

He might not have been in as good of shape now as he had been when in Star Force, but he hadn’t lost much of his speed and used it now to run the bastard down within 20 seconds, not bothering to shoot back until he got within a couple of meters of the target. A shower of sparks blew out from the impact point on the militant’s unshielded armor, but apparently the plasma shot wasn’t enough to get through to the ugly thing’s skin.

Not wanting to try for a head shot, he sprinted up closer and jabbed the barrel of his rifle into its back, tipping it forward and tripping it up on its own feet. Mason jumped into the air as it happened and came down with a stiffened knee on top of the militant, disorienting and knocking the breath out of him as the ex-commando made the takedown.

He put the muzzle of his plasma rifle in the guy’s face and held it there, giving him the idea that it would be a good idea to stay down and stay put. The militant complied and Mason held him in place until his backup caught up to him, then the Marauders pulled out some easy-snap restraints and took the guy prisoner.

Mason glanced back the way they’d come, remembering the bystander that had been shot, then he punched the exposed head of the guy once for the sloppy shot before hauling him to his feet and dragging him back to the ship when he refused to walk.

7

With the floor of the landing bay secured and the main doors on the 17 open, the pointy end of the Valerie eased out of the ship, hovering into the clear and staring down the handful of people that were still in the bay, some of which were now coming out of the woodwork knowing that the Marauders were here under contract and feeling safe enough to have a look around now that the short-lived fireworks were over.

But they weren’t, and as soon as the Valerie got clear of the ship by a good dozen meters or so it kicked up its anti-grav and gained altitude, picking up the nearby militant fighter about a mile off as it circled about lazily. That demeanor shifted as soon as the Marauder got his craft above the retaining walls around the bay and into view, with it accelerating towards him in a quick curve off its former heading.

The Valerie’s shields went up, offering more than enough protection against the plasma weapons of the primitive fighter. The Valerie itself was armed with plasma, but not all versions were equal and Jackson knew he could down the fighter with ease. That wasn’t the mission, however, plus they were over the city right now and he needed to draw it off to keep from hitting anyone below.

Making it look like he was running, the Marauder accelerated to the east, holding back from full thrust otherwise he’d outrun his pursuit. It didn’t take long for both of them to pass over the city’s edge, for it wasn’t that large, and a few kilometers was all the distance he needed before the grassy plains took over. As soon as both fighters were in the clear the Marauder stopped playing impotent and executed a tight, sweeping turn that the opponent tried to mimic…and failed.

Two full rotations around and the merc was on the militant’s tail. He popped a golden ball of plasma against the hull, confirming that it had no shields as it melted/exploded a small section just behind the cockpit. The pilot kept the yield on the plasma low and peppered a few more key spots as the enemy fighter tried to evade, but with the superior design of the Valerie the Marauder was able to keep with it and, so long as he was patient, was able to line up all the shots he wanted.

Eventually one of the small probing shots hit the engines and the fighter dropped from the sky during a loop low to the ground. He’d waited for that moment to fire the last shot, hoping to knock it down when it only had about 30 meters of altitude to fall from. The stubby ship hit nose first, digging a short trench into the grass before the momentum flipped it over in a somersault that crunched various edges in, like the fighter was being punched into a wad of metal, but no explosions resulted and the craft finally came to a rest amidst some small brush fires, more or less intact.

“Bird is down,” the pilot reported. “Need a recovery team asap.”

Jackson brought the Valerie into a low hover and drifted it around a square patrol pattern as he waited, looking to see if the pilot would come out or not, as well as to keep anyone else from venturing out to the crash site from the city or the tiny dwellings nearby.

Too easy.

Two weeks later Mason was on the perimeter of the militant stronghold with two other former commandos, neither of which he’d served with previously in Star Force, but the way they trained their people made it easy for them to link up without any prior knowledge of each other. These two were both Human, with Frank having been Axius and Zaeb mainline. The pair had been with Mason on numerous missions, mostly those that required a bit more muscle than usual, and he liked keeping them close, for as a trio they were virtually impossible to stop.

Frank carried an auxiliary shield generator in a backpack, while Zaeb and Mason were packing extra weapons. No explosives, for they wanted a clean strike, and their plasma rifles were more than adequate to burn through any doors that needed removing.

The trio of ex-commandos moved along a ditch, splashing through the bit of mud in the center in the dead of night and moving up to a bridge that held a guard station. The depression was deep enough to cover them from view and the station was on the exterior side of the trench, focused on incoming traffic without any windows to the inside. Mason had checked on that from afar during the reconnaissance run the previous day, for ever since the Marauders had started picking off the scattered militants across the planet they’d begun retreating here and turtling up.

Not concerned with the sounds of their footfalls, the trio ran through the ditch along a now empty grazing field. No one was out and about the exterior perimeter, and even if they were it would have been on the other side of the fence that tracked the inside of the little-used waterway. They needed to get to target quickly, and the longer they lingered the better the chance of someone spotting them out of pure luck, hence the running.

Most of the base defenses were well inside the perimeter, waiting for someone to cross the bridge or come over the fence and through the fields by foot. Taking the guard station would do little to hamper the defenses, in fact, it was basically a decoy setup, for if anyone hit it the rest of the base would immediately know and go on alert. That made it a sacrificial lure designed to pull the Marauders in, but Mason was going to take it anyway.

He was in the lead as they came up on the bridge, then stopped short of one of the two support beams that came up out of the dirt to hold up the short structure. Pulling his plasma rifle out he hesitated for a moment, letting the other two catch up from the few steps behind him that they’d been running to avoid a lucky shot from taking out all three. He pointed up the side of the ditch, with Frank jumping into the lead and scaling it on all fours.

When he got to the top he pulled out a pistol and moved up to the base of the structure, looking around as the other two climbed up more slowly using just their legs and a balancing hand. There were no lights on this side, save for what was on the bridge, and they didn’t shine on anything other than the road. The ambient glow brightened the area a bit, but the sky was hazy and the trio appeared as nothing more than weak shadows as they circled around and came in the guard station’s front side.

Frank sprinted across the opening, firing a plasma shot through one of the windows with it blowing apart the glass and turning it into shrapnel that bounced off the militants’ armor, startling them out of their relaxed poses as they drew their weapons to try and target the enemy as he shot from left to right across their view.

With their attention drawn that way Mason stepped out on the left and held position, firing multiple blasts from his rifle into the pair of guards before they had a chance to readjust their aim. His shots were precise, and he nailed one of them with three hits to the abdomen, burning through the armor and hitting flesh. That militant went down, but Mason had to duck below the wall and out of the wide window as the other shot towards him, holding his ground for a moment while the doorway into the second room of the station opened up and more guards flooded out.

Mason rolled to his left, making room for Zaeb to crawl up next to him, then when Frank came back into view on the other side and drew a flurry of plasma lances through the opposite set of windows, the pair popped up and scattered the militants as they fired into the group of 6.

Frank didn’t stop to snipe, rather heading directly for the doorless entryway and barreling inside. The auxiliary shield generator deployed around him, cutting off his own return fire while creating a bubble-shield that had been scaled down to minimum distance. It absorbed the hailstorm of blue streaks all the way up to the group, where Frank jumped into their midst and went at them hand to hand.

Mason and Zaeb moved in then, firing through the window and knocking down the militants with clean shots while their opponents were distracted. Their armor gave them longevity, but the three Marauders knew what they were doing and cut them down so fast it seemed like they hadn’t been wearing any at all.

“Clear,” Frank reported after ducking into the back room.

Mason picked up two of their weapons and tossed them behind a counter to start making a pile as Zaeb dragged the bodies outside. They didn’t have time to take prisoners, and the pair that weren’t dead were soon going to be from their wounds, so Mason didn’t pay any attention to them other than to keep them away from their weapons while Frank began moving a desk aside and exposing a panel on the floor that the dumb militants hadn’t even realized was there.

The Marauder shot the attachments off in lieu of the tools to remove them that he didn’t have, then he pried the panel up with his armored fingers, exposing the maintenance walkway that traveled all the way into the facility along with the power and sewage lines…directly under the defenses the militants had set up on the exterior.

Mason commed the others and the trio held the guard station until they arrived, coming up the road in a tank of their own and parking it just on the outside of the bridge. It was wheeled, for the design was far cheaper and more useful for the Marauders than buying the anti-grav variety, though they did have a few of them in their inventory for special occasions. This one was preceding a line of infantry equipped in the same Reen-manufactured armor, all of whom clustered inside the guard station and waited to see if the militants would come out to them.

They didn’t, sitting back behind their turrets and in their tanks waiting for the Marauders to come to them where they were strongest. Mason didn’t intend for their tank to be used yet, for it was just a visual distraction at this point, but eventually they’d need it to deal with the militant versions, which were little more than dangerous toys in comparison.

The 18 other infantry he took with him down into the maintenance walkway, which was barely wide enough for one of them to slip through with all the piping and technical accoutrements dangling in the way. Moving single file they jogged as best they could through it for more than 3 kilometers before they got to where the schematics said was the junction with the outermost buildings in the facility.

They didn’t come up there, but rather moved further through the network of underground tunnels until they came to the nexus point that branched off in three directions. They split up there and set a countdown timer, giving them all 6 minutes to get in position. Mason took Frank and Zaeb with him, while Le’han’trel led one of the other teams. The Protovic had the hardest assignment in this assault, that being hitting the barracks, or rather what the militants had converted into one.

Mason’s trio had picked up Navo and Willis, and the five of them moved through the tunnel until they came up underneath another sealed panel. They waited until the countdown expired, then blew the panel latches off with plasma fire before pushing the stubborn thing up a few inches, finding that there was something on top of it.

Using his well-trained muscle, Mason wedged himself between it and Frank’s backpack, stepping on the fellow Marauder to use him as a stool and prying the panel up enough to get an arm out, seeing nothing but boxes around him.

He pushed his head and torso through, then used the rim of the depression for the leverage he needed and dumped whatever was on top of him aside, allowing him to crawl out and get his weapon back from below as Navo handed it to him coming up. Mason took it and pushed another box stack to the side, making walking room and moving through a forest of supplies until they got into the clear, with no one else in what appeared to be a storage room.

He waited until the other four caught up, then he blew apart the lock on the door and the squad got moving through the facility enroute to one of the fortified buildings they’d scouted from afar earlier. They had to cross out into the open once, hopping from building to building whereas most of the other structures were all interconnected, but they did so fast enough either not to get noticed or to draw any return fire as they busted their way into a populated building that held a number of prisoners/slaves draw from the local population.

There were only two guards on them, which were taken down quickly enough, but by that time the cat was out of the bag and the militants knew they had infiltrators in the base. Not taking any chances, Mason and the others stunned every unarmored person they came across, whether they be militant or not, intending to sort it out later and to keep those they were here to rescue from running about wildly and getting shot in the crossfire.

One pair they found in an isolated room appeared to be mating, and as Mason stunned them both he cursed the stupidity of it. The alarm had already gone up, and this idiot was busy getting laid. He didn’t know if the other was a victim or not, but the one had half a militant uniform on and Mason didn’t really want to look any closer. He grabbed the rifle from nearby and carried it with him out of the room, disposing of it by chucking it behind a potted plant that had since died due to lack of watering.

He and the others worked their way through the large building, finding only one more guard stationed at the opposite entrance. After taking him down with ease, they pulled back and moved to an adjacent building through a connective walkway, hearing the first sounds of a distant firefight that should have been Jarod’s team.

Mason sprinted ahead, and now that their prisoner camp had been ‘rescued’ the rest of this mission was just hunting down the army of militants and taking them out in one form or another, with most of these guys going to have to be killed given their armament and the fact that there were only 19 of his men here to work through well over 1,500 of them. How many Mason didn’t know for sure, but the numbers didn’t intimidate him. These were scum and had the skills to match, and he’d fought far harder training simulations than this.

So long as his people kept their heads and watched each other’s backs they’d be fine. Between their equipment and experience advantage, not to mention their unit coordination, they could take out as many of the enemy as needed so long as they didn’t let them draw them out into the open.

Mason wasn’t green enough to let that happen, and he knew the faster they made kills the less chance there would be of the militants mounting any type of cohesive counterattack, which was why he and the other four ran into the next firefight without bothering to find cover, coming out into a foyer behind a group of 20+ targets that were firing the opposite direction.

The Lieutenant barreled in first, knowing his job was to disrupt and set up shots for the others, so he didn’t shoot more than one initial shot, then used his rifle along with his arms and legs to batter the militants aside, knocking some down and others out of their cover for the opposite team to shoot while his own squad pounded the armor of those on the ground trying to get up until they stayed down.

It took more than a minute to kill them all, and some of his men took glancing armor hits, but their personal shields, coupled with Frank using his auxiliary to block a lot more shots, had kept the militant plasma off them long enough for the firefight to snowball in their favor, leaving the 11 of them standing over the bodies and kicking aside the enemy’s weapons just in case they weren’t fully dead yet.

“Anyone hit?” Mason asked, just in case.

“Nice flank,” Jarod said in thanks.

“Take that way,” the Lieutenant said, thumbing to the right indicating the next adjacent building. “Running sweeps, don’t slow down and give these guys a chance to think.”

“On it,” Jarod acknowledged, taking his team that way while Mason moved on to the left with his squad.

8

Mason ran in tight formation with the other four Marauders, all tucked around Frank in the center with his auxiliary shield extended to cover them as they charged the militant bunker on the exterior of the facility. It had only been made recently, more piled dirt than anything, but it held a pair of plasma turrets and a fair amount of infantry, with open tarmac surrounding it in a sea that very easily could become a kill zone.

Most of the militants in the rest of the base were dead or incapacitated, but there were plenty of holdouts that had found some type of advantage and they were camping out there. Mason would have offered a call to surrender, except that he didn’t want to give away their position to this group before starting their run, for even a single second of invulnerability could make the difference between them getting to the bunker or not.

So far this one had been sitting totally uninvolved in the fighting, and the Lieutenant wanted to hit it before they could go on full alert…and he didn’t want to wait for the tank to work its way around to this side of the base. Currently it was on its way in and blasting the crap out of the militant versions, and more importantly keeping them off his infantry.

Picking their spot early on in what they thought might be a blind spot, the five Marauders started running behind cover so they hit the open area on the move and headed straight towards the bunker on an angle that put them directly in line with one of the window slats.

They’d made it nearly a third of the way across before someone bothered to notice them, firing a rifle shot that hit and splashed against the bubble shield before the main turret on that side swiveled to the right and took aim.

Mason and the others held tight, knowing that the shield could take at least two good hits before popping, then they’d be down to their weak armor shields, all of which were at full power, but none of them could take a square hit from the tripod turret and remain intact. Their armor would protect them from whatever plasma made it through, but a second hit would almost certainly breach through the dark blue plates.

But the ex-commandos were quick, and before the turret could fire off a second blast they were on the bunker and the five of them broke apart, running out from under the energy shield and jumping through the window holes as Frank slid underneath the turret barrel, running into the short wall below and reaching up to grab the weapon. As he did so, locking it in place where it couldn’t shoot anyone, he reached up his left hand with a pistol and fired a shot inside where he had a clean line of sight between the other Marauders.

Mason had dove through head first, barreling into two of the infantry stacked inside that were just now getting to the open-air windows. Playing bowling ball, he knocked them down and tripped a third while Zaeb followed him through, staying on his feet with a more gentle leg slide, and shot one of the standing militants beyond him twice in the gut before turning his rifle on those the Lieutenant had knocked down.

A shot from Frank finished off the standing militant while Navo and Willis entered through a different side of the bunker, with the Critel taking Mason’s roll of cannonball and diving through, further messing up any cohesion the defenders might have had. Both Marauder’s shields went down, either from plasma shots or the physical impacts, but their armor underneath was sturdy enough to take a few more hits while they fought a quick, pitched battle inside the small bunker with the four of them going hand to hand and getting in what shots they could, while Frank stayed on the outside firing in from the window wall.

Between their quicker reflexes, better equipment, and familiarity of fighting with one another, the Marauders came out on top in the fight, taking down all 13 of the militants with only a shoulder wound to Willis to show for it. The plasma damage had burned through and seriously incapacitated his right arm, but he was still able to stay on his feet and fight one-handed, finishing off one of the last militants with an overhead smash of his fist followed by an angry uppercut from his knee that knocked the helmet clear off the red-skinned alien.

Mason shot his exposed cranium with a stun blast, then began policing the bodies as Willis groaned and sat down on a nearby gunnery chair.

“You hit?” Zaeb asked.

“Oh…yeah,” Willis said. “I think I’m done for today.”

Mason circled around behind the man, flinching when he saw the charred hole in his shoulder that was only starting to seep with blood. Everything else within the inch-deep cavity had been cauterized on contact with the plasma. He pointed the others away, with them dealing with the dead and wounded while keeping an eye on the outside as Mason pulled open a small pocket on his armor’s thin backpack and took out a tube of healing gel.

“Hold still,” he said, popping the cap open and spraying the sticky foam into his shoulder. Star Force might not sell weapons, but they were good about making their top line healing technology available for public purchase, and he would have lost several people in past years had the Marauders not stocked up loads of it. They valued their personnel as much as Star Force did, though the same couldn’t be said of other mercenary units operating in the region.

“Thanks,” Willis said as the pain number kicked in, reducing his agony to an uncomfortable ache in his now invisible shoulder, as far as his senses were concerned.

“You’ve got to head back now. This is bad.”

“How the hell did they hit the same spot three or four times?” he complained, knowing the statistical improbability of that in a chaotic firefight.

“It happened,” Mason said, getting on the comm.

“I’ll get him out,” Zaeb offered. “Go finish off these bastards.”

Mason clapped the Marauder on the shoulder as he passed him by, heading for the windows since there were no doors on the crude structure. “Tank’s on its way.”

Navo slid out ahead of him, with the pair joining Frank as they ran off back into the buildings, checking with the other strike teams and seeing what targets were left, as well as the external spotters they’d left on the perimeter. If any of the militants tried to get away they’d run them down, one way or another. This mission had to be a clean sweep, and Mason wasn’t about to have to report back to their client that they’d gotten almost all of the militants.

With the primary bunker covering the access road now out of commission, all that remained were small barricades that held a few militants hoping to hold out or just clinging to whatever cover they could. Mason headed for the nearest one of those, with the trio immediately taking fire down a long hall that led to a park-like lounge.

“Not that way,” he said, backtracking and quickly consulting what passed for a battlemap on his helmet’s HUD, which had the facility’s blueprints on hand for easy reference but with no active position markers for the rest of his troops. Without the secure comm tech that Star Force possessed, and didn’t sell, an enemy could pick out the locator beacons and cause considerable trouble for any units using such a system, hence the Reen and other suppliers didn’t bother to manufacture them. Nor did anyone outside the ADZ, as far as the Marauders knew, though they were looking for such a system to use against technologically primitive opponents.

“Stay here and get their attention,” he told Navo as he thumbed Frank a different direction. They looped around to another approach, a shorter one, then with Navo taking badly aimed shots down the hall the pair rushed the barricades from the side, again getting a few steps of invulnerability thanks to the distraction, with Frank’s auxiliary shield soaking up the rest of the damage.

Mason jump-kicked over the barricade and knocked down one of the four militants while Frank simply ran up and began shooting, again using the cover to his advantage while Mason went hand to hand. The combination worked well, with them downing two of the militants before Mason took a shot to his chest that melted the top layer of his armor.

A blue streak past his right arm hit the enemy as Navo sprinted up to them, then another from Frank in the exact same spot on the militant dropped him, leaving only one for the three of them to deal with.

That militant immediately dropped its weapon and sunk to its knees, yelling something in a language that none of them could understand, but it was obvious that he was surrendering.

Mason kicked aside its rifle and pulled out another set of easy-snap restraints, securing the militant’s hands behind its back then yanking its helmet off. A quick stun shot from Frank sent it into dreamland and Mason dropped the body back to the ground. They couldn’t play babysitters right now, but they’d be back for him later and the cuffs would be an easy clue that this one wasn’t dead.

They checked the others, finding one still alive but unconscious, so they pulled his helmet off and stunned him too before they got moving again, hunting down the last bits of resistance they could find and coordinating with the other teams until the militant facility was theirs.

“Tell him no,” Mason said to Le’han’trel, who was working through one of their hired translators as the Marauders were having a discussion with the Batarank security teams that they’d called in to help search the complex. Any possessions of the militants that they’d brought to the planet and not stolen from the locals were, by contract, the rightful claim of the Marauders, so the mercs had been escorting the search teams around for that reason in addition to their own protection, just in case a militant or two had been hiding out somewhere and chose to make a last stand of defiance.

There had been three that they discovered, all of which were out of armor and either base support or fighters that had been caught off guard and couldn’t get to their armory in time, which the Marauders had already emptied and loaded up on some trucks to take back to the ship. They had four altogether, tucked inside the 17s bay along with the tank, Valerie, and some other craft they hadn’t needed to use, and had found on previous occasions that it was better to haul their own loot out rather than to have to rely on the locals to assist them, for on occasion there were arguments and the Marauders didn’t like giving other people leverage on them.

And today was one of those days.

There was a flurry of words between the translator and the Batarank representative, who wasn’t the same one that had hired them. That often caused complications, but in this case it was the local government who had done the contracting, so technically it was the same party they were dealing with.

“They insist,” Le’han’trel said from behind his helmet faceplate, “that the prisoners face justice.”

“Meaning they want to kill them?”

“I think that’s a safe bet…or worse,” he added as an unpleasant afterthought ran through his head.

“If there’s any killing to be done it’s at our discretion,” Mason said. “Remind them of that fact.”

The Protovic issued the translation to the translator, who intentionally kept his own voice as neutral as possible, as per standing Marauder orders. If there was to be any intonation it would come from the mercs themselves, which Le’han’trel added by removing his helmet and staring the shorter Batarank down with his almost tattoo-like glowing facial patches giving him an intimidating visage as the translation was carried out.

There was a back and forth that followed, with Mason out of the loop as Le’han’trel handled whatever was going down. Eventually the client backed down, or at the very least he stopped talking, which Mason assumed meant he was capitulating.

“Care to clue me in?” he asked when the talking had stopped.

“We need to pack up and go sooner rather than later,” the Protovic suggested. “They refused to give us the remainder of our payment until the prisoners were turned over to them. I informed them that if they didn’t make the payment we’d take it ourselves, in a manner of our choosing. I think I called his bluff, but I wouldn’t want to give them extra time to get brave…or stupid. I think local politics are also coming in to play, with some of these idiots thinking they can gain traction by making an example of the militants.”

“Remind him that our contract gives us the right to do with the prisoners as we wish and that we expect payment before we leave the spaceport, then walk away with me.”

Le’han’trel did as he was told, then when the translator issued the order the three of them turned and walked across the building they were in that had been used by the Marauders to store captured gear that the Bataranks were now inspecting to make sure it wasn’t native to the planet. Outside was one of the trucks being loaded up, but there was still enough odds and ends to fill two more, which they’d have to wait on since they were already headed back to the ship with some of the prisoners.

There were 78 in total, most of which were wounded, some badly enough they might not survive anyway, but Mason wasn’t going to let them remain here to suffer further injustices. One didn’t right the other, and the Marauders were about preventing such things. If they couldn’t stop them from happening then they’d avenge them, but that never involved torture or reprisals of the sort that many ‘peaceful’ civilizations resorted to when they had a chance for some payback against their former victimizers.

The galaxy was a very harsh place, especially outside the ADZ, but the Marauders were never going to succumb to such barbarism, under any circumstances. They may have left Star Force for a variety of reasons, but the righteousness of their warfare principles was something that would forever linger on with them and the others that no longer served. The difference with Brayden’s mercenaries was that they still continued to embrace righteousness rather than leaving it as an ignored internal conscious. The galaxy was harsh indeed, but they intended to fight that harshness in their own way, and no matter what these militants did, they weren’t going to leave them behind to be torn to bits by the locals.

Leaving the impression that the Marauders were in charge, which they were, considering their military might exceeded that of the militants which the Bataranks couldn’t handle, Mason and Le’han’trel began roaming the few locations in the base where they still had people, informing them of the situation and goosing them on a bit. He didn’t know if the Bataranks would try and force the issue, counting on the good will of the Marauders as a weak point for them to leverage, but if they had to play bad guy briefly then so be it. They’d hold them to the contract whether they liked it or not, even if they had to loot the local facilities themselves to get their payment.

One thing Mason had learned out here was that weakness invited predation, and the last thing a mercenary unit wanted was clients to think they had the option of not paying up after the fact. They’d already received a 25% down payment, but future clients had to understand that they were not to be trifled with, so they couldn’t let one get by without paying, even if it meant going to extreme measures to get it.

He didn’t know how much of the Marauder’s reputation had reached the Bataranks, but if they pushed this then they were going to get a lesson one way or another. Best option right now was to spirit away the prisoners quickly before they had a chance to plan something, but they still had to wait on the trucks, so he commed the ship and had the Valerie take to the air…a little added disincentive for the locals to get too arrogant in their new position.

Either way this went down, the Marauders would not be taking a second contract with these people. Anyone who even hinted at not paying was scratched off their list automatically, and these guys had just crossed that line.

Fortunately the empty trucks returned within the hour and Mason was able to cram the last of the booty in along with the remaining prisoners, who were the least injured of them all and could suffer through the cramped positions, which had them laying like logs on top of each other bound up in order to make them all fit. They deserved that small measure of discomfort anyway, but Mason wasn’t going to wait around for another truck regardless. He and the other Marauders didn’t have room to board it for the ride back, so they formed a double file column behind and followed on foot, getting a bonus workout run in with the truck going slow enough not to leave them behind.

It also made for a show of strength, for they were wearing their armor and carrying their weapons as they headed back to the spaceport, making it clear that no one was going to stop the truck and take the prisoners away from them. The others had made it back fine without more than a pair of infantry riding along as escort, but with this being the last one the extra show of force was a good, inadvertent addition, not to mention the Valerie that was casually circling above.

It was too far for them to run the whole way, being some 90 kilometers distant, so Mason had them running in formation until an empty truck was able to return. When it did they loaded up and drove off at normal speeds, getting through the Batarank streets without incident, for the locals made way for them well ahead of their route, probably due to the local broadcasts, for there were cameras everywhere now that they were out of the base that would now return to being a livestock processing facility.

Part of Mason wanted to leave it in rubble, but that wasn’t part of the mission. Despite leaving Star Force, neither he nor any of the other Marauders could bring themselves to eat meat, and a facility that was purposed with slaughtering herds and processing their bodies into foodstuffs was an outright abomination, but there was only so much the Marauders could do to tidy up the galaxy, and their efforts on this planet were now done.

That was something about this job that Mason hated, but that he’d had to force himself to get used to without it becoming apathy. No matter how many injustices they attended to, there were always more just sitting on their doorstep. He had to keep his mind partially numb to it or otherwise it would have driven him insane, and more than a few ex-Marauders couldn’t take it, having to return to the ADZ where things were more civilized.

Mason told himself he was out here to seek out problems and fix them, and even one taken care of was better than none if he hid away in the ADZ. He had to pick and choose when to intervene, while never allowing himself to stop caring about those within sight that he couldn’t save.

When they got back to the spaceport they ran the trucks up into the bay of their ship and sealed up the main door, putting a final stamp on the proclamation that the militants would be going with them, after which Mason found the local representative and asked for the remainder of their payment.

There was no refusal, fortunately, and the Lieutenant made a quick inspection of the cargo crates that had the various goods they’d agreed to in the contract. The 17 opened its bay door up once more and the mercenaries took their payment onboard, along with the Valerie that finally came back in once the deal was concluded, then the ship took to the sky, saying goodbye and good riddance to the planet.

9

July 7, 2735

Noop System

Tieor

The Marauder’s small jumpship returned back to their primary staging base on the commerce planet after taking a detour to a nearby star system where Mason offloaded their prisoners. The merc unit had a long-standing agreement with the locals on Tryion, who operated a respectable prison facility that the Marauders typically dumped their captives into. They’d be kept there for several years minimum, but after deposit the Marauders had no further say in their fate.

They might run into them again down the road, but that was just part of the business. And more often than not, anyone that surrendered to or was captured by the Marauders didn’t want to have anything to do with them again and spread the word to others, which only added to the mercs’ rep in this region. Regardless, the unit couldn’t be tasked with housing prisoners, so the ability to offload them somewhere they knew they wouldn’t be mistreated was more than worth the occasional freebie mission they ran on Tryion.

It was a poor world that couldn’t afford mercs so the agreement was mutually beneficial to both parties, but especially so to the Marauders. They didn’t want to be forced into fighting engagements where they didn’t have the ability to take prisoners. Brayden had stated up front that they were never to become a ‘kill only’ organization, so securing a means to offload captives was a priority for the Marauders.

That meant that after dropping this load off on Tryion Mason didn’t have to devote men to guard them, foodstuffs and medical supplies to sustain them, and keep in the back of his mind the possibility of them getting loose and doing damage to his crew or ship. The mercs could handle short stints like that, but not never-ending ones, with the second leg of their return trip to the commerce world being relaxed and boring downtime that some of them used to rest, others to do some training in the limited facilities onboard ship.

They made the slow jump back to the planet as was protocol, to not give away the full strength of their engines to onlookers, but as soon as they braked against the gravity well and the comm signals and sensors began to register normally they knew there was trouble.

“What the fuck?” the helmsman said, getting dozens of warning beacons from across orbit. “Get the Lieutenant, now!”

“What’s wrong?” another bridge officer asked.

“Just get him…go! Don’t ask questions.”

“Going,” the Protovic said, leaving the helmsman alone on the bridge. A little over a minute later he returned at a run along with Mason and a few others.

“What do we got?”

“Major trouble. Looks like there’s someone attacking the planet.”

“What the hell,” Mason said, walking over to a side station and pulling up the sensor feeds. “Who?”

“Best I can tell it’s a hodgepodge fleet, and they’re not broadcasting any ID. We’re not close to any of them now. They don’t seem to care about the jumplines. They’re clustered around four orbitals and making hits on selective ships in orbit. Where do you want me to put her?”

“Keep your eyes on them and keep your distance until we figure out what’s up,” Mason said, his eyes on his own display screen. “Get a comm link to base and check on their status.”

One of the other Marauders slid into the comm station and made the connection as the others lingered around, waiting to see what the Lieutenant would have them do. He didn’t say anything, studying the information feeds crisscrossing the planet and pulling up every news report, emergency bulletin, and military chatter that they’d broken the codes for earlier. Mason realized that there was also a ground war going on, with Lethol already having been taken and two other major cities currently under assault.

“Base,” the Marauder at the comm station announced, tossing a headset over to the Lieutenant.

He slid it on as he continued to study his screen. “Mason here. Report.”

“I’m very glad you’re back,” Krivan said genuinely. “Tieor has gone berserk. 18 days ago this fleet shows up in orbit and takes a manufacturing orbital. Didn’t even try anything fancy, just blew their way in the front door. Planetary defense force intervened and promptly got their asses kicked, though they did take down a few of their ships in the process. They’ve owned orbit since then.”

“Who are they?”

“No one knows. A mix of races, a lot of them local, and they’re all using different equipment. Different uniforms too. Best guess would be a mercenary coalition, based on the way they fight, but none of the pieces has been identified. Either they’ve been real quiet around here or they’re from pretty far away.”

“Is the base secure?”

“Other than some looters snooping around, we’re fine. The major fighting hasn’t gotten here yet, but the local population is causing almost as much damage as the invaders. It’s a mix of panic and opportunists, with every criminal band and drunken nobody out tearing shit up and grabbing hold of whatever they can. They know the defense force can’t patrol the streets and fight the invading army…and they’re getting the crap kicked out of them anyway. One city is down, and we expect another three will be in their hands within two days.”

“How many are currently under assault? I’m digging through what news reports I can now.”

“Allow me,” Krivan said, transferring the Marauder’s database up to the 17. “I’ve been having our guys pull recon runs across the planet while canceling current assignments. The defense force has put out a call to all merc units and anyone with combat training to help in the ground fighting. I haven’t given them an answer, but price wasn’t an issue. They’ll pay pretty much anything within reason.”

“How many troops do these guys have?” Mason said, running through the Marauder numbers and seeing that this enemy was fighting not just in two more cities, but had fingers out into 18 currently. There were more than 2,000 the size of Chrandor, which is where the Marauder base was located, and it looked like this army was hitting the largest and/or most strategically important locations first.

“We have current estimates at over 50,000 infantry, but more troops ships continue to arrive on a regular basis, so we have no idea how large this is actually going to get.”

“What the hell is going on…” Mason whispered, getting up to speed quickly thanks to the professional sitrep he was reading rather than sorting through the civilian grid mess.

“Lieutenant, are we getting involved or should I start packing up shop?”

“How many other merc units have responded?”

“A lot of the smaller ones, but they don’t have anywhere to run to anyway since they’re based on planet. A couple of the big names have sent piecemeal forces in, but the rest are like us and waiting to see what’s going on before they commit to anything.”

“How much longer do you think the defense force is going to hold out?”

“They’re not holding onto anything right now. It’s all a fighting retreat.”

“I mean how long before they’re all dead and they’ve only got mercs and police left to fight with?”

“Maybe a few more weeks. I don’t know, they’re not being stupid about it and standing their ground pointlessly. They’re just outmatched.”

“Equipment?”

“Everything we know is in the report I sent you, and it’s largely unimpressive…but better than what the locals have by far. Decent personal armor, no shields that we can tell, and enough tank and air support to shut down any large groupings of the defense force infantry.”

“What happened to their toys?”

“Targeted and taken out in the first two days, many still sitting in their bays in other cities. Whoever this is, they’re not hitting targets blindly. They planned this out well in advance.”

“What’s the status of our spaceport?”

“I’ve locked it down with a few of our people supplementing the locals. The looters haven’t been able to get to it, but it’s been busy with traffic seeing that it’s one of the few reliable ones left on the planet.”

“Good work. Make us a hole, we’re coming down.”

“Already got a slot reserved for you. Not sure how the enemy fleet is going to respond though, they’ve been picking and choosing what ships to go after. Nothing predictable to my eye.”

“If our people aren’t geared up, get them so. We’ll be there shortly.”

“Good luck,” Krivan offered before Mason deactivated the headset and tossed it back to the merc at the comms station.

“Caught the last part of that,” Le’han’trel said, appearing behind Mason. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“What am I thinking?” he said, continuing to read through the detailed reports. “Take us down,” he added to the helmsman.

“That we can’t do anything about their navy, but we could make a big impact on the ground.”

“Depends how many more troops they keep bringing in.”

“And it’s possibly the biggest payday we’ve ever seen.”

Mason half smiled. “That thought had occurred to me.”

“And?”

“And I also know that if this force takes the planet, it’s going to destabilize the entire region. That means a lot of trouble, and our previous clientele list is going to dry up real fast…save for jobs probably fighting against these guys at some point or another.”

“You think they’re after more than a full planet?”

“I have no idea, but so much cargo goes through this system that it will wreck the economies of at least a dozen other worlds if Tieor falls.”

“Chaos usually means good business for mercs.”

“For the unscrupulous ones maybe, but remember that our clients have to have funds to pay us with, and if their cash flow gets disrupted their ability to hire will disappear when their bank accounts run dry.”

“Point,” Le’han’trel conceded. “So, you want in on this?”

“We’re going to take on some small missions just for the payday, but there’s no way we can handle an invasion this size on our own, even if the local defense force doesn’t totally fold.”

“If you call in other units from the surrounding systems we can make one hell of a dent.”

“That I’m not doing,” Mason said firmly. “This is Brayden’s Marauders, and Brayden will have to make that call.”

“That’s a long delay.”

“Which is why I’m recalling every unit under my command to have them standing by just in case he does give the go ahead. Damn it, get base back again,” he said, motioning for the headset. Once the merc keyed up the transmission, he tossed it back to Mason. “How many ships do we have insystem, and have any been sent out with word of what’s going on?”

“We’ve still got the 13 parked in the spaceport, and the 29 came back with Nevil’s squad, but no one has gone out to spread the word, at least not from us.”

“Get the 29 prepped for takeoff with a minimal crew as a courier. Have every bit of data you’ve collected onboard and I’ll add a final message once we hit planetside. Headquarters has to know what’s going on.”

“They’ll be ready before then,” Krivan promised.

Mason took the head set off and tossed it back to the comms station as the planet grew rapidly larger on the vid screen in front of them. “How do we look?”

“No one is heading for us yet,” the helmsman said noncommittally.

“Get us down quickly, but not too quick. We don’t want to make ourselves a priority target.”

“Speedy turtle, copy.”

Mason tapped Le’han’trel on the shoulder as he rushed past him, with the Protovic dropping into step beside as he headed back to where most of his team was situated, with him and the others in his wake making a few detours to round up the others and bring them all into the main lounge, cramped as it was with the full complement in there.

“Listen up,” Mason said as the last few scurried in. “Tieor is under attack by an invading fleet of unknown origin. They’ve already taken orbit and are kicking the crap out of the defense force on the ground, with several cities already under their control or soon to be. Our base is secure for the moment, and while we’re sending a courier back to Brayden to see what he wants to do about this we are going to take the local government’s generous offer for assistance and do some trimming around the edges. It’ll be some quick credits, for these guys aren’t all that well equipped, but they’re continuing to get more troops in from orbit so there’s no knowing how far this will escalate.”

“Things look fairly bad now, but as most of you know, taking a planet is a long, tedious process and it looks like that’s what these guys are here to do. We’re going to slow them down a bit, make some profit, then let Brayden figure out the rest. Those of you with wounds I want back in base holding our little piece of real estate. The rest of you armor up immediately. Once we set down in the spaceport we’re taking the shuttles and heading out immediately. I doubt there’ll be much haggling over the contract given present circumstances, and I expect to have it signed and confirmed before we arrive at the periphery of the fighting.”

Mason took a deep breath and let it out slowly in an audible sigh. “This is bigger than anything the Marauders have tackled to date, but nothing compared to what we’ve gone up against versus the lizards or Skarrons. I don’t want any sloppiness in the transition, because I expect we all have a bit of rust to shake off. Life as a merc is a lot less strenuous, and we’re going to have to dust off our old skills to make this mission a go. We’re going up against an army again, so don’t underestimate the opposition. They’re primitive compared to us, but they’re not just randomly hitting Tieor. They’re doing so with a well-executed plan thus far, and we’re going to disrupt it as much as we can. Expect reprisals, and if I say to pull out don’t hesitate.”

“They also have tank and air support, so we’re going to have to be cautious. We’re not devoting ours this early, so this will just be infantry ops. I’m leading the first mission to see what these guys are made of, and until we get a proper name we’re referring to them as ‘Tangos.’ Once I get a feel for the Tangos we’ll send out multiple strike teams, but I’m taking an initial team of 20 out, with volunteers getting first dibs…and since the guys on the ground aren’t up to speed yet, you guys get first call. If you don’t feel up to this then don’t step up. I need sharp guys for this first mission, given that we don’t know what we’re up against yet.”

“Gear up regardless. Unless you’re in your bunk I want you ready to fight at a moment’s notice. I don’t know how this is all going to play out, so we’ve got to be ready to adjust and adapt quickly. Also, there are going to be other mercenary units out there fighting alongside the Tieor troops. We’ll try to avoid them as much as we can, but don’t put it past some of our competitors to stab us in the back if they get the chance, so keep your eyes open and our base secure. Going forward there are no guarantees.”

Mason made eye contact with several of the varied races around him, seeing looks of anticipation and gravity. These were all seasoned vets that knew the score, and like himself they were ready for a bigger challenge than usual…especially if they were going to get paid a lot to do it.

“Alright, get going,” he said, with a clap of his hands, prompting everyone to start moving in a controlled hustle out of the lounge, save for Willis who was sitting on the couch with the hole in his shoulder still plugged up with healing packs.

“You stay put,” Mason said as he left, pointing a finger at him for emphasis. Next order of business was securing a contract with the locals, so he headed back to the bridge to give the defense force the good news and to settle on a price.

10

July 18, 2735

Noop System

Tieor

“What?” Mason half-yelled into his helmet as he ran through Tieor’s streets. He and two other Marauders were heading to a breach point in the city of Machna that had just come under attack, but the Tangos had caught them out of position by finding some subsurface tunnels to skirt the perimeter defenses. No one else had caught it yet, and the Lieutenant knew that they were the only ones that could plug the hole in time. For all he knew, they could be sending an army in through the shafts, but if they could catch them confined they could bottle them up. He had other Marauders closing in, but his trio was the closest.

“Dropships coming down,” another Marauder told him, situated back in ‘safety’ and coordinating all of their disparate positions throughout the chaotic city as the populace began to flee, making running through the streets problematic, even in armor, for Mason was constantly having to avoid or bump out of the way the locals scrambling about. “Big ones, headed for the outskirts of the city. Looks like they’ve got a lot more troops heading your way.”

“Who the hell are these guys?”

“Don’t know, boss, but you’ve got a few minutes before they hit dirt.”

“Copy,” Mason said, knocking aside a Vichni as the fat alien jumped out in front of him from a nearby building. The merc half twisted to make it a moving hit, for every second he delayed the enemy consolidated its strength inside the city.

Not much further up he came to a cross street of smaller width and turned hard left, running into a group of Donklap and half jumping over them with his legs hitting their short heads. He turned the fall into a crude somersault, landing on his armor’s pack and turning over onto his feet. A moment’s delay and he was back up into a run after making sure none of his weapons had fallen off their attachment hooks in the tumble.

The other two Marauders were still with him a few strides back when they got to the tunnel cupola, which was ominously empty. The subsurface transit system moved throughout the city, but didn’t pass beyond it, meaning the Tangos had found a service link or something to make their way into it. With no people moving about, it meant they were down there and had killed or scared off everyone.

Mason pulled his rifle off his back rack hook and primed it, finally flicking on his energy shields now that there were no pedestrians around to run into as he got to the stairs and dropped to a knee as he slung the side of his body around to the right and scoped out the descent.

A yellow plasma orb flashed by his head, with him firing a blue lance back almost on reflex into the knot of troops stationed below behind some trash cans and other impromptu barricades they’d rearranged. With just that second of a glance he knew they were holing up to protect more troops coming through, which meant they had to act quickly.

Mason fired off three more shots, causing two of the Tangos to duck down while one kept firing at him, finally grazing his shoulder and draining some energy off his shield.

“Blow through!” he ordered just before the other two Marauders caught up to him. At his word they didn’t slow and made the turn at a run, barreling down the stairs and firing as they went.

Mason stood up and followed them down the moment they were past, with all three fanning out laterally so they could fire without blocking each other. They all took hits, but between their shields and speed they got on top of the defenders within a few seconds, firing into them at pointblank range before switching over to hand to hand and knocking the dozen or so of them aside with fist, foot, and rifle butts.

It was a risky ploy, but Mason knew from experience that if they waited it would only get worse. The Lieutenant smashed one of the unfamiliar bipeds back into a support pillar, with its thick, armored arms flailing wildly with the hit as it spun off the stone to the floor. A green plasma streak hit it on the way down, then two more from the other Marauders burnt through the rest of its armor before Mason was back to hand to hand, flipping another over and onto the ground before squeezing off a single shot against one that Vick had knocked back.

The mess of brown armor around them dropped to the ground over the next half minute, with the red stripes on the blue Marauder armor gaining a host of melty dots alongside them, but all three mercs had avoided any penetrations and sought to avoid any further chance by going around and pumping shots into the fallen Tangos, dead or not, just to make sure. They had about 10 seconds to work through them before another two came up from below and opened fire.

The mercs broke up and ran to the sides of the landing at the base of the stairs, with Mason diving over a trash can and coming up out of a combat roll firing. A few crisscrossing, well-aimed shots downed those two Tangos before they could do much damage, though Mason’s left thigh now sported a new melt mark just above the knee.

“Down!” he yelled over the comm as he ran forward and over the next set of stairs.

“On your six,” another voice said, with Mason glancing back and seeing four more Marauders at the top of the stairs coming in to back them up.

Mason didn’t wait on them, leading his pair and them down further into the tunnel junction and immediately seeing the Tango’s entry point, along with another three coming out of a wall panel on the other side of the monorail line that crossed left to right. He fired on the first of them immediately, veering right to expose the firing lines of those behind him as yellow plasma came back his way. He was able to dodge the first few shots, then a fireworks display of blue lances shot out past his left side and took down the Tangos after a few seconds of repeated hits to their chest armor.

A fourth was just coming out of what looked like a maintenance crawlspace, so Mason shot him twice before running up to the position and pulling him out the rest of the way, dumping him on the ground for the others to finish shooting as the Lieutenant put his barrel into the shaft and fired repeatedly down it at whoever else was in there.

“Blow it,” he ordered, knowing that one of the men behind him had some small explosives in his pack. Mason and most of the others didn’t, carrying ammo resupply for what they expected to be an extended firefight, but they’d learned long ago that a few ‘boom booms’ could come in handy now and then.

A yellow orb flew out of the shaft and hit Mason in the helmet, partially deflecting off his regenerating shields, but the rest got through and melted his faceplate, giving him a distortion over his left eye as he ducked to the side and away from the shaft. Two other Marauders stepped up and fired inside, then the other came forward with a pair of grenades and chucked them in.

“Back!” he said as Mason and the others scrambled away. A few seconds later they detonated and blew out half of the wall in a plume of dusty debris.

“Check it,” Mason ordered, still to the side and inspecting his helmet from the inside with an armored finger pressing against the melt point to see if it had broken through the material or not. Fortunately it hadn’t, but there wasn’t much material left and he figured another solid shot would make it through to his face.

“Back!” he heard again, turning his face away as another large explosion burst out in all directions, covering him with small bits of debris as the Marauder added another grenade.

“Sealed,” he heard through the dust, then a gust of fresh air from above pushed the grey fog aside and he could see the mess of wall and machinery blocking what had once been the maintenance shaft.

“Put an eye on it,” Mason ordered as he headed back to the stairs.

One of the Marauders pulled a small camera out of his pack and stepped up on a trash can so he could reach the ceiling, where he glued it in place focused on the grenade damage. He activated the telemetry and checked that the controller was getting the feed. Once confirmation was made he hopped down and ran off after the others, leaving the live feed to monitor the debris in case it was dug out and the Tangos tried to come through again in lieu of leaving a man behind to watch over it.

“Lieutenant, get to a building top now,” the controller said.

“What’s wrong?” Mason asked, looking around and spotting the tallest building near him and heading towards it as the rest of the Marauders split up.

“I need visual confirmation of the landing ships.”

“On my way,” the ex-commando said, finding the local’s equivalent of a stairwell and climbing up the emergency ladder shaft that ran next to the lift. He didn’t want to bother with it, not knowing how many other people were cramming inside or how long he’d have to wait, so he climbed the plate-like steps until he came to the top cupola that ended in a phone booth-like structure on the roof. He ran outside and looked around, guessing as to the direction the landing craft would be based on the current fighting going on in the southeast quadrant.

Sure enough that’s where the ships were, three of them in total and spaced at least a couple miles from the perimeter defense lines where the Tangos were currently engaging the defense forces and mercs stupid enough to line up in their path. The Tangos spreading out and trying to flank those more or less stationary positions were what the Marauders were going after, supplementing the defenders without getting themselves involved in more than they could handle with the few dozen infantry he had deployed.

He didn’t recognize the design of the ships, but two were clearly troop transports. The third, however, was a grounding craft, carrying underneath it something that Mason hadn’t seen in a very long time, and the sight of the white sphere sent a shiver down his spine.

“Confirmed, control. That’s a Skarron Type-5 walker.”

“How the hell did these guys get their hands on one of those?”

“I don’t know, but we don’t have anything here that can take that down, and neither do the locals.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Keep our fighters the hell away from that thing. In fact, don’t let any of our units get within spitting distance. We’ll work on their infantry…and see where this goes.”

Trayven walked into Brayden’s office, knocking on the open door to get his attention. The Colonel of the Marauders looked up from the datapad that had the report from Tieor on it, with him going over the military aspects of this unidentified army for the umpteenth time.

“Are the ships loaded?”

“Not yet, we’re still waiting on a couple of transports,” Trayven said, holding up a datachip. “We just got another courier from Tieor.”

“Bad news?” Brayden guessed, gesturing for his ops commander to toss it to him. It’d been several weeks since the first courier arrived, but to send another so quickly meant something had to have changed or they wouldn’t have wasted the ship.

“See for yourself.”

Brayden inserted the chip onto his datapad and saw a number of files on it, but first among them was labeled ‘Skarron Walker.’ He immediately opened it up and saw Mason’s brief notes indicating that a pair of Type-5 walkers were being operated by the invading army with no sign of Skarron or Hobbit involvement. Regardless, they were trashing what heavy weapons the local defense force had and were shutting down the airspace around them with just their plasma cannons…and Brayden knew that their own plasma weapons would be next to useless against that armor.

“Shit,” he pronounced, pulling up the auxiliary files that held a multitude of data on both the walkers and the rest of the invading army’s movements and reinforcements.

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Get every rail gun and missile mount we have loaded up, plus all the small scale explosive ordinance.”

Trayven’s eyes widened. “We’re actually going after those walkers?”

“We’ll charge extra,” Brayden quipped, his eyes still glued to the updated report.

“Don’t you think that’s more than we can handle?”

Finally looking up from the datapad, the Colonel sighed. “I honestly don’t know. But if we can bag even one of them I want the Marauders to have it on our rep. I have no illusions about single-handedly saving Tieor, but there’s fighting to be done on a scale we haven’t seen since we left Star Force, and a lot of credits to be made in the process. I don’t know how this is going to play out, but we need to be there and no other merc unit is going to be able to touch those walkers. They’re ours for the taking, if we can.”

“Alright, I’ll get the weapons mods switched out before we leave.”

“And send a courier,” Brayden added, “with all the information we have on Tieor and these walkers to the nearest Star Force colony.”

Traven turned around, already halfway out the door. “You think they’ll intervene?”

“No, we’re too far out for them to worry about. But there’s not supposed to be any Skarron influence in this region whatsoever, and I doubt they just sell their toys to the highest bidder. I don’t know what’s going on, but anything Skarron-related Star Force needs to have the intel on, especially if this is somehow connected to a push into this region.”

“I hope not, or we’re out of a job.”

“We move when the lines do,” Brayden reminded him. “Get the message sent and our ships loaded, preferably within the day.”

“Give me 8 hours on both and we’ll be good to go.”

The Colonel nodded, satisfied, and turned his attention back to the new reports, studying where and how the invaders were kicking the crap out of the planetary defense forces…and where the Marauders might do the most damage when the bulk of them finally got there.

“Archon,” a voice said softly from behind Jenna-732 as she sat in the small cafeteria along with a few hundred other personnel in the clandestine base on the surface of a volcanic world beyond the ADZ that was part of the combined Clan Ninja Monkey/Clan Cloud circuit.

The Mage turned around, still chewing on a sugar stick. “Whaaat?”

“We’ve received a bit of intelligence from a mercenary unit concerning the Skarrons.”

Jenna swallowed. “What system?”

“The Noop System.”

She frowned, looking at her Padawan. “I’m not familiar with it.”

Levi-12733 shrugged.

“Neither was I until I looked it up. We only have basic data from survey records, but it’s located 128 lightyears from here and more than 400 from what we know to be the Skarron border. Furthermore, the mercenaries appear to be a unit comprised of former Star Force personnel, some of which have seen combat with the Skarrons. They’ve sent data indicating the presence of two Type-5 Skarron walkers involved in a planetary invasion by an unknown force, but without any Skarron or Aronsic present.”

“What mercenaries?”

“They’re called Brayden’s Marauders, and they operate out of the ADZ with the bulk of their activities occurring beyond Star Force’s reach.”

“So who has the walkers?” Levi asked.

“The Marauders say the invaders have not identified themselves, but are a conglomeration of various units unknown to them…and to us. I had an analyst run through their profiles, and we can’t identify them either.”

“It’s a big galaxy,” Jenna reminded him. “But I’ve never known the Skarrons to share to their military equipment.”

“Or to work with intermediaries,” Levi added.

“Which is why I brought it to your attention, given that you’re about to depart.”

Jenna raised an eyebrow, looking at her apprentice. “Feel up to a road trip?”

Newbslayer

1

September 30, 2735

Mak’ri Jor-El

Mid Jump

Jenna and Levi sat in one of the sanctum’s meditation rooms, both on nearby cushioned pedestals with their arms interlocked at the wrists. Jenna held Levi’s right in her left, with a symmetrically reversed hold on the other. Both Archons were motionless, eyes closed, but with a flurry of brain activity that would have pegged out the old neural scanners that had been used to monitor training drills such as this. Archon psionics had come so far since those early days that a whole new generation of monitoring equipment had to be created to keep up with them.

And the more they advanced the more they realized that a huge part of the psionics was Ikrid. Originally they had dismissed the non-physical skills as secondary, but there was so much that one could do with basic Ikrid that it hadn’t become apparent until they’d leveled up that Tier 1 ability. There were literally over 500 different applications logged in the V’kit’no’sat database, some of which even the trailblazers hadn’t achieved yet due to lack of prerequisites…and that wasn’t even counting the Tier 2 upgrades.

At the moment Levi was using Orren, a Tier 2 Ikrid modifier that gave him additional invasive power when trying to actively press into and hack another mind. It wasn’t something that could be practiced against a machine, like some of the other Ikrid applications that the techs and Archons had gotten innovative on to find ways to train in isolation, but rather had to have an active mind to access, and in this case Levi needed a strong one to probe.

Using non-psionic volunteers didn’t offer more than a bit of exploration and light practice, and even going up against lower level Archons didn’t offer the necessary resistance to really push your abilities…but Levi had all the challenge he could ever have wanted from Jenna, whose mind was far stronger than his even without the Farchor ability upgrade, which added additional defensive mechanisms to prevent such tampering as he was attempting.

Jenna wasn’t counterattacking him, rather just trying to block his intrusion. Physical contact had to be maintained for them to get around the Ikrid blocks, but with the flesh to flesh connection established her mind was open to his ‘sight’ and directly accessible. Biological as they were, each Archon’s brain was essentially just a computer with an immense amount of automated processes. Numerous programs were operating within the mage’s mind without her conscious effort, such as her breathing and heartbeat. If an opponent was strong enough, they could hack into her mind and manually shut them down…essentially killing her with a thought.

And where the power of the mind was concerned, amount of tissue was a huge deal, just as it was with muscles. A small opponent might have stronger muscle fibers than a large one, but add up all the weak fibers and you could possess a greater strength than the more developed individual simply because of your size. That was a big disadvantage for the Zen’zat against the rest of the V’kit’no’sat, and even more so for the Archons since they didn’t use the Zen’zat physical upgrades that the Knights did. Even that bit of additional brain tissue was useful, in that it gave you more processing power and additional transmission capability.

The Ikrid blocks had been designed to essentially give the Zen’zat an immunity to that so long as they could stay out of touching range, and with their armor blocking physical contact it wasn’t an issue so long as they weren’t captured and interrogated, but it didn’t allow for a Zen’zat to hack into the minds of the larger V’kit’no’sat races very well. That, in turn, offered the other races some comfort, but with everything V’kit’no’sat there was an upgrade to make you better, which is where Orren came in.

It took the size issue and basically threw it aside by giving the individual specially designed tools for accessing another mind and bypassing the natural defenses with guile rather than brute force. Often an opponent wouldn’t even feel the presence of another mind when Orren was used, for it was so low in terms of pressure that only an active monitoring of one’s status would reveal the incursion.

Only a handful of V’kit’no’sat races were permitted Orren, and none of them had it by default. Individuals had to earn it through a variety of means that were similar, but not identical between the races. It was too powerful a tool to just hand out to someone who hadn’t proven themselves, for even a sloppy attempt could succeed against an experienced opponent and that type of vulnerability would have upset the powerbase within the V’kit’no’sat that was very delicately maintained.

That powerbase was one of their few weaknesses, for none of the races had all of the psionics that the Zen’zat did. They didn’t trust each other that far, and the Zak’de’ron having too many was one of the reasons that they didn’t fit in with the ‘equity’ that developed over time. Zen’zat were so small and pathetic that they weren’t seen as a threat, particularly because they didn’t have a race. They were created from Ter’nat and became Zen’zat after having proven themselves to have some merit in becoming useful tools to the V’kit’no’sat rather than a member race.

And they’d wanted their Zen’zat to be powerful enough compensate for their small size and be of use to the other races, hence they got above and beyond what the other races possessed, with a caveat. All of their psionics after the basic 7 had to be ascended to, whereas most of the other V’kit’no’sat psionics were a default from birth. Orren was one of the few that was not, due to the unique power it gave an individual over others.

But where Orren was the mental sword of psionics, Farchor was the shield. About a third of the V’kit’no’sat races had it as default, with the others all having the trigger woven into their genetic makeup to allow them to gain the defense if they were skilled enough. It wasn’t an immunity to Orren, but rather it was a counter-intrusion program that ran constantly. In addition to throwing up red flags for the conscious mind to see, it essentially worked like a drone army in the battle against the intrusion, able to ‘fight’ the hacking on its own without conscious effort.

How it fought was customizable, which had to be tailored with time and training, but even the default basics made it very difficult for an opponent to be able to take remote control over the individual. More than likely a disruption or a few memories gleamed would be the result, and the ‘kill thought’ ability was shut out entirely, for the basic life functions were so armored with redundancies that there was no way an outside ‘signal’ could override them.

A mind was like a dart board, with a bullseye in the center that was the conscious ‘core’ of the individual, then there were rings expanding outward, with those closest to the core being the most fundamental and hardest to access. Surface thoughts were in the outermost ring, with a whole host of other functions in between. When an individual gained Farchor it pretty much blocked out the inner two or three rings by default, leaving the outer rings accessible but with increased resistance.

That resistance what was Levi was probing within Jenna’s mind, with his Master making a conscious choice not to press back into his, but just to try and block her Apprentice’s attacks like they were tennis balls being flung her way. His power level was too low for him to get very far with a brute force attempt, but Orren made things tricky and offered her a decent challenge when she opted not to respond. If she did she could shut down his attempts quite quickly with a little disruptive pulse into his mind.

Levi was a level 23 padawan and hadn’t gotten Farchor from Jenna yet. It was up to her which Tier 2 psionics she shared with him first, and she’d wanted him to get used to Orren first so he’d be able to understand how an opponent was operating before he got Farchor. Jenna was far better at defending because she had that perspective and ability to counterattack, so to her it made sense to go give him the offensive capability first.

That, and she wanted practice defending.

Outside the advanced training group there was literally no opportunities to work on these type of psionics, and she was very glad the trailblazers had come up with the ‘Jedi’ program of pairing a mage with a padawan…or in some other rare cases that were beginning to pop up, having two mages working together as a field unit pair. Most of the trailblazers were too busy for that sort of thing, but Jason and Paul were known to link up for a mission here and there, but then again they’d always been a pair since basic training.

Jenna was a level 107 mage and had moved through the padawan ranks mostly in the advanced training group, never having a master of her own. Some others were doing the same thing now, simply for the lack of available mages. Some didn’t want an apprentice, but even if all of them did there were so many Archons reaching padawan level that there simply weren’t enough pairings. Down the road that would hopefully change, but for now they were still in a transition period to what Paul referred to as the ‘Jedi Order’ they were trying to build the Archon ranks into.

The padawan levels had been reworked to accommodate each Tier 2 psionic that was unlocked, with several more to go that hadn’t been discovered yet. As it was, Jenna felt it would take another 10-15 years before she got Levi to where he needed to be, transferring all of her own psionics to him and getting him up to a proficient level in them all. There were four that she’d been holding off on, while he currently possessed 16. She’d fed him each one individually rather than having him unlock them all in the first year as some other masters did. It was her prerogative how she had him progress, and he’d been open to doing it her way in exchange for the ability to have a permanent training partner/teacher while they moved about the Star Force empire doing field work.

Not all Archons preferred staying in the advanced training group, which had grown to several levels. The inner circle was inaccessible to even Jenna, with Vermaire and a few handpicked others pushing the limits even further and trying to find the missing psionic triggers…as well as working on a lot of other things that she and the others would only find out about after the fact.

Currently the top Archon was, once again, Morgan-063. She’d bounced in and out of that title a number of times, but she’d eeked out an 8 level lead at the moment and currently stood at mage level 398 out of a total of 500 levels in what the trailblazers were referring to as the first ‘adult’ rank. After all the centuries of training and advancement that Jenna had gone through that almost seemed like an insult, but after hearing their reasons and the continuous comparisons to the V’kit’no’sat Zen’zat she reluctantly agreed that they were only now really on par with reaching mage.

They weren’t inferior anymore, but they were far from dominant. The mages could hold their own with the rank and file Zen’zat, and probably defeat them given the extra psionics that they now possessed, but got up the ability ladder above ‘average’ within the V’kit’no’sat and even the trailblazers were quickly outclassed. Jenna didn’t know what the next Archon rank would be after mage, but she had a long way to go to get there. Drills like this with Levi were helping her level up her Ikrid skills, despite the fact that the levels themselves couldn’t measure all of it.

That didn’t matter to her, for she wasn’t training just to achieve a higher rank. Jenna was training for higher ability, in every way, shape, and form regardless of whether or not it could be outwardly measured. Many aspects of the mind couldn’t be, or at least not yet. That was one of the projects going on in the advanced training group that she knew about, with the techs trying to find more ways of measurement and the Archons taking those and creating new challenges out of them.

Jenna figured they’d eventually get around to finding a way to add more requirements to the levels, and she definitely wanted to defend her ranking when they did, but in truth she just wanted to be as prepared as possible to defend her mind if/when it ever came under attack. The Ikrid block was a great comfort, but that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to be able to resist a strong mind enough not to become a living thrall, and according to Kara that was a distinct possibility with the higher level V’kit’no’sat…and especially with the dragons.

If they could access her flesh and worm their way inside her head, they could essentially rewrite part of her programming and control her from afar even after breaking physical contact. She needed to be able to resist that programming and even flush it out after the fact if it happened, hence the need for practice defending, which was why she didn’t balk at giving Levi ample opportunity to probe her mind.

Others, she knew, found it intrusive and kept their efforts restricted to certain outer ‘rings’ but she did not. The type of sparring she and Levi were doing was very intimate, given that he was able to probe her thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. More often than not he even tweaked her sexuality program in order to throw her off balance, and that alone was enough to make some people blanch and recoil.

But not her, and it wasn’t because she liked him either. He was attractive, and that was one of the big reasons she’d chosen him out of the pool of available candidates, for if you were going to be traveling and living together for multiple decades you might as well have someone you wouldn’t mind getting locked in a closet with. Not that that would ever happen, but it was a mental test she used when picking training partners and such, and Levi had fit the bill there even though there was nothing romantic between them. Casual flirting and sarcasm, sure. But the idea of ‘coupling’ was a totally foreign concept for the Archon now.

And by that she and the others weren’t referring to sex, which was now no longer an issue for the mages. They’d figured out how to deactivate her menstrual cycle genetically, rather than using surgery or chemicals that could be undone with a regenerator treatment. Jenna and the other females, she assumed anyway, were now sterile by choice and she didn’t miss the occasional bleeding, but for her it wasn’t an opportunity to reengage in sexual activity without the risk of producing offspring with psionics unlocked.

It was the opposite for her and the other Archons, a sign of total commitment and saying that reproduction had 0% to do with their priorities. The sterilization could be undone with another genetic alteration if needed, so it wasn’t permanent permanent, but it was something that set her apart from the rest of Humanity and made her feel a little more badass than the rest.

As for her sex drive, that remained intact. They hadn’t messed with it, and amongst the Archons it was seen as kind of a test. It was said that sexuality had a strong influence on the weak minded, which was basically saying that any Archon who had sex was admitting to being a loser. That wasn’t necessarily true, but that’s how she and the others decided to view it.

Which was why she didn’t tell Levi to keep his distance from those thoughts and feelings within her mind. It was very exposing for him to go there, let alone prod around, activate, or even amplify that part of her, but Jenna didn’t like the idea of having a no-go zone. She was an Archon, she had nothing to hide, no shame, no embarrassment, and if she did that would have been a sign that she had something to work on.

Jenna also knew that an enemy wouldn’t hold to a no-go zone anyway, so if she was really serious about learning how to defend herself she had to get hit in every which way during training, holding nothing back.

It was awkward at first, because since becoming an Archon she hadn’t really dealt with that part of her in any significant way. It was always riding in the background, but it was things like that that could be used against you, so she welcomed the challenge…and that fact that Levi’s mental prodding felt really good.

But therein was the trick of it, because if she let herself enjoy it her defenses would lapse and he could gain further access to her mind and circumvent her blocks. The Farchor especially could be partially disabled if she went into ‘pleasure’ mode, which was why Levi hit her with that attack often, because it had offered him the most success in the past.

And that was the way it worked with Archons. Sexual pleasure wasn’t a bad thing, but pleasure for pleasure sake without a purpose was the sign of a junkie-style loser. If you wanted to reproduce it served a purpose. Archons didn’t and therefore sex had no purpose. The rest of the Human population still didn’t seem to understand that simple principle, thinking that the Archons were emotionless monks or just downright crazy. After all, what would it hurt to have a little fun during downtime?

Except that Archons never had ‘downtime’ in that way. Everything they did, including sleep, had a purpose, as did this mental training. Orgasm for the sake of fun was stupid. Orgasm for the sake of training…just an added bonus.

Jenna knew that was sound thinking, and prided herself on being a step ahead of a lot of the others in that regard, for her mind would be a bit more shielded in the aftermath of the training than theirs would be. The ironic thing, in this case, was that she was resisting the pleasure rather than embracing it, and only when she failed royally did she end up in a state of euphoria.

At which point Levi would just stare at her with a ‘you are weak’ look of victory on his face. She hated that smirk, but even more so the fact that he was right. She shouldn’t have a part of herself that she couldn’t control, and it goaded her into working even harder to put some armor over that vulnerability.

Which was why now when Levi tried that tactic he didn’t get far. Resisting pain was a unique skill, but resisting pleasure was wholly different…and it was a skill that Jenna was proud to have learned, for now Levi couldn’t get her awash with that type of distraction anymore, but he could still throw it her way for a momentary quiver, during which he’d try and penetrate somewhere else before she could fully react.

Like her Tier 2 Snu ability, which offered an immunity to Fornax, an opponent could no longer disable her with it…with the difference being that this wasn’t a skill she’d unlocked, but rather constructed herself. And the more little advantages like this that she could create, measureable or not, the more powerful she’d become.

And the more powerful she became, the bigger the difference she could make when a time a crisis came, which was the motivation driving her every waking moment.

2

The sexual ‘prods’ were only one tactic that Levi was using, knowing that he had to hit his master from different angles and keep up the frequency of rotation. His Ikrid skills had advanced to the point where he could manage two or three different avenues simultaneously, but if he wanted a blunt force attack he could only focus on one area. That wasn’t going to work with Jenna, for her mental strength was far beyond his, but if he wasn’t going for a break and just a distraction it could still be useful.

Which is what he hit her with after getting her a bit loopy with a bit of euphoria. He expected the pushback, which came after only a little hesitation, but Levi didn’t wait around to fight that losing battle, instead using his Orren to slip a deep strike in past all the mental noise. To his surprise it hit without much resistance, giving him access to her visual processors. Before she could detect that hack and shove him out again he sent a burst of sparks into her eyes and retreated, hoping to make another Orren strike before she recovered from this one.

The padawan didn’t have similar luck when he tried to access her muscle control, intending to give her a bit of a facial twitch. He didn’t meet up with his conscious effort on this one, but rather her Farchor ‘minions’ which existed as a mass of programming that fought him automatically. He could have got through it with time, but all she needed was the red flag thrown up and a moment to respond to get her conscious power thrown into the fight and kicking Levi’s mental tendril out forcefully.

But she went one further than that. During these drills it was standard practice for the defender not to strike back, for if Jenna did it would make Levi have to play a mixture of offense and defense. The purpose was for him to work on his offensive skills so Jenna would never respond by going into his mind, only defending her own turf, so to speak.

She did now though, following Levi’s Orren strike and running it right back at him. It caught him completely off guard and suddenly he opened his eyes and looked at Jenna, thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the galaxy.

The programming spike continued to alter his senses even after she withdrew from his mind, lasting a few seconds until Levi detected it and reset…with the highly attractive Archon sitting across from him returning to her normal aura within his mind, which was centered around strength, wisdom, and not romance.

“Better,” she said, opening her eyes but keeping hold of his wrist.

“What was that?” Levi asked, referencing the counterattack.

“The signal for a time out.”

“You could have just said something. Did I hit a sore spot?”

“No…it’s just the cumulative effect. You shouldn’t have got that one through.”

“So I’m not getting better, you’re just getting tired?”

“Getting tired because you’re wearing me down. You didn’t use to have this much stamina.”

Levi smirked. “Is that your version of innuendo?”

That prompted another strike, this one with Jenna bypassing Levi’s mental defenses on a whim and accessing his arm control. She made him release her wrist and bring his own palm towards his forehead in a slap…but he reasserted control just short of making contact, with the Archon glancing up at his hand just over his eyes.

“Missed it by that much,” Jenna commented. “You are getting quicker at recovery.”

“Now I know something is wrong. What’s up? You’re getting punchy.”

Jenna sighed, with Levi dropping his hand and grabbing her wrist again. “You’re getting to me.”

“The sexual strikes?”

“Yeah.”

“You told me to hit those hard.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“I don’t have the pleasure endurance. I’ve learned to put up with pain and keep going, but this is totally different.”

“Maybe you just need to take a break and enjoy it for once.”

She frowned at him. “Kind of defeats the point of the training.”

“I didn’t want to say this earlier, because it makes me sound like a junkie, but what if we’re missing something…and by ‘we’ I mean all the Archons. We’ve got a part of ourselves that we’re ignoring, and granted, it’s for reproduction and therefore we don’t need it, but maybe we’re missing something mentally due to lack of experience.”

“Which is the point of this training,” Jenna reminded him.

“No, you’re fighting it,” Levi insisted. “Maybe you just need to analyze.”

“Is this your way of trying to get me into bed?” she asked sarcastically.

“You 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 worked, for they were more comfortable with conflict than anything else, and it settled her mind.

“You have to force me to enjoy it. I can let you in past my defenses, but you’ll have to fix yourself there and not let me back out of it. I’ll probably try on reflex, and when I do you’ll have to be strong enough not to let me push you back.”

“I’ll need some time to put in some programming layers for that.”

“And you’ll need to keep me…subjugated for a long time. Say at least an hour. You have to get me so out of it that I’m not resisting anymore. You have to turn me into a…”

“Sex toy?”

“I am so hating this already.”

“Do you want this to be a series, or a one off?”

“I can surrender once. I don’t want to make a habit of it.”

“As you mentioned before, my endurance has improved greatly. I can keep you hammered for at least two hours, guaranteed. I promise you’ll be drooly by the time it’s over.”

“No, it’s just…you have to do this so much that I’m not left hanging wanting more. If this were sugar, you have to take me to the candy store and let me eat as much as I want until I’m sick.”

“Leave no stone unturned?”

“If this is going to be a mulligan, make it count.”

“I can do that.”

“Give me a moment,” she said, letting go of his wrist and standing up, with him releasing hers. She took a few steps over to the nearby wall and leaned against it with one arm. “I don’t like this. My mojo is screaming no, but like you said I can recover from it later.”

“You’re afraid you’ll like it enough that you’ll want a second go?”

Jenna’s shoulders sagged. “Actually, I think I might…and that isn’t right either. We should know every piece of our own design inside and out. Being fearful or embarrassed of going somewhere isn’t right.”

“I’ve had a bit more time to think on this than you have,” Levi offered. “And I’ve had the perspective of pummeling you with assaults and observing how you react. This isn’t combat, it’s something else, which is why I think it’s a weakness for us.”

“Did you get laid before you became an Archon?”

“A few times.”

“Maybe that’s where I went wrong. I never did.”

Levi shook his head. “With the access we have to each other’s minds, we can do far better than that, so I don’t think that’s really the issue. You don’t get the full picture when you get laid, just a piece of it. I think we need to go through every variation at least once just to become familiar with it, that way we won’t worry about what might happen, because we’ll already know.”

“But it sounds like you’re just a sex junkie when you say it.”

“Which is why I didn’t mention it before.”

“We both know this is a road to nowhere, right? It’s designed for reproduction and we have no use of that.”

“Agreed.”

“And that a lot of people indulge in the pleasure, but because it’s an illusion that pirates the rest of our senses we can’t make use of it.”

“Agreed.”

“And if we were seeking pleasure in the first place we’d never be able to train, because we have to embrace the pain that comes with it.”

“Agreed,” Levi repeated again.

“So that begs the question why am I so weak minded that I’m considering this?”

“I think that’s the trap for us. This would serve a purpose, though it seems like an excuse.”

“I’d prefer an opponent that I could just punch.”

“Or we could just genetically turn it off.”

“No,” Jenna said quickly, pointing a finger down at Levi where he still sat. “That’s cowardice.”

“Agreed. This is a challenge we have to overcome, but we can’t fight it. We have to surrender to it in order to gain the information we need to create a proper defense. At least that’s the conclusion I came to. Still sounds sucky when I say it though.”

“No, you were right earlier. I’m not sure about this, but what’s the downside? A moment of stupidity. I’ll risk that just to keep this from bouncing around in the back of my mind forever. Archons shouldn’t be sheepish about anything, and that fact that I am now is bothering me. But the biggest thing is I don’t need this, and I’m doubting myself as to why I’m considering it…which is a huge red flag.”

Jenna pushed off the wall and came back over next to Levi and sat down. “Alright, my mind is made up. This may be incredibly stupid, but I’m going to see it through regardless. Just make sure you don’t screw up your part. You have to be relentless and probe every corner of my sexuality multiple times. I don’t want to have to do this twice.”

“I can do that,” Levi said, without any sarcasm or innuendo, which settled her. They were both Archons, and at the end of the day they’d always be. Individuality was the lifeblood of an Archon, and sexual emotions were binary, creating an urge to pair up and surrender that individuality, which was yet another reason why they were a negative if allowed to run their course. But the two of them would never go there, could never go there. Not because it was forbidden, but because it wasn’t them. Such mistakes were the stuff of the young and newbs, and they were far from either.

She was a girl, he was a guy, and they might as well use those biological attributes to their advantage to help each other. If this worked she’d return the favor and they’d both grow stronger after recovering from the sensory distortion. If not, she’d shake it off and they’d move on, no longer worried about it.

“You’re not going to make this awkward?”

“We passed awkward when we started this training.”

“For the record, this is one reason why the general population should never have Ikrid. They’d never leave their quarters.”

“Wow. Death of a civilization via pleasure. That’s a new one.”

“Sexuality has a strong influence on the weak minded.”

“Or the ignorant,” Levi added. “Surprise attacks always will be like that.”

“Do you have these same worries, or is it just a girl thing?”

“Different version probably, but basically the same thing.”

“Ok,” she said, interlocking wrists with him again. “This is going to take some time to let you in. Don’t go poking around until you’ve got a lock. My involuntary reflexes could be stronger than you think.”

“I’m assuming so. I don’t think you realize just how powerful your mind is. Looking from the outside I think I can size you up better than you can.”

“Be cautious and make this happen the first try. I’m not used to shutting down my own defenses.”

“Relax, I’ll give you what you need.”

Jenna smirked, but Levi immediately shook his head. “That’s not innuendo. This is a type of training and I’ll make sure you get what you need. I imagine you’re going to have to do some work on your end to really accept this, so focus on that and don’t worry about the rest. I’ve got this.”

Jenna sigh. “And here I’m being schooled by the padawan…how embarrassing,” she said, closing her eyes and beginning to take down her mental barriers around her sexuality, Farchor included. She sensed Levi ‘knocking’ on her motor control, then got the mental explanation that he needed to hold her body in position himself, releasing her to focus purely on the pleasure.

And the fact that she was, if he did this correctly, about to become a drooling idiot. Jenna pushed that unwanted thought away and focused on letting him in. However this went down she wasn’t going to let herself be shy. This may be an unused part of her psyche, but she was going to bring it out into the open and get a feel for it. The ironic part was she couldn’t do that herself, which was why it’d always been lying dormant within her mind.

But no longer. Time to end the mind games once and for all. And she was very glad she had her fellow Archon to help her, for something like this, sexuality aside, required a great deal of trust, for she was opening her mind deeper to Levi than she’d ever let anyone in before. That wasn’t easy to do, but Archons were loyal to the core and Levi’s tone had indicated that he understood the importance of this. She could trust him to help her, and that was the only reason she was able to remove the deepest blocks, for had there been even the slightest bit of hesitancy those would have remained no matter what her conscious mind insisted.

But aside they went, temporarily disabled as Levi’s mind entered those areas and began putting up ‘supports’ to keep the doorway open for when she recoiled later. This was going to be jarring for her, from a pleasure standpoint rather than pain, but it was still going to shake her. How much she didn’t know, but her job was to just ride it out and learn from it after the fact. She didn’t like not being in control, but releasing it was the mission here, so that’s just what she did.

The two of them sat on the pedestals, arms locked and motionless, with Jenna’s last coherent thought being that it was probably a good idea that she’d chosen the hottest padawan available.

3

October 5, 2735

Mak’ri Jor-El

Mid Jump

Jenna and Levi sat in the meditation chamber again, going through another round of Orren drills for the padawan. It was the second set since their experimental training, with both Archons having devoted themselves to physical workouts as Jenna sought to recenter herself. Yesterday Levi had taken the sexual distraction route again, finding it effective but in a different way. Today though was going horrible, for he couldn’t get any useable amout of traction from her with that tactic.

He knew he was scoring hits and tweaking those emotions, but her recovery rate had become so fast that they didn’t offer more than the slightest of head starts. With the entrenched defenses that Farchor gave Jenna, there was no way Levi was going to have enough time to undo them, making her mind virtually impregnable unless he could find a way to distract her. As it was, he was having to work a bit harder to access any part of her mind, with her sexual areas having been her weakest blocks. Those defenses had ticked up a bit already, which made Levi begin to search around her mind’s many facets trying to find another way in.

Going easy on me? Jenna asked during the doldrums.

Hardly. You’re locked up tight.

I don’t feel like it. Everything is still a little loose.

Not enough for me to pry free, and your sex drive isn’t having as much an effect on you.

Are you sure? Yesterday I thought you were being gentle.

I was at first, but I’m not holding back anything today. I can’t distract you for as long as I used to. You’re snapping back too fast for me to go elsewhere.

Keep trying. I don’t think I’m that good yet.

If you have another weak area, feel free to point it out. I’m not finding anything.

So you’re saying it worked?

I know I’m not holding back, so yeah, it seems to have. Care to share what you’re doing different?

As far as I know I’m not, Jenna admitted. But I’m no longer worried. Wary, but not worried, if that makes sense.

I think so. It was my idea, after all.

And I’ll return the favor later. Right now make sure it’s a genuine quality control test. If I have any cracks left, find them. Forget other avenues and just focus on this one.

I have been. I can’t do much here that I haven’t tried.

You haven’t tried a binary.

Levi mentally cringed. I don’t think I’m strong enough for that yet.

Give it a try anyway. The more failures you have the more data you’ll have to learn from.

Alright, Levi said, finding her sexual programming again and concentrating. What Jenna meant by ‘binary’ was a double attack, one using the Orren to slip in unannounced and the other being a brute force Ikrid assault, trying to overpower her defenses and fight his way in. He didn’t stand a chance against her superior strength, Farchor aside, but in theory if he could make enough mental noise to help cloak the Orren angle it was possible he could get some traction right under her nose, so to speak.

Trouble was, applying so much power basically took away his finesse skills, like trying to fight a boxing match while balancing an open bottle of water on his head. He didn’t think he could do it, but if she wanted him to try he’d give it a go.

Levi amped up his mental pressure and applied it directly to that subsection of her mind. He felt her press back without counterattacking, as if holding a line rather than trying to push him out of her head. That gave him some freedom to experiment, but when applying full power to any point, or across her entire sexual program, he couldn’t concentrate enough to engage a separate Orren tendril. He pulled back a bit, going at about 75% strength and knowing that was pretty much a joke from Jenna’s point of view, but he didn’t lose any ground and she didn’t kick him out, merely holding her ground against his lesser pressure.

The padawan managed to summon up a secondary attack on the same area and at first it managed to get through and he was able to create a little bit of euphoria in her. That sent a quiver through her power levels, reducing the pushback for a split second before she just amped it up to compensate. The window of opportunity wasn’t enough for Levi to act on, for he was tapped out just maintaining the two simultaneous attacks, and a moment later his Orren tendril was discovered. Jenna pushed it out and regained her iron wall against him, with Levi abandoning the effort less than a minute later.

Sorry, that’s all I’ve got.

Not bad.

Looks like you finally got your sexual resistance you wanted.

It’ll be armor once I get around to customizing my Farchor there, but yeah, looks like it. Keep poking around to see if you can find anything. I want to be sure about this.

Well I’m sure. I got nothing left to try.

Maybe you’re subconsciously holding back after the pathetic mess you left me in earlier?

Feel free to check, Levi said, immediately feeling Jenna’s presence enter his mind. He didn’t resist her, not that he could have kept her completely out if he’d wanted to, but he let her poke around his memories and current analysis of her, also giving her a chance to look at herself through his eyes. She lingered there for what felt like a long time, then the Archon eventually pulled out, satisfied.

Jenna disconnected their mental link and let go of his wrist, opening her eyes and looking at him. “Didn’t realize I was that resistant.”

“Happy now?”

“Relieved, not happy. I’m still a little loopy.”

“I figured you would have burnt it out of you by now with all those cardio workouts.”

“Not completely. Still missing a bit of my edge, but it’s coming back. Feels like I missed a week of workouts.”

“When was the last time you missed a week…ever?”

“Combat mission, about four decades ago. A lot of hunting, very little fighting. I was very rusty by the time I got back to a sanctum. This is different, but with a similar diminishing effect.”

“Kind of makes you wonder why anyone has sex.”

“What you did to me was far worse, youngling. But yeah, it just cuts your badass mojo right out of you.”

“You’re welcome. I’ve also noticed you’re being a bit nicer to me.”

Jenna frowned. “Really?”

“Yeah, but I guess that’s just a side effect. I tried to use that inside your head but it didn’t work because you were already holding back. When we spar again you’ll probably have to shake that off.”

“Do me a favor and give me a reason to hate you a bit.”

Levi suppressed a smile and, without warning, ripped a side-fist punch across her head. He hit her so hard it knocked her off her pedestal and left a big red mark on the side of her face.

Jenna shook her head, having had her bell rung a bit. “Bastard,” she said, standing up and staring laser beams at him. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said, rising gracefully from his pedestal to join her, figuring that the mental training session was over.

Jenna thumbed over her shoulder. “Sparring ring.”

Levi sighed. “I’m going to pay for that, aren’t I?”

“No, I’m just going to beat the crap out of you like normal.”

“Oh, well then…” he said, a mock expression of relief on his face as he walked past her and out the door. “Let’s get to it.”

Four days later…

“What have we got?” Jenna asked the Captain of the Jor-El as it entered high planetary orbit over Tieor.

“Low orbital traffic, no known ship types. Definitely no Skarron presence.”

Jenna bit her lip, squishing her face up in a confused look. “Find their toys.”

It took a few minutes, but eventually the crew brought up a bad hologram of the surface of the planet. It was being scanned from high orbit, hence the poor quality, but it made out the shape of a Skarron Type-5 walker well enough, sitting in the center of a city. Another hologram came up showing an identical one with several damaged spots, then the zoom panned out and numerous vehicles were surrounding it beyond plasma range.

“Put us down there, then find a camping spot in orbit,” Jenna said, heading for the bridge exit. “Don’t get involved until we figure out what’s going on.”

“And if they involve themselves with us?”

“Pull out to an orbit they can’t follow, but leave a comm buoy within our suits’ transmission range.”

“Copy that.”

Jenna reached out with her mind and found Levi in another chamber nearby. Gear up, we’re heading down.

Brayden sat in the pilot’s seat of one of their hover tanks, with it being the most advanced model they fielded and completely useless against the Skarron walker they were engaging. He knew that closing to within the walker’s plasma range was suicide, so the Marauders were hitting it from afar using a combination of rail guns and missiles, neither of which the Colonel’s tank possessed. What it did have, however, were strong anti-tank plasma weapons and a multipurpose low yield turret useful for both anti-personnel and anti-air functions, both of which were getting a workout as Brayden was fighting off the Tangos’ counterattack.

They were hitting the Marauders with their own small tanks, infantry, and aircraft…the latter of which were a big problem given that he’d ordered his own fighters to keep well away from the walker. He’d gone so far as to keep them out of this mission entirely and had them sitting at a staging base, both to secure it and their line of retreat if it came to that. Right now he was having second thoughts about that, for a good pilot could stay away from the walker and still engage their fighters, though them having a safe haven to run to would have made engaging them very difficult.

His tanks were taking a beating, but they had enough anti-air capability spread out among them that they were picking off a few of the enemy fighters and keeping them back from the assault tanks, which had been modularly fitted to hit the walker and nothing else. They all had to have escorts, and Brayden knew he’d be better suited to fighting that battle than taking pot shots at the more or less stationary walker. It was moving constantly, trying to close with the Marauders who wouldn’t let it, but from a gunner’s perspective it was so big and slow that it was easy to hit.

And hit it they were. The shields had already been breached and the bright white armor was cracked and burnt in many places, but it was still very much alive and lethal. Brayden had six attack groups spread around the perimeter, all of which constantly kept adjusting their position on the grassy plains to keep near to it, but far enough outside its own weapon range. The walker had its own escorts alongside its thick bipedal legs, but most of the Tango’s units had moved out to engage the Marauders, leaving only a handful behind within the protective halo of the walker’s plasma range.

Brayden knew they were wearing it down, but his tanks would come out of this with heavy damage at least. He just hoped he didn’t lose any crew in the process.

The mercenary commander swung the front end of his triangular tank around and fired off a pair of red plasma orbs ahead of a group of infantry that contained a few rocket launchers. The ground exploded and the grass caught fire, scattering the troops as he accelerated towards the flames and eventually pushed through, with his secondary gunner chipping away at those infantry with the small turret on top of the tank.

Just then another of the Tango fights zipped by low overhead, stitching the ground with plasma strikes, three of which hit the tank. Its shield held up against the first two, but the third got through and kissed the hull, followed by several hits from surrounding enemy tanks as they focused on the single Marauder target…as Brayden had hoped. His wheeled tanks were less resistant to weaponsfire, and in order to keep them operational he needed to play bait with the more advanced units, and the best way to do that was dive down the enemy’s throats and dare them to ignore him.

If they did he could hurt them badly, if they didn’t then they’d pour firepower into his tank leaving the others free to fire at will. Every operational unit he kept in the game meant more firepower for his side, and for that reason he didn’t mind his own armor getting hit and melted off in spots. This was a messy fight, and they were going to have to fight messy if they wanted to bag that walker. It was doable, otherwise he wouldn’t have committed his forces against it, but if they handled this right they should be able to kill it and keep themselves alive, but there was a narrow margin of error there and as the Marauders’ commander his place was in the thick of it, taking out enemies and keeping his people alive.

So that’s where he kept his tank, protecting his group of rail guns as they peppered the distant walker with huge metallic slugs that were slowly breaking apart the Type-5’s armor with concussive damage that their plasma resistance didn’t affect. A few missile plumes would be seen going in with the slugs, but most of them had been fired off already to take down the shields as quickly as possible.

The Marauders were having to fight a battle to allow them to fight a second battle against the walker, making for an unusual mission but one that his men were more than capable of handling.

Unfortunately they weren’t able to handle it cleanly, for after another twenty minutes of fighting one of the other attack groups lost a tank in the final stages that didn’t just go out of commission, but it was blown apart by repetitive attacks that were more vengeance than tactical. It was the last gasp of the Tangos on that part of the battlefield before they retreated, leaving the now smoking and still remains of the Skarron walker behind like a giant statue memorializing their defeat.

The other groups, now free to turn their few remaining rail gun slugs on the surrounding tanks, made quick work of those that lingered, with about 20% of the counterattacking forces pulling out successfully. Brayden had lost some 42% of his equipment, with tanks down all across the burning plains, but it was that one vehicle that had got pounded repetitively after it was down that he lost two people in. The rest of his mercs were able to be pulled out, and while some were seriously injured they would all survive save for that unfortunate pair.

He knew this was war, but that didn’t mean there had to be a lack of honor. Once the tank was down it was no longer a threat, and the same was true of the Tango’s tanks that he was now ordering his people to search for survivors, calling in his fighters to scare off what was left of the enemy’s now that the walker was out of order while a number of shuttles came in with search and rescue personnel, both to attend to their own wounded as well as take captives.

Brayden eventually popped the hatch on his tank and went out on foot to help safe the enemy tanks and recover their pilots. He was angry at having lost two of his men, but he wasn’t going to take out that frustration on these pilots, otherwise he’d be just as bad as them…though a part of him wanted to, just to even things up.

He knew that others might be feeling the same way, so he sent a comm message out reiterating standing orders just as he got a signal from his own controller, indicating that there was an approaching dropship coming in from the southwest…a Star Force dropship.

Brayden tagged another of his infantry to replace him in the search and recovery efforts and looked up into the sky, seeing the all familiar silver silhouette gleaming in the sunlight as it flew down towards the surface about a kilometer off. It didn’t land though, merely hovering over the ground briefly and dropping a pair of armored troops out the side hatch to land about three meters down, then it took off again and disappeared up into the sky.

Brayden wished his armor had Star Force comm protocols, for he was used to being able to see who was who at a glance, but these two sets of armor had no ID, though he knew they were transmitting constantly. His equipment just couldn’t pick up the cloaked signals.

His eyes did catch the armor make as he got closer, with him realizing that it was Archon armor. What they were doing all the way out here he wasn’t sure, but assumed it had to do with the Skarron walker. They probably wanted to know where it had come from too, but a part of Brayden was surprised they cared to respond given how far away from Star Force territory this was.

But that wasn’t what took his breath away, for when he got close enough for his mind to register colors he realized that the armor wasn’t green and black, as his eyes had guessed looking through the smoke trails. It was brown and dark blue.

That meant a padawan and a mage, two sets of armor that he’d never laid eyes on before that designated their highest ranks. Having one of them here was mindboggling, but two…that was inconceivable.

Brayden didn’t know what was going on, but this mission had just taken a turn, probably for the worst. While an Archon was always a welcome sight, where they went there was usually trouble.

And a padawan and mage meant a lot of trouble.

4

Jenna saw one of the Marauders wave to them and jogged over to his position with Levi following a step behind. In the distance the dead walker stood smoking, though the thin trails coming off it were insignificant compared to the amount of smoke coming from the grass. Huge patches of it had already burnt off, leaving the ground she was running across now being little more than black char coated with the occasional bit of debris. Larger tank remnants were spread around, obviously the source of the small bits, and she could sense minds still inside some of them.

“Archon,” the Marauder greeted them when they met up. “I’m surprised you came.”

“We were in the area,” Jenna answered. “Which one of you is Brayden?”

“I am.”

“Situation report.”

“The locals are losing, badly. It’s not a complete rout, but cities are falling without any real hope of holding out. We still don’t know who these guys are or what they want, and the few prisoners we’ve taken haven’t been forthcoming. We’re fighting here on contract, but I don’t expect this to be the winning side when all is said and done.”

“There are still men in some of those tanks,” Jenna pointed out.

“We know. I’ve got teams going around and pulling them out. I had planned on interrogating them, but now that you’re here, would you mind?”

“Have you searched the walker?”

“Not yet. We took it down from range, so I haven’t had any units in close yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s dead.”

Jenna glanced at Levi and he took off running in the direction of the distant walker.

“How many ships did you come with?” Brayden asked.

“We’re not getting involved in the fighting until we know what’s going on,” Jenna cautioned. “For all I know this planet had this coming.”

“We sent records.”

“We got them.”

“Then I don’t understand the hesitancy. The Marauders have no affiliation here other than a small outpost, but it’s clear that this is the type of predation that Star Force routinely stops.”

“Star Force also has a habit of taking planets from others,” Jenna pointed out. “And we don’t do it for pay.”

“We only take defensive assignments,” Brayden said defensively, sensing the rebuke in her tone.

“We’ve currently got the lizards on the defensive. You going to chip in and help them out too?” she asked, taking a couple steps past his shoulder and pointing. “Get whoever is in that tank out and I’ll see if I can get some answers for both of us.”

Brayden followed her armored finger with his eyes and saw the wreckage of one of the Tangos’ tanks about 300 meters off. “Easy enough,” he said, getting on the comm and calling his units with cutting tools and medics to him.

Levi accelerated gradually, passing through a flame wall about 100 meters away from Jenna with the tiny plasma flares barely tickling his shields. They did interfere with his vision of the ground ahead, so he clicked on his Pefbar and was suddenly able to see through the smoke and flames as he finally got up to his normal cruising speed. Both the armor he wore and Jenna’s were the light variety, now reduced down in size so much that they appeared to be little more than thick wetsuits over the moving portions. The solid plates were downsized as well, making for a very fast, agile armor that the pair favored.

He wore a slim pack on his back with a handful of supplies, over top of which a weapon rack held a rifle, a pair of pistols, and an ammo pouch. That was standard gear for ‘social’ calls, and would be amped up considerably if any heavy fighting was expected. The extra weight slowed him down a bit, but he’d been running and fighting in armor like this for so long that the bulk on his back almost felt like a third limb by now.

Crossing the distance over to the walker in a blur of moving legs and pumping arms, Levi scanned ahead with his Ikrid, not trusting that the deadly machine was truly out of order. When he got close enough he picked up a single mind remaining, but by the time he got to one of the massive legs the contact winked out, with Levi assuming that one of the crew had been barely hanging onto life and had just now succumbed.

That meant there was no one inside to get to open the door, so when he drifted to a stop underneath he circled around the walker, getting a view of the damage to all sides, then picked his spot and dropped to the ground, gathering his legs underneath him and triggered his Yetu, extending his legs out in a jump that was amplified by the momentary surge in muscle speed. That sent him shooting skyward without the help of his armor halfway up the walker’s leg.

Levi grabbed hold of a joint, gluing himself to the side with a tiny telepathic order to the armor that activated the magical grip points in the hands and toes, giving him a spiderman-like grip even on flat surfaces. He had to move slow, and some materials were less agreeable than others, but he was able to climb up the leg and then onto the bottom half of the giant sphere, using weapons damage for grip when able. He scaled it to the point where there was a man-sized hole then climbed in through the short tunnel that a rail gun slug had carved out.

There was a mess of chewed up machinery, but he was able to wiggle his way into the crew compartment where he found a slew of body parts from races that he couldn’t identify. There were two more or less intact corpses in uniform, but the rest was a blood-splattered death cocoon with multiple access points to the exterior light, indicating where the rail gun rounds had entered from, one of which was imbedded in the sidewall, now a squashed plug of metal rather than the pointy bullet it had originally been.

Levi pulled himself out of the damage-created shaft and stood up, feet squishing on gore. A quick look around confirmed that the control station that he was interested in was still intact, though there was a lot of extra junk in the way. He walked across the body parts and climbed up on the now twisted rigging that had allowed what looked like bipedal pilots to operate a craft designed for the multi-armed quadrupeds that were the Skarrons.

The padawan ripped off a panel exposing the interior components of part of the computer system, then pulled out a long, rectangular component, disconnecting the three wires linking it to the auxiliary power and comm systems. Levi reached back and opened his pack, sliding the salvage inside. He knew the techs back on the Jor-El would be able to access the device, which would then give them an itemized history of this walker. Where it had been, who it had been assigned to, what damage it had taken, the sensor records surrounding that damage, and anything else useful to the Skarrons in analyzing their defeats.

Star Force had known about the data nodules for some time, and had made a habit of ripping them off the dead walkers when they could, though it seemed that each one, no matter how large it was, only contained a single nodule, making it a bit of a lottery as to whether it would be destroyed by damage or not. Given how many walkers the Skarrons deployed in the field, all it would take would be one nodule recovered to give them an idea of what had happened in any given battle, so this one being intact was a stroke of luck…in addition to the thick support beams it was located next to.

He knelt down next to one of the more or less intact bodies, examining the uniform and any other bits of detail available. These obviously weren’t Skarrons, which ruled out one possibility that they’d been considering. The mercs’ data had said they hadn’t observed any Skarron or Hobbit presence, but Jenna and Levi had found it very odd that the Skarrons would let anyone else use their walkers, especially since they didn’t even let their own Hobbits operate them.

But it seemed they had here, or had they stolen a walker from them? Too many possibilities to narrow down yet, but they could scratch one off the list…and hopefully this nodule would give them a few necessary tidbits to help unravel this mystery.

Levi spotted a sidearm loose on the floor and picked it up, finding the trigger and shooting one of the torn up walls. A short burst came out and melted into a panel, but it wasn’t plasma. He guessed it was a lachar, and by the design and yield he guessed it was lower on the tech tree. Odd, given how advanced a war machine these dead guys had been piloting, yet they were carrying primitive personal weapons?

That suggested a hodgepodge grouping, and from the look of the body parts lying around, there were at least three different races present in the walker, all of which he was unfamiliar with, though it was difficult to say for sure about the third, given that he was having to mentally piece it back together.

Levi took another glance around, finding nothing else of interest, then he jumped up to the top of the chamber, grabbing hold of a different bit of damage and climbing out through a much larger gash that led him to a door-sized hole high up on the walker. He skittishly walked out to the edge, unsure of his footing and being wary that it might slide out from under him at any moment, falling apart.

With a thought he activated the powered setting on his armor and took a step out onto the curved hull, sliding down a few meters quickly and then transitioning into freefall. He braced his legs and caught them against the ground, pushing hard and having the armor do most of the work in lieu of the jump pack he didn’t have. His feet dug into the ground several inches as he dropped to a knee, bleeding off his momentum before standing back up and beginning his run back towards the cluster of mercs tanks on the horizon.

The tank pilot that Jenna had tagged for recovery had lost a hand and was unconscious when they pried him out of the pinched cockpit that had been dented inward from a rail gun slug deflection. The Marauder medic had quickly sealed off the wound to keep any additional bleeding from occurring, but we wasn’t about to inject him with any supplicant without knowing his biology. It was quite possible that this one was going to die simply from the loss of blood, but as the medics ran their tests to determine what he could or couldn’t take Jenna slipped off one of her armor’s gloves and pressed her small, pale fingers against the ridged forehead of the orange-skinned biped, using the physical contact to amplify her Ikrid link.

There was a mess of pain and recent memories to sift through, made all the more murky by the unconscious state he was in and her unfamiliarity with this race, but she took her time and sorted through what she could, gradually finding some points of recognition and working from there. It took more than ten minutes before she finally got a name, followed by a bit of additional information before the Tanzghi’s mind disappeared along with his life.

“He’s dead,” she said to the medics who were readying an injection. Jenna turned to face Brayden as she slipped her glove back on and locked it into her wrist plate. “This one belongs to a war party called something I can’t pronounce, but loosely I’d tag them as the Tipring.”

“War party?”

“Neither army nor mercs, they’re recruiting from their populations in time of need. This one has been involved for a lot of years, and it seems to think that whatever they’re doing is to protect their homes. Conquer or be conquered, though with a few wrinkles that I couldn’t quite iron out. Anyway, the Tipring are part of a coalition that’s on some sort of quest. More than that I couldn’t get. Please tell me some of the others are still alive?”

“I’ve got reports of four captives recovered, but they’re all in bad condition. One has already died, at his own hands.”

“Lovely,” Jenna said, reaching out with her Ikrid to scan at maximum range. It took a moment to weed out the merc minds, but she was able to spot two more anomalous ones within bits of wreckage. “I can sense two more.”

“Where?”

“There,” she said, pointing to half a tank more than a quarter mile off, “and…never mind. That’s one of yours,” Jenna corrected as one of the search team pulled out of a wrecked tank and walked off empty handed.

“Near death?” Brayden asked.

“I can’t tell this far away.”

“Let’s get on it,” the Colonel said to the scattering of mercs standing around the pair, who immediately broke up and got moving now that they had a task assigned. Brayden went with them, but Jenna lagged behind as she felt Levi approaching. A minute later his running form broke through a smoke cloud and came into view, coasting to a stop alongside her dark blue armor.

“Anything?”

“Crew is dead, and they’re most definitely not Skarron. I did find a nodule. Looks intact.”

“Good.”

“You?”

“Not much. My date died before we could get very far.”

“There’s gotta be more left around here.”

“A few. The mercs are pulling another one out now, but so far they’re all in bad shape. We may have to go on a little field trip of our own later.”

“Why wait?”

“I don’t like mercs, and I want to get a feel for these guys as much as the Varshoo.”

“Got a name then?”

“Yeah,” she said, sending him a brief telepathic summary of what she’d learned.

“Curious,” Levi mewed.

“What?”

“Something about the way they decorated the interior of the walker,” he explained, sending her a telepathic image of what he’d seen.

“And?”

“I’m not sure, just an odd feeling.”

“If your odd feeling gets any definition, let me know. In the meantime let’s glean what we can from the scraps here, and keep your eyes open for anything on these Marauders. If you can manage a date with a bit of snuggle time go for it. There are at least two girls out there.”

“Plenty of guys then,” Levi deflected.

“You romanced me out.”

“Could just try a friendly hug outside of armor?”

“Or a punch…but I don’t have an excuse for that yet. Just try and find some way to get some skin contact.”

“Your spidey senses tingling?”

“I don’t know. They just rub me the wrong way. If there are any good guys in this fight, it might not be them.”

“Don’t trust a quitter?”

“If they’re still interested in fighting, why did they leave us?”

“Good point.”

“Keep your eyes open and study everything. We’re blinder here than usual.”

“You want me to run my find back up to orbit?”

“No, but call a dropship in to pick it up. I want you here with me snooping around.”

“Don’t think we’re going to get anyone out of armor here. Are we going back to their basecamp?”

“Play it by ear and see where it leads,” Jenna said, beginning to walk in the direction of the newest survivor that the mercs were just now getting to with their equipment, for plasma had a way of melting hatches closed. “For now, just roam. I’ll see what this guy can give us.”

5

October 10, 2735

Noop System

Tieor

The pair of Archons ran together through the night, traveling at better than 30 miles an hour as they cruised at Levi’s maximum sustainable pace for the cross country trip. Both Archons were using their armor’s powered enhancement to reduce the workload, making it feel as if they were running without any extra weight on them at all. Typically they didn’t use that setting save for extreme situations, preferring to just use their strengths to overcome the slowness of the armor, but given the distance they were running across an uninhabited bit of countryside towards one of the Varshoo-held cities they didn’t want to arrive there exhausted.

Jenna let Levi lead the way so he could set the pace, given that he was the slower of the two, but she handled the navigation, giving him a telepathic nudge to veer left at a clump of trees ahead. The padawan did as directed, taking them a bit off the path and through some waist-high grass before the bare dirt returned for a few strides, then quickly replaced by scrub brush that tickled their armor with thorns as they blew through it like a knife blade, leaving only a small disruption for someone to follow.

That wasn’t the concern here, for so far no one had noticed their passage. The surveillance around the captured city was aerial only with a few loose patrols around the perimeter, meaning that if they tried for an aerial assault they’d probably be picked up on their descent, even if they dropped from orbit with jump packs. The long route over land was the easy way in, but taking vehicles or going via road would have been a bit too obvious, even at night. On foot was the preferred method then, but no one expected anyone to travel the 42 mile gap across wilderness in a single night, let alone within two hours.

And because of the design of their armor, their movements were whisper quiet, making them literally ghosts in the night with the overhead cloud cover masking any starlight. They both had a tiny pinprick of light on their helmets that they could use for their nightvision, in a frequency that most races couldn’t see naturally, but neither Archon needed it, for they simply used their Pefbar to see ahead and all around them, offering them better situational awareness within a limited radius.

Beyond that they were essentially blind, but the tracking systems on their battlemap let Jenna navigate them to where they needed to go, for she’d set up several waypoints based on previous orbital scans and they were arriving at the last of them now, for just around the tree clump she’d had Levi veer left at was a ridgeline that would run straight up to the city edge. There it would be cut off abruptly by the infrastructure on the ‘back side’ where the wilderness pressed up against the outer ring. There were a fair amount of trees there, cutting off most vehicular traffic aside from a few wide paths that doubled as roads for those travelers that chose to skirt around the perimeter rather than take internal roads from point to point within the city.

The approach made for a huge blind spot that the invaders were basically leaving unmonitored, and to be blunt why would they bother locking it down? They were running rough shot over the planet and methodically taking one site after another, making it appear that it was only a matter of time before they conquered the entire planet no matter how many mercenaries the locals hired to try and slow them down.

Jenna still thought it was sloppy, especially considering that those mercenary units weren’t tied down to any location and typically would have their own transports, whether they be ships, aerial craft, or some form of speeders. Had she been the Varshoo commander, Jenna would have put up at least a light patrol perimeter around the city in all directions to give the troops inside a heads up in case someone tried a counterattack, but most of their efforts seemed to be focused on locking down the spaceports and main roads, keeping people inside as much as keeping others out.

According to the few minds she’d been able to raid from the Marauder’s prisoners Jenna had determined that there were at least 18 different factions within the Varshoo army here, and many more in their overall empire…save for that it wasn’t a civilization. They were a conglomeration of mercenary units, security forces, defense leagues, and about anything else that had an even vaguely military aspect to it. Each puzzle piece was put together to form the Varshoo, which was a military for hire, so to speak. What they were doing here she hadn’t been able to determine because the soldiers she’d interrogated didn’t know, but this wasn’t the first planet they’d hit.

She’d found memories from 14 other assaults, all successful and against similarly primitive civilizations. The Varshoo were conquering designated worlds then handing them over to someone else, moving on and repeating the process where necessary. Sometimes they’d move straight on to another mission, others would involve holding breaks at some neutral point or even see the puzzle pieces return to where they’d been gathered from. What was behind it all was still uncertain, but Jenna had gathered the identities of those higher up the ranking ladder who might know the answers to those questions, which was why the pair of Archons were headed towards the city of Djok.

It was the headquarters for the faction that had been involved with the first Skarron walker. Oddly, the other one belonged to yet another subsection of the Varshoo, but none of the soldiers had known where it originally came from, but they knew of others having been used in previous missions. They were the key pieces in their assault plan, but not for the raw military power they possessed. They were brought in after the initial attack to demoralize the locals and hold onto a region of the planet where the Varshoo were devoting less troops than they should. It was a bit of tactical mastery and would have worked had the Marauders not inexplicably been able to destroy one of them.

Jenna had tried to get some information on the ex-Star Force unit from the Varshoo, but they knew nothing about them. They’d traveled a long way to get to their target system, having originated entirely outside the local geography…which was why the mercenaries had no knowledge of them either.

Levi took to the lower side of the ridge, dodging between trees as he followed a dry creek bed yet stayed out of view underneath the spotted canopy, pacing wash some ten meters or so from the edge. Jenna could tell from his movements that he was getting tired, but his speed hadn’t flagged yet, which meant he wasn’t too fatigued. If it started to drop off she’d slow him even further to make sure he wasn’t going to tank on her later, but he was holding up better than she’d thought he would. Halfway through their run she thought he’d been overcooking it, but apparently he was a bit more robust than she’d realized.

Then again, running at night always made things seem faster, even when using Pefbar, for you couldn’t get any distant visual markers to calibrate off of, just the quickly moving terrain nearby. Jenna had already worked up a good sweat, which she could feel soaking into her minimal clothing underneath, but she wasn’t feeling taxed and could have sped up a bit without wearing herself out if need be. Levi might be one of the most advanced Archons in Star Force, but she and the other mages were far beyond him, not just in psionics, but in physical skills. Had there been a trailblazer here her role would have been reversed, for they were likewise ahead of her, but few others were.

She’d gotten used to being one of the dominant ones and took to that role well, regardless of whether or not the Archon was with her kin on a training stint or fighting who knew what race out on the frontier. Other than the Voku, no one else even had a chance going hand to hand with her level of skill, meaning that wherever she went she had the advantage, and the outcome of the battles wouldn’t depend on her outfighting her opponent, but in maneuvering the conflict into situations where she could apply her advantage.

She could kill 10 tanks single handedly if she got to them one at a time, coming in from anonymity and getting the jump on their pilots, but go straight in at 10 of them on a wide open battlefield and her armor would quickly be tasked with keeping her alive long enough to run away. She could own any hand to hand confrontation, no matter how many individuals were involved, but Jenna still had to pick her fights…which was why they were going into the Varshoo-held city on foot, hopefully keeping any interactions a personal affair and not attracting any of their tanks or aircraft to the occasion.

They made their way along the ridgeline without incident, other than a few annoying soft spots in the ground that would sink in on contact and threaten to trip you up. Jenna had started to press her Pefbar down into the ground to see the little rodent tunnels to give her some warning, but eventually just said ‘screw it’ because at the speed they were running she didn’t have enough time to focus on such small details. Her balance was good enough to recover when it did happen, as was Levi’s, so she just stuck behind him a couple of steps and ate up ground until they got to the city’s edge.

The padawan slowed, finally, and began to recover his strength as they crept up towards one of the dirt roads, keeping trees between them and the city lights as Jenna mentally pointed him to a spot with a little bit more elevation. On top of it was a guard post, but the two minds inside were bored and half asleep, so not a threat. Not wanting to risk an alarm, Jenna had them move a quarter mile around the perimeter to the north and enter the city there, sprinting across the dirt road and sliding into one of the building alleys that were for pedestrian traffic only.

Given that it was on the outskirts this one didn’t have anyone using it, so the two armored Archons jogged down it with impunity, seeing only a few doors and no windows. They took a moment to have a look up, then both of them took to an opposite wall and began to crawl up using their armor’s grip points, for the building walls were nearly sheer.

Jenna made it to the roof first, pulling herself up over the edge as Levi crawled up the taller building and kicked off the wall, jumping across the alleyway to her side and rolling out of a somersault before catching up to her as she walked across to the building side with a larger street below. She inched her head over and looked down, finding a light amount of traffic, mostly pedestrians who were moving with haste. They weren’t the Varshoo, rather denizens who had been captured along with the infrastructure. A quick mental scan on a few of them indicated that they were in no immediate harm, but they were spooked none the less, not knowing what was coming in the future with their new rulers.

She also realized that most of the people were staying indoors, with only those that needed to travel about doing so. That should help their transit, but the agitated state the populace was in would also make them more aware of what was going on around them. Hopefully though, that attention wouldn’t be focused skyward.

Jenna backed up a few steps then sprinted off the building, planting her foot on the edge and jumping with the assistance of her armor. Levi followed a split second later and the two armored bodies flew across the gap to land on the slightly shorter building on the far side of the double-laned road.

They ran across to the next building, but given that it was taller they had to transfer over to a side building and the alleyway there to do their spiderman thing and climb up high enough to make the next jump. One after another they made their way across the city to the location of the Varshoo headquarters that had set up in one of the local buildings, but with ample security established around the block that it was located on.

The first sniper position they came across had the Varshoo soldier slumped over his weapon as Jenna walked up to him, already having knocked him out from afar with her Ikrid. She searched his memories, trying to determine if any of the people on their ‘to find’ list were inside. As far as this one knew at least some of them were, so the Archons eased up to the edge of the building and looked across the wide street to the buildings on the far side. The one they wanted was behind those, but the gap was too far to jump…and neither of them had brought a jump pack.

“Pole vault or slingshot?” Jenna asked, giving Levi his preference.

“You think I can make the roof, or have to shoot for the wall?”

“I’m thinking wall.”

“Pole vault then. Softer landing.”

“Alright, get ready while I blanket the area,” she said, her eyes disfocusing as she reached out with her Ikrid searching for all nearby minds. Any that had a line of sight on the street she hacked into, planting a little bit of programming that would disincline them from looking up. The effect would last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the race. Given that she was unfamiliar with these they probably only had a short window of opportunity, but it should be enough so long as something didn’t attract their attention, otherwise it would break the little spell she was weaving on them.

It took too long for her to get through them all, with the first ones being questionable as to whether they were still affected or not, but Jenna gave Levi the go ahead anyway and he started running from the far side of their building roof where he had been waiting. She offered out a battlemeld prompt and he immediately took it, syncing their minds and giving them access to other psionics. Using Bataf, which the Archons typically referred to as ‘repulsor,’ Jenna pushed her hands out towards Levi and emitted an invisible column of energy linking to him. It was loose at first, then with their linked precision it instantaneously hardened as he jumped, becoming the ‘pole’ that he rode up into the air as Jenna have him a telekinetic kick in the butt on the way up to add to his momentum.

She pivoted her hands up, bracing with her entire body for his weight was transmitting down to her limbs, but she held her position and allowed him to ride the pole all the way up over her head, then as he began to tip over to the street side the Archons transitioned the ‘solid’ state of the pole into a repulsive conduit that actually pushed him further. That thrust was less controlled, but their previous practice with one another had been sufficient for them to get the distance they needed, with Levi eventually letting go of the psionic and falling the last few meters as he reached out with his hands and feet and stuck against the side of the far building Garfield style.

Jenna saw and felt him slip, for she was still battlemeld linked with him, but he held on with a few fingers as the bounce bled off, then he was able to steady himself and begin crawling up to the roof. When he got there he spun around and planted a foot against the slightly elevated rim and made himself the grip point as Jenna backtracked to get some distance then took off sprinting for the edge.

When she got there she jumped, getting more altitude than Levi had managed out of his own legs, but without the help of the ‘pole’ she didn’t get nearly as high. But as she got into the air the pair established another repulsor conduit between them, but caused it to attract rather than push. Like a long rope retracting, it pulled Jenna across the gap and up a bit as her own momentum did most of the work. A few seconds later she hit feet first against the wall below Levi, then she scaled the side on his invisible rope until their hands met and he pulled her up over the edge.

Their battlemeld link broke then and Jenna searched the street, surrounding roofs, and windows to check on her psionic blanket she’d laid down.

“We’re good.”

Levi turned and looked across the huge roof to the slightly taller building beyond that was their eventual target, picking up a few minds in between behind several protrusions and access hubs into the building below.

“We’ve got company up here.”

“I’ll take left,” Jenna said, with the pair breaking up and quietly sneaking off to different sides of the roof to send the sentries into naptime once they got within close enough proximity to establish a firm Ikrid link to them all, for they couldn’t have one nod off in the view of the others, meaning they had to do them simultaneously when their sight lines overlapped.

But it wasn’t something new to the Archon pair, and within a couple of minutes the rooftop was theirs, setting up their last jump over to the Varshoo command center.

6

Jenna clung to the building wall with two feet and one hand, holding Levi’s armored glove in her other as she blanketed the surrounding area in Ikrid, keeping any onlookers from noticing the two tiny ticks attached to the side of the building as her padawan slowly traced his finger across the window.

Or rather through it, for his fingernail was fully imbedded inside the material and poking through to the interior air as he used his Rensiek to increase and channel his internal heat production onto the surface of an invisible shield covering his finger. The heat went to it, pouring through his flesh and pooling there to reach the temperature necessary to melt the glass. Jenna hadn’t been sure that he was strong enough to get to the required point, for not every race’s ‘glass’ was made of the same material.

This stuff appeared fairly flimsy, but she didn’t want to just break or shoot their way in. She would have done the cutting, except that her Ikrid skills were also well beyond Levi’s and keeping them hidden while in plain sight was the priority at the moment. They still had several hours of night left, which certainly helped their efforts, but the city lights made it difficult to hide down low on the streets. Likewise the top of the command center was ablaze with all manner of illumination, prompting her to decide to go in one of the dark windows on the other side of the street from their jump point and nearly at the same altitude.

Levi pulled his finger slowly, needing to keep the heat flowing to it in order to melt the material. Little globules ran down over his finger, hardening as they dropped off or moved onto the rest of the window. He had to maintain the heat shield all the way up to the knuckle, for if even a little droplet hit his exposed skin it would burn it instantaneously. It was odd how he could hurt himself with his own heat, but the numerous applications that came into play as one got stronger in Fornax more than made up for the danger.

The Archon patiently made a huge arc over his head, having to reposition his body several times to keep the motion continuing into a large circle more than his head height. He made it approximately two meters wide and had to scoot to the side on the window to keep from falling off when he finished the cut. With some telekinetic pressure he held and pushed the clear circle inside, with Jenna crawling over and following it in with a hand placed over top of it and the mage swinging herself down and inside.

She took the glass plug from him and pulled it aside while he crawled in, disconnecting one of her gloves in the process. The pair then slid the circle back into place and used their hands to squeegee the excess material back into a few spots in liquid form, letting it harden enough to hold the window segment in place, though there was no way to hide the finger-wide cut.

Jenna released her last Ikrid links and waited, assuming no one would notice the odd window given its height and the darkness, but she didn’t want to be sloppy. When no mental alarms were triggered she tossed Levi his glove and reattached her own, then the pair got moving across the dark room and linked up in the battlemeld.

With Levi’s abilities adding to her own, Jenna began searching the building and accessing the nearest minds as she began her search for one of the priority targets. Language issues and unfamiliar mental structures bogged her down, but by constricting the search to hierarchy placement she was able to get an idea of which floors held the commanders. With those being in range of the pair’s combined Ikrid, she searched them one mind at a time until they got their first hit.

Jenna logged that position on her blank battlemap using a program that had been introduced along with the telepathic armor that allowed for tracking data to be gathered by her psionics. As a result a waypoint popped up inside the building even before the floors did, aside from the one they were on that was within range of her and Levi’s armor sensors.

The mage didn’t stop with the one target, but kept on searching for others and tagging their locations. Eventually she found three before she ran out of contacts. The building had over 200 people in it, and one target was enough to give them a shot at figuring out what was going on with this invasion.

Thinking together as one, Levi went to the door and opened it, knowing that the hallway outside was clear. He broke the battlemeld link just outside and headed for the few minds on this floor, intending to black them out given how sparsely populated the large building was.

Jenna stayed put, picking off a few nearby minds from where she was and forcing the individuals to fall asleep. Once she was sure they were out of the picture for a good few hours she found a nearby ladder/stairwell and moved down while Levi continued the hunt on the upper levels. She got to one of their three priority targets first and stayed with the two and a half meter tall hairy creature where it laid slumped over a tabletop.

Pulling her glove off again, she made physical contact to increase her Ikrid effectiveness and dove into its mind, sifting through weird and varied thoughts until she found something familiar. Focusing on the memory of the Skarron walkers’ deployment she backtracked to linked thoughts and eventually got to the planetary invasion overview after a few minutes.

Levi reported back that the upper building was clear and she responded telepathically telling him to finish up below while she worked. Knowing that he’d take care of the rest with ease, Jenna kept digging into the recent events. This one had a different point of view than the lower ranking soldiers, and eventually she was able to determine that they were here because they’d been contracted to take this planet for someone called the Trzzl. It was a person, not a race, but someone with a lot of influence in whatever region the Varshoo came from.

They had been instructed to keep as much of the infrastructure and population intact as they could, but some losses were allowable. The Trzzl wanted the civilization as much as the planet it was on, but this one didn’t know why. They were here to take it, hold it, then turn it over to the Trzzl’s people when they eventually arrived. To him this was just a mission and he didn’t care what took place in the aftermath. Once they were done they’d be leaving, but Jenna sensed that how they proceeded with this takeover was important and would have consequences, whether positive or negative, going forward for the Varshoo.

She pressed that further, with the difficulty increasing the further Jenna went off of current events. Speculation was something that required an active mind, with the memory of speculation being something very difficult to track down in a familiar mind. For this one it was buried too deep, but she was able to pull a sense that reputation had a significant effect on the Varshoo and that what they were doing here would affect their people…all of their peoples, given that they weren’t a united civilization.

There was also a bit of fear there, but she couldn’t track it down. She wished this had been a Protovic or Reen, because she could have dug deeper, sleep state or no, but Jenna didn’t even know what this one’s race was called, let alone was familiar with their mental structure. Most minds tended to be structured in similar ways, which was how she and Levi were able to render them unconscious, but even small differences were troublesome when trying to access memories.

Jenna went back to the walkers, focusing on them and following that thread to its source. This one did know where they’d come from, and the Archon triple checked her findings, not believing what she was hearing through his memories. This one hadn’t been involved in acquiring them and the others, for the Varshoo had come into possession of several more, but it had heard the story of how the Varshoo had claimed them.

It was that story that she was trying to check on, gathering up all the details she could glean from its memories, which was hard without being able to understand words.

Jenna took what she could get from this one then left it behind to sleep as she moved down a few levels and found one of the other three targets that Levi had already knocked out. It was a different race, one that she recognized as a Delveb. The Voku had records on them and Star Force had linked up the identity when the mercenaries had sent them data on the invasion. Apparently they were a scattered, yet highly populated race spread across a significant portion of this galactic arm. Jenna wasn’t any more familiar with their mental structure than the big guy, but this spider-like quadruped resembled Bsidd minds in a very limited fashion, offering her a bit more access due to her past experience with theirs.

The Delveb didn’t have any more information on the Trzzl, but its knowledge of the Skarron equipment backed up what she’d picked up in the other one. There had been a planet within range of the Varshoo that was owned by the Skarrons, some type of forward outpost, and it had been hit by another race. During the fighting some type of biological weapon had been used against the Skarrons, wiping out nearly half their population over the course of several months. The remaining troops fought the attackers nearly to the extinction of both sides.

The Varshoo had been monitoring the conflict and in a moment of either brilliance or recklessness they sent landing craft down to the Skarron regions that had been contaminated with the bioweapon. They raided a military base and recovered a lot of abandoned equipment, which was where they got their walkers and a lot of other small-scale weapons. Neither side in the planetary fight stopped them, nor had the means to given the confrontations occurring on other parts of the planet and the limited naval forces left in orbit after the Skarron defense fleet was painstakingly destroyed.

Whether the attackers didn’t care or just didn’t have the gumption to pick another fight, the Varshoo were able to come down and raid the base and surrounding area for several days before leaving with several Skarron transports and their own full of precious war machinery.

Jenna almost laughed. How they had managed that was almost ridiculous. The Varshoo’s tech level was low, and the fact that they were able to pluck even one walker away from the Skarrons was hilarious. It also meant that this whole trip out here was a wild goose chase. The Skarron Empire wasn’t expanding into this region, yet anyway, nor did they have any affiliation with the Varshoo.

That left just one question for her to get an answer to…and that was which side here were the good guys, if any. The Varshoo weren’t here to slaughter, and Tieor being the defenders didn’t automatically put them in the right either. Jenna hated walking away from a fight, especially when a lot of people were dying, but she wasn’t about to throw in without making sure what she was fighting for. For all she knew this Trzzl had a reason to take over this planet, and methods aside, she needed to know more before declaring the invaders ass holes and gut punching them on their way out of the system.

If both sides were ass holes, then it was possible that the Trzzl might actually end up making the planet a slightly less yucky place, and if that was the case then Star Force wasn’t going to get involved in this mess. Bad guy versus bad guy was a fight that Jenna had learned to stay out of a long time ago, and with this system being so far away from Star Force territory her options for dealing with the situation were limited. Had it been closer they could have just taken the planet for themselves and cleaned it up properly.

Jenna wasn’t able to get anything more out of this one, so she tracked down the third while Levi stayed on watch roaming the building and keeping a close eye on the surface entrances. If people started to come in he’d have to bag them before they could sound an alarm, and such things couldn’t be concealed forever. Not to mention if people called in to the command center and didn’t get a response. The Archons’ time here was limited, but they could stretch it as much as needed if they felt like making a bit of noise.

That wasn’t going to be necessary, for the third target was the highest ranking individual on the planet…as well as one of the shortest. It barely stood even with Jenna’s waist, but had as much mass as she did, making it look almost like a black bowling ball given the odd clothing that it wore. Its mind was less extreme and she was able to get a bit more information on the Trzzl. Apparently it was a king-like individual who controlled a large amount of territory spread out in bits and pieces across a very wide region of space, avoiding the major powers and picking on the lesser planets.

The Trzzl was on a quest to uplift the lesser planets, as far as the publicity/propaganda was concerned, and had contracted the Varshoo on four different occasions for their mercenary talents. What was odd was in the payment, for it occurred in the form of tribute from the conquered worlds. Foodstuffs, raw materials, and a limited amount of industrial produce would be percentaged into an annual shipment back to the Varshoo in lieu of a monetary payment.

It was then that Jenna realized the Varshoo were a collection of needy factions that used their combined military power to supply a good portion of what their planets lacked. That was the hint of fear the other one had, for if they failed in a mission there would be no reward and their people would suffer for it. Also, if they failed their reputation would diminish, with future contracts of necessary size drying up.

That made this invasion a mess of a situation. Jenna released the Varshoo leader’s head and stood up, putting her glove back on and reaching out her mind to Levi to find where he was. Her battlemap had lost track of him, given so many floors of material in between them, but her Ikrid didn’t have that limitation and she saw he was near the ground floor.

“We’re leaving,” she said, using her helmet comm.

“With or without answers?”

“They scavenged the walkers. There’s no link to the Skarrons.”

“Scavenged how?”

“I’ll fill you in on the way back. How’s it look below?”

“Quiet for now, but I had to grab four more people coming in.”

“Meet me at the window,” she said, starting to walk away from her sleeping prisoner and heading that way herself.

“Are we helping the locals?”

“Both sides need helping…which we can’t do this far out.”

“One of those, huh?”

“Yeah. That said, you don’t make someone else’s problems your own, so we’ll throw the locals a bone or two on the way out.”

“The other walker?”

“You read my mind,” Jenna joked, coming to a ladder and beginning to climb up to the waypoint on her battlemap that marked where the cut window was. By the time she reached that level Levi’s mind was catching up quickly from below, so she didn’t rush, getting to the room they’d entered from a few seconds ahead of him. She reached out with her Ikrid and made one last check on the minds nearby, finding them still unconscious.

“Slingshot?” Levi guessed.

“Yep,” Jenna said, getting a telekinetic hold on the window slice and yanking it free of the melt points. She managed to do it in a way that didn’t result in any pieces breaking off and keeping the circle’s shape intact, then she gently set it aside and began to move the various pieces of furniture away from the opening by hand along with her padawan. When they finished she knelt down beside the opening as a gentle breeze blew in, making the potted plants rustle, though neither Archon could feel the effect inside their hard armor.

Jenna offered a battlemeld prompt, with Levi taking it immediately and beginning to run across the room for the few steps of acceleration that he could manage. As he did so a repulsor conduit between the two of them yanked him forward, helping him get up to greater speed until he flashed past Jenna, jumping off the edge of the floor where the glass had been cut away and out into the nighttime air towards the far roof.

When he passed her they reversed the conduit, with Levi forming it off his back and Jenna using it to push him forward across the gap. She added a telekinetic lift to it, gaining him a little more height which translated to meters of additional distance that eventually dropped him right at the rooftop edge. His legs hit short, but he grabbed on with his arms and thumped over the edge, hitting on his abdomen and crawling the rest of the way up.

Jenna backed up to the wall and activated the powered function of her armor, then took off sprinting and jumped out the hole in the window with Levi yanking her across the gap with another repulsor conduit. Without the telekinetic boost she fell short, but her padawan’s invisible rope swung her against the building three levels below. She crunched her legs up on impact, softening the thud she made when her boots hit, then she walked up the wall and onto the roof with Levi’s help.

The pair took off running for the far side and began an equally quiet exodus from the city.

7

October 12, 2735

Noop System

Tieor

Jenna shot one of the Varshoo infantry in the face with a stun pistol, dropping it to the ground as she ran past and hopped over the short wall on the perimeter of the park that nestled up against one of the partially captured cities. Most of the fighting was over, but a full quarter had still to be pacified. That sort of street and in-building fighting wasn’t suited to the Skarron walker, so it had been positioned in the park so it could guard the city against any heavy tank retaliation while intimidating those within by its mere presence.

But it wasn’t alone. After the takedown of the other Skarron walker at the hands of the Marauders, the Varshoo had surrounded their second key chess piece with an army of tanks and infantry that had not moved into the city limits. The exterior park sat nestled up against the northern border and was partially encroached on by a forest, with the city and the eastern and western approaches covered in wide open grasslands where the walker had done the majority of its damage against Seriprin’s perimeter defense turrets.

Right now the Marauders were approaching over land, but at a considerable distance. Whether the Varshoo were aware of that or not the Archon didn’t know, but there was no way they could miss the Valeries streaking over the city and hitting selective targets within, all the while staying low enough and positioning themselves on the other side of buildings to keep away from any potential spray from the Type-5. So far it hadn’t responded, having no real anti-air weaponry of its own, and sat parked in a large picnic area that was perfectly flat and covered with some type of short, blue grass, looking like it was a statue that belonged there.

The tanks ringing it were on the eastern and western sides, given that those were the overland approaches. The south was the city where more of their tanks were roaming about and securing those sections they’d already taken, but the north wasn’t covered by vehicles. There was a decent amount of infantry spread out there, but it was the Marauder rail gun tanks that the Varshoo appeared most worried about.

That left the pair of Archons with a window of opportunity, if they were fast enough. As Jenna crossed the low wall and entered the park on the northern border Levi did the same some 400 meters away to the west, stunning a few infantry as he passed them. Both of them were running casually towards the south where the walker was, but they accelerated up to a near sprint as they got into the clear and out on the wide open tracts of the park that were segmented by rows of trees and clumps of bushes and ornate flowers.

Jenna zapped another Varshoo soldier as she ran by, hitting him at a range of some 20 meters, after which she tucked her pistol away onto her back rack and just focused on her movement. They weren’t here to fight it out, despite a long argument she’d had with the merc commander. He seemed to think this was exactly Star Force’s type of work, but given that he’d quit the military he didn’t get to carry such opinions anymore. Jenna didn’t mind stunning the Varshoo when she came across them, but she wasn’t about to start killing them.

There was a fight here, to be sure, and every fight was potentially Archon business, but this was one of those times when, in order to fix the problem at hand, you’d have to fight both sides and take control of the planet for yourself. That was outside of her reach, so she and Levi were going to back off and let this play out without them. Jenna didn’t like that, but sometimes it was more important to keep yourself righteous than to worry about the outcome, and this was, unfortunately, one of those cases.

The issue of defense wasn’t enough for her to come down on the locals’ side, and the merc commander had even admitted that he was here for the payday more than for any concern about the planet…though he had pressed the significance of this world to the surrounding region. That may have been true, but the locals weren’t exactly upstanding individuals and a change might do some good. If that change occurred through bloodshed it was unacceptable, but if she couldn’t stop it from happening she wasn’t going to contribute to it with the same.

Brayden had been insistent that he was going to keep the Marauders here and try to win this fight, but that he’d need Star Force’s help to do it. Jenna had reminded him that even if she helped him fight off this invasion, they wouldn’t be sticking around to protect the planet thereafter. Then, after even more arguing she offered him a limited amount of help, which he politely accepted. They sealed the deal with a handshake, skin to skin, which gave her a quick glimpse at his thoughts.

That quick access was all she needed, for she was very good at reading Humans. A lot of the concerns she’d had about the mercenaries evaporated, but it was clear they weren’t Star Force troops anymore. A lot of what they had once been still remained, and because of that the planet might be a little better off if they did indeed prevail, but the merc commander was definitely being driven by credits and reputation, seeing this as the biggest opportunity his unit had ever had and wanting to climb the ranks in militants for hire crowd.

So as they’d planned, his troops were on their way here…but not to attack the walker. That was reserved for the Archons.

As Jenna and Levi ran towards the Type-5 the gap between them diminished, with them eventually coming together on a stone courtyard with the big, elevated golf ball visible across the next line of trees. Around them a scattering of infantry took notice and fired a few shots off at them, but they were running so fast that when they missed they didn’t get a second shot. Jenna saw one of the tanks on the western side of her park battlemap begin to move their way, but it was going to be too late.

They had a straight line approach to the walker, with only some infantry units in between and they weren’t going to engage them. Before the Archons hit the trees they linked up in battlemeld, with Levi’s psionic component of Neritu adding considerable range and power to Jenna’s Ikrid, letting her stretch out all the way to the distant walker and probe the minds inside as they ran.

She could feel them, but the range was still too great for her to access them enough to assert control. The question was how close would they actually have to get, and would it involve dodging plasma blasts. Both Archons thought they could do it from at least plasma spit range, but with the bit of available terrain in the park they had a backup plan if their strength wasn’t enough.

Jenna took the lead on this due to her greater skill, for identifying the minds was easy compared to accessing them. New races, new difficulties…and that meant she needed more time and power to do the necessary override work.

Meanwhile the pair raced forward, looking for all the world like they were intent on committing suicide. The infantry tried to stop them, but the shields on the Archons’ armor held up against the few lachar blasts that hit. Levi crossed in front of Jenna as a group of three Varshoo tried to block their path and rammed them aside, clearing the road for her to keep running and as much attention on the walker as possible. Once past that group they were in the clear, literally, for the trees had disappeared behind them and they were now out on the open picnic area where the walker stood motionless.

Tanks were on approach from the west, but given their rate of advancement and the Archons’ running speed they were going to be kept out of this little battle, so long as Jenna didn’t have to delay their approach.

That almost happened, for she could feel the gunners begin focusing the walker’s plasma cannons in their direction, ready to pepper the ground in front of the two fast moving infantry and either kill them or cause them to veer off. At the last moment she got control of the one in charge of the batteries on their side of the walker and froze him in place. That was easier than making him power down the weapons, and as the Archons ate up more meters of their approach she was able to freeze another of the crew.

Technically both Jenna and Levi were doing the freezing, but he let her lead their combined effort, though he could ‘see’ everything that she was doing, and vice versa. The mental strain was significant, but it was also shared by them both, making it manageable enough for them to disable the crew and keep the walker standing still and quiet as a statue as they raced their way towards it, trying to beat the approaching tanks.

When they got within 400 meters they had enough power to assert remote control over one of the crew, with Jenna instructing him to lower the boarding ramp. She managed to do it with a suggestive impulse rather than having to play puppet with him, which was fortuntate, for at this range that would have been difficult with them both being on the run. Had the individual been more mentally resistant it could have caused them problems given the unfamiliarity of his mental structure.

A lachar blast streaked across in front of them, but the infantry weapon had been fired at considerable range from the east with little chance of hitting. There were more soldiers over there, now running towards the Archons who were nearly at the walker’s feet. With the boarding ramp lowering and no return fire coming from the Type-5, the rest of the Varshoo knew something was wrong, but they weren’t going to have the chance to do anything about it, even if they managed to get a few lucky shots in.

A bit of plasma spit burnt through the grass ahead of them as one of the tanks made a long range shot, but the air had dissipated it so much that it was no threat to a fully armored soldier. Jenna and Levi ran through the low flames and jumped up onto the boarding ramp before it was completely lowered and climbed up the ladder-like contraption, disappearing inside the walker.

Jenna had the crew raise it immediately, with the two Archons crawling up inside the contraption the Varshoo had created to allow their pilots to operate the device. In sync, the two Archons pulled out their stun weapons and shot all four of the crew, relieving them of the need to keep their minds suppressed or frozen.

“Woo…that worked,” Levi commented as he released the battlemeld link to his master and started pulling bodies out of the chairs and dumping them on the floor. “Can I drive?”

“Help yourself,” Jenna said, sitting down and accessing her battlemap. “Holler if you need help.”

Levi grabbed a seat and went meditative, crossing his arms and legs and doing his best impression of Yoda, knowing that the way to drive one of these was telekinetically in order to compensate for the physical differences between Human and Skarron. This wasn’t the first time he’d driven one, for he’d trained on a mockup simulator along with a lot of other Skarron and lizard craft, as all the veteran Archons had.

Outside one of the giant legs pushed off and tilted the Type-5 ever so slightly to the side, then it stumbled forward taking a short step and establishing the robotic gait that they were known for. Watching the display screens so he didn’t step on anyone, he began walking the giant machine forward and beginning a turn towards the west.

Jenna waited a heartbeat, then telekinetically reached out and flipped on the shields.

“Duh, thanks,” Levi said as the tanks approached. They didn’t fire on the walker, not sure what was going on, and the Archon didn’t fire back. They were just going to deny the Varshoo the war machine that they didn’t deserve, leaving the primitives to fight this messy war using their own tech.

Whether out of confusion or prudence, the tanks never fired on the walker, but they did run alongside it as Levi drove it to the west towards the approaching Marauders. Jenna got a commlink to Brayden and confirmed their rendezvous point, which the walker would reach in two hours. The Marauders beat them to it and secured the area, fighting off the Varshoo tanks and forcing the survivors to abandon their charge and retreat back towards the city.

Once they were gone Jenna lowered the boarding ramp and helped drag the crew out one at a time down to the surface where Brayden and several other mercs waited. A Star Force dropship had already arrived, escorted in by the merc Valeries, and a group of commandos came out to Jenna, taking the prisoners off their hands and carrying them back to the dropship. She let Levi handle the others while she stepped off to the side to talk with Brayden.

“Don’t make me regret this,” she warned.

“You made that look easy,” the merc commented, pulling his helmet off.

Jenna left hers on, and he should have too. One rogue sniper shot would be all it would take to end his day in a very bad way. Yet another sign that these people were no longer Star Force, and starting to pick up some bad habits.

“I ought to blow it up.”

Brayden shook his head. “No, we’ll put it to good use. I promise.”

“I’m taking a chance on you, and the sad this is I won’t be around to find out if I’m right or not.”

“Any chance of getting some naval assistance on your way out?”

“No.”

Brayden sighed. “Very well. You’ve aided us quite a bit already. The new toy aside, it would have taken everything we had left to take it down, and that was after weeks of refit to our surviving tanks, so you have our thanks.”

“We came here for the intel, not the war, but you’re welcome. Just don’t try to use that thing without some practice. It’d be a shame if you broke it the first mission out.”

“We’ll take real good care of it, you can count on that. Do you want us to take the crew?”

“No, we’ll be dropping them off on our way out.”

“Where?”

“Near one of their bases.”

“Why not a prison?”

“We stole their ride. We’re not taking sides. You get the walker because I trust you. I don’t have the same confidence with the local defense force.”

“You mean what’s left of them.”

“From here on out you’re on your own. If the Varshoo bring in any other toys, we’re not coming back to deal with them.”

“Fair enough,” he said as Levi came down with the last one and handed him off to the commandos, then walked up beside Jenna.

“Keys are in the ignition.”

“Control keys?” Brayden asked.

“Just an expression,” Jenna answered. “You can figure out the details on your own.”

Without another word the pair walked off towards their dropship, but Brayden wasn’t going to leave it at that.

“Not to sound like an ingrate,” he shouted after them, “but I get the feeling you don’t like us very much.”

Jenna turned around. “No, I don’t.”

“Why?”

“You’re a quitter,” she said flatly.

“If we weren’t out here, the frontier would be a little more messier than it is now.”

“Not the point.”

“So you just don’t like the fact that we’re doing things on our own now?”

“If I didn’t think you were doing some good, I wouldn’t be giving you the walker.”

“So why the animosity?”

“You left the team, and now you want me to treat you like you’re still one of us. You can’t have it both ways. You wanted out, now you’re out.”

“So that’s the way it is?”

“That’s the way it is,” Jenna echoed.

“As you wish,” Brayden said, putting his helmet back on.

Jenna turned around and walked off towards the waiting dropship with Levi, leaving the mercs to do their thing and wanting to get away from the mess of a planet that was Tieor.

8

October 14, 2735

Ma’kri Jor-El

Mid Jump

Jenna twirled her stun sword around once, accelerating the top half of the loop and using the force to negate the sideways slash from Levi’s double-bladed weapon. The two tubular blades met with a slight ping as the energy matrixes met and canceled each other out, resulting in no flow of the energy with the physical contact. The sound was muted, for the swords were set to a very low setting, but still there was a bit of FX where every blade crossed, adding a bit of energy to the rather standard training drill.

Levi held the blades together for a moment, then reverse-slashed with the other half of his weapon, aiming for Jenna’s right shoulder as he tried to keep pressure on her blade to delay its movement. The mage wasn’t so easily suckered, and she took a half step back before she pushed off a few inches and snapped her blade across her body and blocked the second hit from the double sword with another ping on contact.

Then it was Levi’s turn to backstep as he reset himself with a twirl of his twin blades around the safe central portion of the sword. He didn’t take long to lunge back in, blade pointed towards Jenna’s midsection in a jab attempt that he knew she would easily block. When she did, batting the blade aside and setting herself up for a possible slash of her own with a step to his left, the padawan dropped down onto his heels and spun, bringing the other side of his sword around behind him toward her legs.

Jenna hopped over it, but while she was in the air Levi had a movement advantage and used it to enhance his spin, so that when she did land the other side of his body had rotated around and brought the back half of the sword with it, headed towards the side of her leg as she landed. It didn’t hit, for Jenna had dropped her own sword alongside her leg to catch the blow, but Levi pushed hard and got his master’s own blade to move towards her leg and nip at her boot.

Jenna felt a tingle of numbness enter her foot, but it wasn’t enough to trip her up. She responded by yanking her foot back and planting the tip of her sword into the floor of the training room, using the solid rod to pivot on while Levi twirled back in reverse to stand himself up. With the elder Archon now leaning forward, she let go pressure on the sword and used her off balance stance to propel herself forward as she brought the sword across to her other side, tip pointed down to catch Levi’s blade whether he was intending to hit her or not.

A step later and she was inside his swinging arc, bringing her right knee up and nailing him in the gut. With a telekinetic tug she threw him off her knee and onto his butt, landing her sword in the crevice between his chin and chest, an inch and a half away from touching his throat. She pulled back immediately, having finished that maneuver on reflex more than intent, and stood a couple meters away while he stood up.

“Sorry,” she offered, for this training session wasn’t supposed to be a full blown sparring match.

“So much for defense only,” Levi commented. “What’s wrong?”

“Just a little twitchy.”

“Why?” he asked, bringing half of his sword up in front of him in a guard stance, with Jenna likewise resuming a defensive position.

I don’t know, she said telepathically as Levi came back at her, making two quick slashes with the same side of the sword before throwing in a reverse that forced Jenna to switch her sword from one side of her body to the other. But that was a good hit.

You had it blocked, he said, continuing to lightly spar with her, focusing on the transition between movements more than the force of the blows.

Not well enough.

That’s my point. What’s wrong?

Jenna focused a bit more and met the next three slashes with crisp returns, then added force to the fourth, nearly knocking the double blade out of Levi’s hands as she batted it away to her left.

“It’s not me, it’s you,” she said aloud. “It’s like you’re not trying very hard, so I ease off then you slip it back up. If you’re doing it on purpose I’ll beat the crap out of you, but I don’t think you are.”

Levi winced. “Actually, I was.”

Jenna glared at him. “That’s not the point of this drill.”

“No it’s not, but something isn’t right with you so I was probing. And when I made a hit you seemed to take it personally.”

Jenna swung her sword to the side, lowering it almost to where the point touched the floor, and raised her other hand in exasperation. “I guess I just don’t like walking away from a fight.”

“Who does? That shouldn’t throw you off your game. Your head’s not fully into the training, you’re just acting out of reflex…and not to brag too much, but I’m too strong and know your techniques too well for you to hold me off with even a slightly disfocused effort.”

Jenna shut the power off on her sword, then retracted it back down into the handle. “Part of my head is still back on Tieor. We had to walk away, but part of me still thinks we should be back there saving lives rather than here training.”

“So we go back then,” Levi said simply.

“And do what?”

“You tell me.”

“No, don’t give me that bullshit. If you have a suggestion just spit it out.”

“I don’t, actually. But if you feel like we need to be there, then why not go back and see what we can do to help out.”

“We’ve already taken out the walker. What more would you suggest?”

“I suggest you quit beating around the bush and tell me what’s really bothering you.”

Jenna put her hands on her hips, starting to get annoyed, but as she thought it through she realized Levi was right.

“I think I screwed up.”

Her apprentice frowned. “How?”

“By picking a side.”

“We didn’t kill anyone, and the Varshoo have no business invading planets and killing people, no matter what their situation is back home.”

“But that walker we gave the mercs will kill people, which means we did take a side and got involved in the fight…then didn’t fully commit.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty of war to go around if you want to go back and pick up where we left off.”

Jenna shook her head. “We can’t, and you know it.”

“I do know it, but apparently part of your head doesn’t.”

“Then explain it for me.”

Levi deactivated and retracted his sword, then tossed the extra-long hilt aside onto the mat. He counted off points on his fingers.

“One, we’re not going to help the Varshoo take over the planet. If that was ever an objective we’d have to do it without killing anyone, and we don’t have the means to do that out here. We could help them take over and reduce the losses to the native population, but we’d still be assisting those in the bloodshed, which is unacceptable.”

“Two, we can’t defend the planet for the same reason. If this was a lizard invasion it would be different, because we kill those bastards on sight. Skarrons more or less the same thing. The Varshoo aren’t our enemy. Maybe they deserve to be, but they’re not right now, and we go through a series of procedures to deal with ‘not so friendlies,’ which we’re not in a position to do here.”

“Three, Tieor isn’t an ally. If it was, we’d fight whoever was attacking them. Are they on the defense, yes, and that makes me, at least, sympathetic to their plight and wanting to assist, but if we’re going to fight a war to save them it has to be our kind of war. We can’t do that here, other than in small respects, and those would be aiding a planet full of people that might very well go attack someone else later. Maybe this attack is a reprisal for one that Tieor made against the Varshoo. Until we can determine who is in the right, all we can do is block the fighting through nonlethal means. Can we do that for the entire planet?”

“No,” Jenna admitted.

“Four, we have the mercenaries. There are a lot involved in the fighting, but having one unit made up of our former brothers and sisters throws a wrinkle on the situation. I want to view them as allies, but they left and are not entirely trustworthy simply for that fact. I have to keep myself from making the mistake of treating them like other commandos. They may have been once, but they’re not now. My gut says to aid them in battle, and leaving definitely doesn’t feel right if you’re looking at it simply from that perspective.”

“Five, we came here to track down the Skarron link, and there is none. Our original mission is complete, but because we involved ourselves with the mercs we got entangled in a fight that we didn’t finish. I know that leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, but we did save them from having to take on the second walker by themselves. It probably would have trashed what was left of their unit if they tried, and they were definitely going to try after taking down the first one. We threw our former guys a bone, simple as that.”

“And what if they use that bone to hurt somebody they shouldn’t?”

“The same could be said of the Hycre when we gave them cleansing beams. We can’t monitor everything they do.”

“I wasn’t the one that made that call.”

“And I wasn’t the one that made the call on the walker,” Levi added. “But I agree with it. Those mercs are the only partially honorable part involved in that war. Better to leave it in their hands than the Varshoo.”

“When you put it that way it seems pretty simple.”

“It is simple, when you analyze it.”

“Thank you. I’m more of a counterpuncher than anything, so you made things a lot clearer by laying it out and letting me react to the logic rather than trying to produce it.”

“So you’re good now?”

“Yes,” she said, pushing the button on her stun sword and extending the blade, followed by a whisper of a ping when the energy activated. Levi telekinetically pulled his back into his hands and brandished both blades, then ran a step towards her and began a series of hits and counter hits, seeing in evidence her returned focus.

He amped up his intensity, applying more power to each hit, and she responded in kind for more than a minute, then she quickly shifted to offense and proved yet again why she was the master and he the apprentice, for she got inside his defenses within five moves, then shoved an open palm into his chest, knocking him backwards and adding to it with a telekinetic shove that took him further away from her, but Levi did manage to remain on his feet.

“We are so going back,” she said, standing her ground.

Levi looked at her for a moment with a blank expression, then a grin spread across his face. “You have a plan?”

“It’s amazing how clear your mind can become when you decide to say ‘fuck it all,’” she said, waving him forward with her free hand as she set herself into a guard pose with the blade level over her head.

“What am I missing?” he said, readying himself for another lunging attack.

“A bit of recklessness.”

Levi considered that for a moment, then his eyes went wide with understanding. “No way.”

“Yes way, youngling.”

“It won’t work.”

“Probably not…which is what makes it a worthy challenge.”

“And if we fail?”

“Hence the reckless part.”

Levi raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”

“I’m through letting circumstances dictate my actions. Time we do the dictating,” she said, waving him forward again.

Levi twirled the double blades around. “You lead, I’ll follow,” he said just before launching himself at her and engaging in another rapid fire crisscrossing of stun blades.

When the Jor-El returned to Tieor it didn’t deploy a dropship to take the two Archons back to the surface, rather it headed straight towards the largest warship the Varshoo had and launched a Nami at it. The powered missile shot ahead of the Ma’kri and decelerated rapidly as it came up next to the target vessel, which hadn’t bothered to move. It did have its shields raised, but they did nothing to stop the IDF bubble from going up and snaring the warship in place.

The other warships nearby did move when the Star Force vessel came in close, not knowing of its strength, but clearly seeing that it was larger than any of them. To counter it they moved a fleet in around the knife-like ship and opened fire…with the Jor-El simply ignoring their pathetic attacks and moving up over top of the target warship and the Nami holding it in place.

A few pinpoint mauler blasts brought the ship’s shields down, followed by a few more that plucked away the ship’s upper weapon batteries. Once those were down the Ma’kri extended its own shields around the captured ship and sent a dropship equipped with breaching gear down to the hull, where it cut and installed its own airlock in the Varshoo ship.

Through that breach point two sets of armor followed, with it resealing behind Jenna and Levi and the dropship returning to the Ma’kri. There was an assortment of Star Force troops onboard that they could have used for this sort of assault, but the Archons had decided that the risks for this operation were going to be theirs alone…which would allow them to be as reckless as they liked without having to worry about protecting anyone else.

As the Varshoo ships were seeing, the Ma’kri was so powerful that it didn’t even need to bother shooting back at their fleet and simply absorbed all the damage they could dish out while Jenna and Levi fought their way through the enemy ship with a combination of stun weapons and psionics. The confined corridors were an advantage to them, given that the Varshoo couldn’t mass any real weaponsfire against them, not to mention that the Archons could see through the walls, doors, and around corners with their Pefbar, giving them dominance in that fact alone, ignoring the rest of their long list of advantages.

The two stayed together for the first bit of the boarding action, then after seeing the next to no resistance that they were getting decided to split up in order to subdue the crew faster. It took no more than 12 minutes to get to them all, stunning them into captivity and taking command of the bridge. There they locked down the ship and proceeded to begin collecting the crew of over 800 and dragging them into the hangar bays where a flock of dropships came in to pick them up.

All the while the other Varshoo ships continued firing on the Jor-El up until it fired another Nami at a distant cargo ship that was far larger than any of the enemy warships. Pulling the captured vessel that the Archons were on with it, the Ma’kri moved over to and landed another dropship on it. Levi took to subduing that vessel himself, then a series of commandos, Knights, and techs came over to it from the Ma’kri and began setting up the cargo ship as a makeshift prison, with Jenna finishing the transfer of her prisoners over to it, leaving the captured warship unoccupied.

When the Ma’kri had moved only a couple of Varshoo ships followed it, with the others staying back out of fear, and rightly so, for less than an hour after the cargo ship was taken two more missiles shot out and caught the warships nearby, with the big ship abandoning its other captives and flying to disable their weapons before delivering Jenna to one and Levi to the other, both of whom made short work of the crew and began carrying their bodies one or two at a time to the hangar bays for pickup and transfer to the prison ship.

It was after those two additional warships were captured that Jenna finally sent a message out to the Varshoo fleet, instructing them to either flee the system or surrender, with the threat of similar seizures extended to their vessels as well. Their cargo fleet heeded the warning and immediately began withdrawing to a ‘safe’ distance, but their warships lingered in planetary orbit up until the Ma’kri eventually shot after another one, displaying far superior engines to anything the Varshoo had seen before, the Skarrons included.

When that warship was hit with a Nami, disarmed, and captured within the Ma’kri’s shields, the rest of the Varshoo fleet ran off elsewhere in the system to be tracked down later, for only one enemy jumpship was insystem and it loaded up as many vessels as it could and took off before it too could become a victim of the mystery ship, carrying with it the news and warning back to the nearest Varshoo staging base.

9

October 25, 2735

Noop System

Tieor

With the Marauders providing air cover, Jenna and Levi made an aerial jump into the city of Lethol, coming down onto one of the city streets rather than a rooftop. As soon as they hit ground they were off and running down the mostly empty streets, looking for targets. They dispatched the first few handful of Varshoo soldiers with stun blasts on their way towards the main barracks the invaders had set up, then ran up against a unit of 20+ that were coming out to meet them as more were being roused from their bunks or other duties.

The two Archons were the only ground troops assaulting the city, but the Marauder fighters overhead had made it clear that Lethol was under attack. Still, no one had known where the pair was coming down, so they still had a great deal of maneuvering options within the city if they chose to use them.

But they didn’t. They weren’t here to evade the troops, but to confront them head on.

Already in battlemeld, Jenna and Levi split up and moved to opposite sides of the street as they ran towards the lachar shots coming at them, most of which missed but with a few impacting on their shields. With their footspeed that wasn’t going to be a problem, but if they let groupings like this have time to throw a lot of firepower into their armor then they could get into trouble really quick.

Activating their Lew ability, the Archons created an invisible energy conduit between the two of them that would transmit Ikrid stimuli on contact. When they got to the attackers they didn’t shoot back or dive into their midst, but rather ran along the walls and bypassed them, with Levi having to punch one out of the way as he did so.

When the energy field passed through the troops they dropped over unconscious, as if Jenna had individually targeted each of their minds and put them to sleep, which she could have, but Lew made it far easier because once activated neither Archon had to focus to get the desired effect, just get the invisible ribbon into contact with them.

There was a limit to how far they could stretch it, and unfortunately it wasn’t lengthy enough to allow them to circumvent an entire building, but they did manage to widen their formation a bit when they came out onto the courtyard in front of the hotel that the Varshoo had claimed for use as their barracks. They managed to catch another few dozen scattered around the area, with Jenna firing a shot wide left to catch another outside the Lew clothesline.

All the others were within that effective range, so the Archons simply ran up to the barracks’ main door and took down the few more that were coming out to fight…then they simply stood on either side out of sight and let them run out into the trap, toppling to the ground unconscious as soon as they hit the invisible barrier. Jenna and Levi used their Nemsa ability to strengthen their combined telekinesis and dragged the bodies to the side, stacking them up in neat little rows to keep the center lane clear and not give any clue that there was actually a trap waiting for the Varshoo as they continued to scramble out.

They took down over 300 soldiers with that trick before the flow finally ceased, then the pair went inside and hunted down the few remaining stragglers, clearing and reclaiming the barracks before they moved off elsewhere in the captured city and eliminated the remaining guards, for most of the Varshoo assault troops had moved on to contested sites, not expecting any major counterattack here.

It took over 12 hours to search the city and eliminate the remaining pockets of Varshoo personnel, for which they had to rely on a lot of local tips once the captured denizens thought it safe enough to start helping them out. The Marauders handled those information duties after they set down a collection team within the first hour and began picking up the unconscious prisoners as per their agreement with Star Force that Jenna had hammered out with Brayden, who was more than grateful for their return, but not immediately keen on her plan. That said, he wasn’t about to turn down the kind of help they could offer, and eventually agreed to her terms.

With Lethol recaptured, they were essentially putting up a huge middle finger to the Varshoo, made all the worse by the orbital beatdown that had already been exacted. Jenna followed both with an edict to the invading troops across the planet, ordering them to withdraw immediately and they would be allowed to leave the planet. If not, she and her apprentice would be coming after them.

The Marauders made sure to capture, and then distribute images of how the two soldiers had taken down the entire defense team left in Lethol, hopefully sowing some fear into the rest of the Varshoo, but whatever effect it might have had wasn’t noticeable, for their armies didn’t even bother to respond, continuing their pushes into other areas of the planet and further whittling down what remained of the planetary defense force and their allied mercenary units.

Jenna had expected that would be too easy a victory, but the edict had to be given to set the groundwork for events to come. So as the Marauders collected the prisoners, took possession of the city and helped to see to its population’s needs, and loaded the captives onboard Star Force dropships so they could be taken up to the fleet of now prison ships for safekeeping, the two Archons redeployed themselves out to one of the primary zones of conflict rather than going after another guard force in an already captured city.

Deciding to bite off the biggest amount they could chew, in order to make the biggest impression and test their skills before battle fatigue had a chance to set in, they had a dropship take them to the outskirts of Hamrathor, where the largest Varshoo army was stationed and currently pummeling a third of the city.

“You ready for this?” Jenna asked.

“Are you?” Levi echoed.

“Run and gun and don’t look back,” she advised.

“And when we run out of stun rounds?”

“We improvise, but no killing on our part.”

“And if the others have different ideas?”

“We can’t control them, so just focus on us.”

“This is still crazy,” Levi emphasized.

“We can call it off if you’re not feeling it,” she said, knowing that the only way they were going to survive this was as a pair.

“Fortunately for you, I happen to like crazy,” he said, looking across the grassy plain towards the city edge and the surrounding tanks as he flexed his armored fingers in anticipation. “Let’s bring some civilization to the savages.”

Jenna felt his battlemeld prompt and accepted it, with their minds linking and able to read each other’s senses. Now they had four eyes, four ears, and two bodies’ worth of stimulai between them, not to mention a host of special psionics at their disposal. Levi was still missing several, but the ones he’d already developed would serve them well, and she’d need him and his skills augmenting her own in order to have a chance of pulling this off.

Without a word between them, the two began running forward across the grass and up to cruising speed as they looked ahead at the remains of one defense turret on the far left and the tanks that were currently assaulting another one far right. They were running directly towards their flank, which had hundreds of infantry in columns with them…and that was just the units on this side of the city. Thousands more were already inside, with their air cover swirling about shooting targets on the ground with no opposition coming from the air, just an occasional anti-air burst from a surface battery or defense tank.

Halfway across their run the pair of fighters that had futilely chased off the Archons’ dropship turned back and angled towards the pair of fast moving dots in the grass, stitching the ground around them with plasma fire, which got the attention of the infantry ahead, who turned in their direction now that they’d located the well-known threats, for those two suits of armor were now infamous on the planet after the recent broadcasts.

Suddenly one of the aerofighters stopped firing and took a nosedive towards the ground, pulling up just shy of crashing and skidding across the dirt into a gentle tumble as the other one bathed the two Archons in plasma, igniting fires in the grass around and ahead of them before flying by and making a long arc to circle back around, but as it did so the two suits of armor emerged from the smoke still at a run, heading for the infantry ahead of them and the tanks behind that were busy exchanging fire with the defense tower that was on its last leg.

The infantry wisely stopped their advance and took up firing positions, forming rows and waiting for the enemy to come to them. That waiting didn’t involve holding their fire though, with the first row taking wild shots at range that began to narrow in on the Archons, who didn’t bother to do more than throw a little weave into their running approach.

With the fighter circling back around, it was going to get one more pass against them before they met up with the infantry, but as it moved back towards plasma range the dots increased speed beyond anything that should have been physically possible, then one of them shot forward even faster, flying through the air like a cannonball and landing in the front line of infantry…which collapsed around his impact point, dropping over a hundred men to the ground instantly.

The fighter had a brief window of opportunity to shoot the other one and accelerated in low to the ground and stitched a long line of red plasma orbs up to the enemy soldier, then tipped the targeting reticule down to try and keep the damage pouring on that spot as the fighter continued to move forward. When it was almost overtop the target the pilot blacked out, then his ship nosed into the ground and flip over end for end until it eventually skidded to a stop in a long furrow of dirt off to the side.

With the rest of the Varshoo fighters further off and no immediate threat, Jenna finished her run up to the infantry and threw a linked telekinetic wall at a group of them that still maintained formation off to their left and were peppering Levi with blasts. His shield were already weakened from the fighter damage, and now they were getting hammered hard by the dozens of lachar hits. Small as they were they added up, and it would take time for their shields to replenish themselves once they found cover.

Except that there was no cover.

They knocked down 11 of them, taking them temporarily out of the fight as Levi ran around the others, using a Fornax field to keep them twitching on the ground while he chucked a few stun grenades into the mix, taking the opportunity to down dozens of them before they could get up again. Once Jenna got up to him they split and used their Lew to run around and knock out more of them, all the while their shields were dropping into the danger zone.

Before they got through them all Levi’s went down and his brown armor started taking a few dings from the lachars, but those quickly stopped as he threw up a bioshield over himself. That matrix had less power behind it, but its design was so much more advanced that it was essentially worth 60% of the technological version so long as he sustained the effort.

Jenna still had some regular shields left, so she kept sprinting around and dragging their Lew line across the infantry and knocking them unconscious with the invisible hits until one of the tank shots impacted the ground a meter in front of her, with the concussion of superheated air knocking her up and off her feet momentarily.

She landed in charred grass, immediately pivoting to her right and darting to the side to throw off the next salvo. With her shields down to a sliver, she put up her own bioshield and let them start to recharge, catching a handful of lachar blasts that kept coming her way. Throwing in several deviations in her running path she managed to dodge some of them, but there was a continual chain of hits wearing her down, as was expected.

There was no way around that, given the frontal approach they were taking, but they’d almost gotten the infantry mowed down to adequate size for them to throw their finishing move…but the tanks were going to be a problem, for they were out of range and now coming after them with the defense turret no longer showing any return fire.

Jenna knew they had to hurry, so after running around and knocking down another 20 or so Varshoo with their Lew, the Archons came back together and huddled up, with Levi literally wrapping his arms around Jenna as they took a knee, trying to present as small of a target as possible. His bioshield combined with hers, linking together as the Cerden ability allowed, and grew far stronger with the bond, allowing the next tank shot to hit and not breach.

They were extra vulnerable while stationary, but both of them had to concentrate in order to bring the Jini saturation levels up to what they needed. It took a long few seconds, during which the lachar blasts honed in on their position from the surrounding infantry and added to the damage a second tank plasma blast did, along with a partial third from another tank now gaining a firing line on them.

One second more was all they needed, then together they emitted the Jini, sending out an Ikrid bomb similar to the Lew, except that this one reached out like lightning strikes and hit any mind within range, draining part of their charge without any conscious control or effort.

The remaining infantry from the initial firefight, as well as those that had come over from the other side of the tank formation, toppled to the ground unconscious with those closest to the Archons going down a split second sooner than the ones further out as if a giant tidal wave had hit them. The more minds taken down, the less charge there was to continue spreading out, but unlike an Ikrid link this effect had no range limit, so long as there were links in the chain to jump from.

The infantry soaked up most of the Jini, but some managed to travel through them to the nearest of the tanks, taking out four of their crews and leaving them intact, but inoperable. That left Jenna and Levi huddled together with a moment of peace, as no more incoming weaponfire was hitting their combined bioshield that was just a thin shell remaining around them.

Both of them knew they couldn’t waste time, so they dropped the protective barrier and stood up, sprinting towards the dead tanks and using them as cover as they closed with the rest of them. Soon they were running around the blocks and into view, dodging some more large plasma blasts until they got within Fornax range. Those they sent out individually, splitting up and heading towards different tanks, momentarily disrupting the crews of the closest ones until they could get within sound Ikrid range, then each Archon accessed the minds inside and put them to sleep, Levi one at a time while Jenna managed two or three with each connection.

That left a handful of tanks remaining that had been closest to the city defense turret. Sprinting towards those Jenna juked to the left right before she expected the next plasma blast to be fired, but the stupid gunner fired a bad shot and missed to his right…meaning Jenna dashed directly into its blast point.

She reflexively threw up her bioshield just before it hit, but it punched through with ease then ate through her armor’s shields, knocking her down and melting the outer layer of her armor. Stunned by the hit, she reached out with her mind while her arms grasped for the ground to roll herself over and stand up, finding the tank that’d shot her and throwing a Fornax blast that way to try and buy herself time. The range wasn’t good, but her shot hit, causing the crew to twitch uncontrollably for a moment, but by the time they got their hands back on the controls and shook off the ‘what just happened?’ confusion, Jenna was back on her feet and moving again.

Levi got to the tank before she did, already having knocked out another. They finished the last ones off without taking another plasma blast to the face, then ran together over to the city’s outer wall and took cover alongside it, melting against the five meter tall barrier as a scattering of aerofighters passed by overhead…but at the moment they weren’t interested in them.

Levi had felt Jenna take the hit, still linked in battlemeld as they were, so there was no need for questions. He knew her status, just as she knew his, and they both knew they had to lay low a bit to let their armor and bioshields recharge before they entered the city and went after far more troops than they’d just taken down now…though they’d have the advantage of cover to work with.

While they waited, Jenna got on her suit’s comm and got a line to the Marauders.

“Send in the Valeries and get those fighters down near us if you can. We’ll hold here and try to help you pick them off if you can get them close enough. Send the transports immediately. We’ll cover them on the ground if we have to, but you have to get to these tanks and infantry before they wake up. I don’t want to have to take them down twice.”

“We’re on our way,” Brayden answered. “For the record, I have no idea how you just did that.”

“Archon secrets.”

“Are you injured? Looked like you took a direct tank blast.”

“Yeah, not one of my better moments. Got a little cooked, but I’m fine.”

“Valeries will be there in…seven minutes. You good till then?”

“Yes, but get them to chase them as low as they can near us.”

“Still want to take the pilots alive?”

“That and our range isn’t very far.”

“We can take them down the hard way if needed.”

“Stick to the plan,” she said, with warning in her voice.

“Copy that. Just offering to make your job a little easier.”

“Don’t worry about easy, just pick up what we drop…including the brand new tanks we just bought you.”

“How much time do we have?”

“I’d safely assume half an hour. After that a few individuals might start waking up. If one of them happens to be a tank pilot…”

“We’ll be there in 20,” Brayden promised.

10

Levi ran down the narrow city street, throwing what felt like his billionth Fornax blast into a pair of soldiers ahead, then ran sideways and leapt up onto the wall, bounced off it with his right foot, and came down on the twitching Varshoo from above. The padawan knocked both down to the ground, pinning one against the paving stones with his armored knee while he dove into the other’s mind and took a pair of seconds to render it unconscious. He lingered for a third, making sure it went deep enough to stay out long enough to be retrieved, then he repeated the process with the other.

His head ached with both contacts, but he did his duty and made sure they were both out of commission for a while, then the pain relented a bit. He took off down the street again, headed towards one of the shopping centers that the Varshoo had taken and were now holed up in. Jenna was already there picking them apart, but she’d sent Levi out to clear the surrounding streets and cut off anyone fleeing the area. He’d taken down six others before this pair, and from his Ikrid ‘radar’ he could sense that there were no others coming out…at least not on this side of the large complex.

There were many ways in and out, and there was no way that only two of them could blockade the place, but the goal was to locate and disable the Varshoo soldiers…and if he could pick up a few more on the exterior with easy takedowns, then so be it.

He placed a beacon on the battlemap for the location of the downed pair then paid them no more attention. Periodically his and Jenna’s comm systems would transmit the beacon markers to the Marauders, letting them know where the unconscious troops were so they could get to them before they woke up…or the locals got to them. Between the citizens in the under siege city, the few remaining defense forces, and the handful of mercenary units present, there were a fair amount of people who would consider shooting the unconscious Varshoo if/when they realized that they were still alive and not dead.

The Marauders were running interference with them and collecting the prisoners while the two Archons did all the fighting, not wanting to risk anyone else or have to kill the attackers. The objective here wasn’t to take sides, but to stop the invasion, for neither the Varshoo nor Tieor were worthy of their trust. Jenna had decided to act in order to stop the carnage and to send a message, and neither she nor Levi had any illusions that they were saving the good guys from the bad. This was a fight against chaos and barbarism, and while they couldn’t stop everyone from dying they were sure as hell going to stick the middle finger up to the notion that they had to take a noninterference approach.

The few troops they had on the Ma’kri weren’t fighting, rather handling the prisoners in orbit, and it was going to stay that way. The two Archons had dived in over their heads here and they weren’t going to risk anyone else. The Marauders were already here and fighting so they didn’t care about them, plus they were taking the hardest work off the quitters’ hands anyway.

But it was taking a toll on Levi and Jenna, though more on the padawan. His armor had melted spots all over it, and he couldn’t count the number of times his shields had gone down over the past 8 hours. There had been over 20,000 Varshoo troops within the city, given initial estimates, and he and Jenna had gone through better than three quarters of them personally. He had no stun ammunition left, and his psionics were so overstressed his head was complaining even when he had brief moments like this to rest and recharge.

Power wasn’t the issue, he was just getting fried with every mental contact he made. Levi tried to alternate psionics to keep himself functioning, but even his Fornax tissue felt like it was fraying with each subsequent usage. He really could have used a stun sword right now, or even stun gauntlets, but their weapons had run dry early on, and even two subsequent ammo/weapon drops into the city had been expended given the number of troops the two of them were having to take down.

Ironically Jenna’s armor looked even worse than Levi’s, for she was trying to take the brunt of the fighting on herself. The two of them weren’t linking up with battlemeld anymore, for even that psionic was now painful. If they had to they’d briefly connect to take down a few troops, then it was back to old fashioned hand signals for most of their coordination, for they were so tired they didn’t even feel like speaking over the comm channels.

He’d been pushed this far a few times before in training, but never in combat. He knew the more activities he could eliminate the better, for his focus could then flow into the others and speaking was one such thing. Opening a comm channel and talking to Jenna was easy, but with his mind being so punch drunk it was almost a rule now not to talk, and since they were already using their arms for movement and fighting, throwing hand signals just seemed to be the most efficient way of communicating…even if in fact it was not.

Levi searched ahead with his Ikrid in a brief radar ping, getting the position of the people and sensing where Jenna was inside the complex, then he shut it off trying to minimize the continual frying. That wasn’t the wisest thing to do when in combat, but he had no choice. The city still had enemy troops in it and if he didn’t try some kind of prolonging tactics he was literally going to burn out and be unable to render people unconscious short of beating them there.

When he got back to the entrance he sent out another ping, then ran in and eventually caught up to Jenna. He immediately got a battlemeld request and accepted it, knowing exactly what to do as soon as they made the connection and her thoughts melded with his. Without even seeing her he ran across to the next hallway, turned the corner and activated their Lew, stretching the invisible barrier out painfully, then he and Jenna both ran down their respective hallways and swept the psionic ribbon through the entire store that a group of Varshoo were holed up inside.

When he got to the far end of that block he saw Jenna to his left as she relinquished the battlemeld. She ran towards him and signaled to the nearest door. Levi got there first and went inside, pushing past the barricades that had been set up and began looking around to confirm that they’d got everyone down. He used his eyes rather than his Ikrid and ran around the three-chambered store, seeing more than 40 Varshoo lying about where they’d fallen.

He pulsed once to make sure they were all down and not hiding behind some clothing rack, then he grabbed a few of the weapons nearby and tossed them aside for good measure before heading back out and following Jenna into another section of the shopping center where they tackled a trio of well-placed snipers, with her using her psionics to take them down from afar and sparing him the effort of doing so.

She pointed him to the right and the pair made their way back out into the hallways and to an alcove nearby where she gave him the ‘watch my back’ signal while she entered a doorway and disappeared inside. Levi stood guard in the hallway, watching both ways with his eyes rather than his overtaxed Pefbar for several minutes before she came up behind him and tagged him on the shoulder, then signaled for him to go inside.

Too tired to ask questions, he turned around and went in…suddenly finding himself in the local’s equivalent of a restroom.

He laughed, then walked over to a stall and hit the release on his armor. They’d both been fighting for hours and though his body had gone into a sort of stasis mode with the constant adrenaline pumping through him, his bladder had been mildly complaining for some time now. Apparently hers had been as well, and odd as it seemed, they weren’t going to go back to the ship to relieve themselves.

Yet another excellent reason for the master/apprentice pairings.

Levi stepped out of his armor and almost choked at some of the smells present, from races he’d never encountered before coming here, but his quickly shrinking bladder made up for it and when he got back inside his armor and headed out with Jenna at a run towards wherever she wanted them next, he felt considerably better.

“No,” Brayden said flatly to the Tieor Defense Force commander. “These are our prisoners…all of them. Don’t make me take them from you by force.”

Le’han’trel translated for him, and when the Protovic finished the thickset Shysosvan angrily shot back a reply…then stopped short as his eyes widened, looking at something behind the mercenary.

“Is there a problem?” Jenna asked icily, walking up behind the half dozen mercenaries from around the corner of one of the broken buildings in the center of the city. They’d managed to get to the Varshoo just before they overran their last defense station, then had redeployed themselves elsewhere in the city to finish cleaning up the stragglers.

Both Archons were in shambles, with holes spread over their impressive armor like they’d been hit with a shotgun blast, though none of them had penetrated all the way through to their flesh. That said, Brayden did see a few leakage points where the inner gel layer was pushing through, meaning those spots were now exposed and the next hit there would make it through to their bodies.

“They have a number of the Varshoo and don’t want to turn them over to us,” Brayden explained.

“He doesn’t have a choice,” Jenna repeated from behind a large melty scar mark on her visor approximately where her left eye would be.

“He seems to disagree.”

“Tell him again,” she said simply, but Brayden wasn’t fooled by the calmness in her words. He’d worked with a few Archons before, and he could tell that this one was angry. When their voice went whisper quiet you knew they were about to do something violent.

Le’han’trel repeated their demands, then got a less argumentative response from the Tieor commander.

“He says the captives are theirs and will be punished according to local laws, blah, blah, blah.”

Jenna walked past Brayden and the mercenary cringed even before the bulky alien was knocked backwards three meters by a single palm thrust, bowling over several other subordinates that had been visually backing him up in their little spat.

“Try now,” Jenna repeated, with Le’han’trel adding an explanation of how messing with the Archons was not a very good idea in his experience. Then he went on to remind him that they’d just beaten the entire army assaulting their city by themselves, floating the question of what the Defense Force could do to stop them and insisting that such a refusal was both stupid and rude, considering they’d just saved their lives.

Jenna walked up near the downed alien as the Protovic spoke, but she waited for what he told her rather than trying to glean any information from their minds. She was barely holding her head together as it was.

“Take them,” Le’han’trel translated.

“Brayden,” Jenna urged.

“Mason,” he delegated, with the other Marauder leading a group of others forward and into the area where the locals were holding the few prisoners that the mercs hadn’t gotten to before the Defense Force did.

“Are there any other areas of activity?” Jenna asked when the Shysosvan and his party had scurried off, wanting to get away from the gods of war before they could become their next victim.

“A few transports took off across the plains, but per your orders we let them go. I have sweeper teams looking, but so far the city appears clear.”

“Broadcasts?”

“We’ve had local crews plus our own recording and transmitting the whole thing. Anyone on the planet watching saw what you did, and we’ll keep spreading the images…and making sure they do too. When do you want to release your ultimatum?”

“Not now. If they refuse to leave we’ll have to hit another city, and we’re not in any shape to do that.”

“No replacement armor?”

“We’ve both got another custom pair, plus generic ones on our ship, but we need rest first. We’ll let you know when to release it, until then just feed us the locals’ response and we’ll get back to you when the time is ready…and make sure these idiots aren’t holding out on us. Not one of the Varshoo stays here, clear?”

“Very. I’ll have my people snoop around to make sure.”

“Good,” Jenna said, rotating her left arm around in a lengthy stretch. As she did Brayden saw a small breach point on the back side.

“You hit?”

“Just a scratch. We’ll stick around another hour or so, to make sure the locals hand over the prisoners and that there aren’t still pockets of resistance. You’ll need to do the looking though, and we’ll supplement with orbital scans.”

“Understood, but if I may ask…where are your weapons?”

Jenna exchanged a glance with Levi. “We stashed them in a room when we ran out of ammo so we didn’t have to carry the extra weight.”

“I’ll get them,” Levi offered, turning and walking off.

“Let us,” Brayden said. “Just tell us where they are. We know what to look for.”

“Thank you,” Jenna said, sending a beacon point to their tracking systems on top of the waypoint she’d dropped earlier to mark the building.

“How were you disabling the others without ammo? I haven’t seen any bruising on the prisoners from physical night taps.”

“Psionics,” Jenna said, looking over her battlemap as she talked.

“Does using those make you tired?”

“Extremely. We’ll be here for the next hour,” she said, sending him another beacon marker. “Bring our weapons and any additional intel or problems to our attention, then we’ll be back in orbit for a while. I trust you can maintain the city without us?”

“So long as they don’t send a second attack force, yes.”

“I meant with the locals.”

“There’s a lot of good will out there right now for us. Enough that we’re already getting support from some of the citizenry. I think we can handle things, even if the bureaucrats feel like trying to throw some weight around.”

“See that you do,” Jenna said before turning around and slowly walking off with Levi. They made their way about half a kilometer off to a courtyard large enough to accommodate a dropship that they called down with supplies. When it landed they camped out in the rear compartment, getting ambrosia and some foodstuffs while still staying in their armor. A Knight came down with it and stood guard outside while they hung around the open ramp, just sitting and staring off in a fatigue-induced haze until the mercs caught up with them again.

They brought their empty rifles and pistols back, then Brayden gave them a situation update from his search teams. They were finding pockets of citizens that had taken to hiding, and in some cases sealing themselves into whatever hideaways they thought could preserve them. It was going to take some time to rescue them from their own imprisonment, but the Marauders insisted that they could handle that, and with no more Varshoo troops showing up in the search the Archons finally called it a day after the last of the prisoners were recovered, both from the Defense Force and the city streets, and loaded up into Marauder transports.

Those were taken to a landing zone outside the city where other dropships were coming down to pick them up. Jenna trusted them enough to finish the handover without her babysitting them, so she took Levi and herself back up to the Jor-El with both heading straight for their quarters, already having got some food and ambrosia in the dropship.

Jenna didn’t even bother to shower, simply pulling her sweaty self out of her armor and flopping down on her bed, resisting the urge to fall asleep as she activated her Sesspik. The healing trance took a moment to begin, but when it did the ache in her head diminished by half instantly, with the remainder slowly eeking away as she sped her recovery as quickly as possible, knowing that unless their luck was very, very good there was going to be more fighting in the other cities, and that they couldn’t delay retaking them very long.

As it turned out, she and Levi would have to fight three more battles against the largest sections of the Varshoo army before the rest of their units finally accepted her offer of retreat. A lot of the Tieor government didn’t care for that option, wanting the invaders captured or killed, but with the Marauders backing up the two supersoldiers they were able to provide enough intimidation cover to allow the Varshoo to evacuate the cities they still possessed and return to their troop transports.

Those were allowed to fly up to orbit and dock with the cargo ships that were still in the system. Given that some had fled with their jumpship, it was a tight fit squeezing them all in on their own vessels, but there they would stay until jumpships were sent to pick them up, with a Varshoo courier vessel being sent out immediately to relay the request and inform the others as to what had happened here.

The Varshoo warships, on the other hand, were not returning with them. Star Force took possession of those and subsequently turned them over to the Marauders, along with the task that Brayden had been initially reluctant to accept…that being the permanent defense of Tieor. The mercenary preferred to pick and choose where he fought, but he was also ambitious, which was part of the reason he had left Star Force to begin with, and Jenna had just given him an entire planet of his own.

It took several weeks of wrangling and threats, but eventually what was left of the Tieor government and Defense Force agreed to her terms. The Marauders would take over full responsibility for the defense of the planet, in whatever manner they chose, supplanting the inadequate local defenders. With their own more advanced technology, the captured Varshoo warfleet, and the battle records of what had taken place across the planet, the local Tieor population was firmly behind the change, feeling that they were extremely fortunate not to be living in occupied territory right now, and with that support the local government couldn’t do anything to remove the new rulers of the planet.

But rulers in a caretaker sense. Jenna had instructed them to defend and pacify the planet, ensuring that no bad behavior was going on with the government and interfering when necessary, but otherwise letting the locals manage themselves. That would keep the Marauders independent, but still involved enough to bring a bit of civilization to Tieor, though obviously not up to Star Force standards.

As for the Jor-El, it would be leaving as soon as the Varshoo jumpships came to pick up their army, after which time the Marauders would be on their own, both in terms of military support and oversight. Jenna made it clear to Brayden that he was completely on his own, and whether this turned out to be a beneficial turn of events or just a delay in the Varshoo taking over she wouldn’t know, for Star Force wasn’t going to maintain any ties, even surveillance. The mercs were on their own, for better or worse.

Accepting the dangerous challenge for what it was Brayden, thanked the Archons for their decision to return and the new future for his mercenary unit…whose reputation had just skyrocketed, not to mention their war assets, though many of the ships would have to be refitted, possibly back in the ADZ at a later time. Never the less, they had suddenly become a naval-equipped organization with a planet full of resources and personnel to draw off of.

Brayden still intended to keep the Marauders as 100% ex-Star Force personnel, but recognized that he’d need to set up some support units with locals. He had a lot of work ahead of him, very lucrative work considering the fee Tieor would be annually paying them, both in currency and raw materials, plus real-estate to set up proper bases.

Jenna left him and his men to their own volition, not sure how Tieor would play out but washing her hands of it. She’d done an awful lot to help out, and done so in a typically Star Force way, but their fate was now their own. A day after the Varshoo jumpships departed with their troops the Ma’kri left as well, heading to the nearest clandestine Star Force base for resupply, then it would be off again on another mission of Jenna’s choosing.

Where that would lead her and her apprentice she didn’t know, but there was always need for them somewhere on the border and she liked being a roamer far better than being tied to a semi-permanent assignment for a decade or more.

As they traveled back from Tieor she wrote up a report that would post to the message boards as soon as they got back on the grid. She sent a special flag with it, for the attention of the trailblazers, in which she detailed how useful the master/apprentice system was, for to her knowledge such a pairing had never been pushed to that limit. Jenna added the subsequent problems with the psionic overusage, including the battlemeld abilities, noting that some additional high endurance training should be devised to counter the problem.

And throwing a training issue out to the trailblazers was the equivalent of feeding them candy. Either they or Wilson would come up with a counter program in short order, but for Jenna she wasn’t going to worry about it. Her focus was on getting into the action and making a difference on the front lines, whether lizard huge or border world small. She’d use whatever training they devised, but she wasn’t going to waste her time experimenting and designing it.

That was for others. She and Levi both were cut out for action, and one way or another they always found their way to a mission that required it. The lizards might be the greatest threat Star Force currently faced, but that didn’t mean all the little ones didn’t matter, and as both she and her current and futures apprentices grew in strength, the bigger the difference they could make in these small conflicts where sending in a Star Force army wasn’t an option.

Jenna hadn’t originally intended to take on that role, but accepted it for what it became as well as the nickname some of the others on the major front lines gave her.

Newbslayer.

www.aerkijyr.com

Fiddlesticks

1

May 2, 2739

Merovingian System (Core Region)

Low stellar orbit

Paul’s dropship took him across from the Warship-class jumpship he’d arrived in the system on and over to the much larger mining station situated in extreme low orbit around the red dwarf star that filled the view below them. Dubbed the Prometheus, the station was a prototype that had only recently gone online with minimal production, and when Paul had got word of it finally working he’d made sure to arrange his schedule to bring him back to Earth, then made the 9 lightyear hop over to check on its progress in person.

The star was small, some 17% the mass of Sol, with significant surface activity that altered the luminosity regularly. That turbulence wasn’t a problem to the mining efforts, and this star had been chosen in particular because of its size, proximity to Sol’s industrial base, and being within a system that was 100% Star Force territory. There were no planets whatsoever here, with a cluster of sedas taking their place that utilized natural resources from other systems to sustain themselves, though with the Canderians virtually every seda they build could exist on minimal shipments via internal recycling measures, which was why they’d been given this empty system to colonize.

The construction of Prometheus had taken more than 18 years, and to date was the third largest orbital structure ever built by Star Force, with the other two being monstrous sedas that were literally the equivalent of small moons. Neither of those were here in the Merovingian System, making the Star Forge-class mining station the centerpiece by far.

It wasn’t a Canderian construction, but rather one of Star Force’s mainline projects that had been on the drawing board for centuries. Unlike the V’kit’no’sat versions this one was a permanent feature, without the gravity drives that allowed theirs to migrate from system to system. This one had minimal engines, both to keep it aloft and to navigate its way around the star to access different places on its surface. Right now there was a tiny shield conduit stretching down into the star that functioned as a binary straw, and as Paul enhanced the magnification on the dropship’s cameras he could see the stream of glowing matter rising up through it.

Likewise, there was a less luminous flow going back down with unwanted materials. That secondary filtering process was taking place within the Star Forge itself, while the primary was happening at the base of the straw through an enormously complicated series of energy shields that were pulling on various materials and keeping others back, then sending the wanted slurry up to the station for a more selective filtering process.

Paul had been told the ‘straw’ was barely functional, but that regular harvesting had begun anyway…and now he could see for himself that it was continuing, though if it had been up to specs the tiny tendril of light would have been much thicker to the eye. He continued to watch the transfer process up until his tiny Falcon-class dropship was swallowed up inside the pillar-like Prometheus, which felt akin to flying inside the side of a Death Star, size wise.

The trailblazer chucked his datapad aside and left it with the craft before stepping out onto the hangar deck to find Henderson waiting for him.

“About time,” he told the level 6 tech in charge of the project.

The man frowned heavily. “Don’t give me that lip. You have no idea how much of a handful the shield calibration has been.”

“I’ve been reading your notes regularly,” Paul said as he fell into step beside the taller man who led him across the mostly empty hangar bay towards the station’s interior corridors.

“Then you should know it’s a damn near miracle we got her functioning as is. The Vic’s built theirs with a lot of cool toys that we don’t have, so this beastly testament to inefficiency is naturally going to have problems popping up around the clock.”

“Production continues?”

“Amazingly yes, and we’ve already harvested 4.3 kilograms of solari…which triples our lifetime synthesis tally.”

“I trust you’re putting it to good use.”

“Not here. What they’re doing with it is out of my hands. As of yet we haven’t seen any return.”

Paul knew that wasn’t unexpected, for the machines the solari would be used to help make had never been created by Star Force before, and thus prototypes would have to be built and tested before any upgrades to the Star Forge could be shipped out to them.

“Corovon?”

“Trace amounts. We’re not anywhere near that deep yet, just scraping a little off the surface layers. About half a metric ton that we haven’t bothered shipping out yet.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “You’re calling that trace amounts?”

“Trace as in what we’re getting from the slurry. Be impressed if you want, but you know this beast is capable of far more when we eventually get her up and running. I’m so buried in her innards I don’t even care to think how that compares to production outside this system. And on that note, the Canderians were wondering if they couldn’t have a kilogram or two.”

“It’s in their backyard, so it only seems fitting…if you’re able to sustain the ‘limited’ production.”

“We’re fishing, remember, so I can’t promise results, but the syphon is relatively stable now. Crude as hell, but stable.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Give them 1.5 kilograms then route all remaining corovon production directly to Sol.”

“Get the cargo ships moving and I will. Right now it didn’t seem worth sending an entire jumpship for.”

“Why didn’t you send it with the solari?”

“I did, but we hadn’t collected more than 3 kilograms by then. This load we got when we hit a pocket of higher concentration. This is our fifteenth probe point. The ninth was the heavier corovon ‘deposit,’ though I hesitate to use that term given how much convection there is in the star. We can sink a syphon down and let it linger for a long time before saturation levels bleed off, though not as long as I’d like.”

“How far have you repositioned?”

“We move at least 100 kilometers each time, but all our taps have been in the same geographical area. Didn’t see the point in moving us around a lot until I got the syphon working better. Really this isn’t harvesting yet, just messing around and tinkering.”

“I know a lot of people that are going to be very happy to hear you say that,” Paul commented, realizing that if this Star Forge even got to a percentage of its full capability it would revolutionize Star Force mining operations, which would then have repercussions throughout the empire as the new volume of materials became available.

“You’re welcome. Are you here to look or get your hands dirty?”

“What do you need?”

“Some troubleshooting assistance.”

“Happy to. What are you working on?”

“Everything,” Henderson commented, running his fingers through his blonde hair as they reached a lift station. “It’ll be easier to explain when we get to the control room.”

Paul stood with the master tech overlooking a large pit of a room with a fully staffed control team. There were numerous workstations all facing in around the large central hologram that had a sliver of the star at the base and the elongated Star Forge floating above it with a single tendril down to the surface. He knew it was designed to have many such tendrils operating simultaneously, but so far there was only the one and Henderson said that would be the case for many years to come given their lack of necessary equipment.

As the level 6 techs continually progressed through the V’kit’no’sat database they had come to the mutual agreement that there were four phases left before Star Force caught up with their level of technology…or rather their previous level, for there was no way of knowing how far they’d advanced in the interim. As it was now, Star Force didn’t exist on any one tech level, for it had pushed various lines of rediscovery faster than others, so the entire technological acumen was a mishmash of various strengths and weaknesses.

Their comm systems were the top priority, and as such were more or less located on the highest level Star Force had managed to date. The Ta’lin’yi were also on a similar level, with the cannons and comm both being phase 5. In order to progress up to phase 4 in any way, there were solari particles that were needed in the construction of the tech, or the construction of the machines that would then make that tech, hence creating a roadblock much as arc elements and corovon had been before them.

As it was there were still more arc elements that Star Force didn’t have access to, because the ability to synthesize them required tech that utilized solari that they presently didn’t have. In this way there was a crisscrossing of prerequisites that were needed to advance the overall tech level of the empire, with sudden surges coming across the board when they were finally made.

Solari were the next stage of advancement in a big way, and would open up the next four phases once they got their hands on the necessary compounds. Star Force was very, very close to creating a phase 1 piece of tech that they’d been researching hard for what seemed like forever, and that was the Dre’mo’don, which was lacking one solari that was holding back its production.

That solari was denomsi, which was an atom in the Trelpo element list. That list, like C-type elements that required corovon in their makeup, had a pair of subatomic particles called hrat and varsh added to the standard protons, neutrons, corovon, and electrons. Denomsi was made of two neutrons, a corovon, and a proton bonded with a varsh, around which a halo of four electrons were compressed, and was one of the rarer forms of solari, which was basically a catch-all term for compounds almost exclusively harvested from within stars.

There was probably no denomsi within Merovingian, for it was typically found only in high mass stars and small black holes. Varsh bonding required some very exotic environmental circumstances, and while Star Force had been able to recycle a small amount of the varsh particles from V’kit’no’sat ‘trash’ within the pyramid, they were nowhere near close to the point where they could synthetically bond them to protons, thus denomsi was a compound that they would either have to collect directly as a raw material or wait a very long time to be able to build the type of equipment necessary to synthesize it later down the line.

Given that it was the one roadblock to creating their first phase 1 piece of tech, primitive as it might be in comparison with the V’kit’no’sat models, it was high on both the trailblazers’ and the techs’ priority list, which meant getting to the point where they could mine the high mass stars. Prometheus was essentially the field laboratory where they would experiment and learn how to build a Star Forge that could do that, all the while collecting what they hoped would be a shopping list of solari that would help them create the higher level machines necessary to build such a device.

Paul had seen the blueprints for the Prometheus before and knew that a lot of it was empty space waiting to be filled with newly created equipment when it came online. What he didn’t know was to what extent Henderson had gone to get the first few pieces working. His masterpiece of ingenuity reminded Paul of O’Neill’s power generator in Stargate, where the legendary Colonel had gone around collecting all kinds of stuff from the SGC, tearing it apart and picking out the pieces that he needed to then build a crude, but functioning power source to briefly give the Stargate the boost needed to travel very far away.

He hadn’t seen that episode since before he went into basic training, but that sort of tech wizardry had always impressed him…and it was that sort of thing that Henderson wanted his help with now.

Inside the hazy boundary of the star on the hologram the shield column could be seen penetrating a short distance, then it broke apart into seven different directions like the roots on a tree. Each of those filaments then broke apart further until they ended in small nobs. Those nobs were really shield spheres that were sifting out various compounds within the star and allowing what they wanted through into the interior of those globes…more or less.

That slurry of material, which ranged from corovon to solari to basic hydrogen depending on the filter they used, was then collected in a small holding shield before being shunted up the primary line and into the station. Right now all seven tendrils were sifting for the same thing, that being a range of heavier materials above basic hydrogen and its plasma counterpart, but low enough that corovon and bulkier molecules would be obscured.

What they collected was all being shunted up together without any delay, for the Prometheus couldn’t yet accommodate multiple shafts in the connecting tendril, only the two…one up, one down, and the bonding rod that ran between them. That was also made of shield energy, but used for the purpose of structural integrity and doubled as a wire connection allowing for control signals to be sent down into the completely matterless construct.

It was those shields that operated the entire harvesting process, and those shields that were barely up to the task in Star Force’s case that were holding the whole operation up. It was a miracle that they’d gotten as far as they did without the solari, and Henderson’s work was to be credited with that. The Prometheus was a crude piece of crap at the moment, but it was marginally functional and sifting out the compounds necessary to improve it later down the line.

Right now Henderson wanted Paul’s help improvising, not in a purely scientific way, which he knew the trailblazer lacked in prerequisite knowledge, but in the basic problem solving mindset that the Archons were infamous for.

“We can’t get more than 53 kilometers deep without risking the stellar fluctuations from overloading the filaments,” the tech explained. “The power we’re receiving from the absorption shields are sufficient to maintain the overall structure without us having to tap our reserves on the station, so that’s not the issue, it’s the matrix strength. The further we stretch the weaker it becomes. The farthest we’ve been able to get a single probing column has been 72 kilometers, and that was luck. The currents are so chaotic that it literally snaps the matrix below 60 with the torsion between levels.”

“And we need to get lower why? Beyond the obvious,” he added when Henderson gave him another displeased look.

“Because we sampled chori on one of the probes, but haven’t detected a single particle of it above 58 kilometers.”

Paul rubbed his bare chin with his left hand. “Just out of reach then.”

“Are you aware of how many machines this station needs that require chori?”

“A lot,” Paul said, knowing the exact number was somewhere in the dozens.

“I can’t get the depth with our current equipment. I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“Is there a less turbulent region?”

“The only way to find out is to send down a probe, which means blind luck. We don’t have any sensor equipment that can penetrate the surface. We need Pro’phad energy for that.”

“Which requires hrat manipulation.”

“And the easiest element to produce it with is chori. If we have to move around and just poke randomly we can, but there’s no guarantee we’re not already in the most stable region.”

“Or the most chaotic,” Paul offered, but he realized the dilemma. “Did the sample bring back any?”

“No. The lifting structures are quite different from the samplers. They simply detect what’s there and transmit the data back up the control conduit. The probe is just that conduit surrounded by an absorption matrix and capped off with the sensor dome.”

“What about an inefficient straight line tap? Beef up the shields as much as you can and just try to get a handful of particles, enough to build a single piece of equipment that can then be used to upgrade that tap?”

“Already tried it. When we reinforce the shield matrixes we diminish the depth. I’ve pushed and pulled every angle I can think of. 53 kilometers is the furthest I can get with any collection capability.”

“Have you tried stirring the pot?”

“Meaning?”

“Bring the lower materials up to collection depth.”

“The currents are already pretty rambunctious, but the lower levels are unaffected. Different densities keep them separate. Even if I could create a stirring mechanism near the filaments it wouldn’t pull the deeper materials up, just move the higher ones around laterally. I’ve been working on doing just that to facilitate the remixing of the saturation levels around the collection points, but only on the drawing board at the moment.”

“Shaken then, not stirred.”

“Other than the Bond reference, I don’t see…” Henderson said, cutting himself off as a thought occurred to him.

“Boom,” Paul offered, seeing the twinkle in the tech’s eye suddenly spark.

“Shielded missile penetrating to depths then detonating, creating a surge of heavier matter into the upper levels…wouldn’t be efficient, and that sort of disruption would snap any shield matrixes we had in place…”

“Deploy them after. What’s it take, less than 30 seconds?”

“Depends how much we want to stretch, but most deployment times are under 30.”

“All we need is to sniff a little bit, right?”

“4.78 kilograms of chori is what we need to build heavier emitters. Get me that and I’ll get you twice the depth. You got some spare warheads I could borrow?”

Paul smiled. “Not onboard my ship. I’ll have to swing by the vault to pick up some.”

“What’s ‘the vault?’”

“A little place in Sol where we keep all the cool tech that we haven’t really found a use for. Stuff we built just to build to see if we could…or for a rainy day. Military operations don’t call for bombs very much, especially the big ones.”

“How big are we talking? I’ve never been involved in the munitions research.”

A slight smile crept across Paul’s face as he accessed the nearby control station and dug his way into the Star Force files, pulling up a restricted section and waving Henderson towards the grocery list of boom-booms.

“Any of these big enough?”

The tech looked through the list, pulling up several and seeing their insane yields. “Explosive junkies.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

2

May 7, 2739

Merovingian System

Prometheus

Paul’s ship approached the Star Forge for the second time in 5 days, having just made the short jump over to Sol and back again, this time carrying 15 warheads and an equal number of penetration vehicles, for you couldn’t simply shoot a missile into a star and expect it to get very far without being destroyed first. Each of the vehicles was the size of a dropship and heavily shielded, having been built originally to get the fat bombs to their targets before they could get knocked out of the sky by anti-air defenses.

As soon as Paul’s warship came within range of the Prometheus he received targeting coordinates from Henderson, then using the yield level they’d discussed previously, the ship launched the remote craft with the trailblazer flying it remotely down and into the star. He stayed with it as long as he could, but eventually the control signal was cut off and both men had to wait to see what would happen.

Several long minutes followed, with Paul knowing it would take time to reach the necessary depth within the star. Had the penetration vehicle been using standard combat shields it would have been destroyed almost instantaneously, but Paul had some quick swapouts done in Sol to replace the shields with the absorption variety. Calibrated using the data from the Prometheus, the shields were designed to soak up the energy from this star, taking that power and redeploying it into the shield matrix. If the calibration was off part of the destructive power would get through and kill the bomb before it had a chance to detonate, so there was no way of knowing if the first attempt was going to be successful or not other than to wait for the bang.

Paul had brought 15 for a reason, and it wasn’t just to shake up the surface levels multiple times. If some additional tweaking of the shield matrixes had to be done, he didn’t want to have to run back to Sol again to get some more…not that they had that many on hand. The yields were so great that there wasn’t much cause to build them, though he’d really like the chance to throw a few against the lizard shipyard rings.

That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so their limited supply was just sitting and collecting dust when he dropped by the vault to pick them up. Hopefully now they could be put to a more productive use.

They weren’t all the same make, and the one he’d just sent down to the star was a concussion model, designed to be detonated within a medium and use the surrounding material as the destructive force. Had it been detonated in space it would still do damage at close range, but couldn’t affect much of anything across a vacuum, for the energy matrix had an expansion distance of less than a kilometer. It would push through it so fast that anything hit would be thrown out violently, but beyond that boundary line the energy fueling the push fizzled.

That wouldn’t be an issue within the star, for the density of material surrounding it was more than enough to trigger a huge blast wave…if it detonated.

Paul watched the clock ticking off the seconds, not knowing for sure how fast the penetration vehicle could descend. It had a small gravity drive to pull it through the stellar matter, but there was no way to know how it would respond because nothing like this had been tried before. The only data they had was from the shield columns dipping down into the star, for research into the internal dynamics was pointless considering the database in the pyramid.

That meant to date Star Force hadn’t sent any physical probes down into any star, nor could they have until the recent development of the absorption shields. Paul was fairly certain this would work, but there was no way to know for sure other than chucking one in and seeing what happened.

The Prometheus was situated 120 kilometers above the surface of the star, but stellar fluctuations had bits of atmosphere tickling its own absorption shields, meaning there wasn’t a definitive boundary above the somewhat chaotic exterior…that became a lot more chaotic when the bomb detonated. It took time for the shockwave to hit the surface, but when it did a huge bump formed, rising up several kilometers before breaking and shooting out a shower of stellar matter halfway up to the Star Forge before gravity started dragging it back down again.

Paul watched and waited, seeing a shield column begin extending down from the Prometheus following the retreat of the glowing stellar material. It punched down inside it even as it was churning about, then the telemetry feed from Henderson showed it push down even further, eventually spreading out its tendrils like a growing tree.

He saw some of them disappear, snapping under the strain of the turbulence, but others remained and continued to sprout more roots. Soon a glowing tendril began to shoot up from the surface, traveling in the lift column and eventually reaching the Prometheus where it was taken inside and separated into its constituent components with any unwanted material heading back down the opposite side of the giant straw.

The amounts collected were known almost instantly, with Paul watching the feeds. Solari particles were a small minority within stars, and it required a lot of sifting to get a significant amount of them, so when no chori showed up he didn’t immediately label their first try a failure. Rather he waited and watched, seeing a few trace amounts of other solari popping up as it was separated from the hydrogen and helium, which were both sent back down into the star as waste material.

In the future those would have been claimed as well, but the storage areas for the bulk materials weren’t yet activated. When they were they’d fill up quickly, which would require regular cargo shipments off the station, and as of yet no regular jumpship traffic was routed here so the Prometheus hadn’t bothered harvesting any of the common elements.

The analysis telemetry had registered 9 different compounds so far, then a tenth was added as a bit of corovon was collected. It was a tiny amount, but in its rare form. Most corovon Star Force collected was bonded to other compounds and had to be separated from it on a subatomic level, but most of the corovon in the star had already been separated due to the destructive soup that made up the star…or at least the trace amounts this far up. The deep core was another matter, but Star Force didn’t have the shield strength to reach that far down as of yet.

It took more than eight minutes before the first bit of chori was reported, and just a tiny spec at that, but another followed some 23 seconds later, with more bits and pieces coming up the straw and into the Star Forge.

A hologram of Henderson popped up beside the main feeds in the command nexus where Paul was watching from and the trailblazer mentally flipped the image to a headshot rather than a full body image.

“A few hits,” Paul mentioned.

“How long the plume stays within the radius of the collection field is in question, but if this saturation level persists a number of days we’ll have enough out of this single detonation. If not, we’ll need to reposition and repeat.”

“I’ve got two more of similar yield. If it takes more than that we’re going to have variations to deal with.”

“Keep your fingers crossed then. In the meantime head back on over and we’ll troubleshoot the rest of our headaches, unless you need to be elsewhere?”

“I’m going to stick around a while. I’ll be over within the hour.”

Henderson nodded, then his hologram cut out.

Paul glanced at the updating collection numbers again, seeing a steady trickle of chori being brought up and wondering how soon the subsurface currents were going to sweep it aside and outside of the filament perimeter.

Paul stood on the floor of a huge chamber, or rather the lack of one. The artificial gravity was working, but everything over his head was empty space inside the Prometheus…for 17 miles.

He looked up, unable to see the ceiling in the darkened distance and knowing that this area was reserved for future construction. The outer shell of the Star Forge was complete, as was a lot of the interior, but there were voids such as this that had atmosphere but little else on the 94 mile long mining station. It’d taken a hell of a lot of resources to build it, but now that it was here those materials were going to be returned in the form of stellar mining resources from now through infinity. At the moment there was only a negligible trickle of exports, but that would gradually grow and as it did so would the station’s interior.

At full strength it was estimated that at least a crew of 200,000 would be needed, but the Star Forge had been designed to house upwards of a million with ease, and areas such as this could be fitted with additional residential areas if necessary. How the Prometheus would eventually turn out was unknown, allowing for the adaptation that was required in any prototype. The trick of it was that you couldn’t build multiple prototypes of this size, so you had to get all the kinks worked out in this one effort before you got around to building any standardized Star Forges down the road.

Paul threw a handful of small lights out into the chamber, catching them telekinetically and spreading them out in a wide circle and sticking them in place with the light adhesive on their backs. He flicked them all on, bringing far more illumination to the void than the open doorway behind him allowed, but it still got ate up by the immense distances involved, for the chamber was over 4 miles wide.

The trailblazer closed the door, leaving only his small lights as a source of illumination. He had his Pefbar, of course, but that was soon about to be outranged, thus the need for a visual source of reference. He touched a small control panel attached to his left forearm and dialed down the gravity in the void to 5%, then gently dropped to the ground, bending at the knees briefly before launching himself up with a Yetu-enhanced jump.

He shot away from the floor like a missile, with the bit of gravity gradually slowing his ascent but not before he angled into the near wall. Paul kicked off of it, sending himself out towards the interior where he essentially hung weightless traveling through a giant arc in the dark, with only the small circle of lights below giving him any point of reference.

It took more than two minutes before he landed again, so far out into the chamber that the lights appeared to be a mere pinprick in the distance across the floor. Paul dialed up the gravity to 12% and took off running in long strides that eventually began to reach in excess of 20 meters each. It was an odd motion, but one that he’d practiced before…yet never had he had this much open space to play with.

He ran in a straight line in the total dark, his back to the tiny prick of light, and jumped on the next step, doing a triple flip in the air before landing again. Next he threw in a cartwheel at considerable speed, flipping over twice before getting a running step back in and righting his motion, then jumping up again in a Hulk-sized leap that was more lateral than up.

Using his Pefbar he could see the ground below as he flew across it about 30 meters up and still gaining altitude. Eventually the gravity nulled out his upward momentum and he began drifting back down again, where he eventually hit and restarted his loping run…which he halted by leaning backwards and slamming his staggered feet down, transitioning into a skid that ground on his shoes and brought him to a stop.

He dialed the gravity down to 3%, then launching himself straight up, letting himself pass beyond his Pefbar range of the floor and into the darkness. He couldn’t maneuver much at all, with only the air around him to grip, but he created some bioshield fins on his arms and legs and used them to spin him about so he could see the tiny dot of light in the distance.

Paul centered himself relative to it and just ‘floated’ as he continued to move upwards, closing his eyes and trying to feel something similar to what it was to fly, and not just for fun. Five months ago Kara had had another revelation revealing the identity of one of the elusive tier 4 psionics, and to his and other DBZ fans’ great delight, she confirmed that it was, in fact, a biological gravity drive similar to what the Zak’de’ron possessed.

They didn’t need it, being able to fly with their wings alone, but the added ability gave them insane maneuvering capabilities, and given their insistence that their Zen’zat be able to fly as well, which Kara could thanks to her Vorch’nas, it only made logical sense that they’d included the biological equivalent in the hidden genetic triggers.

Paul didn’t think that he could learn to fly here and now, but as long as he was here and had this massive chamber to play around with, he might as well try and tickle the sensation a bit, not knowing how in hell one was supposed to find the trigger for flight when one couldn’t fly.

So he just floated upwards, eventually coming to the apex and slowly sinking back down again. He kept his Pefbar focused below him, so he could see the ground coming when he got close, but otherwise put his mind into a meditative mode and just tried to bounce around a bit inside his own head, hoping to glean a bit of insight but not really expecting to find anything.

When his spherical sense picked up the approaching floor he bent his knees slightly and readied himself for the landing…which was about at the same speed that he had jumped from. He caught himself with his legs, then bounced off a bit when he failed to negate it all, rolling through a light somersault and awkwardly jumping back up again.

This time he didn’t try to soak in the feeling, but instead deployed a series of bioshields along his legs and moved them down towards his feet, disengaging them there and deploying another at his hips simultaneously…his version of a crude jet engine. He had done this sort of thing in the water, but the loose air was another matter entirely.

He used the multiple shields to push the air down away from him, adding to his upward momentum while throwing fins off his back and arms to guide his movement. The shields had to be locked to his spine, rather than independently deployed, but that only made them easier to generate. The trick was in creating multiple ones simultaneously, as well as moving them relative to his body.

Once getting a feel for the air and remembering his rhythm rate, for he had no visual reference to judge his speed off of, Paul just focused straight up and put himself through a workout, able to seemingly fly in any direction for an infinite distance, for he couldn’t detect the far walls, let alone the ceiling. He also wasn’t moving very fast, for the propulsion he was providing was now having to fight the gravity without his upward momentum.

When that transfer happened his gut settled slightly, for he was no longer ballistic and the gravity was tugging on his insides a bit more than his fall rate allowed. It wasn’t much, but Paul knew he was on his own power now and intended to stay aloft for quite some time, throwing in a few aerobatic maneuvers while he was up there.

He gradually increased the gravity as he progressed, making it harder and harder for him to counter the pull, with him eventually coming back to ground when he hit 9%. Pedal as hard as he could, he just couldn’t move the bioshields fast enough to get enough air underneath him to counteract his weight.

Tired from the effort, he switched the gravity up to 20% and created a telekinetic plate beneath his feet, then split it in half and spread it out like an inflatable bag, pushing him up into the air by forcing distance between his feet and the floor. Paul launched up and slightly forward, pulling a quick flip and coming back down again, using the same tactic to create a ‘crashbag’ underneath him to help slow his descent.

That one failed, badly, for instead of crunching down it merely stopped him cold up until the point his feet overloaded and breached the weak field, bringing him down to the ground with Paul catching the rest of his momentum on his legs with ease.

“Damn it,” he said in the dark, with the tiny circle of lights so far away now that he could barely make them out. “How the hell does Morgan do that?”

Paul set himself and launched upwards again, trying multiple times to get the ‘cushion’ effect and hoping to learn from the succession of failures.

3

April 19, 2741

Daxmet System (Old Calavari Region)

Cjom

Heema walked down the long hallway onboard the Alliance jumpship, following a row of other Reen that were making their way to the hangar bays to leave the ship. Almost the entire complement of passengers on the Star Force vessel were Reen, with Cjom now being the furthest endpoint of the ADZ transit grid into the region that had once been dominated by the Calavari, though this system had never belonged to them.

Two years ago it had been infested with lizards that a Star Force fleet and army eradicated, freeing the former transitional system that had been used to funnel Calavari and other survivors away from the lizard advance and into the ADZ. Now that they’d returned to reclaim it, the new Alliance that Star Force essentially controlled was giving the Reen’s former system back to them.

It was something that Heema and others had been pressing for relentlessly in their efforts to grow their race’s dominance within the ADZ. Already they possessed two planetoids of their own within those borders and numerous pieces of others that defaultly belonged to Star Force and operated under their limiting, but fair code of conduct. However, this was the first opportunity they had to reclaim what was once theirs and to establish a foothold outside of the ADZ, whose climate was stable, but overly populated with any type of expansion requiring considerable skill and resources.

The worlds outside the ADZ were another matter, with plenty to seek out and colonize now that the lizard threat had been pushed back…except that Star Force wasn’t allowing any such colonization to occur except with their express permission, and the Hycre and Protovic were backing them on that. The mysterious Voku also seemed to be in their pocket as well, for that overly powerful race had just set up its first embassy within the ADZ and was beginning to make civilian contacts with what they referred to as Star Force’s wards. The Reen didn’t like that term very much, but in truth Heema had to admit it was accurate.

The Reen had been sucking off of Star Force and the others defending the ADZ against both the lizards and the Skarrons for so long that a lot of his people had never known life outside of it. Heema was one of the few that had, though he owed his life to Star Force as well, thanks to their wisdom in regards to training to attain self-sufficiency. It was a new concept for the Reen, but a small portion of the population had heeded the Humans’ help and even requested personalized tailoring of their training programs.

Heema had been through one of those himself, and had found that his greater size was not such a disadvantage as others had deemed. Star Force knew ways to work around their weaknesses and give them access to the high intensity workouts they needed. As a result Heema and many others onboard this jumpship had formed a guiding core to Reen society, reducing the turnover of new leadership and allowing their race to begin focusing on larger, grandiose goals above and beyond pushing their reproduction to acquire new territory from Star Force Alliance World regional allotments.

Gone now were the days of driving the purely civilian angle, with the Reen having rebuilt their military fleet to respectable levels, though not yet up to a strength that could confront the lizards on an even playing field. The radical advances in Star Force technology were not being shared with the Alliance, save for some key pieces that had gone to the Hycre and Protovic…and those two races had guarded those gifts closely, leaving the rest of the races having to work with their own tech or what they were willing to share with each other.

That tech level had gradually increased with the ventures that were being pursued in the ADZ interior, given that it had been almost exclusively free of lizard incursion and both races and corporations had been able to develop to a level where they could begin funneling resources into endeavors above and beyond mere survival. The Reen had absorbed what new breakthroughs they could, buying others and researching a few of their own, but their warfleet looked much the same as it once had, with numerous green scarabs floating in orbit nearby that welcomed the Alliance jumpship when it arrived via unnecessary escort formations.

It was true that the lizard border was close, but Heema and his colleagues had known that reclaiming Daxmet would require a significant level of defensive forces that they couldn’t yet field. When Star Force had approached them with the offer to return one of their former systems to them, free of charge no less, for the Reen had played zero part in the invasion that had cleansed it of the lizards, they had also offered a deal for protection if the Reen wanted. That, or they could go it alone and hope the lizards didn’t hop the line and hit them, given that they’d be the one weak link in the Alliance reclamation zone, for no other race had been given a world in this region aside from the Protovic, who’d expanded out colonizing a few new systems and adding to what had become a relatively isolationistic empire on their part.

They interacted a fair amount within the ADZ, but now that both the lizards and the Skarrons were no longer on their doorstep they were not pushing the war fronts, merely staying put and building up their defenses while Star Force continued to be the aggressor. In addition to the Voku, a race called the H’kar had sent a huge fleet to the ADZ and the small colony they’d been allowed to establish as basically a resupply base. Heema knew little beyond the public news releases, but it was said that the H’kar had come here specifically to fight the lizards, and their technology level was far beyond that of the Protovic or the Hycre, so their replacing of one of the former cornerstones in the Alliance combined operations was apparently an upgrade that Star Force was comfortable with.

He hadn’t heard a word of malcontent about the Protovic turtling up, and rumor was that Star Force had simply outgrown them, with differing objectives in sight now that the immediate threat was no longer encroaching on their mutual borders. The Protovic were pursuing their own internal agendas while Star Force was growing by leaps and bounds, both inside the ADZ and out, with several new regions being added to the general public knowledge. Already there was the Achkor Zone that was coreward of the ADZ, but now this huge new swath of territory that was being opened up around Daxmet was loosely being referred to as the Calavari Region by a handful of Star Force people Heema had regular contact with.

Then there was an even larger third region out beyond the Alpha and Delta Regions, as of yet not picking up any identifier that he was aware of, but he knew the majority of Star Force troops there were Bsidd and that they were planting a lot of colonies for that rapidly expanding race in the area while returning a slew of small worlds to their former owners…but in the Calavari Region only the Reen had been singled out, and no one yet knew as to why.

That had made quite a few races very mad, for other systems had been reclaimed that they had owned a piece of previously, but Star Force wasn’t yet returning those. In fact it was rumored that they were colonizing them for themselves, though without the transit grid extending out to them yet there was no way to be sure. Most races within the ADZ relied on the Star Force run grid for most of their movement needs, and as such didn’t have the jumpships needed to go snooping around the region to see for themselves what Star Force was up to…plus the threat of being jumped by the lizards was ever-present, even in the reclaimed areas.

That was why Heema and several other senior Reen leaders had argued for making a deal with Star Force to have a permanent presence in the system. At first there had been pushback on that, for a lot of the young Reen wanted to get away from what they felt was an overbearing empire denying them their sovereignty, and from a certain point of view they were correct, but as Heema and others had taken a long time to understand, Star Force’s control was limited to only a few areas of society, and so long as you operated within those requirements you were essentially free to do whatever else you wanted.

They always reserved the right to intervene anywhere they wanted for any reason, which made a lot of people, Reen and otherwise, more than leery when reading such proclamations, but Heema had come to understand that was simply a caveat to insure that if something bad happened they’d have an established avenue in to deal with it rather than them trying to control the Reens’ daily lives. A big, yet underrated part of Star Force philosophy with running the affiliated portion of its empire was with giving races the freedom to experiment and grow, yet requiring them to gain a certain level of aptitude before dealing with them on more than a caretaker level.

Heema knew many viewed that attitude as a slap of disrespect to the races that were not members of Star Force, but the Reen leadership had come to understand early on, at least in part, that it was actually a subtle test and challenge they were laying down, allowing a path for peerdom if a race proved themselves worthy of it. The Reen had been pursuing that agenda in various forms for nearly 200 years, and now that they had a full system of their own to do with as they pleased, with no Star Force presence watching over them, many Reen didn’t understand why Heema and others insisted that they strike a deal to bring them in.

The obvious reason was security, but it was more than that. The rebuilt Reen empire was intrinsically linked with Star Force, and rather than try and go their separate way, which was virtually impossible given that Star Force was expanding so rapidly that systems like this were quickly becoming engulfed in new controlling regions outside the ADZ, they should make use of the advantages that gained them in order to take their civilization up another order of magnitude and rise above their competition that was still stuck inside the ADZ.

Heema had been part of the negotiating team with the Star Force representatives, and he was almost sure that they had been hoping for this response from the Reen, for they came up with numerous detailed options that heavily favored the Reen without requiring any sort of payment from them, which was highly atypical for Star Force interactions, but which suggested that the Reen’s status had risen to a level above that of the other races and now they were starting to see the perks of such a status.

Heema didn’t expect them to be on the same level as the Protovic, but then again if they were retreating within their own borders and attending to their own needs there was an opportunity there that the Reen weren’t about to pass up. While their warfleet was miniscule in comparison, their economic base was about 1/3rd that of the Protovic and growing with every year. That put them as the number 1 race within the ADZ, economically speaking, that wasn’t a member of Star Force, but Heema and others saw the opportunity rising to leave that peer group behind and take a step towards the Protovic, and even the Hycre.

Right now the Reen were in a league of their own, somewhere between the big powers and the peons, and how they developed this system was going to play a big part in where their race went in the power structure. Heema had no expectations to ever get beyond Star Force’s influence, though a great number of their former worlds had existed on the other side of Calavari territory where Star Force had never even ventured to date. Whether or not they’d ever get to them again was unknown, but if they did he fully expected it would come on the heels of Star Force pushing out that far, not in the Reen going there themselves, for as it was they were no match for the lizards.

And such long travel times would break apart the well-knit little empire they were building here. Daxmet was the furthest stretch, but with the ADZ transit grid extending out to it that kept a link that the Reen didn’t have to build…which was yet one more of the reasons to have a Star Force presence in the system. The Reen were a very different civilization now than they had been pre-ADZ, and that civilization was better, in his opinion, compared to the far flung loose alliance of worlds they had previously commanded.

The current Reen were united with a common focus and working towards a series of goals, growing rapidly in both population and material, with this system going to add to the latter almost instantaneously. The key to that was in getting their high population here, and this jumpship transfer was just one of many that would be forthcoming. The Reen had hired out a specific portion of the ADZ fleet at great cost to begin bringing them here in droves, with this being the 13th ship to arrive in the past month.

When Heema got to the hangar bay there were a number of Reen transports already inside and loading up passengers, ready to take the large, six-legged ‘giraffes’ down to the surface and come back up again to pick up more. According to the ship’s sensors, there were already thousands of the craft making the round trips, having been brought in here some 8 months previously with the main transitional fleet that was busily rebuilding a tiny spec of civilization on the planet even while Star Force crews were still deconstructing the lizard infrastructure elsewhere.

Heema climbed onboard the transport and walked to a nook-like depression in the floor of the giant craft, settling down there along with many others nearby him in an egg-crate fashion since the Reen didn’t use chairs. He waited there until the Reen ship was filled with 62 of them, then it lifted off the deck and flew out into space, transitioning down to a lower orbit enroute to the excessively thick atmosphere of the planet.

Heema watched via a display screen on the ring of his personal nook, seeing the massive Sentinel station off in the distance. There was currently only the one in the system, but with it was a Star Force warfleet that would keep the lizards at bay indefinitely. That fleet wasn’t situated around this planet, however, but rather one of six moons in orbit. It had been named Brobdingnag, and was the location of a modest construction effort that was building the framework of what would become an Axius colony, but one for the larger races only.

That would bring the Axius Reen with it, giving the independent civilization and their Axius kin a geographical link, as well as the opportunity for the two to exchange individuals when they wanted. It also meant that Star Force would be protecting one of its own worlds in the system against invasion in perpetuity, rather than the Reen having to negotiate some sort of payment deal to keep them here on contract.

The Sentinel had been placed around the planet, both for strategic reasons and a sign that the defensive effort was going to be a mutual one. The Reen had their warfleet now, with most of it present in this system, and over time they hoped to improve it to the point where they wouldn’t have to rely on Star Force, but right now they would back them up however necessary if a reprisal attack from the lizards did come.

The Sentinel acted as an island in orbit that both fleets could run to for sanctuary if needed, and just having one of the massive stations here had a psychological effect on everyone in the system, for it stated that this was permanent territory within the Star Force-led Alliance and any invading race was going to have to pay a very high price in order to take it from them on the first try, let alone the inevitable counterattack to come later.

To Heema that single Sentinel signified that this was home and part of the ADZ whether it was within those borders or not. The planet may be 100% Reen, but the system truly belong to their benefactor, even if they weren’t going to colonize past that single moon. That confidence was what was attracting so many Reen here, for behind Heema’s flight were many more coming with individual citizens that had not been ordered or deployed here in any governmental fashion. They were coming to take part in the colonization effort on their own merits, and it was up to Heema and a few other veterans to make sure they had room for them all prior to arrival.

4

When Heema’s transport got to ground he walked out into the thick atmosphere, taking him and the others a moment to adjust. He breathed in heavily, with the air taking time to get all the way down his long neck and into his four lungs, giving him a bit of a head rush when the higher concentration of oxygen processed through his bloodstream. It passed quickly and he followed the others out across the tarmac, looking around at the partially complete city in which they’d landed.

The green infrastructure was everywhere, which clashed slightly with his blue/green body. He wore no clothes, nor did any of the others, save from foot pads. His skin was hard enough to double as light armor in some places and the Reen weren’t all that sensitive to temperature changes, so the idea of clothing was something that their race rarely used. It had been said that some in Axius had taken up the custom, but Heema saw no need for it.

He walked over to a large entry port that doubled as a tunnel that led into the city. Given the Reen’s native size everything here was built bigger than most ADZ civilizations. They also had no liftcars aside from cargo transfers, leaving people with the responsibility to move themselves around for the most part within any given city.

Heema took to a series of ramps that descended down into the subsurface, then found one of the main ‘roads,’ for there were also no Reen vehicles for transport, given that they were themselves the size of small vehicles. He accelerated up into a six-legged scuffle trot and moved down the mostly empty throughways heading for the distant command complex. Building ahead as they’d planned, the emptyish city was going to be filling up quickly as more transports came down with passengers and Heema wanted to get situated before that organized chaos began.

He traveled for several kilometers before finally reaching his off-ramp and ascending up to the surface, crossing over a street there and entering the command building. It looked like a stubby rock from above, but within it was nothing short of gleaming with polished everything. Most Reen construction was crude and functional, not given to aesthetic concerns, but the command complex was one of the rare exceptions.

Heema passed by the ceremonial guards and moved into the guts of the building, climbing a small ramp spiral up to where he’d been told his pit would be, then walked out into it through an archway, seeing several of his support staff already there and working.

“How do things look?”

One of the other giraffe-like necks turned/twisted around to look in his direction. “The construction efforts are slightly ahead of schedule and the offloading is proceeding smoothly, though we’ve only had a small fraction of what’s in orbit come down as of yet.”

“Get me up to speed,” Heema said, walking over to his personal pit and settling in. He lowered his main body down over a short, wide pedestal with his legs spread out around it and sank into the cushion, relieving his front legs to use to manipulate part of the controls in front of him. The rest he would operate using his head, teeth, and very supple neck.

“Status reports are waiting for you.”

The Reen jabbed one of its long legs out and triple pressed a button, sorting through a primary display prompt and getting to the preset data packet. He used a nearby set of buttons to scroll through the table of contents and selected the overview, knowing that the rest would be more detailed information of everything summarized here.

Heema read through it slowly, but didn’t double back on anything. A lot of it he already knew, and it was just a matter of getting caught up with the communications transit lag. A relay network hub had been set up immediately following the defeat of the lizards, and ever since this system had been on the grid, but that still left a considerable delay given the distances involved, plus the time he’d spent blacked out during transit.

The majority of the resources being used to construct the city were being shipped in as well, and to facilitate that a series of six depots had been set up on the surface from prefab structures. Heema checked the resource levels within them, finding their stockpiles had dwindled down to almost nothing. The convoy he’d come in with, which was actually staggered over a series of days, was bringing a lot more cargo to infuse those depots with, but the long term development of the planet couldn’t rely on such interstellar shipments.

The cost of such shipping was enormous, meaning like any prudent planner would know, you had to build from a local base of resources if any massive project was slated.

Heema checked on the status of their mining sites, finding four that were in the initial stages of setup. None were operational as of yet, but one was already burrowing down into the crust to set up the first of the catacombs that would house the primary mining habitats and processing centers, all of which would be located below ground, with only a spaceport and surface transit line hubs being built on the surface.

The rail lines were also under construction, stretching out from the growing city and about halfway to the nearest mining site. Once completed they’d be running cars back and forth on four different tracks that ran parallel to each other with a few hundred meters gap separating them. The first load of cars was in a jumpship half a day behind Heema’s, so it looked like they were going to be arriving prior to the completion of the tracks, which was proper. They didn’t want any delay in ore shipments once they began coming up from below ground, for the simple reason that they had nowhere to store them on site.

The main resource center was going to be located in its own region of the city, with a massive yard filled with bins and warehouses to contain it all as it arrived via train, then the ring of factories surrounding the yard would begin processing the already sorted and crushed materials into whatever basic building blocks the Reen needed. Structural ribs, wall segments, adhesives, wires, lighting…there was a long list of compounds the mining operations had to find and produce in order for the factories to do their job, and Heema knew that list wasn’t going to be fulfilled overnight.

To expedite matters there was already a pair of recycling stations up and running. They were connected to the city via a dirt road with thousands of Reen vehicles crisscrossing the countryside and cycling back and forth from those mobile stations, which were moving around periodically to hunt down the piles of lizard debris that Star Force was letting them salvage from. The Human-led empire was taking most of it for themselves, which was only right given that they’d reclaimed the planet, but they were as interested as the Reen in seeing the planetary colonization spur get underway.

What exactly it would gain Star Force Heema wasn’t sure, but he knew there was always an angle to whatever they did…it just wasn’t always a greedy one. He still hadn’t, after all these years, fully figured out the motivations behind their decisions, but their actions were very predictable. Those who behaved themselves and showed merit were courted and rewarded. Those who caused trouble or showed themselves to be inept were contained and dismissed as irrelevant.

He had no doubt that the Reen were here now because of their past actions, and that those long term efforts were now paying dividends. Heema was convinced that giving them this system back was another test, leading up to what he couldn’t guess, but he’d noticed that when Star Force gave someone as much leeway and free assistance as they were giving the Reen now, they were interesting in seeing how they used it.

And Heema was adamant that they not waste a moment of this opportunity.

After getting situated with the new staff and the familiar few that he’d brought with him, he immediately headed out into the city to start making contacts with the newcomers and getting them put to work immediately, for there was a bit of uncertainty spreading amongst the incoming population as to what to do next, with most seeming to think they’d have time to relax and linger as if this was a holiday before the hard work started.

Heema quickly put such notions to rest, culminating with a speech to the highest ranking 300 or so Reen on the planet in which he outlined his suspicions that Star Force was testing them here and that they could not let an ounce of laziness or indecision creep into the colony. They had to be focused on clear goals and working to achieve them round the clock. Lack of coordination or visible purpose would send the wrong message, and even while the civilian population began to arrive and figure out what part they wanted to play here, the leadership core group could not afford any such wanderings.

Plans had been made previously, and Heema reiterated them again, giving clarifications where needed, then the group broke up and returned to their respective duties with a much quicker pace. Most of them had thought of this as their chance for some breathing room away from Star Force’s oversight, but grumblings as to that once again being present confirmed the other Reen’s acceptance of what Heema had said. They viewed it as partially a negative, whereas he truly saw it as an opportunity, as well as a goad.

Were the Reen competent or not?

Wanting to prove that they were, Heema set himself on a tireless schedule, personally checking in and sometimes overseeing every new startup operation as it came online, as well as making personal contacts with the populace and it continued to grow. He had help from a few of his colleagues that arrived later, but the larger the population would grow the harder it would be to keep everything moving at lightspeed. Some lagging would take place somewhere, and Heema was insistent on hunting it down and rooting it out, replacing the personnel if need be.

This colony had to be full speed ahead round the clock. Anything else was unacceptable.

The growth of the Axius colony on the moon above happened slower, not because of Star Force’s construction crews being inferior to the Reen, but because they devoted only a small number of them to the task at hand. This was not going to be a large startup, and it took more than two years before the first transfers were allowed, with nearly all of the inbound Axius colonists being Reen.

A few others that qualified for the ‘large’ Axius colony, due to their bodily size, came with the hexpeds, but that was more out of a sense of adventure in going somewhere new than any connection with the planet below. The Reen in Axius were interesting in seeing how their race fared, as well as in establishing personal and business relations with them. In the beginning there were only a few hundred thousand Axius colonists, and when they took up residence the construction crews left to move on to other startup projects.

That left local construction crews with the responsibility of expanding the city as needed, and such expansion was deliberately kept at a slow pace. The majority of the resources collected from the nearby moon mining sites was directed into the shipyard in orbit, starting with a single small slip and expanding the infrastructure out into a progressively larger facility that would be able to service the war fleets operating on the nearby front lines.

Having a safe haven where they could refuel, rearm, or undergo repairs was invaluable, for otherwise the transit times would be long and lengthy having to run back to the ADZ for such things. The moon colony wasn’t building any drones or cargo ships, but it was focusing on building up a stockpile of spare parts and ammunition production so that they would be able to service a growing number of vessels coming back from a wide number of ongoing battles and the raiding fleets continuing to probe deeper into lizard territory ahead of the reclamation invasions.

The Axius colony therefore focused its efforts on the service function rather than pushing to grow their population. A trickle of additional infrastructure continued, as did a small amount of immigration that was strictly controlled. They’d offer up a few slots now and then, as most Axius colonies did, with people swapping residences for a number of reasons. After the shipyard was established a fair number of non-Reen Axius came in to work them, as well as the mines and factories that fed them materials, but the bulk of the civilian population remained Reen and was gaining about a third of its growth from planetary individuals seeking to join Axius.

Several annual slots were reserved for them as well, but the numbers were minuscule given the size of the colony. They had to contend with maturia growth estimates and not overflood the moon with population, always wanting to keep residential occupation at no more than 90% capacity, allowing for quarters swapping and advancement. They did not want to tell an individual who had earned an upgrade that there were no units available, so they had to make sure habitat construction always ran ahead of population numbers.

So Brobdingnag would remain a mere spec of Star Force civilization within the star system while the Reen infrastructure grew by leaps and bounds. Within a decade of their arrival their population had grown to half a billion, with many more ready to make the move once additional facilities were built underneath a halo of Sentinels. No one seemed overly concerned about the threat of the lizards, Heema included, for Star Force never would have built a shipyard here if they felt it was a vulnerable location, and as the years passed more warships would be seen in orbit guarding that station, with an occasional and very welcome shipment of new Sentinel segments coming in to assemble yet another massive piece of anti-lizard deterrent.

Then one day many years later a huge Star Force fleet of warships and Ma’kri entered the system and began offloading damaged drones that the shipyard hurriedly began to repair, filling all its slips and yet having more waiting in line. Two of the Ma’kri had even suffered significant damage and were moved into the larger berth, one at a time, with a small army of Axius workers supplementing the onboard techs as they began to rebuild the ships with the crews still onboard.

The Ma’kri-sized slip was exposed to space, for this wasn’t a super-sized shipyard, but it was surrounded with an always running energy shield to protect it against attack or rogue debris. Inside that shield there was no atmosphere, which made the repair efforts tricky, but it wasn’t something new to the crews, nor above their expertise.

What was new was the type of damage they were seeing, for it wasn’t plasma in nature. It was the result of more of a cutting beam-type weapon, and since all the traffic they got here was from conflicts with the lizards, who almost exclusively used plasma weapons, the damage to this fleet was a bit of a shock, not to mention the scale to which these ships had been damaged, for some of the drones were barely able to fly from jumpship to repair slip under their own power.

Scuttlebutt gradually worked its way around from the Ma’kri crew to the shipyard workers, with word being that the lizards had developed a new weapon and a fleet full of the augmented ships had come to the relief of one of their planets that was under invasion. The Star Force fleet now sitting in orbit had fought and defeat them, protecting the ground troops and allowing them to continue battling on the surface without naval interference, but they’d gotten beat up in the process.

None of the jumpships had been damaged, for the weapon upgrades weren’t anything that was going to get through those shields without considerable, repetitive banging, but the smaller vessels were not so fortunate, especially given that they didn’t have the option of retreat when they had to protect the troops on the ground.

Fortunately no one had died from the damage to the two Ma’kri, but their hulls were still a mess and a lot of the junked weapons couldn’t be replaced with the stores the moon had. They were going to repair the hull and armor damage, but to replace the more sensitive components fully they’d have to travel to some place with larger stores.

The commander of the fleet, a trailblazer no less, wasn’t going to wait that long. She wanted this fleet back in as much working order as possible, then they were heading back into the fight, intent on hunting down these newly equipped lizards that were roaming around and knocking them out before they could jump planetary defenses. The new weapon was more powerful than plasma, but worse yet it had range, meaning the lizards could easily engage the Star Force drones outside their mauler and talon cannon kill zones.

That changed the game considerably, taking the short range lizard fleet and upgrading it to a significant mid range threat with what the crew had already dubbed as ‘phasers,’ which turned out to be either a long burning beam or shorter flare of more intensity. The lizard fleet had operated with both weapon varieties, though it was said they were comprised of the same destructive energy.

The lizards had been making small upgrades to their tech ever since Star Force had first encountered them in Epsilon Eridani, but now it seemed they had hit upon a major breakthrough…and everyone knew it was only a matter of time before all of the lizard worlds began producing ships of the same make and model.

5

December 31, 2754

Rotunna System (Beta Region)

Ida

Kara-317 flew through the skies of Ida, passing out over the city’s edge and buzzing the jungle’s treetops following one of many surface trails. She’d arrived insystem less than two hours ago enroute to a bit of a summit gathering on Sashneo. It would take weeks to get there, coming from the clandestine missions she’d been pulling outside of the Achkor Region, and she wanted to pick up a couple of Archons to take with her. Currently they were out running a workout together on the trails, and she didn’t feel like waiting around until they finished up and returned to the city.

Her armor’s sensors penetrated the treetops and gave her body heat indicators from all the lifeforms in the jungle, but only for a set distance. No Human signatures were within her current radius, but she was familiar with the set of trails, having spent a month here previously on another layover. They didn’t appear to have changed much in the past century, and if she knew Prick and Pram they’d be taking the longest of the trails, so Kara followed it expecting to pick up on them eventually.

She moved quickly, knowing that the invasion date wasn’t going to change if she arrived late and she was cutting it close as it was. Kara hadn’t realized it was even going down yet until she’d gotten back on the grid and caught up with current events and postings. Her mission had seen her behind enemy lines for the past 2 years, with her going all the way out through lizard coreward territory to try and find their current border of conflict with the Skarrons.

She’d had to go really far to find it, for the lizards were taking it to the super huge empire far harder than they’d ever come after Star Force…and it was paying dividends for them, for they were acquiring an enormous mass of territory. How well they’d colonized it yet was still uncertain, for there was only so much scouting Kara could do with her single jumpship, but knowing the lizards they’d suck up every system that was to their liking within the regions they dominated and begin using them to spew out more conquering fleets and armies.

By now Kara was assuming that the lizards controlled a region coreward of Star Force that was at least equal to everything they had around their own core systems…which was freaking huge. Too huge, for it meant the lizards were growing by leaps and bounds with literally no one around to stop them. Add in the new phasers they were slowly implementing to their fleets, and even their handheld weapons, and their threat level was literally shooting through the roof.

Star Force did not have a full map of their territory, and very little was known past the no-go line aside from what the Hycre were snooping around to find, and Kara’s travels were adding to that, but only in a small way. She had found the new Skarron border, but it looked like it was still in flux. Several systems were falling to the lizards when she got there, literally being overrun, while a handful of others were holding firm and seeing insanely huge fleets battling it out.

Those she watched from afar, and conceded that the Skarrons were still every bit as deadly as they’d once been. How the lizards were beating them was a question mark, but they were doing it, evidenced by the long trail of conquered systems on the ‘green’ side of the border.

At least that’s how Kara thought of it, and had her ship’s maps labeled. Most lizard tech was yellow/tan, but their bodies were green and she’d always mentally associated that color with them. On the reverse she saw the Skarrons as white, because that’s what their walkers were colored.

The green on the map was eating into the white at an alarming pace, based on the distance from the ADZ that it had now stretched, but Kara knew the white stretched across an entire galactic arm and into the next, which was why she was surprised the lizards were still doing so well. No matter how many systems they took, the Skarrons should still have been able to bring in a fleet, or 100 fleets from elsewhere and hammer them back. That wasn’t happening, yet, but it definitely wasn’t because the Skarrons weren’t trying.

She’d given the Skarrons a little push of her own, racking up 6 lizard warship kills while she was out scouting solo. Her armor had so many uses it was crazy, and she’d gotten in the habit of sneaking onboard enemy ships and destroying them from the inside. Every ship the lizards didn’t have to throw against Star Force was an improvement, but she was kind of pulling for the Skarrons in this fight, despite the fact that they were the larger threat. Kara didn’t know why for certain, but it just seemed like the lizards were the cocky upstarts that needs to get the wind knocked out of them and that hadn’t happened yet.

Star Force was working up to that, and were already doing so in small scale around the ADZ, but the first big counterattack was about to happen and she wanted to be a part of it, for the lizards really had this one coming their way.

As for the pair of Archons she wanted to bring with her, it wasn’t for her sake, for she usually fought better solo, but they’d been kind of ostracized, mostly by their own doing, from the rest of the Archons and Star Force, and had been holed up here training on their own for the past 6 years after completing some fairly successful counter-ops into lizard territory. They also liked to work alone more than with others, and Kara was probably their only true friend…which she found to be sad, hence the slight detour coming here to pick them up for a mission that they really needed to be a part of, not only for the skills they brought to bear, but for their own sakes.

She spotted several individuals ahead on the trail, but there were 5 of them and Kara knew that the pair she was after would be alone so she didn’t bother dropping down through the trees to identify them or use her Ikrid to get a mental fingerprint. Flying on, she passed by several other groups and singular individuals, finding only one pair amongst them, but when she dropped down underneath the jungle canopy she discovered it was the wrong duo…and not even Archons at that, just a very fit couple of commandos.

Kara flew back up above the trees and searched on, reminding herself to mentally look before heading down again on an assumption. Eventually she found another pair 18 kilometers out and relatively isolated, already headed back on the trail. She didn’t bother to try and get a feel for them telepathically, breaking her own rule given that she was sure it was them this time, and dropped down to the trail a good 600 meters ahead of them. There she waited, arms crossed over her chest as her armor retracted back down into the clear jewel on her left wrist.

Kara sent out a short telepathic ‘hi’ when they got close so they wouldn’t run over her, for they were moving at decent speed and the trail was anything but straight. She felt them slow a bit before they rounded the thick tree trunk ahead and came into view, with Karen almost skidding to a stop a meter and a half ahead of Travis who mimicked her sudden deceleration.

“Where the hell did you come from?” he asked the mage.

“Nice to see you too,” she responded with a genuine smile, looking at both of them in all their sweaty glory. In one sense they were peers, even beyond her when you took into account their battlemeld psionics, but in other ways they were still her two little younglings and she was proud they’d advanced their way up to the striker ranks by now, and well eclipsing their former classmates, most of whom were still rangers and acolytes.

“Trouble?” Karen wondered, walking up beside Travis and gently brushing elbows with him as they filled up the narrow trail. They often did that, making physical contact where others would leave at least a few inches gap, and Kara assumed it was a side effect of the battlemeld, for they kept themselves linked together virtually round the clock in addition to their own lesser, but unique twin link that they’d had since birth, or whenever it had actually formed.

The honorary trailblazer shook her head. “Just passing through enroute to Pagaliss, but I don’t have much time, otherwise I wouldn’t have interrupted you two out here. I only got word of the invasion a little while ago and if I don’t hurry I might miss the beginning, and I figure that’s where I might be able to make the biggest difference.”

“More than on the ground? I doubt that,” Travis commented.

Kara inclined her head slightly to the right, as if she was studying him, or perhaps his stupidity. “My personal warship kill count is now up to 87, and that includes two lizard assault pillars.”

“I thought those were sneak missions, not during battle.”

“Which is why I want to get there before the shooting starts,” Kara pointed out.

“At least you got an invite to the party,” Karen said, disgruntled. Of all the Archons being rounded up for this mission from across the ADZ, she and her brother and their unique skills had not been included in the battle planning…nor much else over the last century aside from small missions that usually saw them doing some sort of short term or solo work. Nothing truly befitting their skillset.

“And now you’ve got yours,” Kara commented, seeing both their eyebrows raise a tick, also in unison. “What, you thought I’d waste time just to drop in and say hi?”

“Did they want us, or you?”

“I am one of ‘they,’ and you’re wasting time. Get your asses back to the showers and get cleaned up. I want us out of this system and on our way ASAP.”

“You could just fly us back,” Travis said as Kara stepped aside to clear the path and motioned them forward. Karen took off running, with him following a step behind.

“I don’t like you that much,” Kara said as they passed, with their conversation coming to an end. They could have continued it telepathically and she could have ran with them, but there was really nothing else to say at this point…plus she could feel them accelerate and start to hammer the last section of their workout, and there was no reason to go with them and show just how slow that actually was compared to her skill level.

Once they were gone Kara jumped up into the trees, with her Vorch’nas spreading out to cover her body as she zipped up through the leaves and into the sky again, keeping pace and following the pair from above given that she didn’t have anything else to do. They were the only reason she’d come down to the planet in the first place, and it wasn’t going to take all that long for them to work their way across a few kilometers of jungle, no matter how twisty these trails were.

Her Vorch’nas had more than enough power to let her just linger in the air, lazily following from above but out of their sight. She even went so far as to engage her Kgat ability, which was essentially a cloaking mechanism for her mind. She couldn’t use any of her other psionics with it active, but it essentially took her off everyone’s mental radar, with their Ikrid unable to penetrate or even detect her shield. Likewise she couldn’t sense them, but it made for a very useful trick for sneaking up on people who didn’t already have their Pefbar active.

She didn’t want the twins knowing she was pacing them, but she kept watch on them and the few others on the trails below with her armor’s sensors, which she attuned for a narrow scan on their pair of heat signatures, giving her more data and allowed her to ‘see’ them through the trees. Kara could tell from their movements that they were excited, which was another reason why she didn’t want them to know she was watching.

They pushed hard all the way back to the city, which was when Kara left them for a bit after making mental contact and arranging a rendezvous point. They were there with some half-full duffels slung over their shoulders exactly 27 minutes and 13 seconds after they entered the city, which was about 18 minutes faster than she’d expected. Though she was sure they weren’t going to say anything, Kara knew they were aware of the gravity of the invite she’d just extended to them.

“Took you long enough,” Kara quipped sarcastically as she turned and walked ahead of them down the connecting tunnel to a tram station that led to the spaceport where her dropship was waiting…or rather the dropship that she’d arranged to have waiting, for she’d just hopped out an airlock in orbit and came down to the planet in her armor. That was one bit of freedom she relished, and was more than grateful that the dragon had been arrogant enough to slap the Vorch’nas on her wrist without asking permission first, which at the time she would have flatly denied.

“What are we going to be doing?” Karen asked after they got situated in the dropship, with Kara sitting back in one of the seats with her feet up on the headrest of the one ahead of her, with no one else onboard save for the pilot.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing, and I’ll defer to Morgan’s preference when I get there, but I expect that you two can assume a lot of ground work after the orbital battle is completed…unless you think you can find a gunner with lesser skills to boot.”

“The general information we got didn’t say much beyond we’re taking back the old Calavari capitol,” Travis added. “I’m guessing your closed files said a bit more.”

“Did you see the reconnaissance reports?”

“No,” Karen answered for them.

“Whether out of pride, spite, or some logistical concern, the lizards have built up Varasiss more than the other former Calavari conquests. A lot more. The planet isn’t as developed as some other lizard worlds that have been around longer, but it’s going to be the strongest one we’ve hit to date and will open up a huge chunk of territory around it once the supply lines go down. For that reason alone, we’re expecting multiple reinforcement fleets to arrive while we’re hammering on them. With their new phaser-type weaponry it’s going to be one hell of a naval battle before any of you set boots to ground.”

“You said Morgan was leading the invasion?” Travis asked.

“There are going to be at least 5 trailblazers involved, so it’s more accurate to state that they’re leading the invasion.”

“Why’d you say Morgan then?”

“She’s Morgan,” Kara said with a ‘duh’ look on her face.

“Are the Calavari going to be part of this invasion? I assume they would be,” Karen added.

“Just about everyone is invited to this party,” Kara pointed out, “but we’re keeping it to a Star Force only affair. The H’kar will stick to other engagement sites. This one is personal.”

“Hycre?”

“They’ve got plenty on their hands reclaiming their own conquered worlds, and the Voku are busy causing trouble elsewhere. This is going to be in-house.”

“Assuming we can take it, are the Calavari relocating there or just adding it to their collection?”

Kara smiled. “Oh, we’ve got big plans for that.”

“Care to share?” Travis asked.

“Why do we only produce Sentinels in Sol or Epsilon Eridani?”

“Biggest industrial systems we’ve got,” Karen answered.

“Pagaliss is slated to start producing them too.”

“Damn,” Travis whispered, realizing that without a lick of infrastructure there now it was going to take some massive construction efforts to get them to the point where they could build Sentinels with any regularity. Sol was chucking them off a virtual assembly line like they were lego bricks, but they’d had 700 years to build up that industrial capacity, while Pagaliss was starting from scratch. “They’re ambitious bastards, I’ll give them that.”

“We, youngling. We.”

“We doesn’t usually include us,” Karen pointed out.

“It is this time. And for crying out loud, you’re just strikers. Don’t expect to be running things. Even without my armor I could snap you two like twigs…simultaneously,” Kara said, exaggerating a bit.

“We’re catching up,” Travis said defiantly.

“Just quit assuming that the trailblazers should treat you as equals. They’ve been doing a whole lot of stuff way over your heads, and was doing it before you were even born.”

“Why do you treat us differently then?” Karen asked a lingering question that had never come up before.

“I happen to like you two arrogant pricks…”

“Why do people always call us arrogant?”

“Because you are. There’s a line between confidence and arrogance, and you live on the far side of it. You literally ooze it, which was one reason I insisted that you shower before we left.”

“We do have the best battlemeld skills, trailblazers included,” Karen pointed out, “and we’re the reason the trailblazers even have them.”

“But they can still kick your ass. Until you can hold your own you shouldn’t be talking like you can.”

“We did break their record.”

Kara smiled. “That alone is reason enough for Paul and Jason to stick it to you every time they can. You should take that as a compliment, by the way, not an insult.”

“And how should we take getting passed up for all the important missions?”

“Ah, hate to break it to you there, but we recruit the best available and our favorites for the missions we’re in charge of.”

“What’s your point? We are the best,” Karen said as if that should have been common knowledge. “Within our area,” she added belatedly.

“If you’re local they’ll use you. They won’t waste your skills. But if you’re out of system they won’t call for you unless they have to.”

“Why?”

“You don’t have a Clan.”

“So?” Travis asked. “There are others that don’t.”

“No one else rejected their Clan stating that they were too important to Star Force to be involved in one.”

“Our battlemeld research was top priority…or am I missing something.”

“Your Clan affiliation wasn’t hindering that. You ditched it to state you were on the level of the trailblazers, not a subordinate…which is pretty much like flipping them off. The fact that you haven’t hooked up with a Clan since then is going to keep you on a lot of people’s black list, and when they’re recruiting favorites, well, that ain’t going to be you.”

“Except for you, it seems,” Karen pointed out.

“Oh, I completely agree with the others. You two are unbearable,” Kara said deadpan. “I just happen to like you anyway.”

“Thanks, sis,” Travis said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

Kara pointed a finger at him to her right, and suddenly he was bodily slammed across three empty seats and into the wall by her telekinesis. She turned to face Karen with an apologetic look on her face. “Sorry. Was channeling Paul there for a moment.”

6

February 27, 2755

Numar System (Calavari Region)

Sashneo

Kara’s jumpship entered the system to find a long stream of vessels in the process of making the microjump out from Sashneo and pooling around the exiting jumpline headed to Pagaliss…meaning they’d got here just in time to catch the convoy before it left.

The honorary trailblazer watched from the command nexus as she sent a waypoint to the ship’s helmsman indicating where she wanted them to converge. Once they were in close enough range for realtime transmissions she got a line to the Megazord, with a hologram of Morgan materializing in front of her from the waist up.

“You’re late, youngling.”

“Couldn’t be helped. I was out of comm range for a long time.”

“Heavy fighting I heard.”

“Very,” Kara emphasized. “The lizards might be moving the line in their favor, but the carnage is pretty even. We’re lucky neither of them is focusing that level of attention on us.”

“They couldn’t get past the Sentinels without being eviscerated first.”

“Agreed, but we couldn’t be pushing outward like we are now, tech advantage or no. I really think we’ve been put on the back burner. They’re having to fight hard against the Skarrons, but the territorial gains are huge compared to what the ADZ would offer.”

“They always have focused where others are weak.”

“I wouldn’t call the Skarrons weak, but they are kicking their ass right now.”

“As big as the lizards’ empire is compared to us, the same is true for the Skarrons compared to the lizards. They’re not going to beat them, especially if we start cutting the heart out of their territory here.”

“I wouldn’t make any bets at this point. Did you read the full report?”

“No, I just skimmed.”

“When you get some free time look at the Broongal invasion. We camped out there for two weeks, with recorders running the entire time.”

“I’ll add it to my list. Are you coming in that jumpship or do you want to transfer over to my command ship?”

“We’ve still got a full complement of drones to add to the melee, so I don’t see any reason not to bring it along.”

“I meant where do you want to ride.”

“I brought the twins with me, so I’ll be staying here unless you want them on your ship.”

Morgan laughed. “I may not like them, but I’m not banning them from my ship. Transfer over before we jump and I’ll add your warship to my fleet group.”

“Sounds good.”

“Where are you planning to throw down once we get there?”

“Are we ramming down their throats, or do I have some time to sneak around first?”

“The bulk of the ground troops are coming on a three day delay, but I am sending a few ships ahead of the main body to pull scouting data so we’re not blind when we arrive.”

“If they’ve got an invoker or assault pillar I’d like a crack at getting onboard before they go on alert. If not I can at least take out a dreadnaught for you.”

“I envy you that. But I’m not sure how secret we can keep our arrival.”

“I just need a few hours head start. If I can’t get onboard so be it, but I’d like to try regardless.”

“Alright, I’ll take us to the front of the line and make sure we get there ahead of the others. When I release the scouts to do their thing you can hitch a ride on one of them. They’ll be paying attention to the donut, so you may be able to slip in a back door.”

“That works for me. I doubt they’d send one of the big ships out to deal with a single command ship.”

“Not without a support fleet, no. But we’ve been kicking the crap out of them so bad that they’re bound to find a new wrinkle or two in their tactics to make it harder on us. I didn’t check earlier, but what’s the phaser distribution like on the Skarron front?”

“Oddly enough I didn’t see a single phaser-equipped ship. They’re doing everything with their plasma tech.”

Morgan raised an eyebrow. “So they ignore us with the bulk of their fleet, but start sending their most powerful ships after us and not the Skarrons? That doesn’t sound right.”

“It may be that they’re just burning off the old vessels rather than trying to upgrade them, and doing so against us won’t gain them much in return.”

Morgan considered that. “Well put.”

“I’ve had some time to think on it. How many are you seeing out this way?”

“Their roaming fleets seem to have all switched over, but the planetary defenses are still mostly plasma. Not sure what we’ll find in Pagaliss, but give the lizards a few decades more and I think their plasma weaponry is going to start being a rare find.”

“Their turnover can’t be that great.”

“Might be upgrades too. The hull designs are identical, so if they want to take the time to swap out the interior it might be more prudent than building entirely new ships.”

“Save for the places you know you’re going to lose a lot of them anyway.”

“If they’re beating the Skarrons with plasma, then why not send your best ships to somewhere they’re more needed? I just hope the techs get the bugs in the Keema worked out soon. I want our range advantage back.”

“We still have the cleansing beams,” Kara pointed out.

“If Paul were here he’d smack you right now,” Morgan said with a smirk.

“I think he’s more interested in getting a Dre’mo’don prototype up and running. That’ll far outclass the Keema damage at medium to short range.”

“True, but I still prefer our base weaponry to outdistance the lizards’.”

“They were bound to make an upgrade at some point. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more, to be honest, with all the races they’ve conquered up till now.”

“Annihilated, not conquered. When you kill everyone in sight there’s no one left around to tell you how to make their toys.”

“Point taken, but they did incorporate a Kvash plasma streamer into their ships.”

“Which is now obsolete.”

“How much better are the phasers? I’ve read the numbers, but what’s the feel like?” she asked, referring to how they affected the fleet engagements when viewed through the command nexus, and therefore ‘felt.’

“They’re still weak ships compared to ours, but it feels like we lost Teemo’s blind and he’s just playing regular, dominant ADC.”

“That bad?”

“The Keema will give us that back. Just have to get the damn beams working. Hey, we can talk later. Get your butt over here before we jump.”

“Going,” Kara said, deactivated the nexus and turning around. She jogged down the L-shaped hallway and onto the bridge, pausing when she got to the Captain’s chair.

“I’m transferring off and you’ll be entering Morgan’s group.”

“Going hunting?” Captain Hafferson asked.

Kara smiled. “You know me.”

“Good luck.”

“Likewise,” she said, running out into the corridors and heading for her quarters to pack up her few belongings. She gave the twins the heads up and had them do likewise, then the trio met up in one of the hangar bays and got on a dropship that took them across low stellar orbit toward the schools of space ‘fish’ waiting there.

Those fish weren’t individual warships, but rather full-fledged jumpships with all of the naval fighting craft tucked up safely inside their holds. Some were twice as long as others, for there were many different models, but spaced amongst them were 7 larger donuts, with a few more on their way out from Sashneo. Each of the five trailblazers here had one, plus some more pulled from various duties to bolster the strength of the fleet as well as add more drone controllers to the mix, increasing the efficiency of each of the ‘little’ warships with more eyes and hands available to fly and fight the ships.

Kara could see that this was easily the largest Star Force fleet ever assembled, even bigger than what they had guarding Sol…not counting stations and other ‘permanent’ defenses. However, along with this typical warfleet were a few jump cradles carrying the segments to not one, but two Sentinels. They weren’t going to wait to take the system before deploying them, and so long as the fleet kept the segments covered as they were assembled the addition of a pair of ‘safe’ islands in orbit would be extremely useful in the fighting to come.

Aside from those three types of ships there was no additional diversity of designs. All the cargo and troop jumpships were still in orbit around Sashneo, with the Ma’kri waiting there to escort them in later. As big as those ships were, they weren’t suited for really heavy fighting the way the drone warships and their controlling jumpships were, so the trailblazers were electing to put them to support duty rather than delegating one of the warships, such as Kara’s, to that task.

The jumpships were capable of taking a lot more fire than the Ma’kri were, essentially having become mobile mountains that were very difficult to destroy, with the bulk of their firepower residing in the crewless drones. The Ma’kri were not crewless, and more suited for medium to small-scale engagements where they could dominate with their speed and capture capability.

But while the Star Force fleet looked relatively uniform, it was anything but. Morgan-063’s group was comprised of mainline units, while Larissa-048 had brought a chunk of the Bsidd fleet over for this assault, as well as a conglomeration of 18 different Clans. Connor-018 was commanding the Canderous, Scionate, and Lacvamat, while Kian-093 was bringing a huge Axius fleet to bear…yet it was nothing compared to the Calavari fleet, which had the largest ship count and was under Liam-090’s command.

Both the Bsidd and Calavari had radically different drone designs, eschewing the standard ‘blocks’ in favor of other geometric shapes, but they all used the same basic jumpships, meaning that from the outside the massive fleet looked to be from one faction, but in truth it was a representation of Star Force’s diverse naval power and the unity of design and purpose that bound them together.

But beyond that, it was just damn impressive to look at.

Kara’s dropship seemed smaller than a gnat in comparison, flying amongst the huge vessels and over to Morgan’s command ship, slipping inside one of the small bays on the otherwise packed hull of the ship that was not designed as a carrier, but rather a badass fleet-buster that did a good impression of a pint-sized Sentinel.

But it was far more than that, with the interior segmented up into all sort of command and control functions, weapon storage, survey gear, medical facilities, and just about everything else you’d expect from a command center. This one just happened to be mobile and sat in the middle of the fighting rather than safely behind the fleet.

Those who lead have to lead…and the only place to do that was in the front.

The idea of sending the peons first was not part of Star Force’s military structure, which was a major reason for their troops’ and ships’ longevity. Even the drones, which were considered expendable, were not wasted by flinging them at the opposition, nor were they designed flimsily. They could take hits and damage and still be able to retreat to be repaired later, which was the perfect counter to the lizards’ swarm tactics.

But the biggest thing that was evident by the command ship in front of the dropship and the jumpships surrounding it was the sheer size involved. Star Force had grown massive over its 7 centuries of existence, and there was no way tiny little cruisers were going to take this fleet down. Kara felt a moment of pride as they transitioned over, looking at the assembled fleet, then they were inside and walking off across the bay and into the connective tunnels that crisscrossed the entire vessel.

The trio of Archons boarded a small pod car and zipped off across the kilometers of ship, eventually coming to the armored central region that housed the more sensitive areas. It was shaped like a ring that surrounded the central plug that was the TF-class dropship housed inside. That was currently full of ground troops, mostly mech division, but likewise protected by the second layer of armor, ensuring that this command ship could survive an insane beating and still keep most of the crew alive to be recovered afterwards.

That wasn’t going to be an issue in the coming battle, for Star Force wasn’t bringing a fleet designed to make it a fair fight. They were bringing a sledge hammer that was going to pound the known lizard forces flat and have considerable margin for error knowing that they’d bring in an unknown number of reinforcements to counter them as the invasion progressed.

Still, it felt good to be standing behind that much armor, just in case something did go horribly wrong.

In Kara’s case she had an out, and in some respects she’d be safer flying through space in the middle of the battle than standing inside a ship…so long as she didn’t come up against any anti-air batteries. She was small enough to avoid the aim of the big ones, in theory, but the small ones would rack up so much consistent damage that they’d puncture her advanced shields in a relatively short amount of time.

That said, she liked having a backup plan as well as the fact that she’d be fighting in the naval battle personally, rather than plugged into a gunnery station or in a command nexus. That was something that no other Archon had ever had the pleasure of doing, and only she understood just how reckless it really was. It all came down to guile and positioning, which she would have to be employing in a couple of days, for Pagaliss wasn’t that far away from Sashneo.

“Play nice,” Kara said when she finally sensed Morgan approaching from around the corner in one of the more crowded interior hallways.

“You know us,” Travis said just before the trailblazer turned the corner and her face came into view. “What the hell?”

“Never seen a tattoo before?” Morgan asked as she walked up to them.

“Didn’t know you’d gotten one,” Karen answered, referring to the scattering of dots and curvy lines on the right side of her face, giving her an exotic pirate-ish look that was extremely badass.

“It’s about a year old. You guys here to fight or mouth off?”

“Can’t we do both?” Travis asked deadpan.

Morgan smirked, for cocky or no, that was typical Archon. “Where would you like to figure in? Ground ops I assume?”

“We can supplement gunners if you need some extra hands.”

“We’ve always got extra seats for strikers. Do you want leadership duties, heavy combat, scouting, or sneak ops once we make ground?”

“Heavy combat, preferably,” Karen answered. “But we’ll fill wherever needed.”

“How do you feel about working with Arc Knights?”

“They’ll slow us down,” Travis said bluntly.

“On a reinforcement team that I send into trouble spots where we’re facing the heaviest resistance.”

Both of the twins’ eyes gleamed a bit. “That works,” Karen answered for them.

Morgan mentally gave the two directions to the section of the ship where those Arc Knights were going through training drills in the very crowded sanctuary. “Find Chandler and start making friends. You’ll be working with his strike team. He leads them, you tag along and work on your kill counts.”

“Come on, sis,” Travis said aloud for Kara’s benefit as the twins walked past Morgan, “time to play nice.”

Kara watched them go, but waited until they were out of earshot until she spoke to Morgan. “That went well.”

“I’m actually glad they’re here. They may be cocky sons of bitches, but put them in the right fight and they’ll dominate. Speaking of which, where do you want to be assigned…or do you just want to roam as normal?”

“You know me, I just make it up as I go. Unless you need another team leader?”

“The five of us can handle those duties, so feel free to go where you feel you can make the most impact, cheat armor and all.”

“Yeah, yeah…you’ll change your tune if we ever figure out how to duplicate my little baby,” Kara said, lifting her left arm and pulling back her sleeve to show off her Vorch’nas.

“I’m not having one glued on my arm even if we do.”

“That’s what I thought too when Puff stuck it on. Now, I’m glad he did. Never have to worry about losing it. I was horrible with my car keys.”

“Why?”

“Multiple thought lines. Until basic taught me how to turn it to an advantage I was always distracted and losing stuff. And those are genetic, not ink, right?” Kara asked, gesturing with her chin towards the top Archon’s face.

“Of course they’re genetic. No one sane uses ink.”

“Just checking. Looks good, by the way.”

“I like my natural hair color, so I figured I’d experiment with my skin. You feel like running or sparring?”

“How crowded is the track?”

“Very. But we can take a hike through the outer ship and get away from everyone else. Nice long hallways, very few turns.”

“You have a course set up?”

Morgan smiled. “I do.”

“Show me where to stow my duffle and I’ll give you one hell of a workout.”

“No armor, cheater.”

“I won’t need it,” Kara said with a confident smirk.

7

March 2, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Low stellar orbit

Morgan sat on a stool in the command nexus, her hands on the control sphere and her mind interlinked with the ship’s computer as she watched through delay as to what was happening around the system. The Megazord had come out of their braking maneuver along with one Warship-class jumpship that had then deployed its drones in a scouting capacity, with several models designed for such a role. The command ship held position guarding the jumpline that the fleet would be following on in a few hours’ time, with the linear jumpship tucked up alongside it.

The lizards knew they were here, for the system had a plethora of tracking devices set up that the Star Force vessels could detect the signals from. They hadn’t, however, come out to fight the interlopers. Rather they were sitting in planetary orbit around Varasiss, forming up into what they thought would be the best defensive formation possible. Typically the lizards would have rushed the command ship, but it seemed that they weren’t taking the bait this time, despite their overwhelming numbers.

The drones had spread out across the system, updating the last intelligence report and confirming two small colonies on other planets. It was one of those that Morgan was watching now, for the small fleet of 129 cruisers there had a Star Force icon amongst them. It was a tag that had been placed in response to a location ping rather than an active signal, but it was the location where Kara currently was.

The aggressive little twit had wanted a shot at the two invokers around Varasiss, but there was no way for her to get in to them or the defense stations ringing the planet. Rather than sitting the upcoming battle out on the command ship she’d opted to go for a low priority target, and the superficial mining colony had been accessible. One of the drones had deposited her in orbit of the rocky planetoid and she’d done the rest from there. How she didn’t get blown out of the sky Morgan wasn’t sure, but Kara had managed to board one of the cruisers and was now inside, hence the icon to make sure no one shot that ship…not that there was anyone here yet to do it.

As the trailblazer watched the cruiser she was on suddenly lurched from its sitting position and gently rammed the one next to it…with a little spec transferring across from hull to hull like a flea.

There was no way Kara was going to be able to sneak around now, but she hadn’t yet called for pickup. Rather, a signal came in, relayed by the drone that was sitting in a higher orbit around the planet, that indicated that the first cruiser was dead, either through internal sabotage or the lack of a crew, and it looked like the arrogant Saber was going to press her luck and go for a second.

Morgan’s mind was simultaneously watching the huge fleet around Varasiss, with no response from them yet. They were still shifting about their positions somewhat, but keeping well off the main jumplines in and out. The invokers were in the back row, with the mass of cruisers and larger warships situated out in front and around the defense stations, probably because they knew that against Star Force the invokers were vulnerable, and while they might lead with them against other races that was just a good way to lose them early on here.

As Kara’s confirmation signal came in that she’d breached the second cruiser’s hull Morgan placed the Star Force ‘no shoot’ tag on it, with her attention being diverted to the incoming jump ping. It was a signal that was sent out a few minutes prior to arrival, hyper accelerated due to the coast speed of a jump, but one that would arrive prior to an incoming ship. Morgan’s command ship hadn’t sent one when it arrived, for there was no one friendly here to receive it, but it did allow her a heads up to send back a return signal with any last minute instructions.

Since the lizards hadn’t come out to the star to fight them she sent the ‘all clear’ signal along with the preferred jumppoint she’d like them to come out on…which was an easy one in close to the star that would require less fuel. Had the arrival point been ‘hot’ they would have braked harder and emerged further away so the odds of the lizards being able to poach their ships one at a time as they emerged were low.

That was also another reason to send a ship ahead to a fight like this. If surprise wasn’t going to be a factor then having a good scouting report before you brought everyone else in was worth the effort. Had a tenth of this lizard fleet been waiting for them around the star they would have been walking into a trap that could have destroyed every last one of her ships.

As it was, the lizard defense fleet had the potential to destroy the forces she was bringing to face them…if the Star Force ships were being flown by newbs. The firepower the enemy had at its disposal was massive, but there was more to naval warfare than just having big guns and pointing them at the other guys. There was a lot of strategy and small-scale tactics involved, which was why she liked having as many remote pilots as possible controlling the drones. The more time one had to think the better they would fight, and the less duties per controller the freer their minds would be.

Kara’s call for evac came about thirty seconds prior to the arrival of the first command ship, which was followed by a series of jumpships in close proximity, forming a line as they came in that diverted to positions Morgan indicated to clear the approach lane. Meanwhile the drone in orbit around the mining planet headed straight into the cruiser cluster there as the enemy ships were firing on their own, now that Kara’s presence had been noted. To kill her they were going to destroy their own ship, meaning it was time for the Archon to run.

Morgan watched with a part of her mind while she monitored everything else going on, picking up a few additional bits of data from the holograms around her, but most of her data was coming directly through the neural link. When the drone got to the cruisers it didn’t engage them, choosing to fly in amongst them and pancake the lizard cruiser that Kara was on. With its ventral shields dropping for a moment, the Archon jumped across and clung to the hull while the corvette was getting pounded with plasma orbs and streamers.

Once she was inside the perimeter of the shields Kara stuck herself to the hull and the exposure reclosed, with the corvette rushing off and outside the cruisers’ firing range before its defenses could go down. Satisfied that Kara was out safely, Morgan turned her full attention to the huge chess match about to be played out, giving the deploy order to the jumpships that had already arrived to start releasing their drones here at the star rather than wait until they got under the lizards’ guns.

Travis sat in one of the control booths onboard the Megazord, operating the shield controls for a cruiser. He could have handled the entire ship himself if needed, but he was just backing up the regular pilots at the moment and applying the special touch that could make the difference between victory or defeat when this many enemy guns were in play.

The drone he was connected to was engaging the lizards in orbit of Varasiss in a massive exchange that he couldn’t even begin to follow…but that wasn’t his job here. He was to focus on the shields for this one ship and that was it, trusting in the rest of his team and the overall strategy of the trailblazers on site to guide them where they needed to go. The fact that the ship he was sitting in was also under attack didn’t phase him, for he understood naval warfare on this scale and the need to delegate, otherwise it would turn into a randomized free for all.

Those were sloppy and costly, with the lizards having more than enough firepower to make them pay for it. As it was his cruiser was getting hit hard, and not from the ships nearby. The few that were within mauler range were going down quickly, but those beyond that and plasma range were firing their phasers through the gaps and turning the drone cruiser into a pin cushion of pink streaks, allowing several dozen, if not hundred of ships to target the cruiser simultaneously.

The range increase from short to medium had given the lizards so much more naval power it was nuts, but Star Force’s tech and skills were still superior. It was likely that this cruiser was going to be destroyed, for apparently they were to hold position and slug it out for a moment. Normally when the shields dropped below 20% they would be on their way to the back lines to get a breather and a recharge, but not now.

Travis wasn’t controlling the helm, so he didn’t see the communications from others or know the battle plan. Shield control was pretty much an isolated job, with him having to watch the surrounding ships and decide which of the 18 shield segments needed reinforcing more than the others. He had two options for that…the regenerative energy coming from a continuous feed, or the cannibalization of other shield segments to send to one of greater priority. He didn’t like using the latter, for some of the matrix was wasted in the process, but on occasion it was necessary in order to safeguard the ship against a huge hit you knew was coming.

Right now there were no big hits, just lots of little pink stings mixed in with green plasma. The ships around the cruiser were about 2/3rds the old variety, leaving the other third with the new weaponry. In fact those ships were sitting further back in the formation, leaving the plasma-equipped cruisers to run head on into the approaching ships and get chopped to pieces while drawing fire themselves…all the while the more advanced models snipped at the Star Force ships outside of mauler and talon range.

The cruiser had a cleansing beam and it was using it to great effect, but if the ship wanted to throw its full weaponry against the ships shooting at it from afar it was going to have to get closer. In the meantime the enemy was going to get some free shots off, whereas in the past it had been Star Force getting those free shots while the enemy closed distance. That swap alone was giving the enemy more teeth, but they were still losing ships rapidly.

Travis took a chance to look around mentally from time to time, seeing how many drones were going down…and there were plenty. This wasn’t going to be a roll-over engagement, and Star Force was going to have to pay a price in equipment to take control of orbit, which was why Travis had elected to take the shield control rather than the cleansing beam. That was just point and shoot, while the management of the shields could be much more intricate in the hands of an experienced controller.

When the cruiser got down to under 10% shields Travis got a rare prompt from higher up the command structure, telling him to stand ready to lower shields. Along with the stylized order, which appeared as a unique icon rather than words, was a tag for an incoming ship that the striker saw was of the support variety.

That was why they’d been holding position rather than retreating, and when the slightly larger vessel pulled over top of the cruiser Travis deactivated a single sector, sending a coordinate ping to the controller on the other vessel. A moment later a stream of sand shot across and accurately targeted the opening Travis had made for them, with the replicator armor blocks clinging to the hull there and piling up on it in a lump.

As soon as they did so Travis got a second function under his control. In addition to the shields he now gained control of those armor blocks and immediately began spreading them out over the hull like a wave of water. The shield ship kept pouring more in, as if it was a giant grain harvester unloading into a wagon. Meanwhile the rest of the cruiser kept fighting and getting hit, with Travis easily able to multitask the two duties. He poured a little more recharge energy into sectors 3 and 8, anticipating increased attacks on those vectors as the enemy ship placement began to shift again, then rushed the secondary armor to those areas first, just in case the shields did breach soon.

When the shield ship was done it pinged him, and Travis reformed the shield over the hole, with the clump of blocks there sitting just below the extended radius as he continued to move them out and around to the locations he wanted, simultaneously pushing the cruiser’s shields several meters out from the hull to accommodate the armor and holding clumps that he built up like wood stacks at various locations. He needed them nearby to reinforce upcoming damage, otherwise it would take too long to drag them across the hull from a single location and the enemy weaponsfire would get through to the primary armor or even interior mechanisms.

All this was done in his mind ahead of the incoming damage, for the shields had not failed yet, in any sector, but that was his job as shield controller. He had to think ahead and preposition the matrix energy, for it didn’t form or move instantaneously, and neither did the secondary armor blocks.

And he didn’t need anyone to tell him why the support ship had reinforced the cruiser, for the answer was obvious. The smaller ships didn’t have cleansing beams, for the most part, and whoever was controlling this battle group wanted the cruiser’s beam in play constantly. Had they retreated to recharge their shields they would have temporarily lost the damage the weapon was doing.

That was better than losing the ship and the weapon permanently, but the support ship gave them another option and the cleansing beam kept poaching enemy ships at even greater range, targeting the more advanced models, Travis noticed, which was definitely the correct play. If they got the enemy down to all plasma varieties he could alter the shield settings for anti-plasma and tank up their ship considerably, but while those phasers were being used he couldn’t weaken their defense against them with the specialty shield, meaning the sooner the advanced models bit the dust, the better.

With that strategy making sense, the cruiser suddenly began to move forward, prompting an eyebrow raise from Travis. He wasn’t going to distract anyone by asking what was going on, but he was curious…then he noticed several smaller drones falling into position behind the cruiser a moment before he got a second prompt telling him to shift the majority of his shields into the forward arc and fan it out a bit to provide cover for them.

That was a very aggressive play, but if that’s what they wanted then so be it. Travis made the changes to shield shape, then gutted 80% of the rear shields and shunted that energy forward, losing a lot in the transfer but almost immediately doubled the forward matrix density. He left a thin layer around the rear of the ship and began redistributing armor blocks there to cover for the lesser defense, but for the moment the only ships with a good firing line on the cruiser’s rear were her sister ships, so it seemed to be a worthy gamble.

Over the next ten minutes the cruiser dished out and took a hell of a beating, eventually reaching a range where it was able to fire a number of cleansing beams into a nearby defense station before that weapon was damaged. It didn’t retreat then, and Travis stayed with it gaining every little advantage that he could for the ship as it played blocker, running into a thick group of enemy cruisers and tearing into them with its maulers and talon cannons while subsequently attracting the majority of the enemy firepower to it.

The smaller drones that were following it were therefore allowed to get deeper into the enemy lines than they otherwise would have, bringing them within short weapon range. They stayed in the cruiser’s shadow as long as they could, then they broke up and dove at the enemy like a Nidalee on a half health ADC.

Travis only saw part of that battle before the cruiser was destroyed and his screen blanked, along with the mental connection severing. He had a breather of all of six seconds before he saw a request prompt on the screen asking him to take control of a specific function. The Archon accepted rather than surfing through the options and wasting time, suddenly finding himself in control of two mauler cannons on a frigate. He saw the end of one of them firing as his screen came up, meaning he’d just replaced another pilot from that duty…who would be shunted to another task or reduced from multitasking down to a single, more efficient focus.

Travis took the controls and got another salvo off with barely any break in sequence, seeing a full dreadnaught eclipsing his gunner’s view. The enemy ship had its shields down and bare hull in front of him, with Travis gladly using his pair of weapons to chew apart the yellow/tan hull plates at nearly pointblank range.

8

March 5, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Low stellar orbit

“Ouch,” the Captain of the troop jumpship said upon seeing the fleet status as it updated upon their arrival into the system.

“What?” Iden-202747 asked from the commander’s chair behind his, where a large holographic map of Varasiss had just come up showing a considerable lizard fleet still holding on to a piece of orbit centered on a trio of defense stations.

“Look at our drone count.”

The striker pulled up those numbers with a few button presses, seeing that better than two thirds of the drones had been destroyed. He frowned, bringing up the jumpship count and finding that all of those were still operational, meaning no one had died in what, at first glance looked to be a defeat for Star Force. It had been expected that the orbital battles would have been completed before the convoy of troop transports arrived, or at least with the lizards being driven off into other parts of the system to be hunted down later.

With the amount of drones lost and the lizard foothold in orbit, it appeared things were not going well.

“Orders,” the Captain said, relaying the updated transmission that was being bounced from jumpship to jumpship as they came into the star system, with Iden’s being the 18th in line. The mainline troops had jumped ahead of them, with this convoy being comprised of all the Clans. Behind them would be the Axius convoy followed by the others.

Iden read the orders, seeing the Captain signal to the helmsman to get them underway immediately. The jumpship began to move on the primary bridge map around the perimeter of the star following the other Clan vessels as they cleared the jumpline for more of their own to come in and began the trek over to the Varasiss jumppoint, for it seemed they were wanted at the planet immediately.

And not just for a holding orbit. As Iden read through the orders he saw that they contained a sitrep explaining the situation…and he suddenly understood why so many drones had been lost.

“Larkey?”

“What’s up?” the ranger asked, standing behind him a few steps.

“Looks like we’re going to have to earn this one on the ground. The lizards have set up some extremely large surface to orbit phaser arrays preventing orbital bombardment. The fleet sacrificed a lot of drones to punch out a few colonies to give us a blind spot, but the rest we’re going to have to take down on the ground before the fleet can move in.”

“Shit. Sounds like a Hoth scenario.”

“It is,” Iden said, pointing to the section of the orders that identified it as such, “and they want the Clans going in first.”

Larkey-319228 smirked. “We are the best.”

“Softening duty,” Iden continued. “Mainline will mount the main assault supported by the non-Human units. Extreme hazard conditions for us.”

Larkey nodded. “Looks like we’ve seen the end of lizard extermination missions then. Didn’t think it’d be that easy this long. About time they came up with a proper surface defense.”

“The fleet is going to work on taking out the last of the orbital defenses while we head down, meaning that if they lose we’re going to be in a very awkward place.”

“Did we lose that many ships?”

“Have a look,” Iden said, enlarging the armchair display and throwing it up as a second hologram that showed the losses on both sides, with the green lizard numbers far exceeding the Star Force gold.

“What the hell. Did they really have half the enemy fleet here?”

“Seems like it. Sorry we missed that fight, but it looks like we’re going to have an even harder one on the ground, for they’ve stacked defenses down there too.”

“Bring it.”

“Cap, give me shipwide,” Iden said, pausing a moment until a light on his armchair showed that he was connected. The Archon telekinetically pressed the button and began speaking to the air.

“Attention all badasses. Our favorite waste of bullets have proven themselves just as devious and dangerous as we all know they are, but this time really takes the cake. They’ve taken their new weapon and used it to take away our orbital bombardment capability via a lot of really big guns on the surface. Naval has pounded us an entry vector the hard way, leaving us with only a third of the drones we came with and more lizards in orbit left to kill.”

“While they work on winning that fight we’re going down to the surface, head of the line. The Clans are going to be the tip of this spear and tasked with the hardest objectives. We have to soften the lizard defenses up enough that the Calavari and Bsidd don’t get slaughtered, and mainline will be holding their hands throughout, but the lizards have dug in good and have a nearly infinity supply of their scaly asses to throw at us, so we’re in for a tough fight.”

“This one we have to earn, and without air cover until we knock down a lot of defense turrets. That means infantry and mechs and no Lacvamat until we take down the priority structures. Not sure how we’re going to play this one yet, but Clan Jinx gets to live up to its namesake in the coming days. Everyone get prepped immediately. In a few hours we’re going to be on Varasiss dirt.”

Iden clicked the button again, this time with his finger, cancelling the comm channel. “Cap, find us a good parking spot…and thanks for the ride.”

“Wreak some havoc,” he said, which was Clan Jinx’s version of ‘good luck.’

Iden threw him a two fingered salute as he stood up and jogged off the bridge with Larkey, intending to get geared up and on the first dropship heading down.

By the time Iden and some 200+ Jinxes were in a dropship flying down to the surface the first of his jumpship’s heavy transports had already detached from its holding rack. The four destroyer drones they’d brought with them were also gone, having been sent over to the main fleet to help replace what had been lost, but the rest of the jumpship’s carry space was full of landing ships carrying the bulk of the troops and the heavy equipment. A scattering of conventional dropships were going with them, along with a pair of drop pods.

Those two were trailing slightly behind Iden’s dropship and heading to firebase 8 on Larissa’s orders and would be depositing their Mark III Madcats directly into battle. The landing zone Iden was heading to was one of the more stable ones, located on a plain that existed between the mix of buildings and rubble that were the nearby lizard colonies that the fleet had painstakingly pounded from orbit to eliminate any aerial hazards that could have interfered with the grounding of the troops. As it was there were hundreds of thousands of wisps in the air and currently being held at bay by an army of mechs with anti-air capability.

The madcats would add to that considerably, with the first priority right now being to get the firebases up to snuff and their defenses online, which wasn’t only against ground troops but naval ships as well. Each of the prefab structures contained at minimum one cleansing beam capable of reaching back up to orbit located on the top of a high tower, allowing it to tip over and shoot targets on the ground so long as they weren’t too close, given the angles involved.

Clan Ninja Monkey and Clan Firestorm were already on the ground and had set up the most complete firebase, which was where Iden’s troops were coming down with the exception of the madcats. As soon as his dropship landed he and the other Archons streamed out, then split up to collecting their regulars that would be coming out of the larger transports.

Iden was the sixth highest ranking Jinx on site, but the operation was still under the trailblazer’s command so he had orders waiting for him in his helmet once he made it to ground and Larissa sent them out. Right now there were far too many wisps in the air and more on the way, crossing the planet to get to their location, and only a handful of anti-air batteries had been set up. Star Force’s skeets and other aerial craft were pinned to a small area around the firebases, else they’d run into the anti-air turrets of nearby colonies. That meant they could only fight here, in a region approximately 200 miles wide, and it was about to get very, very crowded.

Iden wasn’t assigned to deal with that, but he did need to protect the units on the ground that were setting up the prefab structures and growing the firebases. They couldn’t protect themselves yet, but buy them enough time and the battleforts would allow the rest of the troops the freedom to roam while they could fend off any nominal attacks on their own.

The lizards were currently sending waves of tanks from the surrounding colonies in to the contested area, not to mention the troops already there that had survived the orbital bombardment. Star Force hadn’t taken the time to level everything, just enough to knock out the key structures. That meant there were plenty of intact buildings, not to mention underground structures that would have to be fought through to clean out and properly safe the area.

That couldn’t be done while the firebases were under assault, so first priority came to protecting them long enough to get properly set up and have the mainline troops start coming down. After that the Clans would be free to push out and start hitting key targets.

Iden ran from point to point, leaving Larkey and the others to head to their individual assignments as he headed to one of the currently descending transports, making sure to stay away from the box on his HUD that showed the no-go zone where the ship was slated to land. The Archon waited nearby, then as soon as the doors opened up he ran inside, bypassing a slew of thors and ravens as the mechs walked out, all of which were painted ponytail blue.

Iden contacted the bay control as he ran and got one of the reserve mechs for himself. Typically he fought as infantry, but not every mech was assigned a pilot so that if one was damaged in the field that pilot could cycle back and pick up a fresh ride. It was one of those replacements that the striker claimed, with a pair of techs waiting for him next to the neo running a quick final prep when he arrived inside the mobile mech bay.

“How we look?” he asked, climbing the ladder up to the catwalk to get to the rear access hatch in the back of the mech.

“We’ve still got one empty module. Do you want to wait and have it loaded?”

Iden shook his head. “No time. I’m going to be a mauler baby today anyway.”

“She’s good to go then,” the tech said, stepping aside and waving him to the open hatch.

“Tear ‘em up,” the other said as Iden telepathically connected with the mech controls and began sealing the hatch as he walked through into the small compartment. Upon a second mental command a series of panels on the floor depressed and slid aside, with a control harness rising up and locking into vertical position. Iden walked around to the front of it and stepped backward into the loose boots.

He leaned back and the few other fasteners tightened around his waist and wrists while the boots snugged up firm against his own shoes. A headrest was fitted into place, then he felt the prompt from the new telepathic controls in his mind. He pushed the imaginary button and felt his vision go out for a moment, with his body likewise going numb as the machine’s status flooded his own senses.

The next moment he was seeing from the perspective of his neo, his body’s stimuli replaced with the machine’s. He didn’t care for the crude sensation, for this interface was barely out of prototype, but he had full control over the war machine from that moment on and walked it out of its berth in the bay with no more effort than trudging around with a heavy backpack on. The neo’s steps were his own, not a computer-controlled driving experience, and now had instantaneous reaction speed compared to the old harness system that he’d actually gotten to be fairly good with.

He walked in line over to the exit doors, getting hung up on the back of the flood of mechwarriors who had already been in the ship and ready to depart immediately. As such he was the next to last mech out, with Iden working the battlemap and tagging those mechs he wanted reassigned to him. Other formations had already been worked out, but since he was a striker they were immediately reworked around his needs.

Two more neos and six ravens pinged in their acceptance of his redirect and he set a waypoint on himself as he maneuvered through the mechs outside the ship and found a bit of open ground. Overhead there were wisps everywhere around the firebase, with a ring of mechs firing so many sammies up that it looking like the finale of a fireworks display…except that it never stopped.

Iden ran his neo out through the rain of lizard ship parts and popped open the left shoulder on his mech, inside of which there was a small anti-air sammy turret as well. He set it on auto + exterior control, allowing either his onboard computer or a controller back in the firebase to target the wisps above while he focused entirely on the ground fighting. His other shoulder had an anti-infantry plasma scattergun that he kept locked up, for the tanks ahead weren’t going to be needing that.

The empty slot was on the ‘head’ of the neo, which was just a small lump that held a modular slot that hadn’t been filled with a weapon. The two mauler cannons in his arms were the primaries though, not to mention the hands on the mech, which could now grip things like they were his own. That sort of dexterity was worth using the crude mental interface, as was the running speed.

When he got into the clear he sped up, but not as fast as he was capable of for the light blue mechs behind him were piloted by regulars who could not use the mental interface yet. In the future it would be able to access a person’s mind, but right now most of Iden’s access was him using his telepathy and the regulars didn’t have that or any other psionics.

The two neos were using the harness controls that Iden’s mech also contained but that he hadn’t deployed. His ‘harness’ was just to hold his body still while his mind expanded out into the machine, allowing him to stride in a way that no computer could ever hope to match, giving him the fastest mech on the field.

There were other Archons out there, but none of the other strikers were in them, leaving him top dog…amongst the Jinxes at least.

There were a lot of other Clans operating out there, but as far as his Clan’s mechs keeping up with him were concerned, he had to ride the brake a bit to keep them in formation behind him. That formation right now was a line, with the other 8 mechs just covering ground behind him as they raced toward a pair of voltrons in the distance that were getting hammered by green plasma and quite a few pink phaser beams.

It seemed the lizards had upgraded their tanks with the new weapon as well.

“Two ravens per neo,” Iden ordered, mentally tagging the two ‘chicken walkers’ he wanted on his wings. “Stay fairly close to each other, but operate in kill trios and take some of the heat off those Ninja Monkeys.”

Iden signaled the two monster mechs and let them know that support was coming, then he got a request from the starboard one barely a second later. He looked ahead on his battlemap and saw some huge new tanks that were packing a beefy version of the phaser, making the scene look something like an old Godzilla movie. Those big tanks were far in the back, with the smaller ones swarming up to the voltrons’ feet where a few dozen other Ninja Monkey mechs were hacking them to bits.

“Damn that’s a lot of tanks,” Iden whispered off comm. There was no way he could get to the big ones without going through the little ones…nor did he have the long range weaponry needed to snipe them, though the voltrons were doing a decent job of that. There were just so many of them, and more were coming up in the distance. If they didn’t knock this group down now, there would be so many piling up here that they couldn’t suffer that multitude of weaponsfire, for their dominance relied on giving their shields a chance to recharge. Throw a lot of fire on them and they’d be reduced to taking armor damage.

They had to split them up and keep them in manageable numbers, and the lizards looked like they understood that fact too and were spamming them without holding anything back, ground or air.

As Iden’s shoulder sammy hit and downed a wisp in front of him the craft careened into the ground at his feet, causing him to jump up and to the right. He had the presence of mind to retract the sammy with a thought before his neo hit head first on the ground…but thanks to the interface he was actually able to roll the machine through a somersault and crawl back up onto his feet.

“Nice dodge,” one of his ravens said as they passed him by, slowing a bit until he got back up to speed. He popped the turret back out and let it get to work, then accelerated up into a full run, leaving the ravens in his dust.

“Follow me in and pick up the pieces,” Iden said, actually managing a sprint in the mech, which was something that only a select few had ever achieved. He came up even with the voltrons and their defending mechs and punched on past them, skipping a few of the lizard tanks and diving into the sea of them until he ran out of running room.

Then, with a boost from his jump jets, he leapt into the air as if he was doing the long jump and came down on his target mech further ahead, bending his left elbow and driving it down into the top of the yellow/tan machine and crumpling its weapon cupola on top, killing the crew inside as he drove the parts down into the interior as he pancaked the vehicle.

Laying on his belly on top of it, Iden popped up the mauler cannon on his right wrist and fired at the nearest tank as he crawled his way back to his feet, with the ravens doubling up on his target as they finally came back within range.

9

April 17, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Kajit stood perched atop one of the buildings in firebase 3, his two clawed feet latched on to the edge of a stubby spire along with a host of other Lacvamat situated on his left, right, and behind him, cluttering the rooftop so to keep the ground clear for the walking troops as they waited. Kajit was watching the battlemap inside his helmet and the assault taking place on a colony several hundred miles to the north. The area in between them and it had been fought over and largely destroyed in the past weeks, but so far the Lacvamat had not been allowed to participate in the assault.

That was supposed to change today, and right now a Clan unit was attacking the colony from the rear while mainline troops were doing most of the fighting out front and working their way into the lizard city. It too had an orbital defense battery, but the Clans weren’t going for it this time, rather they were sneaking in and trying to take down the small scale anti-air defenses first so the Lacvamat could join in on the assault.

As it was, the war to conquer the planet was going Star Force’s way…yet slowly. The planet was huge and nearly a third of its landmasses were covered in lizard structures, meaning there were a lot of them to kill. Orbit had been secured and the Sentinels orbiting directly above the ring of firebases were a welcome presence, but a lizard relief fleet had arrived only three days ago and done considerable damage to Star Force’s remaining drones before being defeated. Most of the lizard ships had been hunted down and destroyed before they could flee the system, but there was no way to know when the next group would get here.

Kajit couldn’t worry about that, for it was a naval matter and he was fairly sure they wouldn’t see lizard cruisers in atmosphere aiding the ground troops anytime soon, though that was always a lingering threat. With the lizard naval assistance out of the question Star Force was creeping its way across the planet, taking down more of the orbital bombardment capability as they went, but in order to get to it they had to take the colony first or conduct a solid raid into it, meaning the ground troops had to fight through the worst defenses the lizards could throw at them before Star Force’s naval power could be applied.

That sucked, but there was no way around it. The ground army needed the Lacvamat involved, but the anti-air defenses that were holding the fighters back would also be effective against the flyers, and they were a lot less protected given their small size. They were encountering so much resistance from the lizards, however, that a change in tactics had been made to hit the anti-air batteries first so they could bring in the flying infantry support.

That’s what Kajit was waiting on. The battlemap had giant no-go zones around the firebase where they weren’t permitted to fly, and right now it was better to keep the airspace overhead clear for dropships and larger transports to bring supplies down from the recent cargo convoy. A lot of heavy equipment plus foodstuffs and ammo were flowing to the surface, so the Lacvamat simply sat on the rooftops in full armor and waited for the go ahead.

When the anti-air turrets would go down was not a thing that could be predicted, so Kajit spent the better part of 5 hours sitting and waiting before the giant red box over that colony disappeared. When it did he had to wait all of three seconds before the transit order was given, then Lacvamat all around him began to leap into the air and flap their armored wings to gain altitude, staggering themselves so they didn’t run into one another.

Kajit waited until he found a gap then took off, using his small anti-grav jump pack to help him get airborne. He could fly under his own power, but the armor that he and the others wore made it difficult, for every part of their bodies, from their two feet to their thin, fleshy wings were covered in flexible, yet hard plates that weighed them down. It was a workout to move in them, but the anti-grav compensated for that with a light, constant lift during flight or a short burst of altitude such as now with the device adding to the leg kick that sent him skyward.

The Lacvamat didn’t waste any time circling above and moved off towards the north in a long column. A few hundred miles was a workout, but nothing that would exhaust them. Had this unit been Human, Calavari, or any of the other groundpounders they would have had to be transported by dropship to the battle site, but the Lacvamat didn’t have that handicap. They’d fly there on their own, and do so at considerable speed once they flapped their way into a high enough altitude to begin a shallow dive and use the air resistance to launch themselves even further ahead.

As such the long column looked like a series of waves heading up and down, but with each repetition they gained speed, using the anti-grav units to do most of the climbing and sparing them the fatigue. Alongside the 5,500 Lacvamat were a couple of squadrons of skeets flying escort to make sure the lizard fighters that were still roaming the planet in swarms didn’t try to ambush the flying infantry. Kajit and the others could fight them fairly well, but it wouldn’t take much of a hit to knock them out of the air and Star Force didn’t like personnel being treated as expendable.

Kajit assumed that was why it had taken the trailblazers so long to call them into combat, waiting for the right moment when they could put their skills to use without facing the unavoidable loss of personnel. Lacvamat combat within Star Force was still in its infancy, but it had been laid out plainly to them that they were not the heavy hitters in a ground fight, but rather the support. That wasn’t due to lack of skill, but rather the differences in biology. If Kajit landed on the ground he was not going to be able to fight hand to hand well, especially since he didn’t have any hands.

He had trained to make some use of himself if he ever found himself in that situation, but the Lacvamat were meant to stay in the air at all times and offer fire support to ground infantry units, which was why when he and the others finally arrived at their waypoint just outside the colony under assault they broke up into smaller units and went into a flock-wide holding pattern just behind the four Hoth-class walkers bombarding the city buildings with cleansing beams.

Soon a slew of dots popped up on the battlemap throughout the city, with one in particular being highlighted. That was where he was supposed to go first, and along with 7 others he flew up about twice the height of the hoths and broke away from the mass of Lacvamat as about half of them also clustered up into groups and headed different directions. Kajit made sure to stay below the designated ceiling where the skeets were operating, for they didn’t want anyone to die from a needless head on collision while the aerial fighters were keeping what was left of the wisps off them.

Kajit activated his armor’s shields and biased them 95% to the underside, trusting in their air cover to keep the lizard fighters busy and their topsides safe. That allowed him to better protect his wide profile from the ground view, for the wings on the Lacvamat were necessarily huge in order to lift their body masses and made for easy targets when spread wide.

Speed was their best defense, but having a thick shield matrix underneath their wings helped greatly. If he or the others took any armor damage it was a signal to turn tail and run immediately, for the thin layer covering their wings couldn’t stand up to much pounding due to the weight issues. They simply couldn’t armor themselves like the Calavari could, so most of their defense had to be shunted to the shields and evasion.

Kajit pinged in his approach and linked up with the ground unit they were tasked with assisting, getting revised targets and suggested approach vectors. He and the others split up further, conversing amongst themselves as how to organize this, then the Lacvamat turned the corner around one of the taller lizard buildings and suddenly they were looking down on a large firefight between a sea of lizards on the streets and a few clumps of mainline Human troops.

There were no tanks or mechs on either side, just infantry, which made Kajit cringe at their numbers but also salivate at so many exposed targets…from the air anyway. They’d erected a lot of barricades on the streets, but the waiting pools flooding across the streets and into the buildings, or rather out of them, were just standing in the Lacvamat’s firing arcs.

The trick here was not to get shot down, for so many plasma orbs fired skyward would almost undoubtedly hit him, if only through sheer accident. To counter that he picked up speed and angled for a low approach, charging his own plasma weapons that were located along the inside of his legs, as well as the secondary array that ran up his chest. Those concealed hatches opened, revealing an ice cube tray of slots, each of which slowly filled with a potent blue plasma orb.

The two rifles on his legs also powered up, then when he swooped over the target coordinates given to him via the battlemap he fired them off onto that location in two blue streaks, then released the cluster bomb directly over top of it as he passed by. The tiny blue orbs went sideways a bit into a dispersal pattern to cover an area rather than hit a pinpoint target, then exploded out like bombs when they hit. After that Kajit fired his leg weapons twice more each as he buzzed the lizard troops, then came to the end of their crowd a moment later, turning the corner and putting a building between him and their hasty return fire that was too slow to target him.

Another target pinged on his battlemap, in approximately the same location, and he circled around the buildings to come at them from a different angle. Meanwhile the other 7 Lacvamat in his group were doing the same, with the ground troops feeding them targets as quickly as they could hit them. He hit his second one, then a third before he noticed at a glance that a Knight wedge had used one of their soft spots in the flood of lizards to press a barricade and physically push it aside. Now they were moving out into the larger group of enemy infantry, hiding behind their overlapping physical shields as they led a column of Regulars through the breach point.

Kajit circled around and made another strafing run, never knowing how many he killed for he was flying past them so fast he couldn’t look back to see the damage he was doing with the array on his chest, but he could catch a glimpse of his leg rifles when he angled them forward onto targets he was just coming up on.

After that last flyby he received a different request that had him circling around another building and flying back over Star Force troops that were pushing their way towards the breach point. Kajit came down to street level, landing on a bit of clear pavement as the Regulars nearby parted to give him room, not wanting to be caught up in his wings, but he neatly tucked them into two vertical fins bracketing his head as he landed.

There he waited a few moments before an Archon ran up beside him and climbed on his back. The green-armored warrior was heavy, but with full power applied to his anti-grav Kajit was able to get them both up off the ground with some very heavy and fast wing flaps. He had to maintain that heavy cadence to keep them moving while reducing the anti-grav down to a sustainable level, else the capacitor would empty and he’d have no assistance whatsoever for the few seconds it took to recharge.

The Archon sent a waypoint to Kajit’s battlemap, not even bothering to say a word of thanks for the ride. That wasn’t rude, but rather a reality of how Star Force fought and the intensity of the current battle. They were both here to do a job, and the less distractions they had the better.

Fortunately Kajit didn’t have to fly far, for the Archon wanted dropped off on the other side of the lizards so he could flank them. He took him around by a safer route rather than flying directly over the horde, then came to a stall over the ground, tipping his back end down and allowing the Archon to slide off without interfering with his wing flap.

As soon as he was free, Kajit took off heading to another of the communal attack points given that he hadn’t received any more specific targets. He landed several more plasma attacks directly over the lizards before their formation eventually broke and they began to retreat…not to escape the enemy, but to fall back into more favorable points for ambushes and other means to kill the Human troops.

Kajit took it on his own volition to fly in low and attack some of those isolated lizards, even coming down so low that he grabbed one of them by the back of the neck with both of his feet and dragged him into the air half a meter before firing one of his leg rifles directly into his head. He dropped the corpse and banked hard right, using his anti-grav heavily as he tucked his wings to avoid his left from running into the side of the building on the narrow street.

He kicked off the wall then popped his armored sails out again, taking several plasma blasts to his shields as he reset them for universal coverage after seeing what was behind the nearest lizards. Trusting in his training and resisting the urge to run for the sky, he flew down to head level and extended his wings out as far as he could, then rammed a whole line of retreating lizards and clotheslined them in the chest/face.

Kajit got caught on them and would have tumbled if all the bodies hadn’t held him back. Once his feet hit pavement he retracted his wings and balled up on the ground, then a hail of blue plasma flashes surrounded him as the four Regulars that had been chasing after this dozen or so lizards mowed them down. Kajit got shot two more times, but his shields held up long enough for the Regulars to finish them off as he held his somewhat panicky cocoon.

“Are you alright?” one asked, walking up beside him as Kajit unfurled enough to stand up.

He curved his long neck towards the suit of bipedal grey armor. “No armor hits.”

“Thanks for the takedown,” the Human offered before running on.

“My pleasure,” Kajit said to his retreating form, then he fully unfurled his wings and took to the sky again as he searched the battlemap for more local target pings.

10

July 1, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

“Damn,” Larissa said, heading for the door of the command center in firebase 19. “I’m going in. Get everything there now.”

She didn’t bother to wait for a reply from the other Archons in the control room, busy interfacing with her helmet’s battlemap and comm system tracking down the nearest skeet in the air and recalling it to her as she made her way to the roof. Her Bsidd were pressing into another lizard colony, much as they had been doing the past months, but the sneaky bastards had thrown them another surprise…and this one was a full-fledged trap.

Containment walls the size of buildings had sprouted out of the ground, having been buried under dirt and trees with no visible sign of their presence, and locked her troops inside a ring that surrounded the colony. Meanwhile subsurface tunnels began spewing out heavily armed lizard reinforcements, including tanks and wisps, all of which had been held back while the city defenders had died fighting over their heads. They’d sacrificed them to get the Bsidd in position above them, then sprung the trap.

That was cold, but very typical of the lizards. She just hadn’t seen hidden walls be used before, and unless they had some subsurface building apparatus that had gone into effect since the invasion began, this trap had to have been built in place before this world ever came under attack.

That wall was keeping the infantry in and the mechs out, for it was too high for them to jump over. The wall was literally a series of skyscrapers having jutted up out of the ground, and was something that Larissa had never expected. What the hell had the lizards been thinking?

None of the other colonies had seen this type of defense system, and what was the point of just doing it here, when the entire planet was being overrun. It made no sense to her, but it was happening none the less. Larissa swung by the equipment room on the way to the roof, grabbing odds and ends and adding them to the armor she already wore while stuffing her pack as full as she could get it.

When she hit the roof she had to wait a few minutes, then out of the southern sky a skeet appeared, heading her way fast. It looked like it was going to overshoot, then braked hard until it was over her head, with the pilot fully aware of what was going down and sharing the trailblazer’s urgency. He lowered the skeet down to her, turning off the shields in the process so Larissa could jump up and grab on to the underside with her hands.

With those stuck into place with the grip enhancements in her armor’s gloves, she swung her feet up and latched on with those two, hanging from the underside of the fighter and squishing herself up along its surface as aerodynamically as she could.

“Go,” she said, with the skeet’s shields reforming over top of her and the building disappearing from her Pefbar vision. Trusting in the pilot, her face was buried in the view of the grey armor plates and her body tucked into the IDF that was likewise extended along with the shields. It didn’t feel like they were moving, but her battlemap said otherwise. This skeet had been engaged in combat in a neighboring colony that was mostly overrun, but now it was headed a bit further out to where the lizard trap had been sprung.

The new firebase wasn’t too far away, for it was logistically improbable to operate an invasion with ground troops over long distances. It was going to take at least 20 minutes for the pilot to get her there, but on the upside the Bsidd carried the heaviest armor of any Star Force infantry, and she hoped that most of them would be able to survive until she and the other reinforcements got there.

“We’ve got company,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to be able to set you down gently. Do you have a jump pack?”

“Unfortunately no.”

“The skies are full of skeets, and I’m going to take a beating just getting you to the wall.”

“Take the low road,” Larissa said, studying the battlemap of what was happening ahead. There were so many skeets pounding the troops inside the walls and the mechs outside that some of the ravens had started to go down and the others were pulling back. “Just get me to the wall. I can climb over.”

“That’ll take too long. If I get you on top, can you find your way down the other side?”

“Yes,” the mage said confidently.

“Alright, I’ll get you there, but this is going to be rough…and you’re going to be a target once you drop off.”

“No, they will be,” she said icily as a pink flash hit the shields to her left, with there being so many fighter icons around them that there was no way to know which one had just shot the skeet.

“Standby for release. I’m going to get you low enough that you can sense the roof with your Pefbar, but I’m not going to be able to come to a complete stop.”

“Just get me under 100 miles per hour. I’ll bleed off the rest.”

“You sure?”

“No time to argue. Drop and run and don’t look back.”

“Ok. When I signal, don’t hesitate. Ten seconds.”

On the battlemap she saw the skeet zipping low to the ground, buzzing treetops then passing low over a field that led up to the wall where the pilot curved it to the right and traced a path around the wall as swarms of wisps descended to chase after them. The pilot had the skeet moving fast enough to prevent them from getting any good shots off, but there was no way he was going to be able to drop her off at this speed.

When she saw the skeet begin to gain altitude, rising up very near the wall as it continued its breakneck speed laterally, she understood what the pilot was doing, using the wall to shield the fighter for as long as possible. Suddenly the speed dipped off and the skeet rose up above the height of the wall, exposing it to fire from the wisps inside the perimeter.

Larissa readied herself, then ‘felt’ the rooftop of the wall appear beneath her, flashing past rapidly. That gave her mind something to focus on, and she began summoning a telekinetic field just below her when the shields disappeared.

“Now!”

Larissa let go of her grip points, expanding the telekinetic field into a crash bag that pushed against both the ground and her, slowing her fall of only a few meters but doing nothing to stall out the insane forward momentum. It did allow her a moment to simultaneously create a spherical bioshield around her entire body, and when that touched the rooftop she felt the impact. The silky smooth bubble didn’t offer much friction resistance, but there was enough that it started to spin her around, head over heels like a hamster in a ball.

Before she got spun into dizziness Larissa also emitted a different kind of telekinetic field outside the shield, this one acting similar to a crash bag except that it sustained itself rather than deflating and acted to bleed off momentum as if the bioshield suddenly had a blanket of glue covering it.

Larissa still spun herself sick before she rolled to a stop, but fortunately she had been able to use her Pefbar to see where she was going the whole time and avoid careening off the roof. Trying to hold still for a moment and flush the disorientation out of her still spinning head, she extended her Ikrid out and picked up the minds of the lizards in the nearest of the fighters. Most had chased the skeet, which was now well outside her mental range, but a few of the enemy craft had noticed her drop and were swinging back around to target her.

She froze one mind when it got within range, with it flying on its previous course and passing by her on the outside of the wall…then crashed into the ground below. The next one was also going too fast for her to do anything with other than freeze it, but it flew out of range before hitting the ground and recovered thereafter, though it was now outside of weapons range.

The third one she managed to get within her Ikrid range long enough to do a more intensive mental hack, taking control of the lizard and having it fly the wisp low over the wall and stop in front of her. Had it not been under her control it could have shot her easily, for she was still woozy and couldn’t have managed more than an awkward roll if necessary.

Larissa hobbled over to the fighter, her balance not yet fully returned, and made like Garfield against its hull. She had the pilot take off again and fly her down along the inside of the wall. She didn’t have full control, only able to point him where she wanted to go and allow the free sections of his brain to handle that task, which was always a risk, but until her head settled she couldn’t try for anything more.

The wisp got her close to the ground and she figured it was good enough, so she let go and fell again, this time with far less forward momentum, and used another telekinetic crash bag to cradle her landing. When her feet hit she fell over, more from the lingering disorientation than anything else, but she slowly got her legs under her and forced herself to move. Larissa was in the interior slice of the grassy plain and an easy target, with the nearest city buildings about half a mile away.

To her far right she saw lizard troops and tanks, about 2 miles away, maneuvering around in the open area. She spotted some Star Force icons nearby within the cityscape, but the trailblazer couldn’t worry about them just yet, for several fighters were redirecting towards her. The one that she’d hijacked began to turn around through a sharp turn, but Larissa froze it again at the edge of her range, with the turn not being sharp enough to avoid the inside of the wall.

It crashed into it softly, crumpling the front and dropping it down to the ground mostly intact. She let it hit before she released her hold on the lizard’s mind, then she reached out and began freezing every fighter within her range. That wasn’t enough to keep all of the weaponsfire off her, for a few pink bolts hit nearby, but their aim was off…and all of these fighters appeared to be equipped with the upgraded weapons, which gave them far more range than the old school wisps.

Larissa’s balance returned as she ran, with her accelerating further as it did. She crossed to the nearest buildings in under two minutes, disappearing into a narrow street and not sensing any lizards in the nearby buildings, so she ducked into the nearest one, breaking down the door when the handle didn’t respond.

Now that she got her head out of the view of the fighters she pushed out her Ikrid and Pefbar to make sure the building was empty, then she took a closer look at her battlemap, trying to find where the Bsidd were and what their condition was. The city/colony was some 18 miles in diameter and her troops were spread out across more than half of it when the trap was sprung, but only after a group of lizard tanks had led most of their mechs outside the boundary line for where the wall came up, leaving the Bsidd infantry inside with only a few mechs as backup.

The combination Bsidd/Mainline skeets that had been providing the ground troops air cover had been driven off or destroyed by the wisp plumes, meaning the enemy now owned the airspace as well, and unless they came low enough for Larissa to psionically grab they could stay up there and rain down phaser blasts on any troops outside the buildings, which meant the few mechs they had left were going to be easy targets unless they could find some sort of overhang or hangar to hide out in.

With no aircraft above to relay battlemap signals the connection between the troops within the city was going to be hit and miss as buildings got in the way, but Larissa was able to see where most of her troops were, including several ‘loud’ pings for assistance that were not signal stealthed. Those would be visible in orbit and through layers of rock and metal, with one of them occurring less than a mile away.

That was enough for Larissa, so she took back to the streets and held close to a sidewall at all times, trying to avoid making herself a target from above and diminishing the firing angles when she did. A couple more fighters smashed into building sides was all it took to get her close to the nearest ping, but as she got there more signals began to pop up inside the nearby buildings. She diverted towards those, breaking in another door only to belatedly realize it wasn’t locked.

Larissa didn’t have time to waste, for the longer this trap was allowed to play out the more of her Bsidd would die. How many had already gone down she didn’t know for sure, but there were markers all over the map indicating downed troops, including a pair nearby a group of 30+ live signals amongst a sea of lizard minds.

The trailblazer pulled her rifle off her back as she came up on a trio of stragglers probably intending to flank the Bsidd, but she saw them coming before they came into her hallway and gunned them down before they had a chance to fire a return shot, though she did have to freeze the third one to accomplish that. She hurdled their stupid bodies and kept running towards her troops, getting a feel for what was ahead.

These Bsidd were bunkered up in a large commons area, and by ‘large’ she meant more than the size of a football field. There were lizards everywhere around them, but mostly on one side. She could feel several of them dying per second, indicating that there was an ongoing firefight and her Bsidd were doing what they were trained to do when they were outnumbered…turtle up if you couldn’t run and share damage with shields and armor, using their own bodies to block for one another and hope to outlast the enemy’s body count.

There were over a thousand lizards in that room alone, with more stretching off into adjacent hallways out beyond her Ikrid range. Through a mix of anger and confidence Larissa found a way up to the second level where there were balconies overlooking the main complex. She could feel some lizards up there, undoubtedly shooting down on her troops.

When she got up top she came to an empty room that had a sheer glass wall rather than a balcony, meaning she’d guessed wrong and the snipers were another room over. She reached out with her Ikrid and put them to sleep, along with as many others as she was within range of as her comm activated.

“Archon beware,” a Bsidd voice said, coming from one of those holed up in the commons, “there are too many lizards. Do not try to come to our aid. Turn back and try for targets of opportunity.”

“Not part of the plan,” Larissa said, walking up to the glass and looking out over top the swarm of lizards and seeing the columns and upturned tables where the Bsidd were hiding and fighting out of. “How damaged are you guys?”

“Most have armor damage, but only three have burns.”

“Get ready to shoot disabled targets.”

“Where?”

Larissa’s lip curled up in a silent snarl. “Right in the middle of them, to your northwest.”

“Do not, you will be killed.”

“I’m a mage,” she reminded him, pinging the location on the battlemap where she wanted them to be ready to attack. “Get ready. Shoot the ones on the ground, but don’t move towards them or you’ll get caught up in my disable.”

The Bsidd didn’t argue any further, instead responding with a ready ping followed by a slew of others as the rest of them acknowledged that they were in position.

Larissa gently set her hands against the glass, stepping back with her left foot and readying a combination of Yetu, Lachka, and bioshield.

“Fiddle me this,” she whispered, blowing out the glass ahead of her, running a step forward, and launching herself out the window and over the heads of the lizards below, landing in the midst of them and emitting a huge Fornax field that dropped hundreds to the ground twitching uncontrollably.

Proving Ground

1

July 1, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Sam Nestor held his skeet in a steady line as he glanced at the battlemap, seeing the rest of his 10-man squadron flying around him at nearly maximum velocity. While their engines could go faster their shields could only handle so much sustained friction, and traveling up to a high altitude for the diminished drag would actually take longer to reach their target so they’d decided to punch through the densest region overland as quickly as possible, with each of the fighters being a fiery meteor on its way to the distress beacon.

That beacon had gone out with orders, drawing all mobile units nearby to a particular colony that had inexorably sprouted containment walls and opened up a flood of lizard reinforcements from below, including a cloud of skeets that was now measuring over 300,000 and still growing. The Star Force aerial craft that had been on site previously were now gone, either shot down or retreated, and heading directly into that mess was a virtual death sentence. Naval assistance would have been very nice right about now, but a few limited attempts had already been thwarted.

The main defense tower for the colony was already down, but enough nearby ones were still online to prevent any warship from coming within firing range. Despite that fact, one of the command ships had flown down and got its shields hammered long enough to unleashed three Ka’sevron rounds towards the colony, set to detonate in the atmosphere rather than hit the surface where their troops were, with the intent being to knock down a lot of the fighters while they were grouped so close together.

None of the three rounds made it to the target, one getting sniped down by a lucky phaser shot coming from the nearby colonies while the other two were hit with anti-air missile swarms from the same sources. The Clan team that had gone in to knock out the anti-air defenses in this city had paved the way for the skeets to come in on a very low ground level, but rise high enough up and you’d expose yourself to the long range anti-air from the neighboring locations, which unfortunately the descending missiles had to pass through.

Sam was currently flying under that ceiling, having been pulled off another assault and redirected to the ambush site along with numerous other units. He could see a large group of Calavari Valeries approaching from further away to the south, plus a scattering of Canderous remote fighters being controlled from orbit. Everyone else was further away, leaving Sam’s skeet squadron and a few others nearby as the closest reinforcements.

His squadron had been configured for anti-air operations, but a few of the others had anti-tank and standard variety skeets, plus a few gunships that were going to be badly needed here. He knew they couldn’t dive into the swarm, but if they could entice a portion of it out from the city to chase them they could double back and pick them apart slowly…not fast enough to get to the troops inside the colony, or what was left of them, but they had to start somewhere.

This was by far the largest concentration of wisps the lizards had deployed, and they were all coming up out of subsurface hangars. That was insane, and made it look all the more obvious that this was some sort of preplanned trap…but to what end? Even if they killed all the Star Force troops within the city that was only a small portion of the invasion army. It was true that they were having trouble beating the lizard defenses down as quickly as they’d originally hoped, but this one debacle wasn’t going to stop the inevitable progress they were making across the planet, so what the hell were they thinking?

And more importantly, if they had anticipated an invasion and prepared for it, what was special about this one colony, or were there more of these wall rings hidden around other sites?

Another contact on the battlemap nearing his squadron at high speed caught Sam’s eye. At first he assumed it was some type of missile, wondering if a Ka’sevron had been smuggled down to the surface and fired off at low range to beat the anti-air defenses, but they weren’t built for gravity resistant flight. The icon on it was definitely Star Force, but then he realized that it wasn’t a weapon per se, but rather a unit traveling at speeds the skeets could never hope to match and catching up with them quickly.

Sam activated the comm channel reserved for his squadron. “Heads up, the Queen of Diamonds is in play.”

“Music to my ears,” one of the other aerial Regulars replied as Kara’s icon shot by the squadron to their left and didn’t slow to keep pace with them.

“Looks like she’s going on ahead. I know she’s nimble, but watch your firing lines when we get there. She may juke into them as easily as away, so keep a good margin when the fray starts.”

“How are we playing this?”

“Lightly,” Sam insisted. “Even the gunships can’t plow right in, so we’re going to have to nibble.”

“The ground troops don’t have that kind of time,” another pilot said. “Have you seen the estimated number of ground troops they’ve deployed inside the walls?”

“I know, but we’re no good to them dead. We can’t go anywhere near that swarm and expect to survive for more than thirty seconds.”

“How about a 20 second hop in and out then?”

“I feel the same way you do, but we can’t beat these guys, only trim them down a little. So let’s focus on that.”

“What do you think she’s up to then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe heading to ground like Larissa did, or maybe she’s going to fight the swarm too. If she wants us to coordinate she’ll tell us, but aside from direct orders we’re not going to dive right into the lizards’ preferred kill zones.”

“Agreed,” another pilot said. “Are we waiting for the gunships or start nibbling on our own?”

“We can’t wait. Let’s see how many we can bait out and knock down. If they flood towards us we lead them off and hope someone else can exploit the opportunity.”

“Copy that.”

Sam looked ahead, through the battlemap since the camera view was little more than a fireball at this point. The shields were keeping his hull safe, but there was so much turbulence covering the needle-shaped energy barrier that it was disrupting a lot of his sensors. The battlemap connection was holding, so he could fly by that along with a few other means, but he was definitely isolated from the outside world in the friction cocoon, with the other members of his squadron flying nearby but far enough away that his turbulence wouldn’t interfere with them.

The trip over was a lot of waiting, but when they were still more than two minutes out Kara’s signal intercepted the lizard swarm and he immediately saw two enemy signals wink out, followed by a stream of others. He didn’t know how she was taking them down, but the question as to whether she was going to ground or not appeared to have been answered.

Sam gripped the flight controls eagerly, then began to decelerate well beyond the colony perimeter along with the rest of his squadron. The fireball faded and his camera views that covered the interior of the opaque canopy returned. He reset his shields to conform to the T-shape of his craft and felt a considerable amount of drag hit the skeet, slowing it even more until the normal feel returned and the magically appearing boundary wall came into view ahead on the horizon, with the bee hive of tiny green dots hovering over top of it so thick that they looked like a sick cloud.

“Irelia, Candice…go knock on the door.”

On his order two of the skeets stopped decelerating and shot on ahead while Sam and the others began taking on a holding pattern. In response a plume of wisps shot out from the cloud to intercept the pair, exchanging a bit of weapons fire, blue for Star Force and all pink for the lizards. That was a bad sign, meaning that these wisps were the upgraded variety with greater range and kill power. He just hoped they hadn’t added shields yet.

As the two Regulars swung around after killing five of the wisps, they dragged their pursuit with them and out away from the rest of the cloud, bring them back towards Sam and the others.

The pilot cringed, for there were hundreds following them out and only the 10 of them, with Kara nowhere near them to help out.

“Here we go. Don’t get greedy and pull back at the first sign of trouble. We can repeat as often as we want,” he said, readying his plasma scatterguns and taking aim at a clump of fighters nearing his position. He swerved slightly to the left and accelerated hard, getting up close to them and unloading into their general area, seeing bits of plasma hit their hulls and confirming that they had no shields, but aside from some smoke trails on the others only one went down.

From that point on Sam was lost in the twists and turns of combat, seeing nothing else of the multifaceted battle as he was consumed with his little corner of it.

“This is insane,” Namkrel said over the comm to his fellow mech pilots as they flew their Jamtror-class war machines towards the distant colony capped by a swarm of lizard wisps.

“There’s an army of Bsidd in there, not to mention a lot of Humans, the Queen of Diamonds, and a trailblazer,” Hemror said firmly. “We’re going in.”

“How?” another Calavari mechwarrior asked as their group of 34 jamtrors flew in aerial mode side by side, having gathered from three different battles at a series of rendezvous points while other units raced on ahead to relieve the besieged Star Force troops.

“We go as far as we can by air, then fight the rest of the way in on the ground.”

“I don’t think we can make it to the wall in the air.”

“Neither do I, so we’re going to land outside and beat the crap out of their wisps until the skies clear enough for us to get over.”

“Now that sounds like a plan,” Namkrel said, reversing himself. “For a second I thought we were going to fly straight into that mess.”

“We’re not that reckless,” the Calavari said with a bit of sarcasm. “But we’re not going to let our allies die retaking our capitol.”

“Have you looked at the battlemap?” another in the group asked via comm. “There are a lot of downed signatures in there.”

“If all we can save is one, then we save one,” Hemror said, making it clear with his tone that there was no room for argument. “Then we avenge those that were ambushed.”

“Alright, let’s do this,” Namkrel said, a mix of eagerness and worry. “Give us a waypoint.”

“In a moment. Let’s see if we can’t sneak a little closer. Follow me down,” Hemror said, dropping his flying mech from altitude until he was skimming the grassy plain they were approaching by. It was the least contended approach, but with plenty of wisps circling around lazily above the city waiting for anyone to get close. The mechwarrior kept his bulky fighter moving quickly, waiting to see when the enemy would react to their presence.

Like clockwork, when they came within 9 kilometers a group of wisps broke off and headed towards them, prompting Hemror to mark a position 3 kilometers away from the wall as their landing point. They would meet the enemy fighters before that, but their shields and weapons would be sufficient for them to engage and pass through them before they were overwhelmed.

“Fire on targets of opportunity, but do not deviate from course. We have to stay grouped up or they’ll pick us apart individually,” he said, firing his single lachar at a distant wisp and missing…but managing to hit the one behind it. The beam punched a hole in the front of the fighter, penetrating the cockpit and hitting the pilot in the head, dropping the mostly intact craft to the ground where it plowed into the dirt in a debris-ridden streak.

“That was a hell of a shot, Hem.”

“Thanks,” he said, not bothering to mention his true target. He fired off a scattering of lachar blasts with less luck, hitting a few more of the tightly packed wisps but not taking any out of the sky with the weak weapon. When they came within range he fired off his scattergun along with the other pilots and filled the space ahead of them with cones of tiny plasma packets, catching dozens of wisps as they angled in and peppered the heavily armored and shielded hulls of the jamtrors with phaser strikes.

Hemror was pleased to have killed at least two himself, though many of the wisps were flying from cone to cone so it was impossible to determine how much damage he alone had done. Still, there were many fighters falling out of the sky, though the mass that had come out to meet them seemed not to have been thinned, for they were all over them now and hitting their shields hard with the massed firepower.

The Calavari pushed through it stubbornly, getting to the waypoint with some of their shields going down and their thick hull plates beginning to take hits, but Hemror came to a hover over the ground with some 12% remaining and immediately transformed his fighter, with it sprouting legs and four arms while it floated just above the ground. When the head piece finally formed he set it down, feet sinking into the grassy soil, and the power from the anti-grav transferred over to his shields, recharging them at more than double their previous rate.

His light mech sprouted an anti-air cannon and the Calavari began peppering the sky above him with sammy blasts, targeting the approximate area he wanted the computer to chew up, then its quicker calculating capability tracked and hit the wisps within that area as they flew about, save for a few that were fast enough to avoid the shots. Most were too boxed together to maneuver much, so a lot of wisps started to fall out of the sky, especially when the other mechs landed and contributed their own fireworks.

Hemror signaled for them to form up into a moving cluster and the biped machines began gathering around his mech, making for a virtually impenetrable airspace above and in front of them that the wisps simply couldn’t survive within. The 34 mechs kept together and walked forward, heading for the distant wall and downing aircraft while their shields began a slow recharge. They were still taking hits from range, but with every craft they shot down there was one less phaser hitting them…until more reinforcements began to come out and replaced those that were lost.

By the time they reached the wall the air was so thick above them that they could barely make out the sun. Most of the mechs no longer had any shields and were taking hull hits, so they clustered up at the base of the wall and used it for some cover, allowing them to focus their sammies into half the airspace they had been covering before, increasing damage against the wisps while decreasing their own vulnerability. The worst hit mechs were pushed against the wall and mostly blocked by the others, allowing their shields to begin regenerating and hopefully allowing the group to eventually recycle themselves back into fighting shape.

All the while aircraft were dropping from the sky like bugs, some of which actually fell into the mechs. Some of them were quick enough to reach up with their four mechanical arms and grab the pieces as they came down, but others were knocked off their feet and had their armor damaged by the larger hits.

As they were turtled up there Hemror and the others got a course and a destination waypoint over the wall and into the city from an Archon. Crazy as that sounded, the Calavari were relieved because they trusted in the Archons’ judgement implicitly. So when the countdown ended and it was time to go, the lot of them began hovering up along the wall and holding to it as closely as they could while still taking hits to their weak shields.

Those hits suddenly stopped as the wisps were pulled away by a large group of Valeries and skeets that roared in over their heads, effectively plowing a path for them to move into the city, but one that would only exist for a few short moments.

Hemror recognized the opportunity for what it was, so when he reached the top of the wall he set down on it and immediately began running across to the far side that was some 350 meters away. When he got there he jumped off, using his anti-grav to slow him to a barely controlled fall, during which he transformed his jamtror back into fighter mode and shot off across the plain towards the city’s outer buildings only meters above the ground.

He took some fire as he went, despite the disruption occurring above him, but he made it to the outer edge with 8% shields left and set down there, wedging his fighter between two buildings on a narrow street and transforming back into mech mode. Others did the same nearby, scattering to find cover, then they began marching their way towards waypoints that he and a few others began laying down so they could gather in some larger openings and keep peppering the sky in groups as they forced their way towards the lizard tank and infantry armies.

In the blink of an eye their fighter cover was gone and the swarms reformed over their heads, with a lot of them firing down into the streets from directly above, but with most of the skyline now obscured by the surrounding buildings.

2

July 1, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Flying low to the ground two Star Force drone cutters skimmed under what was guessed to be the minimum depression angle of the lizard anti-orbital batteries, flying in close proximity to each other and the Canderous transport that was trying to keep up behind them. It was manned, while the cutters were not, and already the swarm of wisps over the besieged colony were starting to break their holding patterns and come out to meet them.

There were multiple units already on site, ranging from the Calavari to the Clans to even a small Scionate team that had managed to sneak in close to the wall and deposit a mobile anti-air battery, but it wasn’t enough. As the hours passed more and more Bsidd signals within the city were going down, and until the massive amount of air cover was removed there was no easy way to get troops and mechs into the city with the walls blocking ground access…not that it would have been safe inside either, for the wisps were shooting anything alien that moved within their sight, meaning those Bsidd still alive were holed up within the buildings and not on the streets.

Bringing a command ship down again, this time all the way to ground level, was impossible without drawing fire, for it was just too big to get under the necessary altitude, so two of the smallest drones were sent with the Canderous transport being a mere afterthought. It was headed in with a load of mechs, all of which were the remote variety that they heavily favored and could be controlled from orbit. It also meant that they were expendable and the Canderians intended to use that fact to inflict maximum damage on the lizards that had flooded what had looked to be a captive city enroute to being fully in Star Force hands.

The fact that the enemy had baited them annoyed everyone, but the Canderians most of all. They were sending more manned mechs and infantry units via other means, but fast tracking these mechs via transport in order to get them there as soon as possible, though they knew the odds of it getting shot down before it made the wall were good, hence the quick rendezvous with the two cutters that had been deployed at approximately the same time.

Those two planned to pave the way, all the while using their strong shields and armor to weather the phaser fire long enough to inflict serious damage to the fighter swarm. They too were expendable, so long as their remains didn’t fall down and crush the very troops they were attempting to save.

When the wisp cloud met them there was a furious exchange of fire, with the anti-air weapons on the cutters opening up and downing handfuls of fighters per second, but their larger weapons didn’t do as much damage, though they were also firing them off into the swarm and hoping to get some lucky hits. As the wisps circled around and engulfed all three ships more sammy fire sprouted from even further away as a Madcat Mark III that was jogging towards the colony opened up with its beefy anti-air batteries in the shoulder boxes and began trimming more enemy fighters out of the swarm.

Still it wasn’t enough and the Canderous transport was forced to ground before making the wall while the two cutters pressed on, dragging a good portion of the wisps away from the Canderian ship while it unloaded its drone mechs. A few Valeries flew overhead, poaching some isolated fighters then running like hell before they could be overwhelmed, but the sky was still filled with targets and even more wisps were coming into the colony from other lizard strongholds, meaning that for as many as Star Force shot down there was no guarantee of them ever getting through the aerial cover to rescue the stranded Bsidd.

That was unacceptable, so while even more Star Force troops were assembling to assault the lizard city the Canderian mechs ran out of their cargo bays and didn’t even bother shooting into the air, making a straight line across the sparsely wooded countryside towards the massive wall ahead as the two cutters began firing on it with their mauler and talon cannons.

Huge chunks blew out with the hits, all the while the anti-air batteries continued to down wisps, dropping them over the already cluttered landscape like dead flies. The Canderous mechs had to avoid those, running a zigzagging pattern at times, but they still arrived at the wall before the cutters had even gotten halfway through it.

Seeing what they were doing, a huge chunk of those fighters still hovering over the city detached and moved on the ships, firing so many pink streaks into the shields that it looked like the ship was growing a fur coat…and just the one, for nearly all the wisps’ firepower was directed away from the second. After some six minutes of concentrated attack the first cutter dropped from the sky and landed outside the wall, digging into the ground and breaking in two from the impact as already melted supports snapped, but a few weapons batteries remained operational and the remote gunners continued to use them to shoot fighters or the wall where they could.

The flock of wisps followed the drone down and silenced those guns quickly, then they redirected to the other cutter while the Canderian transport ran for its life, already having deposited the mechs that were themselves getting chewed up from the fighters. They were firing back now while they waited to see if the second cutter could get through the wall before it went down, but to their dismay it didn’t. It had blown out a trench almost all the way through when it was knocked out of the sky, with the Canderian remote pilots immediately running their mechs into the gap before the mass of fighters could redirect their attention towards them.

They held there, having trouble walking over the blasted rubble, but eclipsing most of the sky and firing up through the parts they could see to keep the fighters from just parking over them and shooting down. Meanwhile three of the mechs at the lead of the group began using their own smaller weapons to carve out a tunnel through the underside of the wall, which eventually took them completely out of the wisps’ firing line.

18 of the 92 mechs were destroyed before that tunnel was completed, but when they blew out a connection to inside and could see the lizard buildings ahead the mechs ignored the fighters above and moved through the gash and onto solid ground…then started running like mad for the cover of the city buildings ahead.

All of the mechs were thors, specially modified to fit Canderian specs, and not the fastest movers within the Star Force catalog, but they weren’t slow either, so the wisps only had a short window of opportunity to target them. They made use of it, downing another 36 before the rest finally disappeared within the city and scattered, linking up with the various clusters of Star Force troops there that already had located the best hiding spots to stay out of the fighters’ firing arcs.

It was a costly delivery, but even one Canderian thor was invaluable when facing off with lizard infantry…though more important now was the gash in the wall, with all other ground units approaching the city directing to that spot. Likewise the lizards did as well, sending a mass of tanks to put themselves into blockade and ambush position just on the inside, intending to plug the hole rather than let the Star Force troops run the aerial gauntlet and succeed in getting a scattering of reinforcements inside.

A group of Clan Tron ravens ran up a shallow river in single file, using the waterway to pass through the forest that was too dense for them to push through on foot. The transports that had brought them here didn’t dare risk getting anywhere close to the wall and safely dropped them off at range, allowing them to approach at their own discretion while a multitude of other units did likewise all around the perimeter so the wisps couldn’t concentrate everything they had in one location.

This group intended to head for the gash if possible, but right now they just needed to get close to the wall and the river was the quickest way to get to the surrounding plain. When they eventually got through the trees and stomped out onto dry ground they saw the smoking remains of a hoth nearby. Its crew had been pulled out already, but the still standing corpse of a mech was a testament to the damage that wisp swarm could do if they chose to come out this far.

They weren’t at the moment, and had only came out after the hoth when it started carving up the wall with its cleansing beam, but typically fighters couldn’t touch a mech with that heavy of armor, indicating that both the numbers and new weaponry involved were escalating this battle up to an entirely different level.

That said, the ravens continued forward. They weren’t going to throw their mechs away needlessly, let alone their own lives with a rushed attack, but they needed to be in position to do something if an opportunity arose. Following that logic they continued to head for the wall at a position about 50 degrees north of the gash, intending to play this by ear.

Larissa stood leaning against a wall, taking a quick breather after killing another 20 or so lizard infantry. The Bsidd with her were barricaded inside one of the lower levels of a huge building that the fighters would have a hard time tearing down even if they tried. That would give her troops time to reposition if it came to that, but it also gave them a fairly large playground to fight in without exposing themselves to the air cover and she was making the most out of that advantage.

The lizards were still pouring troops into the building despite the number of entrances that she’d destroyed to limit the flow. There was an abundance of killing necessary and Larissa had already been at this for 19 hours. The Bsidd were even worse off, but she was buying them some quick naps when she could, taking the bulk of the harassment raids on herself.

She was getting loopy though and relying on her ambrosia to keep her going. Her Inas ability had sustained her thus far, but unlike in training there was a constant flow of adrenaline here that added to the wear and tear on her body and mind, prompting her to grab even a few seconds of downtime when she could, with this bout lasting all of 27 seconds before she sensed more troops approaching around the corner in the hallway 20 meters ahead of her position.

Pushing off the wall she gathered herself and aimed her pair of lizard phaser rifles ahead as she jogged towards them, having expended her Star Force ammunition long ago. Larissa pulled the triggers even before the first one showed its scaly head, with the first little pink flash hitting it in the armored chest as soon as it came around the corner. She peppered the next two, which had their traditional armor vests augmented with nearly full armor, leaving only their hands, feet, and head exposed. It stopped a few hits, but the potent phaser blurps eventually burnt through and took them down.

The trailblazer would have preferred just mowing them down, for her psionics were being stretched even more than her physical body, so she compromised, throwing a Fornax field over the group as they spilled out into the hallway and began shooting back, then she ran forward and went hand to hand with them. Dropping the rifles after a few more shots, she snapped more necks than anything, eventually leaving a pile of corpses as she sensed more lizards approaching from a slightly different area of the building.

“Archon, we have friendlies incoming, southern street entrance.”

Larissa paused, expanding her battlemap and seeing no one there…but then again these thick lizard structures were hampering the signals to no end.

“Who and how many?” she asked the Bsidd.

“Scionate and 26.”

Larissa frowned, returning to a jog towards the nearby lizards as she searched the battlemap again, expanding it out even further…then she finally saw them.

“Cover the northwest lobby with a strike team, hit and fade if you can’t own them. I’ll get the Scionate inside,” she said, heading a different direction and leaving the nearby group of lizards to her troops. As she made her way to the south entrance she watched the battlemap, seeing the quickly moving signals hopping from one building top to another at a speed that she would have been hard pressed to match.

There were wisps hounding them up there, but somehow they’d made it this far and she was determined to get them inside, though cursing herself for not having lugged a jump pack all this way, for there was no way she could reach the rooftop in time using the internal structure. She would have gone up the exterior, but without a jump pack her spiderman wall climbing would never get her there fast enough.

Larissa came to the southern entrance, then telekinetically started pulling objects off the debris pile blocking the doorway before wedging herself into the gap and using her powered armor to throw the heavier pieces aside. She really wished they’d found the Jumat trigger by now, but as it was Morgan was still the only one to possess that tier 3 psionic.

Clawing her way through the mess, she eventually broke through into the now nighttime sky and was met by a hail of pink rifle fire. Her shields took a few hits, then a Fornax field took down the 30+ lizards waiting outside with Larissa pulling a pair of their rifles loose and shooting them down with their own weapons, finishing just as the first Scionate fell over the rooftop far above her.

The dive slowed near the end, decelerating enough that a low flying wisp nearly rammed him as he tried to snipe the Star Force soldier out of midair. Fortunately it missed, then the fighter took a nose dive down to the street and crash/skidded past Larissa, with her mind locking down the pilot’s long enough to make sure the wisp was crumpled beyond a return to flight before she reached her Ikrid out to the other fighters above as the rest of the Scionate spilled over the rooftop like a waterfall of suicide jumpers.

With her providing psionic cover the wisps never got a good shot and three of them careened into the sides of the nearby buildings, pinballing around with two of them crashing. The third managed to bounce outside her Ikrid range and skillfully recovered quick enough to avoid a fatal smash, but limped off slowly into the sky with a dented and damaged craft.

“Archon,” the first Scionate said as he approached her position and swung around her backside, coming up on her right flank in a guard position as he surveyed the dead lizards around her.

“Inside,” she ordered. “Kill all you can find, but stay within the confines of the building.”

“Gladly,” it said, running on all fours and diving into the gap in the debris still partially blocking the door while Larissa stayed put and continued to cover the others as more wisps poked their way down between the buildings. The yellow-armored cats eventually all fell safely to ground, then sprinted over to her position and followed their brethren inside, with her ducking through last and beginning to reassemble the barricade with the bits of junk she’d moved aside earlier.

“Did you lose anyone on the way in?” she asked the three that had stayed with her.

“Not us, but many mechs have fallen to the fighters, both Calavari and Canderous. Archon Connor sent you this,” he said, producing a small container from the pack on his armored back that rotated around his body to his belly where his paws could reach it.

Larissa took it telekinetically then opened it with her armored hands, finding a canister of ambrosia senzu beans inside.

“If he was here I’d kiss him,” she said, popping the seal on her helmet and telekinetically flying three of them up and into the storage slots before stowing the rest in her own pack. “The Bsidd in this building are very battle fatigued. Protect them and help me hunt the lizards. They keep sending waves into the building and I’m having a hard time covering all the angles.”

“Hunting lizard infantry is our specialty,” the armored mask covering the Scionate’s muzzle said before turning to the right and sprinting off with the other two following on its armored tail.

“Thank you, Connor,” she whispered, taking another few seconds for a microrest before finishing up the barricade. It wouldn’t hold up to a tank blast, but fortunately they hadn’t sent any of those to her position yet. Other Star Force units hadn’t been so lucky, but she’d cobbled together what survivors she could find and rallied them here, with none of the Bsidd mechs that she’d come across having made it this long.

With the battlemap signal disruption being what it was, she hoped there were still others out there, but at the moment the only ones she could pick up were a trio of Calavari jamtror about two kilometers away that were poaching lizard tanks while sticking to a region of the city that had a multitude of overhangs. Larissa wanted to be out assisting them, but there was no way she was going to leave these Bsidd infantry alone. They were barely hanging on as it was, and there was no way she was going to risk them dying after all they’d done to stay alive thus far.

She considered leaving them in the Scionate’s protection, but nixed the idea immediately. There were too many lizards still coming at them for the Scionate to handle alone, and right now her psionics were the big reason they were able to mow down so many that the Bsidd were having to assign cleaning crews to remove them from the hallways in the interim between fights to keep their bodies from clogging up their pathways and firing lines.

No, she was going to stay put unless there were other troops nearby that she could bring back to them, and those mechs wouldn’t fit in the building. Until someone else strayed nearby she had to stay here and hold out until the rest of Star Force fought their way in to rescue them.

3

July 2, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Kara saw the break in the fighter swarm above and leapt up from her position between two very close buildings, shooting into the sky like a missile and arcing towards one of the nearest wisps. It didn’t respond to her approach, frozen on its current course thanks to her Ikrid as she moved up close to it and produced a small green/white orb in her hands and sent it into the hull at a range of less than 20 meters.

The Archon curved away sharply as the fighter detonated in a confetti-like spray and headed for the next closest one as the others took notice of her position. There were only a few hundred within reliable firing range and she intended to tear up at least a third of them before having to retreat back down into the city.

As she hunted down, froze, and destroyed her next target, a larger battle was brewing out over the gash in the wall. Star Force troops had been hammering it relentlessly and subsequently destroying a lot of the lizard tanks in the process, which had taken pressure off the city streets and the few surviving Star Force mechs roaming there. She’d been down helping them for most of the past two hours, but couldn’t miss this opportunity to strip away a bit more of the enemy air cover.

That air cover had been continually reinforced by units coming in from other colonies now that the hidden hangars below the city had emptied themselves. Between her, the mechs, the dead drones, and the Star Force fighters operating on the periphery of the swarm, they’d killed over 120,000 wisps, but there were still more than a quarter million in operation. More than half of those were now centered over the gash and engaging a lot of mechs that were increasing the kill count drastically.

The only infantry that had gotten into the city were through hot drops, with several Archon teams making their way across the wall at other locations while the swarm was preoccupied with the gash. Those had met heavy resistance but managed to slide through, with the lizards keeping enough fighters over all parts of the city to prevent any mass of troops from getting through and inside the barrier wall.

Morgan had come in with one of those teams, meaning that there were now three trailblazers on site, if she included herself. Had either of them asked she would have linked up and used their battlemeld abilities against the still numerous sea of infantry inside the city, but Kara knew as well as they did that her armor gave her too many combat options to keep her reserved to commando work, and that the biggest problem right now was the air cover, hence her taking out groups of fighters whenever she could.

With more and more heading to reinforce the gash against a third drone warship making its way there she now had a lessened concentration above the buildings, yet still far too many for the mechs to come out into broad daylight. As she zipped about taking down wisps while the others nearby tried to regroup to mass fire on her, Kara noticed another lizard convoy coming in over land on the opposite side from the gash. There was probably at least 20,000 more fighters providing air cover for it, with so many tanks and transports that it was clear that the lizards badly wanted this colony held for some reason.

When Kara eventually had her shields ripped off by the mounting phaser fire she dipped back down below the rooftops and lost her pursuit, ending up clinging to a wall in shadow mode and watching the approaching convoy as one of the wall segments in their path began to lower back into the ground. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but for some reason this convoy hadn’t been hit on its way in…and it was probably due to that excessive amount of air cover. The lizards were notorious for learning and adapting, and it looked like they’d taken a cue from the burning hulks of ground transports stretching out in lines around the colony resulting from their previous failed attempts to reinforce the city.

Suppressing a long string of cussing, Kara slid down the side of the building and kept to the shadows as she moved through the city, stopping only once to kill a group of lizards that were moving about in small number and out in the open as she headed to where the reinforcement convoy was now coming through the mechanically created gap.

She waited amongst the buildings as the tanks rolled in and crossed the plain that separated wall from city, letting them get just onto the streets before she jumped out from the side and stuck herself to the first tank where it couldn’t shoot her, nor could the ones behind it. She summoned up a large energy orb and used it to melt through the armor with a single hit, then sent a second one inside that detonated and shredded both the crew and interior components while leaving the outer shell visibly intact.

The hovering tank dropped to the ground, blocking a third of the street, and Kara jumped to the next few repeating the process and creating a blockade of junk as a mix of phaser bursts and large plasma orbs rained down on her and the dead tanks simultaneously. She weathered a few glancing hits to kill one more, then flew off down the street and turned a corner, getting out of their firing lines.

A huge pink beam passed over the city with a telltale buzz, but from the angle she knew it had come from another colony. When it abated she heard other faint buzzes, immediately flying up to building top level and taking a look despite the trio of wisps that noticed her and fired bad shots in her direction.

Another huge beam passed over the city and she could see many others crossing the landscape from other neighboring colonies and converging on a point back inside what was now Star Force territory…where she saw a distant, but huge mass coming across the ground. Kara did a double take as her battlemap tagged it as the Ironstrike, one of the command ships in the orbiting fleet. It had come down to ground level but was so massive that it couldn’t get below the closest of the neighboring colonies’ firing lines and was taking heavy fire head on.

Kara finally paid attention to the wisps and flew up to meet them, killing two before heading back down into the city and avoiding the pursuit that inevitably followed from 50 more nearby. She cycled around through a few blocks then came up on a more concealed perch so she could see with her own eyes what was happening.

The giant grey donut got larger and larger on the horizon, but was still so far away that she could easily see around either side. With her armor enhancing her sight she was able to zoom in and confirm that its shields were still up, but those planetary defense beams had to have been hitting it hard. Like a giant tsunami coming towards them the Ironstrike grew larger and larger, eventually becoming its own mountain range before it even got close to the boundary wall.

But it didn’t have to get too close before its cleansing beam leapt out and backtracked one of the pink beams to a neighboring colony, returning the attack on the distant defense tower even as the mass of weaponry coating its hull began firing at the wisp swarm whether they were designed for it or not. Kara saw several bloons launched into the mass, followed by Ta’lin’yi and maulers in addition to an insane number of anti-air batteries mainly designed to shoot down missiles, but that proved to work equally well against fighters.

As awe inspiring as that was, it didn’t dawn on Kara what they were doing until the ship reached the edge of the swarm near the wall gash and a warning was sent out over the battlemap to get indoors and under any available cover immediately.

She held her position, eagerly awaiting what was coming. As the swarm looked to hold its ground and continue firing on the Star Force troops at the gash until the last moment, an IDF field expanded out from the command ship and caught them all in its grasp. Suddenly the gravity of the planet disappeared from their point of view and with it the ability for them to maneuver with their anti-grav…leaving them floating in midair on whatever trajectory they previously had.

With them incapacitated most of the fire coming down to the surface ended as they were no longer to aim properly, but as the first of the planetary defense beams got through the Ironstrike’s shields and blasted a huge crater in its armor the ship continued to move forward at considerable speed. The mass of air preceding it knocked the fighters askew, then the hull hit and splattered the wisps like bugs against a windshield.

The command ship mowed down so many of them that they fell like bits of yellow/tan hail down to the surface. That storm continued up to the wall, covering the mechs that were fighting their way to the gash and then on in to the outer buildings. Before long the edge of the donut passed over Kara’s head and knocked the wisps out of the sky right down on top of her.

She held her ground, mentally calculating their fall angles and having to jump aside once to avoid a collision. Once the forward edge of the massive ship was past her she saw hundreds, if not thousands of wisps flying around beneath it that hadn’t been caught up in the IDF, or held there long enough. Using the battlemap she confirmed that the field was only extended off the front of the ship, so Kara jumped back into the sky and started hunting the remaining wisps aggressively now that their concentration had diminished to almost nothing and they were scattered about with plenty of room for her to maneuver beneath that beautiful donut.

As she flew to her first target she noticed on her sensors as chunks of the command ship also began to fall to ground as the planetary defense phasers carved up the outer layers now that the shields were down.

Larissa was running down one of the city streets with two Scionate pacing her when the ‘duck and cover’ order came in, but they were being pursued by a pair of tanks at the time and didn’t have the luxury of doing so. They’d been probing a large infantry gathering point and bit off more than they could chew when several nearby buildings began producing far more infantry than they had previously contained, indicating a high probability of additional tunnels beneath this section of cityscape.

The tanks she could have taken on her own with her psionics, even fried as she was, but with infantry pacing them there was no way she could knock all of them down and kill the tanks at the same time, so the only legitimate option she had was to run, regroup, and find some other place to probe to keep the lizards’ attention off her Bsidd and more to their own defense.

With each corner they turned they got a brief respite from the weaponsfire, but there were multiple groups of lizards now pursuing them, including a handful of fighters that ventured down into the narrower city streets. One of those that got too close Larissa snagged and had it swivel about and fire on one of the tanks, delivering a pink phaser burst into the yellow/tan hull armor.

After that she lost contact with both, running out of controlling range for the fighter and turning yet another corner as they zigzagged their way back into ‘friendly’ territory where the rest of the Scionate and a small group of Archons were patrolling and hunting down any small lizard teams that ventured inside.

By the time she and the two Scionate reached that zone the sky disappeared a la Independence Day as the command ship moved over the city, plowing into the wisps and gratuitously knocking them out of the sky…save for the fact that she was running where some of them were falling.

With a telepathic urge she sent the Scionate over to the nearest wall and joined them in running there, hoping that the wisp pieces would bounce off the walls and not hit the ground within a few meters of the buildings. She was right for the most part, but they did get sprayed with small debris twice as impacts on both the ground and the buildings above threw components and glass everywhere.

Larissa’s shields held up to that sandblast, but the street was literally dotted with dead fighters and she assumed a great deal more were covering the rooftops, which fortunately were more or less flat in most cases, else they’d been funneling all the wisp remains down to the streets. The Scionate likewise were alright tucked up alongside the wall and the three of them continued running back into friendly territory, with the giant ship above them entirely eclipsing the sky but not firing down on the remaining fighters.

For a moment Larissa wondered why, since after the ‘duck and cover’ order had been given there shouldn’t have been anyone in the streets to get hit by misses, then she saw several squadrons of Star Force skeets and Valeries making their way overhead and engaging the remaining wisps directly, along with Kara’s signal that was prominently displayed on the battlemap so everyone involved would be aware that she was there when often they couldn’t see her, given her body’s tiny size compared to the fighters.

That and she was a badass, so she might as well have a badass marker on the battlemap.

Larissa likewise had one of her own on the ground, letting all other nearby units know where she was at a glance rather than potentially lose her small dot in the mix of others. Right now Morgan’s icon was half a city away, with the full battlemap returning now that there was a Star Force command ship and fighters overhead to relay the weaker signals around the buildings.

To her relief she saw many active Bsidd units scattered across the battlefield, but at a glance she knew there was less than 10% of what had originally been here, with the ‘down’ markers covering the city in large clumps.

Before she could pull up a count of all markers that had gone offline, either destroyed or deactivated since the beginning of the ambush, the command ship began pulling back with large ‘no-go’ box popping up and traveling along with it as large chunks of the ship’s forward end were falling off and crushing buildings below.

“Oh shit,” she said, realizing just how much damage it was taking and stopping in her tracks. The Scionate nearly ran over her, but skidding to a halt a few meters past as they jumped to her outer flank. “Stay here and be ready to run, warning or not. Keep your eyes up.”

Larissa did likewise, watching both the battlemap and the sky as the sun returned underneath the retreating edge of the ship. Just then another thick pink beam hit and a chunk over her fell off. The trailblazer didn’t move, even as the warning box fell on them at the last moment as the ship’s computer estimated the general area that was vulnerable. It didn’t have time to calculate individual pieces, for there wasn’t that much distance for them to fall, so it was giving generous measurements.

Larissa watched the building-sized chunk detach and gravity take hold of it. “Stay put,” she said, eyes up as it fell perilously close, landing on the roof of the building they were hunkered up against and pancaking the top. She couldn’t see the impact, but a moment later the upper levels puffed out debris that began to rain down on them, then a waterfall of material followed it over, soon to add to the wisp debris clogging the street.

“Follow me!”

Larissa took off across the street, dodging a big piece that came down and taking them into a zone between the dusty waterfalls that followed. A few bits hit her shields and bounced off, with a huge chunk hitting and half burying itself in the street to their left while a pile of debris fell and built up on top of it, as well as one to their right.

The next thing she knew dust from both flowed out like clouds and covered the area, making it so none of them could see what was around them.

Larissa clicked on her Pefbar and mentally linked to the two Scionate, giving them a bit of her psionic vision as well as the ability to warn them if any more chunks came down towards them, though she couldn’t see the top of the building and would only have a split second to react if something did come within her range. Sending calming ‘hold’ orders telepathically, she had them wait with her while the building continued to crumble, eventually losing the majority of the top 5 levels as the command ship segment imbedded itself as the crowning ornament on the lizard structure.

“I think we’re in the clear,” she said, mentally telling them which way to head. “Let’s try and get out of these clouds…then we have a ground war to fight.”

“The lizard fighters are gone,” one of the Scionate commented as he looked at the battlemap.

“Most of them,” Larissa agreed. “We’ll have troop transports on the way and mechs coming in through the gash shortly.”

“Are we evacuating or fighting this out?”

“The wounded will be pulled out, but we’re definitely killing these bastards here and now.”

The pair of Scionate growled appreciatively inside their armor.

“Thought you’d feel that way. Come on, let’s go find that group we were just playing with and reintroduce ourselves.”

4

July 6, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Morgan ran ahead of the Ninja Monkey Regulars, leaping up onto the side of one of the shorter buildings in the city and climbing the rest of the way to the top. From there she sprinted across to the far side while her troops circumvented it around the perimeter and began to engage the lizard infantry on street level that had bunkered themselves behind a series of what looked to be premade blockades and a courtyard with an overhang that prevented attack from the air.

Or mostly, for when Morgan reached the edge of the building she jumped off shallowly and fell down between the wall and the edge of the giant infrastructure umbrella that was concealing the courtyard, slipping through the two meter gap and landing on top of a trio of standard variant lizards that were seated in the shadows below eating some of their battlefield rations.

With a thought she knocked them and the dozen or so nearest her to the ground with a Fornax field, then ignored them and ran further under the canopy towards the back lines of the mass of troops heading to engage her Clan infantry out and around the corner. She didn’t even bother to pull out a weapon, merely throwing a few Fornax blasts to her left and right to stop enemy phaser fire from coming her way as she barreled into the back of the crowd and punched right into the midst of them, pulling a few aside with telekinetic grips and tossing them through the air and out of the way, but mostly she fought her way inside hand to hand until she was buried amongst the horde.

Suddenly a wave of bodies surged up over her head and pushed outward, scattering like leaves as she started throwing concussive energy around. Morgan moved through their ranks like a snow plow, knocking them aside and unconscious in many situations from the blunt force until she worked her way up to the front lines and attacked the barricades from behind. They were several meters thick and seemed to have extruded from the street…and would have been impossible to blow through with only infantry weapons in any realistic amount of time, but she spotted a control station imbedded into the wall on her left as a handful of lizards managed pointblank shots into her shields.

She tossed them aside casually with another Jumat burst from her left arm and ran up to the terminal, physically pulling the two lizards in front of it away and throwing them out behind her before bringing up a bioshield covering her back as she quickly studied the controls…which weren’t complicated. There were only two buttons, one that toggled a holographic interface and another that operated the barricades.

She didn’t have time to explore the hologram and punched the other button. Agreeably the barricade plates began to retract into the ground one by one and slowly, opening up first a door-like slit that allowed the first of her Ninja Monkeys through behind the cover of a heavy Knight shield.

The lizards that had been sniping through narrow peep holes pulled their weapons out of the crack-like gaps and fired on the column of Star Force infantry appearing, but Morgan took care of them with a series of Fornax blasts, disabling them long enough for the commandos to come through and shoot them as they were twitching on the ground.

Her shields kept taking hits, but there were so many lizards nearby that they could hardly shoot at her without hitting their own and she wasn’t about to let them get any space by backtracking. The trailblazer ran with their pullback, sprinting a few steps back into their midst and scattering them again with consecutive Jumat attacks while her troops shot them where they fell.

Playing vanguard, she lead her Clansmen further under the overhang and into their makeshift base, eventually pulling out her own rifle and helping to finish off the last stragglers before the entire area was clear and she marked it as such on the battlemap. In that first moment of freedom she looked around, seeing piles of crates scattered around tables and what looked like makeshift bunks. The entire ceiling was solid save for the gaps around the edges on the eastern and western sides. Stretching out her Pefbar into the structure she saw the internal mechanism that allowed the roof to retract, meaning this courtyard was originally exposed to the air.

A closer look at the wall she’d fallen down along revealed several imbedded ladders, meaning that the lizards had a backdoor to escape should they need to. Seeing that she took to one immediately, climbing back up to the rooftop and looking around.

There was no one in sight, visually or on her Ikrid radar. As typical the lizards had fought to the last man, but whoever had designed this makeshift base had left them an out. Maybe they hadn’t used it because they knew they could be picked off by the aircraft circling above, but even having the option was something new for lizard methodology, not to mention the retractable canopy.

Morgan jumped across the small gap and landed a few meters down on top of it, feeling it with her Pefbar as she walked across. It wasn’t just a roof, but an armored one that could take a lot of hits from aircraft before it was penetrated. This was definitely meant to be an infantry bunker, and had she not taken the backdoor approach it would have been very difficult for her troops to fight their way inside. The tops of the barricades had been open to the air, meaning they’d have had to climb or jump over them to get to the other side…which explained why so many lizards were pooled and waiting there to gun them down the moment they did.

This colony was full of surprises, but fortunately this was going to be one of the last few. Star Force had control of most of the city by now, with only a few pockets of resistance such as this holding out, though it would take weeks to search the entire city and properly safe it. They didn’t have that luxury, for there were many more on the planet that needed to be conquered. Why this one had so many tricks and traps she didn’t know, but she betted it wasn’t going to be the only one. They’d have to do some more thorough scouting before committing to the future engagements, and she planned to be handling a lot of that herself going forward.

“Archon, we’ve found a tunnel entrance,” someone reported over the comm.

“Coming,” Morgan said, jogging back over to the gap and dropping down below the roof, cushioning her fall with another Lachka field. She saw the location of the commando that had commed her and ran over to his position to find a concealed panel in the floor underneath one of the tables. It was already open and showed a single person ladder tube heading straight down.

Morgan sensed further than she could see with her Pefbar, but the terminus was too deep for her to make out, with no minds present to add any datapoints.

“Damn it,” she said, checking her battlemap. “We’ll have to come back to it later. We need to get moving to point 6. Grab what replacement weaponry you need and follow me,” she said to everyone in her 33 man unit over the comm.

The pair of Knights ran over to her immediately, their shields tucked up against one arm leaving the other free to punch or fire from. They still had some Star Force ammo left, but most of the Regulars were out and had resorted to using lizard weapons given the 7 hours they’d been out hunting the bastards down. They were almost done now, with only two or three more engagements to go before they could head back to a firebase or resupply point within this city, but until then they’d have to make do.

Morgan had saved a few rounds of her own, using her Psionics most of the time and doing a lot of damage with her Jumat. She’d gotten to the point where she could snap necks with it if she applied enough force at just the right angle and speed, literally giving her the ability to point her finger and make one of them die, but she’d found it much more effective in attacking groups solo, or better yet with a fireteam in support to clean up the easy targets that she knocked askew.

The only Archon in the group, Morgan headed back to the barricades, seeing that they’d all retracted into the ground and were now little more than a few paving stones across the street. She ran over them with the two Knights trailing a step on either side while the commandos formed up into a column two wide and followed her out with the entire group picking up speed as they headed on foot to the nearest location that was still seeing combat.

Cvog was walking his Granthor-class mech through the lizard streets in line with two others of a similar make as they transitioned to a waypoint given to them by an Archon. All three orange mechs were physically torn up, with Cvog’s having lost a third of its shield generators. Still, the designs were so robust that they were more than capable of chewing up any lizard tanks left roaming about, let alone able to snuff out any infantry that was stupid enough to oppose them, shoulder mounted rocket launchers or not.

The Calavari had seen a bit of calm for the last 15 minutes and were now moving about in a patrol pattern that kept them handy in case any of the last combat teams needed assistance. Most of the other surviving mechs had already left and headed back to the makeshift firebase set up within the city’s outer edge near the gash, but Cvog and his two senior mechwarriors had pulled one of the last duties, given that they were the most experienced and the lesser soldiers needed the reprieve more than they did.

He was fatigued, but pushing through it. Even after Star Force had regained aerial superiority the fighting had not been one-sided. The defensive setup in this colony was completely different than what they’d been encountering in others, almost as if this had been where they’d put their main defensive efforts into the architecture and everywhere else was just secondary…except that he didn’t know of any reason why this city was special. It wasn’t the largest they’d hit, nor had any significant industry or spaceports. It was a standard city, except when it came to fighting for it.

There were so many subsurface tunnels that it had taken more than 2 days to hunt down most of their tanks, and it was rumored that there were still some moving about where the air cover couldn’t spot them. Those tunnels that had been found were now shut down, but unlike other lizard designs they weren’t all connected to each other, so the discovery of one didn’t open up them all to the invading army…and the subsurface of the city was coated with plating that made it more difficult for Star Force’s sensors to penetrate.

This was the most dangerous battlefield Cvog had ever fought on, for you never knew for sure when the fighting was over. That, combined with his fatigue, made him twitch when a battlemap contact suddenly landed on his mech’s left shoulder and stuck there. It took him a moment to process what was happening, then he did a double take when the Star Force icon told him that the Queen of Diamonds had just flown in and perched on his mech.

He hesitated at first, then opened up a direct comm channel to the Archon. “Is there something you require?”

“Just felt like riding a bit while I catch a breather. How are you three holding up?”

“Well enough, but our mechs need considerable repair.”

“I can see that, but unlike a lot of others yours are still battle worthy. We’ve lost over 60% of what we brought in here to the scrap pile already.”

“That many?”

“Afraid so. We pulled most of the pilots out alive, but equipment wise we’ve lost a lot. And that’s not counting what the Bsidd lost prior to the reinforcement.”

“Do you know why this city was so heavily fortified?”

“No one does. And we’re not launching any new assaults until we find out what’s going on, just finishing up the ones we’re currently engaged in.”

“Their tunnels have given us considerable headaches. We never know when a street is clear or not, and they’ve been very good at disguising the entrances.”

“Are your shields inoperable?”

“Diminished, but waiting in standby.”

“Noticed they weren’t up when I landed. How much has the rocket infantry been bothering you lately?”

“They’re gone as far as we’ve seen. The last half hour has been rather boring,” he said as they came to an intersection and made a left turn, with him walking his mech through the maneuver via the full body harness system that had him standing inside the cockpit with all four arms latched in, which made for far more fatigue than the seated models.

“Been that way for most, but I’ve got a feeling we’re about to see another breakout.”

“Breakout?”

“Troops coming up from underground.”

“Where do you want us?” Cvog asked, his attention escalating a notch.

“Right where you are until…check that,” she said, sending him and the other two mechs a waypoint a few dozen city blocks ahead. “Just got intel on another tunnel entrance. Feel up to an ambush?”

“Depends how many there are, but yes, we’re ready to fight.”

“Looks like a holding area with about 80 tanks of various makes.”

“80?”

“I’ll go with you, and Morgan is already down there waiting. She’ll disable a lot of their pilots and I’ll get the ones nearest to you. You just have to point and shoot.”

Cvog smiled. “The techs should build a seat for you up there so you can ride along all the time.”

“Gets kind of slippery when your shields go up, so I’ll jump ship just before we head down but keep close by. Shoot the nearest targets regardless of whether or not they’re firing back.”

“Copy that,” the Calavari said, rechecking his weapon status. They were all good to go, save for the missile box that had long since been depleted. He followed one of the other mechs as it sped up into a mechanical jog, with the trio making better speed through the cluttered streets and having to step over sporadic debris, either from wisps, ruined buildings, or occasionally Star Force equipment, for this area had seen heavy fighting previously.

Which made it all the more ironic that another tunnel entrance was located here. The lizards must have been saving this one and Star Force had completely missed it the first time through.

When they eventually arrived at the spot all they saw was an intersection with a waypoint on it, but then the road suddenly broke apart geometrically and rose up on pivot points like an opening flower, exposing a ramp that led below ground into a tunnel. The trailblazer hopped off his mech’s shoulder and began to free fly on her own beside them, with the Calavari bringing up his mech’s shields again as they walked down into the dim tunnel that only had two narrow strips of illumination running along either side of the ceiling.

The gap between walls was large, allowing two of the mechs to walk side by side with ease and Cvog brought his up alongside Garavat’s as a new waypoint was added. They trekked towards it, descending several more ramps and taking two multiple fork intersections to the right until their battlemap showed a huge chamber inside of which a single Star Force icon was located, which also had a trailblazer tag.

The little firefly that was Kara zipped on past and entered ahead of them, ducking to the side a few meters and hovering near the wall as the big orange war machines entered and opened fire on the nearest tanks…that didn’t even swivel their turrets towards them.  Some further behind them did and fired off pink phaser streaks that had far more intensity and duration than the wisps did, but they met the mech shields and did not penetrate with the first few shots.

The maulers that the mechs returned fire with did far more damage to the tanks, and with each one that they killed one more lizard tank behind them would suddenly stop firing and freeze up, with Cvog knowing that was the Archons using their magical psionics.

This lot of lizards was going to take some chewing to get through, but with not one, but two trailblazers to assist them he had no doubt that they’d be able to succeed in destroying them all. The only real question was how much more damage their mechs would take in the process.

5

July 14, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Larissa stood in the center of an enormous underground bunker, looking up from the floor to see racks upon racks of wisp docks stretching out from the walls in a latticework of space-saving designs. There were open airways between them to allow for mass movement, but the 30 story tall room was definitely designed to allow for very compact storage and quick release, with tunnels connecting to the surface appearing on the ceiling in multiple places.

The racks were empty now, for all the lizard fighters in this colony had been destroyed and were now laying in pieces around the cityscape. As far as Larissa knew the purge of the locals had been completed two days ago, but there were so many nooks and crannies for survivors to hide in that she didn’t consider anywhere on the planet outside of the Star Force firebases to be truly safe.

After a good day of rest the trailblazer had come back out here to have a look around as survey teams were continuing to map the underground chambers, often having to use very powerful sensor equipment brought below ground to circumvent the dampening layer in order to find new tunnels whose entrances hadn’t yet been discovered. There were hundreds of independent systems, some like this one having been burrowed more than 2 miles below ground. The lizards were notorious for developing subsurface structures, but they’d never gone to this extent with a surface city overtop.

Normally their robust underground facilities were camouflaged on the surface, with little or no infrastructure above. This colony clearly wasn’t one of those cases, and unlike the others these subsurface facilities weren’t all interconnected, making it clear to Larissa that they had been built for one purpose and one purpose only.

To confront, confound, and ambush an invasion army.

If one tunnel system was discovered the others wouldn’t be exposed, allowing the mass of lizards below ground to operate with virtual impunity until all of their hideaways were rooted out. In this case that hadn’t happened, for the mass of them had come out to ambush the Bsidd army conquering the city. Had she had a command ship directly overhead in orbit they probably could have detected the tunnels with an intense sensor scan, or at least they could now that they knew what to look for, but with the orbital defense guns the lizards had developed there was no way to get a ship into that low of an orbit to do the scan…and that meant there was no way of knowing how many more of the lizard colonies on the planet had this sort of ambush infrastructure in them.

It was time to launch two more attacks, but the trailblazers were holding off on those and finishing up the ones currently in play while they studied this colony in depth, not wanting to risk another surprise until they had some answers here. A Mainline/Clan reinforcement fleet was on its way to help solidify their hold on orbit, for two days ago another lizard fleet had shown up and had to be beaten off. They’d killed a few drones in the process, and if they kept whittling down their numbers they’d be at risk of allowing ships to get to ground, and that was unacceptable.

The lizards weren’t going to reclaim orbit though, not with two Sentinels holding pieces of it, but the risk was in allowing lizard cruisers to get in-atmosphere and directly attack ground troops. Star Force held naval superiority, and that was the only reasonable way that they were going to be able to conquer this planet, for the majority of it still lay in lizard hands. That would take a lot more killing and equipment loss to accomplish, and Larissa didn’t expect to leave this planet for more than a year, possibly longer if more surprises were waiting for them.

Other empires wouldn’t mind just spamming troops and overrunning the enemy, which was difficult with a spammer like the lizards, but Star Force wasn’t going to send anyone into battle assuming that they were going to die. Loss of equipment was one thing, but loss of life was completely unacceptable. Larissa had lost over 70,000 Bsidd to the ambush in this colony, and she was going to take her time now to avoid walking into another such debacle again.

And that time right now was being spent wandering around the captured colony, looking at what the lizards had built and how they’d used it, all the while just thinking things through while others dealt with security sweeps and debris removal.

Larissa sensed the mind approaching from her left before she ever saw the dark blue armor, and kept her eye line on the racks above as Liam jogged over to her position. If something had been wrong he would have commed her immediately.

The trailblazer in command of the Calavari on this mission decelerated to a smooth stop beside her left shoulder and looked up in the same direction she was. “Ingenious little bastards, aren’t they?”

“What’s new.”

“Them not trying this in other locations.”

“We don’t know that for sure yet,” Larissa said, finally looking at his faceplate.

“It’s not part of the planetary design, and there were no partially constructed bunkers like this in the colonies that we’ve already taken.”

“Are we even sure about that? Some of the smaller ones we could have completely missed.”

“I’ve been having the Calavari do some double checks. Nothing has turned up as yet.”

“And?”

“I think this was a test.”

Larissa raised an eyebrow. “Of what, exactly?”

“What it would take to kill us. They lost a huge amount of troops, but now they have data to analyze and how many they have to throw, against the Bsidd at least, in order to overwhelm our shielding and armor advantage.”

“A little late in the game for that.”

“They’ve never been able to take away our orbital bombardment capability before.”

“Point.”

“I think they’re going to be even more devious now that they don’t have to duck and cover like they have in the past. And once they get these defense batteries widespread, we’re going to have a hell of a time taking planets…at least ones with a full grid like this. We’re going to have to hit them while there are still sections of the surface accessible to landing craft and knock out the guns via ground assault. If we wait and let them fully turtle up we’re going to be burning through drones like crazy making entry corridors.”

“Welcome to the new age,” she said dryly. “Was there something in particular you wanted, or were you just roaming the area and felt like stopping in for a chat?”

“Need some space?”

“No…I didn’t mean it like that. I’m alright. I just hate losing people.”

“Ditto, but we have to keep pressing on. The lizards are growing new troops and building more wisps by the minute. We can’t be reckless, but the invasion has to keep moving forward.”

“No, we need to catch our breath and figure this out before we hit another target.”

“What are we missing?”

Larissa sighed. “I don’t know. This is too drastic a change. I admit, the lizards have always been inventive, but we’re seeing a slew of new technologies and techniques. These aren’t the same lizards we’re used to dealing with.”

“Actually, if they’d continued to let us dominate them that would have been out of character.”

“Something has changed, and until we get a feel for it I don’t think we should press forward with any amount of pace. That damn sensor dampener is going to cause more problems than we’ve encountered already.”

“This may have been a test of it as well,” Liam noted. “To see if we could detect the boundary walls and chambers like this.”

“And with their interstellar transmitters currently out of reach they’ve no doubt been feeding that data back to the rest of their empire. Damn it.”

Liam looked at her, but didn’t say anything more.

“Alright, point taken. But we have to find a way to detect the boundary walls if there are any more of them out there.”

Liam pulled a small device out of the pack on his back and set it on the floor. A moment later a series of holograms sprung up around them with the trailblazer using a telepathic interlink to make adjustments on the buttonless little white disc. The three images moved out to form a circle around the device, with Larissa and Liam making up two of the five points around the circumference.

“She back with us?” Morgan’s full body image asked Liam.

“Yeeessss,” Larissa answered for him, annoyed more with herself than anything. Hesitancy wasn’t an Archon trait.

“I’ve been on site for the past 6 hours,” Kian said from Larissa’s left on the impromptu little Jedi council ring. “I’ve been taking point blank sensor readings and I cannot detect a subsurface wall ring, nor any dead zones. Even if they have the full setup within this colony, without the wall they can’t pin us there and we’ll have the option of retreat.”

“And the fighter swarms?”

“I’ve got most of the mods on the Axius mechs reconfigured to anti-air, so if they try the same trick again they’re not going to have so easy a go at it. That said, I think we should proceed a bit more cautiously in the coming days. I want to double up with the Bsidd on this one.”

“Calavari are doubling up with Mainline,” Morgan pointed out. “It’ll take a lot longer to knock colonies off the list, but it’ll take a lot more of an ambush to overwhelm us if they do have any more blindsides coming our way.”

“Agreed,” Larissa said, pushing aside her past worries. There’d be plenty of time for thinking going forward, and if the lizards were using a new playbook it was best to read a few more pages of it. “But let’s start with a few probing attacks before we mass into the city.”

“Allow me,” Conner insisted. “If Liam or one of you can take my assault list, I can have Canderous split up and play vanguard for all future hits. Their drone mechs and fighters are a good stick to poke the lizards with, and they certainly don’t mind going in first.”

“Not a bad idea,” Morgan mentioned, “but the lizards waited a long time before springing the trap. They might just wait out the probes.”

Liam raised a finger, prompting everyone else to stop talking, for they knew his mannerisms well enough to recognize he had just come up with a new idea. “Morgan, how deep are those sensor dampening plates located?”

“Mostly just below ground level. The techs have found a few deeper below the largest buildings. They’re speculating that those were added after construction rather than during.”

“What if we have the Canderous mechs escort a remote drilling unit, either attached to a mech or something independent, that can break through that shell and stick a conventional sensor probe underneath? If the plating is all more or less at the same depth, we should be able to get a peek at what’s underground.”

“That’ll take an awfully big transmitter to penetrate the surrounding structures,” Larissa pointed out.

“Yeah, but that could work,” Connor said, thinking hard. “We’d have to cannibalize a naval drone, but we’ve already got reclamation equipment here that can be converted to digging purposes. Patch in the sensor array and we’ve got a short range trap detector.”

“Might have to sink it down in a few locations to cover the entire city,” Kian added, “but I like the idea.”

“And we can use it to bait the lizards out if we bring it in to search for the wall rings...wait, never mind. We can just use a low flying drone for that if we don’t care about being stealthy.”

“Are the walls sensor stealthed laterally or just on the caps?” Larissa asked Morgan.

“Just the caps, but even then they can’t hide against that close of a scan at that magnitude of power. I think the lizards designed them to fool orbit scans, not anything down on the surface.”

“Fighters?”

“I don’t know,” Morgan wavered. “We only have one wall to work with, and we can’t rebury it to find out. Until we detect another one this is all just guesswork, aside from the subsurface bunkers.”

“We’ll need a calibration run to determine how many drill points we need before we send Canderous in,” Liam added.

“How do Kara’s sensors stack up?” Connor wondered.

Morgan shook her head. “The advanced design can’t compensate for her lack of power. Already had her try and it didn’t work.”

“Are we holding back the Clan strike teams, or still sending them in first to hit priority targets?” Kian asked, looking at Larissa.

“I’d say simultaneously, otherwise the Canderous units might draw too much attention.”

“If we do the sensor sweeps and the colonies come up clean, do we still want to double up on targets?” Liam asked.

“Yes,” Larissa said firmly, then raised a hand to dismiss any thoughts of her still being gun shy. “There still might be new surprises in store for us, so let’s just pull back a little and lay the hammer down hard until we see their full basket of tricks. After that, which will probably be the end of this planetary invasion, we can get more economical with our troop deployments…what?”

“I agree,” Liam said, “but I’m still waiting on the day when the lizards start building their cities with bombs and just destroy them whenever we put troops inside. The larger force we use to take them the greater incentive that will be.”

Connor sighed. “That would fit right in their playbook.”

“I don’t think so,” Morgan differed. “While I admit they certainly could do that, it…oh, damn.”

“Yeah,” Connor agreed, seeing the same thought process that had just gone through his mind go through Morgan’s. “Exactly.”

“I don’t think they have the yields for that,” Kian differed. “And even if they go piecemeal their own buildings are going to block a lot of the damage. They can’t kill all of our troops with a trap like that, and I think they’d start with a kamikaze bomb tank or wisp before they tried anything on that scale.”

“Well those two caveats are lovely in and of themselves,” Connor commented.

“Could we do it?” Morgan wondered.

“I don’t know,” Liam said, thinking hard. “Certainly not the most economical way of destroying a colony. It also depends on how strong the buildings are. Ours can stand up to a lot more than the lizards’ can. Most effective way would be a kinetic impact, but you can’t do that from inside…unless you had an asteroid in orbit and just called it down, but you’d lose the surprise effect and give time for the ground troops to evacuate.”

“Scale it down then. What if we booby-trapped individual buildings with our biggest bombs?”

“We could,” Liam agreed. “And to a lesser extent I think the lizards could too. If they ever go that route…”

“We start leading with all drone mech and even infantry units,” Larissa said, pointing out the obvious countermeasure.

“Or just blast them from orbit like normal,” Connor added.

“That’s probably why we haven’t seen that tactic yet,” Liam pointed out. “But I wouldn’t put it past them at some point going forward if we have to keep using ground assaults to disable orbital defenses.”

“Damn it,” Morgan’s hologram swore. “Other than taking our chances, do we have any way of detecting bombs of that size prior to launching an assault?”

“In theory, we should be able to scan inside buildings so long as they aren’t sensor stealthed,” Liam said, thinking a few steps ahead as he spoke. “A bomb of that size would be very large, given lizard technology…”

“Which is improving,” Kian added.

“Granted, but you know as well as I do why starships don’t have self-destructs. Too much mass to move around. Blowing up buildings is no different, especially when you want to wreck several blocks at once. If the lizards want to build that big of a bomb we should be able to see it from orbit if we look closely. If they put it underground that will dampen the blast. If they sensor shield an area we’re going to be careful of it regardless.”

“So a sensor shield above the ground line?” Morgan asked.

“Yeah, I’d say that’d be bomb bait. If they put one below ground they could kill a fair number of our troops, but they couldn’t get enough of them to be worth the effort. It’d have to be above ground.”

“Or in a cruiser they fly in kamikaze,” Larissa wondered.

“We can stop or dampen those with mobile shield generators,” Liam dismissed. “Have you guys seen many det packs recently?”

“Not really,” Morgan answered. “They’ve pretty much given up on those attacks against infantry. I’ve seen a few try to grab a mech leg and do damage, but our infantry just shoots them down from range.”

“Same,” Larissa agreed. “They’ve become very selective in where they deploy them, probably because they can’t be sure to kill us with a single blast given our armor strength nowadays.”

“Good,” Liam declared. “Let’s hope they stick with that mindset. All the same, we need to start working on some defenses against a larger implementation of that tactic if they choose to push it in that direction.”

6

October 24, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Iden dashed through the forest and up to the clearing surrounding the lizard colony that was their target along with 9 other Archons from Clans Jinx, Sneaky Fox, Stark, and Vulcan. There was barely a strip of 50 meters separating the trees from the outermost buildings, but Iden suspected that had been deliberate, for on scouting this colony they’d detected another hidden underground wall buried beneath the trees ready to be sprung up at a moment’s notice, trapping whatever Star Force troops were inside.

They assumed there were hidden bunkers underneath the city that held more infantry, tanks, and wisps but that remained to be seen. It had been decided to skip this colony and attack the others without the traps, as they’d been doing for the past 3 months. All of those that they’d hit up until now had been normal colonies, with this being the second ‘trap city’ as they’d come to be called. Problem was, it had an orbital defense tower like all the others, and if they wanted to be able to operate high altitude aircraft and bring down transports anywhere in this area it had to go down along with its neighbors.

Those were being taken down as the colonies fell one by one to the seemingly inevitable march of Star Force troops across the planet, but that slow march was going to be hindered even more so if they left this orbital gun intact until the final days of the planetary assault. It’d been decided to send a team in to take out the tower and the tower alone, then leave the rest of the city to rot while they moved on to other targets. Trouble was, with so many troops conceivably hidden inside waiting to be released, a standard Clan assault to target the key structures was problematic.

Their solution was to send an Archon team in on foot and exploit the vulnerability of having the forest that close to the perimeter, which Iden now was as he sprinted across the gap and jumped up onto the wall, sticking there for a moment then climbing up with no one else aware of his presence other than his fellow wall-crawling Archons.

Sonya-837 and Chrissie-10398 had the lead on this mission, being a master/apprentice pairing and bringing their experience and unique psionic skills to bear while Iden and the others were strikers and rangers. They were all carrying heavy packs with jump packs layered underneath, making their transit a bit clunky, but destroying the tower with psionics alone was almost impossible, hence the myriad of explosives that he and the others were carrying.

Send a missile in and it’d get shot down by the numerous anti-air turrets within the city. Carry their own version of det packs in on the backs of Archons that the lizard infantry would have to counter and the odds increased greatly. That said, this strike was incredibly bold.

Which Iden rather liked.

When he got to the rooftop he followed the pair from Clan Vulcan at a running pace, crossing the wide building and jumping across the street below to the next…and having to fall a couple of stories in the process. He cushioned his fall with his jump pack easily enough and ran on, with the other seven Archons doing likewise as they avoided the streets entirely and pressed to get as far into the city as they could before being spotted.

The little armored fleas had come in at night for just that reason, and were able to hop across the cityscape with remarkable speed until a patrolling wisp finally shot a pink blip down into the rooftop 12 meters away from Iden, blasting a small crater out of it and blowing up a pyre of vaporized plating and water, for the recent rain was still puddled everywhere.

A telepathic prompt from Sonya told everyone they were headed indoors, with them altering their running direction as soon as the Vulcans pulled the fighter down and into a nearby building with their psionics. Once it was out of line of sight they broke away from their run to the next building jump and swerved into a rooftop entrance, taking the stairwell that led down into the building.

“Stay tight and focus on point defense,” Sonya told them over the comm. “We’ll handle ranged targets.”

Doing as told, Iden pushed out his Ikrid and Pefbar to cover the rooms closest to them, traveling behind a Clan Sneaky Fox ranger. Most of the minds he came across were already unconscious by the time he sensed them, with the lead pair knocking them out at range like she’d said. If they missed one or couldn’t handle a large number of them then it’d be his and the others’ job to take them down, either through Ikrid blackout or by shooting them, but their mission wasn’t to kill lizards this time, it was to kill the defense tower, so they couldn’t get distracted with firefights and had to keep moving at all times.

For Archons that meant constant running, but that wasn’t a challenge considering the kind of workouts Iden and the others did. The mage and padawan weren’t moving too fast so he wasn’t having a problem keeping up, but he knew that trouble was all around them and could be shoved down their throats at any moment. The only way they were going to get where they wanted to go was to not let the lizards zero in on their position and stack bodies against them. That was the trick to this entire mission and why it was so dicey.

It was certainly doable, but they couldn’t take a frontal assault mentality. They had to be ghosts as often as they could, disengaging more often than not and confusing the enemy as to which direction they were headed. They couldn’t take a direct line to the tower or the lizards could prepare for them and put so many infantry between them and the target that there would be no way even a trailblazer could get through them all.

If that did happen, Iden had already been told that they’d revert to secondary targets, taking out some anti-air towers or ground defense turrets and try to pull the lizards attention back away from the primary target. If that didn’t work they’d have to improvise, and pull out if necessary. They weren’t going to risk another normal Clan assault to get the towers, though the first one hadn’t triggered the traps until the mop up crew had come in to fight the army within rather than hit the defenses. That was probably to maximize the number of Star Force kills they could get, but now that their secret had been revealed there was no guarantee they’d wait as long at this location.

So this was going to be it, one way or another. If they could sneak in and blow it, great. If not they’d work around the tower and neutralize this city until the end…then pound it to rubble from orbit. A single defense tower could do a lot of damage coupled with the city defense shield, but it was the combination of overlapping defenses that gave this new lizard tactic its true teeth. A command ship could probably take a tower 1v1, so if they had to they’d wait and deal with it that way.

But they really needed the airspace clear to keep hammering the surrounding colonies, so Iden and the others were determined to make this work. They kept close, running a staggered two-wide formation with each a step ahead of their buddy as they ran through corridors and down stairwells, using some ladders where they had to, but avoiding all lifts that could be computer overridden. The Archon team traveled all the way down into the substructure and into the shallow tunnels that ran underneath the city streets, allowing them to pass into another area without making themselves visible.

The trail of sleeping lizards, however, was quite obvious, so as soon as they found a empty area the team disappeared, avoiding lizards rather than subduing them so they could sneak off and keep the enemy confused. That took time, and Sonya made sure to keep them heading away from the tower more often than not. That made the trek across kilometers of city seem like Frodo’s hike to Mordor. They stopped twice to rest, eat, and catch a bit of sleep, then after two days of skulking around in the undercity they finally got near the tower.

Which was where they ran into a brick wall, so to speak. There were underground defense stations guarding the access routes into the skyscraper-sized complex. The lizards might be stupid, but they weren’t stupid and knew that if a battle broke out Star Force would be more than willing to undercut any surface defenses and backdoor the big tower.

They were stupid for having subsurface access routes at all. They should have completely sealed off the tower aside from a handful of access doors several meters thick. Instead, there were large archways allowing road-like access inside…behind a wall of gun turrets, barricades, and loads of infantry.

“We go up,” Sonya answered before anyone voiced the question. “Quietly.”

Iden followed the mage on a short backtrack then up above ground inside a nearby building. It wasn’t the closest, but a row back from the tower that was smashed into the infrastructure. That did provide it with some building blockers from lateral attack, but it also gave them jumping access to the exterior if the shields were down.

He wasn’t sure how she was going to play this, but the tower itself had a very robust defense shield covering its moderately armored exterior. There were even sporadic anti-infantry turrets clustered around its base and anti-air varieties higher up, but no window access for them to come in at altitude. That meant only the street level access points were left, but those, he knew from past Clan missions to destroy these beasts with mechs and strike-level infantry pushes, had even more formidable defenses around the base of the tower than they’d just seen beneath it.

He didn’t think they would be going in that way, but then what was left? Climb up to the top and go in through the gun mechanism itself?

Once on the dark roof and crouched down amongst the limited urban terrain there, Iden saw Chrissie pull out a compact sniper rifle, swinging out the front section on a midpoint hinge and snapping it into place. She dialed down the intensity, then shot off a very thin sammy beam towards the tower. The beam disappeared to his vision halfway there, and hopefully it wouldn’t draw too much attention amongst the rest of the city’s night lights.

“Shield’s down,” the padawan confirmed, packing up the weapon and returning it to her back rack.

“Target,” Sonya said, with a waypoint popping up on Iden’s battlemap, bringing a rueful smile to his face. She’d tagged one of the anti-infantry batteries five or six stories up from the ground, but considerably below the anti-air variety. “I’ll come last and throw the rest of you. Chrissie goes first and cuts an entry hole. If we can’t get in drop to the surface and run like hell. We’ll rendezvous here.”

Another waypoint several buildings away popped up and Iden’s helmet stored the marker for future use while diminishing its aura in the rest of the map and giving him an easy toggle ‘find me’ visual button on the left of his HUD.

“Let’s go,” the mage said, jumping out of her crouch and running to the building’s edge where she leapt across to the next one.

Iden followed second to last, making the jump that was just at the edge of his range on half a charge. He upped his jump pack’s anti-grav duration a bit more to be safe, landing on the far roof and following the others across it to the far side where Sonya stopped ahead of the others, knelt down on one knee, and extended a battlemeld link out to everyone. While they all didn’t have the same psionics, especially the rangers, they did all have the basic ability, which was one reason why they’d been chosen for this mission.

Iden accepted the link from her and extended the ‘handshake’ to the others. Soon they were a 10-man mind with him having to numb up his senses a bit to keep from overloading from all the shared stimuli. The rangers had it worse than he did but this was something he’d practiced before, as most of them had. Going beyond 10 was unusual, and holding a 10-man link for a long period of time was just as rare.

They wouldn’t be needing it for long, Iden knew, with him combining his Lachka with 6 of the others and using it to shove Chrissie off the building as she ran up to the edge and jumped, using her pack, muscles, and a repulsor conduit from Sonya to shoot her out like a missile across the extra-long distance. Acting as one mind their timing was perfect, and Sonya feathered the conduit enough to land her two meters above the wall turret where she stuck on impact with her armor’s gloves and boots, then she slid down a bit and began cutting into the weak armor around the edges of the battery.

Iden couldn’t feel what she was thinking, for they’d thrown her beyond their battlemeld range…but not beyond Sonya’s. It was weird, because even though his link to Chrissie was gone he could still get a few snippets relayed from the mage’s mind. Whether that was intentional or not he didn’t know, but as soon as Chrissie landed the rest of them started going across one by one at slightly staggered intervals, with the two rangers going next and leaving the most psionically capable Archons for last.

Iden went 7th in line, feeling the push from behind but unable to create a repulsor conduit because he hadn’t yet learned that ability. He compensated by goosing his jump pack to maximum and floated across the gap until he smacked the edge of the tower, bouncing off it and only grabbing on with one hand. There was no leverage whatsoever, but his fingers stuck to the wall and he thumped against it as his body finally bled off the momentum of the bounce.

Chrissie was below him and to the right, and he realized she had a specialized cutting tool as their battlemeld links reformed that was literally melting the plating away, with the pieces being held up in the air nearby telekinetically by the others, with Iden also grabbing a piece to help out so they wouldn’t fall to the street and alert anyone to their presence. Before she could get them a man-sized hole, Chrissie paused what she was doing and braced herself against the wall in a three point stance, then reached a hand out toward Sonya, using a repulsor conduit to help reel her in with no one left to push the mage across.

The set of dark blue armor smacked the wall three meters to the right of Chrissie and more than a story below, bouncing off like Iden had but holding both hands to the wall and keeping them there. Her legs rebounded and flopped against the wall as Chrissie got back to work, soon prying loose an entire section of the weapon and diving in head first, with more parts coming back out as she dug like a gopher through the equipment with her cutter leading the way.

Iden took a moment to look around. There were no fighters nearby angling for them, and no one down on street level looking up. In fact, there was no one down there on the plaza surrounding the tower, with all the defensive troops tucked into overhangs that would protect them from aerial bombardment…and fortunately now cutting off their lines of sight upward.

“I’m in,” Chrissie said over the comm after cutting the battlemeld link.

“Junk first,” Sonya reminded them, telepathically steering a few floating pieces through the gap. Iden passed the two that he was holding aloft and felt Chrissie take them, sucking them inside the hole along with a steady flow of others.

Sonya went in after the parts, then the master/apprentice pair began clearing out the immediate area, putting lizards to sleep from afar but finding only a few nearby as Iden and the rest of the Archons slowly climbed inside. When he got to the opening he saw how tight a fit it was, having to press his chest down as low as he could to keep from snagging his weapons rack on bits of machinery. His Pefbar allowed him to see it all so there were no unintentional snags, just a lot of slow, deliberate movements up until he came to the proper wall and the hollow space inside.

From there he slid along without broken components trying to grab him until he came to another hole, this one cut by Chrissie that led out into an internal hallway. As he ducked down to crawl out he felt a telekinetic tug hasten his transit, with him throwing the ranger on the other side a ‘thank you’ gesture with a wave of his free hand while he reached back and took his rifle off the safety hook on his pack with the other.

He waited for the others to come through, then stepped over the junk pile and followed Sonya’s waypoint, running to catch up to the pair that had already moved three floors up and wasn’t slowing down.

7

Iden dug through his pack, which he’d disconnected from his armor and was now laying on the ground as he pulled out his portion of the explosives all the Archons were carrying. They’d worked their way up to the top of the tower, intent on scrapping the weapon itself rather than the power supply. Conduits could always be replaced, but the actual array would be more difficult to rebuild and so far none of the other colonies that had come under attack had managed to replace theirs…though this one was going to be sitting here for a long time, meaning they had to wreck it as much as possible.

They weren’t bringing down the tower. It was far too big for that and the small amount of explosives they’d brought, plus the fact that they were still inside. What they were aiming for was wrecked components, with the fist-sized cubes Iden was pulling out and tossing into the center of the small room he was crouched in being telekinetically caught by another striker and pulled inside an open maintenance panel.

Four other Archons were doing likewise in the room, with everyone feeding the explosives into the base of the main gun and the Archon placing them inside at the most pesky spots. To date no one had gotten inside one of these things to figure out how it worked, for all the other towers were just being blasted from the outside, but placing explosives was more about breaking things than understanding them on this trip, so anything that looked fragile or combustible got a cube stuck to it.

Iden emptied his pack and tossed the last pair into the air, seeing them disappear inside the open panel along with a stream of others as he picked up and reattached the mostly empty pack to his armor. There were still some foodstuffs and ammo left, but most of the bulk he’d been hefting around was now gone and he felt noticeably lighter as he retrieved his plasma rifle and stood guard until the other striker climbed back out of the assembly.

“We’re good to go here,” he said, with Iden giving him a moment to grab his pack before the group headed out. The others were split up between defending their lower flank and placing explosives in other key areas nearby, all of which would be on a countdown once triggered.

A waypoint flashed on his HUD, indicating where Sonya wanted them to come. As Iden and the others moved down through the defense tower’s upper levels, which were mostly maintenance access, he saw a countdown pop up at 15 minutes .There was still a ‘boom’ button that Sonya had, but should they get out of range of the small transmitter the countdown would take care of giving the final order on its own.

Fifteen minutes though told Iden that they were going to have to fight their way out, and as soon as he got within a level of where Sonya and Chrissie were he sensed lizard minds coming up from below. Halfway down the stairs he got a personal waypoint, along with seeing others popping up as the mage told them where to go, spreading the group out across the level, for the lizards were coming up at multiple stairwells.

The striker sprinted over to his position, relieving Chrissie who headed off another direction. Iden stayed put and gun pointed down his stairwell for several long seconds, staring at a pile of bodies below before live ones began to crawl over them.

He fired two shots into the heads of the pair that came into view, adding their corpses to the pile and caused those behind them to stay behind the wall and not try to force their way up until they had greater numbers. Iden could sense them pooling below him, then a plasma blast zipped past his head from the flank and hit a lizard further down the hallway on his level that had seemingly come out of nowhere.

Chrissie ran by him to deal with it and Iden turned his attention back to his stairs just as the group behind the corner below charged up and onto the pile of bodies, clawing their way over them and up the incline towards him, eating his plasma streaks and dropping dead or injured to trip up the others.

But as usual, the tactic was not completely suicidal. The lizards up front acted as shields for those behind, gaining them a meter at a time until the horde was almost within touching distance. Iden backed up a step, continuing to fire down as the closest lizards reached the upper three steps and began shooting back. The striker held his ground and killed two more, taking a pink spurt of phaser into his shields before he stepped forward and kicked one back into the group, causing a domino effect that knocked half a dozen down before the kinetic momentum was bled off.

More from behind pushed those who had fallen back up and onto their feet, with Iden going hand to hand and smacking the next closest lizard with the butt of his rifle. A telekinetic push sent another on the stairs tipping backwards. Flipping off his shields the striker tossed his rifle aside on the floor of the hallway and tackled the next closest lizard, emitting a Fornax field as he did so. The resistance in its limbs and those behind it vanished, with him pushing the pile of them back down the stairs using his own momentum and weight.

He kicked himself free and climbed back up the stairs before he released the field, summoning his rifle back into his grip and using it to shoot the stack of disoriented bodies below as he got a recall prompt and new waypoint. A wide Fornax blast as a going away present covered his tracks as Iden raced down the hallway to the left and joined up with two of the others as all the Archons converged on Sonya’s position and pushed their way down a single stairwell.

“We’re going out through the lobby, run and gun,” she told them. “Stay behind me and Chrissie and shoot targets of opportunity, but don’t break off. We’re going to have to hammer our way out.”

“What happened to the gun port?” Iden asked.

“I can feel wisps outside, so that’s a no go.”

“Looks like we got their attention,” one of the rangers noted as Sonya/Chrissie threw up an invisible wall that shoved some 8 lizards back from the base of the stairs at the lower level and into the hallway, clearing a path for the Archons to continue moving down. Iden snapped off a pair of shots as he passed, hitting at least one lizard as the others did the same, with the last man in line throwing Fornax blasts behind them to keep their tracks clear.

Their route down through the tower was predictable, with every level there being more and more opposition, but it wasn’t until they hit the bottom third of the building did they run into the first physical barricade blocking the stairs. Iden felt a battlemeld prompt and accepted, with the Archons using Nemsa to create a joint telekinetic push that dislodged the heavy canisters from where they sat, picking one up and throwing it further down the stairwell where it bowled over or crushed numerous lizards below. The others they moved into a side hallway one by one, with the Archons without Nemsa using their Ikrid to disrupt the lizards on the other side and throwing in a few Fornax blasts where they had clean lines of sight so they wouldn’t hit the other Archons.

Iden had gotten his Nemsa not through individual ascension, but from another Clan Jinx striker. Likewise most of the other strikers had acquired a handful of battlemeld and tier 2 psionics in the same way, with Pren being the only trigger that he’d found on his own. It added to his telekinetic power, which was then multiplied many times over by combining it with the others’ power levels. Adding theirs together not only gave them a sum total greater than what any individual could produce, but by using multiple emitters they gained a power boost from the overlap, and the more minds involved the larger the boost.

They could have lifted a small tank together if need be, so they didn’t have trouble moving the makeshift barricades until they came within 3 levels of the surface and found structural components welded across the stairwell. Together they tried to dislodge them, with a few openings sprouting a phaser blurp or two before the lizards on the other side were psionically shut down through one means or another.

“Cover us,” Sonya said, disconnecting from the battlemeld along with Chrissie. Iden and the others stayed linked, for it made for precision Ikrid and Fornax attacks through the physical barricade without them worrying about hitting each other, not to mention it allowed them to watch their backs via the Archon there, for all could see/hear/feel what the others did. Having the big two out of the link made it less stressful and Iden was able to maintain the smaller group battlemeld without too much effort, even managing a precision plasma shot back through one of the small peep holes in the crisscrossed pile of trash blocking their way.

Both Sonya and Chrissie removed one of their armored gloves, with the padawan grabbing Sonya’s wrist as the mage pressed two fingers up against one of the weld points and held them there for several seconds before the metal began to glow. Using the battlemeld Irod ability, the two overlapped and strengthened their Rensiek fields and concentrated their channeled body heat up to temperatures that neither could have handled individually. It was slow going, but soon the first weld point melted away and Sonya drew her fingers across it like she was smooshing aside sticky, glowing goo.

When they finished with that one they moved their locked arms over to the next point, heating and dislodging it as Iden sensed lizards massing above them and in the nearby halls, closing in on them from all sides.

Suddenly he turned, throwing a mutual telekinetic hold on a lizard coming down the stairs from above them and stopping it dead in its tracks. A moment later the det pack carrying lizard started to fly back up the stairs, and apparently figuring this was as close as it was going to get, hit the trigger half a level up, blowing itself and the surrounding structure apart.

The concussion wave hit Iden and the others, taking down his shields and piling him on top of Sonya below, with two more armored bodies and bits of wall falling on top of him.

“What was that?” she asked, pushing the others off her with Chrissie’s telekinetic help. “Damn it,” she added, sensing the pain in her padawan.

“I’ll live,” the Archon said with a grimace, referencing the charred hole in her hand where some of the molten metal had dripped on her in the tumble.

“Det pack,” Iden informed her, given that she hadn’t been linked into the battlemeld to see it coming. “And we’ve got a hole,” he said, telepathically pointing to the outside wall that was missing a huge chunk of structure, with a lot of the debris having fallen through it down to the next level.

“Go,” Sonya said, still being on the bottom with Chrissie.

One of the rangers beat Iden to it, running up to and jumping through the hole to fall several meters down to the next level. When the striker came down there was a flurry of phaser blips crisscrossing the area, and Iden’s weak shields went down after a few hits, having been drained of power in the explosion. Adding his plasma fire and psionics to the ranger’s they cleared out a perimeter around the hole and pushed the lizards back, allowing the others to come down and form up, with a regauntleted mage and padawan pushing into the lead and plowing through the sea of lizards pooling around them.

They fought their way to the next stairwell, finding no barricades on it and quickly making their way down to ground level. They didn’t stop there, but went down further into the subsurface levels until they got to the security checkpoints that they hadn’t wanted to fight their way through to get in. Hitting them from the opposite side took some of the turrets out of alignment, but there was an even larger sea of lizards waiting for them, with plenty of room in the road-like hallways to stack their numbers and return fire en mass.

“We’ve got the turrets,” Sonya told them as she and Chrissie leapt ahead, falling into small craters of lizards as they made room by emitting short range Fornax fields to allow them to leapfrog ahead into the tightly packed masses. “Plow the road guys.”

Iden and the others knew what that meant and fired into the lizards closest to them, using the distraction the other two were making to their advantage but only killing or dislodging enough of the enemy infantry to create a momentary corridor for them to move through. It felt like him playing football all those years ago, with barely any gap gained, but even a little bit was enough for the Archons to wedge themselves in and through, then killing more just ahead as they turtled up into a group, allowing their bodies and shields to cover each other’s flanks as they powered their way through, with almost everyone having their shields at low to no power.

Their armor held though, and with so many bodies in such a small space the lizards couldn’t get many shots off. They needed a bit of air between them and their targets to really dish out the phaser blasts and the Archons weren’t giving it to them. Like a pack of security guards escorting a celebrity through an animated crowd, the 8 Archons pushed their way up to the gap between the nearest two turrets that were now smoking with plasma damage.

Both of the elite Archons were already ahead of them, attacking the other turrets and killing their gunners as they tried to pivot them around to shoot the opposite direction. They reminded Iden of grunt plasma turrets from Halo and fired the same, for they oddly weren’t equipped with the new phaser tech.

Chrissie took one hit square on in midair, with the plasma blooming to cover almost her entire body as she punched through the green destructive cloud and landed on top of the turret, swinging her body around and whipping her armored foot into the lizard’s head who was sitting behind the protective blast plate. A few shots from her rifle into the control mechanisms junked that turret, with her armor holding up against both that intense burst of plasma as well as dozens of phaser hits.

Iden knew she and Sonya were wearing the heavy armor varieties that their ranks afforded them, but they were still pushing the limits in order to take out those big guns, which he knew the lizards wouldn’t hesitate to fire into their own people in order to kill even one of the Archons.

As that pair leapfrogged across the 7 turrets in total Iden and the others pushed their way through, with a lot of the standard variety lizards just jumping on them and grabbing for their weapons, arms, legs, or whatever other handholds they could get to drag them to a stop so the others could shoot them, but with the group battlemeld linked they could see it all coming and used a lot of impressive hand to hand combos and their psionic kin to intercept or knock away the grapples. Part way through they pushed out their formation and formed a small opening inside that Sonya and Chrissie jumped into, their armor ugly with melt marks and the padawan with a slight catch in her left arm movement where the elbow joint was no longer swinging smoothly.

With the turrets gone all that was left was a football field-sized area full of lizard infantry. Getting beat up by the occasion phaser hits and the physical contact draining shields whenever they started to regenerate, the 10 man Archon team slugged their way across, killing a lot but with even more lizards piling into the underground road behind them as they came down from street level. This was the biggest spamming effort Iden had ever personally seen, and he was glad they’d decided to bring a full 10 Archons, for any less and he doubted they could have made their way across without enough armored bodies to soak up all the incoming damage.

A telepathic signal from Sonya told them not to use their Fornax, for the lizard bodies around them were also a shield against the others, so Iden stopped throwing out any such attacks laterally and used his Lachka and limbs to fight off those nearest him. All he had to worry about was the two meters to his left, for he had an Archon in front of him, beside him on the right, and one behind him, giving the striker the ability to focus on his little part of the armored turtle and avoid taking hits from all around, though is left arm and hip were getting pretty chewed up.

To counter that he switched with the striker to his right in an awkward transition, but that left both of their highest damaged areas facing each other and buying them more longevity throughout what felt like an eternity of shuffled steps moving forward. Eventually Sonya gave them the heads up and launched Chrissie forward like a bomb, with her landing in the midst of those ahead and toppling them to the ground twitching from a Fornax field.

As a group the other Archons ran over them, with Chrissie and now Sonya throwing Fornax blasts out ahead to keep those lizards down while avoiding disabling their own people. Iden and the others fanned out, jumping over the tightly packed fallen bodies and throwing their own Fornax blasts into them and helping each other with telekinetic lifts, including one from Sonya that pulled Iden up midair into a hail of phaser fire and over the last knot of them, but landed him on a small patch of clear tunnel ahead.

He twirled about, punching the nearest lizard to him and shooting the next as the other Archons reached the semi-clear area and were able to start fighting their way forward at a jog, doubling up on targets and getting some momentum into their formation. Half a minute later they were all but in the clear, with them all accelerating into a high run with the master/apprentice pair taking the lead and scouting out any hazards while planning their underground route back to the city perimeter.

All Iden had to do was keep up and follow the group, while keeping an eye on their rear and the swarm of slower lizards trying to chase after them.

8

February 11, 2756

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Karen shot through the air like a guided missile, landing foot first into a lizard with a rocket launcher and knocking him back, throwing off what would have been a shot into the cluster of Calavari going hand to hand with a horde of lizards blocking the narrow gap in the rocky ridge. As soon as the Archon’s body hit the ground the Bataf link to Travis ended and she bounced on her hip, rolling to a knee and keeping some of her momentum as she sprang to her feet in one fluid motion, detonating a Fornax field that took down the other half dozen lizards around her with only one of them managing to get a shot off into her black armor.

Her shields caught the pink blip as she brought her rifle to bear and shot the downed lizards, then she reached a hand back over the edge of the ridge and leaned the opposite direction, reestablishing the Bataf and connecting herself to her brother with another repulsor conduit, yanking him up to her and getting both of them high above the battling armies throwing down in the forest north of the current target colony.

Unlike previous assaults, the lizards hadn’t waited to fight within the city boundaries, instead choosing to come out and into the forest to fight Star Force as they began to hack away at the perimeter turrets. A combination of tanks, wisps, and rocket carrying infantry had hurt the mechs badly on the narrow, treeless approaches, forcing them back with only the six hoths still in play at range, but even those were getting hit hard by wisp clouds that were funneling in from two other nearby colonies. More than half the planet was now in Star Force hands, or rather had been removed from lizard ownership as the invading forces hit and moved on, not putting down any roots aside from a handful of firebases.

Deconstruction of those sites would occur later, with the current priority being the removal of the enemy troops. Once again the lizards were being devious, with the Calavari assaulting the colony having to fight through the forest in order to get to the city’s edge, for it protected them against tanks and aircraft alike, though on several occasions a rain of phaser fire had punched through the canopy on precise locations, strafing the Star Force troops before being beaten back, either by mobile anti-air units the Calavari were carrying or a handful of mechs that were tromping their way through the trees and making some very long roads to get in closer.

The wisp cloud defending the colony was keeping Star Force air cover away, but it wasn’t so thick that they could be reckless with their numbers. Aside from a few brave strafing runs on the infantry beneath the green/black leafed trees they were staying back over their own buildings and reaching out in several tendrils to hit the hoths that were continuing to snipe the perimeter turrets from range, though they were having to find inventive spots to establish line of sight given the hilly terrain.

With some of the turrets taken down already the infantry had an open door to get into the buildings and return to the normal street fighting that this invasion had grown accustomed to, but the lizards weren’t going to have it and were saturating the hills with troops. Virtually all of them were standard variants, for maulers were next to useless against armored Calavari, but the one that Karen had just kicked out of firing its rocket had been a mauler, with the muscular variant having been repurposed into a heavy weapons carrier.

There were more of them popping up almost at random, and while they were typically going after tanks or a lucky aircraft hit, they’d begun using them to shoot clusters of infantry the past two days, with this current pass through one jaggedly cut hillside seeing the most resistance of any location. Karen knew there were tunnels carved into the hills, for she had already spotted two entrances, suggesting that this hadn’t been a last gasp effort on the part of the lizards to keep Star Force out. It was another planned tactic, though this city did not have any boundary wall traps. That said, the landscape worked almost as well to keep people in or out.

Until the wisp dome over the city was removed they had to be careful not to get surrounded, for there was no way of knowing how many of these small tunnels there were, or how far out they reached short of flying a drone warship up and scanning the hills further. The one they’d sent to check for a buried wall had had a hell of a time getting close enough without rising up too high passing over the hills to come within range of the defense tower that was still operational, not to mention those in the nearby colonies that could double up firepower if a ship rose high enough.

With the initial Clan insertion having failed, the main Calavari force had been brought up to join them in a more conventional assault…that had turned unconventional quickly, forcing them to fight in these hills with the lizards able to move around far more easily given their smaller size and, mostly, because of their tunnels. The Calavari couldn’t fit inside them, and from the reports going around in the other locations across the 12 mile wide front, the Clan infantry couldn’t either unless they got down and crawled on their hands and knees.

Karen suspected that was deliberate, for the lizards moved around on all fours as easily as they did biped, meaning they could reposition across the battlefield far easier than even she and her brother could, allowing them to flank and ambush to their hearts’ content, which was making this battle such a pain in the ass that an Arc Knight team had been sent in to assist, with Karen and Travis coming with.

Those six Knights were down below, split up into threes and both working their way towards the choke point, cleaning out the flanks on the Star Force side from where they knew there were concealed tunnel entrances. They’d help the Calavari secure the area and press on through, but it was up to the twins to sniff out any surprises in the gap itself.

To that end they both ran through the trees along the top edge of the ridge, making sure not to fall off the corroded hillside that was already giving way. The portion exposed to sunlight was full of bushes and other plants eating up every available ray, and inside of that there were multiple lizards sniping down on the Calavari or waiting to do so when they had an opportunity. The trees below offered some cover, but there were plenty of deadfalls that Karen would have bet the lizards had cut down previously to give them firing lines on anyone approaching the gap.

With their greeting party now dead, the two strikers ran together along the edge using their psionics to detect the lizard minds hidden in the brush even before their Pefbar could make them out amongst all the jumble of branches and vines. Battlemeld linked, the pair had no trouble picking them up one by one and chucking them over the side. Whether they died on impact or were merely wounded upon landing they didn’t care. They were getting them out of sniping position and giving the Calavari some easy kills while keeping their own noise to a minimum as they made their way towards their mission objective.

They’d come up the hillside/cliff pretty far away, giving them some cover while the lizard units were split between the gap and the creek bed further to the southeast. That was much heavier guarded, with numerous concealed turrets to bust up mechs trying to use the waterway to walk through. A fight was going on there, but a cautious one, with several Clan teams trying to pick off the turrets to allow their mechs and the Calavari’s to get through once they got up to them. Any on approach within 5 kilometers were getting a wisp greeting, so the fighting was designed to take down the ground defenses before they sent the mechs into harm’s way.

There were over a dozen other locations that the Calavari and Clans were trying to make their way through, with this gash being the smallest. Some loner units had scaled the hillside already and were making light probes into the area beyond the lizard defensive line, but those were quickly being forced back through sheer numbers of infantry. Each of those forays did get a little bit more battlemap information for the entire army to use, with one tunnel location ahead having been spotted previously and marked for the twins to avoid.

They could feel minds moving around deep underground, but how many was unknown due to the depth involved. Putting a few to sleep just to mess with them, Karen and Travis swung wide of the tunnel entrance, sensing a few waiting there in the bushes to secure the location and ambush anyone who came close…which would then be followed up by a flood of the scaly infantry spilling out.

They didn’t want that now, so they bypassed them by jumping up into the trees and going the slow route, branch to branch. Fortunately the forest was large enough to get them up more than 10 meters, and it was the thick upper branches that were protecting them from aerial fire that also allowed them to hop between trees, made all the easier with their psionics. A combination of climbing, jumping, and lifting each other got the pair past the tunnel entrance, then they dropped back down to the forest floor and kept moving cautiously but at speed, knowing the Arc Knights would add that extra something special to break through the bottleneck below in short order.

It didn’t take long to get within Ikrid range of the lizards lining the gap, and there were hundreds of them spread out along either side up top and even more within what were probably carved out hideaways within the narrow V-shaped crack that ran probably better than 300 meters at its steepest, but with nearly a half mile of full stretch from flat forest floor to the same on the other side.

It was a kill zone for sure, but it wasn’t the lizards that the twins were looking for.

They crept as close as they could get before there were too many minds around them, so they jumped back up into the trees and gradually got their Pefbar range close enough to see their half of the gap, or at least their piece of their half.

Damn it, Travis told his sister telepathically as they both crouched on separate branches emanating from the same two meter wide trunk, they do have explosives.

And plenty of live bait to conceal them, she added, seeing the boxes buried just inside the dirt/stone on the inner edge of the ‘V’ in a way that they could bury anyone passing through. I don’t see any landlines. Must be remote activated.

That’s bad.

When in doubt, ask for help, Karen said, using both her and her brother’s psionic strength in unison through their battlemeld to access the lizard minds nearest them and start rifling them for information. The first 20 or so didn’t have any knowledge about the explosives buried beneath their feet, but finally they found one that did, but he didn’t have the trigger.

Or… Travis suggested, with her knowing exactly what he was thinking before he could say it.

I don’t think they have a detonate button on them, she said, bringing her Pefbar back to the location of the meter-wide block buried about 80 meters ahead of them and to the lower left, just shy of one of the concealed bunkers on the inside of the gap, but with enough rock and soil around it to blow out like shrapnel when it did go up.

If we get closer maybe we can disable it and not worry about a trigger.

Good call, Karen said, immediately beginning to hop to the next branch then, setting herself, she lifted Travis telekinetically over to the nearby tree, adding a repulsor conduit to supplement her Lachka. Travis landed across a fair sized gap then returned the favor, helping his sister across and the two of them began moving slower and slower, keeping as quiet as they could until they were directly over the heads of three lizards hunkered down behind knee-high wall segments hidden within bushes that they could snipe from and hide in when the Calavari eventually got to the trench below.

Travis kept a mental eye on their minds, ready to freeze or distract them if necessary while Karen reached down into the ground with her Pefbar getting a better view of the explosive and looking for something to mess with. She took a moment to be careful and consider her options, but the sounds of the firefight just a few hundred meters away and the lizard troops running back through the gap in retreat underscored just how little time they had.

Warn them off. This is going to take some time, plus we don’t know how many of them there are, she said, using her telekinesis to pull apart a wire from its connection on the buried device.

She felt Travis smile, then abandoned her sabotage effort as her brother jumped down from the tree and she followed, landing next to the mind-frozen lizards as both of them abandoned their subtlety and sprinted along the edge, drawing attention and numerous lizards out of their hiding spots on the flats above the gap. One concealed tunnel entrance opened up and a line of lizards began pouring out but the twins ignored them, heading for a specific bunker on the other side of the gap and nearly a quarter mile down it, almost dead center in the entire giant booby trap.

Going for pure speed, they didn’t fire any shots nor bother to disrupt the lizards other than with a few hasty psionics. They were standing on top of a giant minefield and had to get to the middle bunker now, else risk the whole thing blowing up underneath them. They figured that wouldn’t happen until the Calavari got at least partially inside, which was prompting their recklessness.

When they got down almost all the way to the target they turned hard right and Karen launched her brother across the gap long jump style, steering him to the wall niche a few meters below the edge that he entered feet first, sliding into a short tunnel about Hobbit height. As soon as he was inside he emitted a Fornax field and kept it up, sliding/crawling his way into a connecting tunnel and dragging one twitching lizard out of his way, kneeing him in the ribs as he pushed by him.

Maintaining the Fornax field at half his maximum radius wasn’t hard, but the longer he kept at it the more stress his head would feel, and like pulling on a rubber band, the further you stretched it the more power it took to maintain the effort, meaning he was on the clock.

Scurrying his way through the small tunnels he pulled a fishhook turn that led him back to a concealed bunker that had one-way view panes into the gap, hidden behind a clever holographic camouflage screen of leaves and sticks that were also transparent with barely an outline showing on the wall of the little, traitorous den. There were three lizards inside, all lying on the floor save for one, who was twitching uncontrollably in his seat as Travis’s head began to complain from the sustained effort.

He pulled out a pistol from his back rack and shot them all twice in the head, then pushed their bodies over the entrance and stacked them up like lego bricks, blocking the entrance.

“Got it,” he told Karen via comm, now that she was running like crazy back through the forest to the Calavari with an angry army of lizards following her and hopefully not noticing him. “Tell them the trigger is secure and I’ll remain here to make sure it stays that way.”

“You want me to double back and help?”

“No, just get clear. These tiny tunnels mean they don’t have a chance of getting to me, and there’s a camouflaged window here I can break out of if I have to, so I’m not pinned in.”

“They can break in too, you know.”

“I’m fine. Get the team up here and take out those sniper positions before the Calavari start pouring through like big fat targets.”

“Alright, see you after,” Karen said, with her soon passing outside of his ability to mentally track. Their battlemeld and twin link were broken, leaving Travis with only his own thoughts for a while, which was odd considering how they did almost everything together.

But then again this wasn’t the first time they’d split up, and they had trained themselves accordingly so that it didn’t become a weakness. Still, the sooner his sister was back inside his head again the better. For now though, there were lizards scurrying about in the tunnels on the other side of his meat blockade and he intended to gum up the tiny roads with as many sleeping beauties as he could arrange.

9

June 1, 2756

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Liam returned to his command ship’s nexus, having spent a very long couple of months groundside since his last visit doing commando work and helping to take down key targets during or in front of the massed assaults on the remaining lizard colonies. Now there were only 7 remaining, spread out widely across the planet having been bypassed by the Star Force troops because they were trap cities. Five of them still had their orbital defense towers intact, but the trailblazers had decided not to risk any more clandestine assault teams, for the last one that Morgan and Kara had been on had turned into a wounded evacuation run.

It’d had five mages, three padawans, plus the two trailblazers and hadn’t managed to kill the tower. After the three previous successes and numerous other similar missions behind enemy lines in the less defended colonies the lizards had enacted numerous new safeguards, some of which had involved detonating entire buildings around the tower when security breaches were noted. The team had been in one of them when it came down, but fortunately the armor they were all wearing kept them alive, not to mention a few hasty bioshields being thrown up in the process.

Six of them had been wounded to the point of limping, with three having to be carried out and an air evac being impossible. Kara had got them through it, going rogue and hunting the lizards in the depths of their substructures to act as a diversion and to clear passages, with a one-armed Morgan doing plenty of damage despite her left limb having been broken and hanging limp inside her cracked armor. Others had been more badly injured, but the few that had only a few dings in the chaotic building collapse supported the trailblazer enough to get everyone out.

That was three months ago, and all the Archons in question had long since returned to battle after regenerator treatments. The V’kit’no’sat tech was still far ahead of Star Force medical devices and rebuilt their bodies within hours, though all were weaker for it after the fact…something that infuriated Morgan to no end because it could possibly see her losing her top Archon status.

After that mess the trap cities had been ignored, with assaults on the others continuing with less surprises but still an incredible amount of heavy fighting. The lizards were no longer the soft targets they once were, and it seemed like the entire point of their planetary defense being a test of their new tech and tricks. The trap cities that remained would give the lizards even more data to work with when Star Force hit them, and the interstellar transmitters that each had were continually broadcasting signals out to other lizard worlds when they came within line of sight during the planet’s rotation, meaning that even if no lizard left the system alive their empire would still gain from the knowledge of what had happened here.

And of what it took to stop or kill the Star Force troops.

But with the rest of the colonies now destroyed the amount of firepower a single, or two orbital guns could throw back at the fleet was low. But then again their defense fleet was near to anemic, for the lizards had been continually sending in relief fleets to whittle their drones down. Star Force had been bringing in occasional jumpship fleets with replacement warships but their hold on the planet was tenuous, though there was little chance of the lizards actually retaking it with the two Sentinels in orbit…short of yet another escalation that had Liam a bit concerned.

They needed to finish off Varasiss soon and start fortifying it themselves, and to do that these last few colonies had to go.

Rather than waste more drones on an orbital assault, or even use the command ships and see them potentially take more hull damage on top of what they’d already racked up to date, Liam accessed the Sentinels and had their limited engines begin altering their orbits to bring them down to a very low altitude rendezvous point. He wanted both of them together to insure that neither one lost shields, for to date they hadn’t been scratched and letting the lizards get a few hits in now would have been beyond sloppy.

It took a great deal of time to get them together, then as they lowered themselves with their anti-grav running high to counteract the planet’s gravity they started taking fire from a single phaser beam coming up from the surface. The pink energy tore through the clouds and hit the starboard Sentinel’s shields, with them warding off the attack with ease. Liam studied the data from the shield loss and ran through the quick math, seeing that it would take more than 500 hits at present levels to penetrate.

That wouldn’t take too long, for the recycle on the lizard gun was only 1.7 seconds. Liam held off firing the Sentinels’ weapons until both were in position, using the extra energy to supplement the gravity drives and shields, then pulled power from the latter and engaged the heaviest cleansing beams.

Six beams from each shot down their pale white lines and hit the defense shield covering the lizard colony, with their recharge rates linked together so they all hit simultaneously in an attempt to create a momentary breach with the overload and sneak some damage through. The slugging match that followed was mostly one sided, with the lizard colony’s shields coming down within a minute and the defense tower another 20 seconds later. That ended the orbital threat, for no missiles had been fired from the surface, oddly enough, but then again the Sentinels had enough anti-air weapons to knock them down with ease, so Liam wasn’t sure if this colony didn’t have them or wasn’t choosing to waste them.

There were numerous defense turrets across the city, but it was impossible to determine exactly what they all were when some were buried beneath armor plating until they were revealed. At this point Liam didn’t care, and quickly reset the power flow away from the shields and into the weapons in order to give the Sentinels full firing capability. Targeting the beams himself, he began to cut the colony’s buildings apart, starting first with the defense turrets and hangars, then moving on to the other buildings while the wisp cloud that had been hiding underneath the city shield began to grow and disperse, running off to other locations around the planet.

There was no knowing how many other lizard bases were concealed on Varasiss, and with some luck they might lead them to one. He didn’t expect the enemy to be that sloppy, but you never knew.

The Star Force fighters patrolling the planet were ordered to keep their distance and let the lizards run while the Sentinels bombarded the colony, then moved on to the others. Once they had all of them torn to shreds they’d begin hunting down the remaining units across the planet, and there was no point in risking further engagements until that was completed.

After several hours of bombardment Liam redirected the Sentinels to the pair of colonies remaining that had overlapping fields of fire, knowing this would be the bigger test. Based on the data from the single beam he knew there wouldn’t be a mathematical issue with taking them down, but still there was always an opportunity for surprises, and with the pair of phaser beams reaching up to strike back at the Sentinels came the missiles from both colonies.

Liam turtled up and deactivated the cleansing beam, routing full power to the shields and point defense weapons, weathering the missile storm until it eventually ran out and knocking down most of them before they could hit. When they ceased and only the ongoing phaser strikes continued he reengaged the cleansing beams and began hammering against one of the two cities’ shield discs.

It took a while to knock it down, then the tower, then he did the same to the second colony, but he managed it all without so much as a shot hitting the hull of either defense station. Afterwards he turned the firing control over to other gunners and let them methodically rip apart the two cities while he left the nexus and headed to the command ship’s sanctum for a good long run before catching a few hours of needed sleep and returning to the bridge to oversee the next colony attack.

Meanwhile the ground troops were out and about in numerous locations, hunting down and safing the underground tunnels in the colonies that had already seen combat and were now nominally in Star Force hands…though all that meant was a handful of scouts looking for lingering enemies. The planet was huge and now full of ruins, without enough troops to properly occupy each site. From the reports continuing to come in there were still lots of pockets of small resistance everywhere, with about half of them operating with cohesion rather than random, last ditch attacks from survivors.

The other four trailblazers and Kara were down there leading the efforts to eradicate them and locate what they thought were hidden control centers. There were so many tunnels underground that a good portion of their drone fleet was now floating over the surface doing intense scans to try and locate them in an effort to identify potential traps before the Archons and others started their expeditions into new areas. Morgan especially wanted to be there running point to look for more detonation devices, and while they hadn’t seen hardly any employed in such a manner during the length of the invasion, the gradually increasing popularity of blowing up your own building to get the enemies inside was alarming.

If that trend continued Star Force was going to have to readjust their tactics when assaulting other lizard worlds, else risk losing chunks of personnel with every structure they forced their way into. When you didn’t care about dying and were just trying to achieve maximum damage to your enemy you opened up a lot of darkside tactical options that looked like they were uncounterable, but Liam and the other trailblazers were notorious for finding ways to get around the problem, though this one was going to be one of the worst to tackle to date.

Kara flew across the sky a couple miles above the surface of their recently reclaimed planet, traveling from one ruined colony to another as she took a momentary break from tunnel diving and just did some patrolling up top. There were no Star Force fighters in the area at the moment, and the lizard survivors had a habit of moving from place to place so that when you finally did fully clear out a city, if that was even confirmable, they could move back in again coming over ground. The areas with wide plains were easy to spot them on, but the forested areas not so much.

She didn’t expect to spot any lizards in the trees from this altitude, but felt like snooping around a bit while another subsurface assault team was getting prepped for her to lead. The Scionate she’d been with had been recalled and a group of Calavari were coming in to replace them, though they weren’t exactly the best at crawling around in small spaces. Most of the lizard infrastructure underground was large enough to accommodate them, but it was the small auxiliary tunnels that they couldn’t fit inside, nor did Kara like the idea of crawling in there herself.

More than once she’d gotten a bit claustrophobic, recognizing the fact that if she got pinned there it would be almost impossible to dig her way out. It was worse for the others because they didn’t have her Vorch’nas, and talk amongst the trailblazers was that some of these locations would best be dug out from the top and simply removed from the surface in a massive earth moving endeavor rather than trying to explore and safe them manually.

Some prototype AI drones were getting their evaluation work in, with masses of the things being ordered up for production in the ADZ and shipped out here, with the first load scheduled to arrive within the month. They were all the size of a bowling ball or smaller, with interconnective capability like the drone warships used but designed to operate almost exclusively in blackout situations like, say, having tons of rock between you and a transmitter.

They weren’t combat models, with Star Force not trusting computer programming with weapons in an urban setting. There were too many factors to preprogram for, and they didn’t want so much as one accidental death because of a miscalibration. Artificial intelligence was a myth, and a machine could only do what it was programmed to do. Without someone at the controls that programming would always be limited and unable to adapt to new situations, hence the little bug bots didn’t get weapons.

What they were was surveillance and scouting equipment, able to transmit to each other over short distances and extend a net of comm and control lines down through tunnel networks if placed appropriately and in large enough numbers. Right now the bots they had were scouring the innards of one dead lizard colony, mapping it out as they went and roaming where they chose underground. They’d discovered three lizard hideouts so far, as well as constructing a battlemap of the lower regions without any Archon or Regular having to hike down every corridor.

The prototypes were serving their purpose more here than ever expected, for this was the largest subsurface infrastructure they’d seen from the lizards to date and Kara expected jumpships full of the little buggers to be roaming the planet for years to come as they slowly deconstructed the mess. Everything Calavari had been eradicated by the lizards in their time here, and Star Force was intending to return the favor, tearing out all the lizard infrastructure rather than coopting any of it for their own use.

As Kara was approaching the edge of the colony ahead she got a ‘request for assistance’ beacon on her battlemap. It was coming from a city to her west that had Lacvamat patrolling from the air and they seemed to have located a nest of lizard tanks operating in the rubble. They were making strafing runs on them, but reported enough of an anti-air presence that they couldn’t press the issue on their own and required assistance.

Kara banked to the left and picked up speed, elongating her personal shields into a needlepoint above her head and cutting through the air as aerodynamically as possible. There were several other units responding to the call as well, with a squadron of Calavari Valeries closer than she was, but there was only so much one could do from the air and the Lacvamat had rightly called for what they referred to as ‘groundpounder’ backup.

Signaling that she was incoming, the honorary trailblazer watched the landscape zip by underneath her during the long trip. Fast as she was, there was only so many kilometers that she could eat up per minute and the planet was, obviously, huge. When she eventually did reach the location she zipped down from altitude and shot through the gaps in the Lacvamat flocks, coming down to an altitude that they weren’t risking and landing directly in the center of a formation of six tanks that were firing up into the air trying to hit the Lacvamat and doing a bad job of it.

“Surrender and I’ll let you live,” she said in their native language, broadcasting the edict loudly from her armor’s external speakers as well as sending it over the lizard comm channels.

Kara just stood there in her red scales staring at them from behind her head covering, which had no visor nor any other openings to signify a face, just more red scales covering and protecting her eyes that were seeing a camera image displayed before them. Even though she could see it coming, the tank to her left swiveled around and fired a blast at her from less than 50 meters away.

She didn’t dodge, but took the shot on her shields as she stared it down, with the other lizard troops likewise turning towards her and opening up with a lot of infantry weapons, for they were literally crawling around in every nook and cranny she could see from street level, and it was obvious that they had no intention of accepting her generous offer.

“Can’t say I didn’t try,” she said to herself, using her anti-grav to juke her out of the way of the next tank blast and transition into a flying run inches over the ground as she summoned up an orb of green/white energy and delivered it to the closest tank by hand.

10

May 1, 2762

Pagaliss System (Calavari Region)

Varasiss

A part of the 22nd mainline Star Force fleet, some twenty warships strong, entered planetary orbit around Varasiss and broke off from the cargo convoy they were escorting, heading towards the large starport in low orbit while the 226 fat transports began sending down dropships to the surface as a flock of even more flew up to them to begin unloading the supplies and personnel being brought in to the revived Calavari capitol. The warships had convoyed out with the cargo jumpships as a matter of convenience, but they would not be returning with them. Rather, they were here to use the Pagaliss System as a base of regional operations as they contributed to the ongoing assaults on lizard worlds nearby.

The starport they were rendezvousing at was Atlas-class, and more of a battle station than commerce center. It was the size of two command ships and had enough shields, armor, and weaponry to make it a strongpoint defense rather than a helpless target that the fleets would have to guard, but its primary purpose was still to facilitate traffic to and from the surface now that Varasiss was linked into the Star Force transit grid.

There were dozens of civilian ships too large for the hangar bays docked with an outer ring around the disc-like station, but the warships wouldn’t be availing themselves of that capability. They were sitting themselves into nearby parking orbits and sending over dropships of their own, knowing that they’d be waiting here for at least 2 weeks before joining up with a H’kar raiding fleet and heading out. Giving the troops and crew a chance to get off the warships and have some free time was permissible given the secure nature of the system, with 16 Sentinels and thousands of drones patrolling orbit as the surface of the planet was being slowly reworked.

‘Slow’ was a point of view, and while visible from orbit as small dots the actual construction on three different cities was occurring at a blinding pace. Star Force had devoted an enormous amount of resources to get the first city built to operational status within 15 months, then using a combination of supplies shipped in from the ADZ and local resources either harvested or recycled, they’d begun expanding on it rapidly for another two years before now having branched out to another pair of locations on the planet.

The original city was easily identifiable from orbit as the dropships from the 22nd fleet crossed over to the starport, depositing Bronsor and a number of other Knights and commandos onto the massive station. They were most likely remaining there for their downtime and mingling with the civilian population that was about half Calavari and half a mix of everything else. The ADZ knew that Star Force had big plans for Varasiss going forward and many people wanted in on the action, with a lot of entrepreneurs already having set up shop on the starport while the surface cities were currently reserved only for Calavari citizens and Star Force personnel.

Bronsor was rare in that he was a Calavari, but not part of the Calavari faction within Star Force. He’d joined the mainline fleet long ago and had never had cause to regret that decision. Virtually all of his fellow soldiers were Humans and he had to live by their standards, which were far harder than those the Calavari used because the smaller race was more agile than them, hence they expected mobility that few Calavari could ever hope to match. It had been a struggle for him, but gradually over the years he’d developed enough speed in his big body to keep up with the Humans, to a degree, which allowed his natural bulk to become an asset rather than a liability to the assault teams he was deployed with.

The Knight left his fellow soldiers to their own business and saw about arranging transport down to the surface, which his position allowed. There was little in the way of entertainment facilities down there, unlike the starport that had commerce as its number 1 priority, but Bronsor wasn’t taking this trip to unwind. It was of a personal nature, for he hadn’t set foot on the Calavari capitol for more than 300 years.

He was one of a rare few that still remained that remembered the time before the Calavari had joined Star Force, with most of their current population having been born after that fact. He regretted losing so many friends and kin over the years since, but most of the losses were due to lack of self-sufficiency and them simply choosing to wither away rather than train. He wished that hadn’t been the case, but their choices were their own. Nowadays self-sufficiency wasn’t such an outlandish concept, and any race that was part of Star Force practically lived and breathed it, with those who chose otherwise being the outcasts of society rather than the dominate drivers of it.

Not all Calavari, and not even all Humans, achieved and maintained self-sufficiency, for it was a personal war that one had to continually fight and for whatever reason people would find a reason to quit. The stronger one was the more time they had to reconsider before they lost all their strength, but Bronsor accepted that there would always be the cowardly and the stupid in the galaxy. He just wished that more of his former kin had lived in this era, for he was sure they would have made it had their old culture not held them back from taking the Humans at their word in those early years.

Bronsor was now amongst the oldest of the Calavari, and was by far the strongest. His training had not only maintained his self-sufficiency, but built on it, leveling him up at a modest pace over the years with his Human peers pushing him in ways he’d never expected. A few other Calavari had followed his example and worked their way into the mainline ranks, but none of them could take him hand to hand. Some in the Calavari military had tried, years ago when he’d had some downtime to spend helping to illuminate them as to the greater potential they had, and only two had bested him.

Those two stood more than two feet taller than him and had taken their training to heart. To his credit Bronsor beat both of them in a rematch once he got used to dealing with their larger size, for fighting with and against Humans required different movements, and he’d been momentarily caught off guard in the transition. Credit was due to those who had temporarily bested him though, but since that day he’d never let it happen again.

Bronsor eventually found his way onto a dropship heading down to the original city, with him seeing that it now stretched out across more than 50 miles with densely packed spires built in Calavari fashion. Rather than blocks they were smooth lines with no sharp corners whatsoever, but beyond that it was standard Star Force, with him knowing that those buildings were packed with structural supports and space saving designs to maximize every square mile of the landscape. The Calavari had a slightly different way of doing things than the Mainline did, but they had learned quite a lot from the Humans and assimilated a great deal of their architectural principles.

As the dropship headed for one of the spaceports he could see the gigantic central spires that looked like they were literally holding up the entire city. At present there were five of them, with one located dead center and the other four spread out around it in compass points. More would be added as the cityscape expanded, with Bronsor knowing that each was a shield general/defense turret. If needed a very powerful defensive barrier would go up over top of the city that could block a considerable amount of orbital bombardment while the spires returned fire with the brand new Keema weapons.

Inefficient and power hungry as the prototypes were, they offered so much range and firepower combined that they made the cleansing beams look like toys in comparison. The energy was an exotic type, requiring several rare arc elements to produce, but the result was a clear beam that carried a slight visual distortion with it, making the energy conduit look like glass even in the void of space. It didn’t have any special effects like the Ta’lin’yi did when it hit matter, or the maulers with their shield disrupting nature. No, the Keema were just a straight up, normal weapon that was simply overpowering in intensity.

Each spire had one Keema atop, with lots of secondary weapons, including cleansing beams so they could attack both starships in orbit and troops or aircraft on the planet. So far this was the only location to have any functioning Keema weapons, for the drone warships were too small to accommodate the crude designs. Even Earth’s planetary defense hadn’t constructed any, wanting to wait until better models reduced the size and energy expenditure, but here, near lizard territory, the Calavari had wanted the big guns immediately, just in case the lizards decided to try and retake the planet before Star Force dug in deeper.

Right now the fighting was still going their way, but the lizard worlds were getting harder to take. Bronsor and the others had their work cut out for them in the coming years, but that was what they were here for. This little trip down to the surface was an addendum, and had there not been time nor the opportunity Bronsor wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

But so long as he was here, he was going to take the moment to revisit the planet.

When the dropship landed in the city he exited it with the other passengers then promptly let himself get lost in the cityscape and just roam, tasting the distinctive air once again and having a flood of memories rush back. The Calavari were better for the changes that had been made to them, and eternal thanks to the Humans for that, but something had always been missing for them, and standing on the surface of Varasiss again he now understood what it was.

Legitimacy.

For three centuries they’d been refugees, despite the numerous former Calavari worlds they’d already retaken and begun repopulating, and even though Bronsor didn’t think of himself in that way, and hadn’t for a very long time, something deep inside of him that had been buried came to the surface with the taste of the planet’s atmosphere, prompting him to head for the city’s perimeter and find his way out into the wilds surrounding the construction sites.

It took him a while to pass through and around them, for there were so many construction mechs working that it looked like the planet belonged to a race of metallic giants, but eventually he found some clear space and jogged off through the grassy plains on an impulsive workout and just got some distance from himself and the city, feeling the natural gravity of the planet that further brought out the old memories.

The sights, sounds, and smells of the grasslands were the same as they had been when he’d first come here, so long ago. He hadn’t been born on Varasiss, but he’d done his military training here and immediately considered it to be home, as did virtually all Calavari. There was something unique about the planet, and only now did he truly understand what it was after all his training and experience gained with Star Force.

It was pride, and knowing that this was their home and that they belonged here. Even now that his own pride was centered in the mainline fleet and his acceptance by the Humans into their hallowed ranks, a piece of him remembered that old pride and being back here, with the planet no longer in enemy hands and rightfully returned to the Calavari, the long missing piece in his buried psyche was finally unlocked and he could feel himself healing the last of the lingering damage from the near destruction of his race.

And being here, now, made those memories feel as if they’d just been yesterday, almost as if part of his brain had shut down during all these years of service with Star Force and he was permitting it to finally wake up. With it came the pain that would always be with him, for the losses suffered were not something that one ever forgot. The memories could be set aside, along with all others, until they became relevant again, but the key to healing wasn’t in forgetting or forgiving, it was in getting oneself on the proper path…and a hefty dose of payback.

The Calavari now had it. Varasiss was their capitol again and millions of Calavari citizens were flocking back to their homeworld as fast as the infrastructure expansion could accommodate them, but above and beyond that Star Force was investing heavily in the system, intending to make it one of the rare few cornerstones in the overall empire, or so the rumors went. From the mass of construction already having occurred in just a few years, Bronsor didn’t have any doubts as to Star Force’s intent for the system.

With a lot of running and a loss of a sense of time, the unarmored Calavari eventually made his way across the grasslands to a clump of trees that created a little island in the otherwise flat and empty horizon preceding the main forest still some 20 miles away. He decided to stop there, slowing to a walk as he got to the edge and exploring the bit of untouched countryside that was a rarity on the planet after two massive wars had been fought on its surface.

These trees were large and old, telling Bronsor that they too had been here before the lizards had invaded. He walked over to one of them and brushed his bare hand against the slick, smooth bark trying to soak in as many sights and sensations as he could and reconnect. When he touched the tree he let his hand linger, eventually closing his eyes and taking several deep, slow breaths, then opening his eyes again.

What he saw was victory. After so many years and battles and losses and horrors, the Calavari stood here victorious. The lizards were being beaten back and the Nestafar were gone. Bronsor and only a few others would truly appreciate this, and he felt both isolated and privileged to have that unique perspective. He was one of the last survivors from that time period, and now he stood here as a representative of all his kin that had fallen.

“We won,” he said, speaking to the dead. “We won.”

Several hours later Bronsor made his return run across the grasslands, having put the last bits of unfinished business to rest in his memories as his mind turned to the future as the horizon in front of him was filled with the spires of the ever growing Calavari city. He felt so small compared to them and the grandiose landscape he was in that it was both humbling and exhilarating. He was a part of something so vast and complicated that he could never hope to understand it all, but he didn’t have to. Star Force had earned his trust long ago and never given him cause to second guess them, and his people had assimilated to their way enough that they were now equally Star Force and also deserving of that trust.

That meant Bronsor could revel in all that they’d accomplished together without having to be responsible for anything other than his tiny role in all of it…and he knew that’s the way it worked for everyone else, even the trailblazers, for right now they had no idea he was out here running across the wilds getting in a workout. That workout was his responsibility and totally off their radar. He held up his end, they’d hold up theirs. That was how Star Force worked and downright thrived, not through forcing or constricting people into a philosophy and supplanting their own judgement with an exterior edict, but in trusting each person to figure things out on their own and do what was needed without monitoring or nudging.

The population in general would always have losers, in various forms, but so long as enough people held true to their personal responsibilities they could carry the rest of the living baggage with ease. Bronsor was part of an empire that thrived on freedom and trust, giving people time to experiment and learn and fail, then grow stronger from it if they chose. Some wouldn’t, some would, but those that did would add to their ranks, for they would never grow old and the longer Star Force remained in existence the greater the numbers of the responsible ones would grow and overshadow the losers.

Those would eventually die off from their own stupidity and laziness, but Bronsor and the others would remain indefinitely, continuing to grow and learn from each other, further strengthening the empire in ways that the Calavari had never before dreamed possible. Bronsor was literally living a dream right now, after having fought his way through a very long gauntlet to earn it.

And him being here now wasn’t just for himself, but in memory of all those who had fallen along the way. Not in some misplaced sense of debt, but in the understanding that what Star Force was had to be protected. It was too valuable, too sacred to allow to be damaged, let alone destroyed, and being here, now, with all of the past memories fresh in mind, he realized more than ever that the galaxy and life itself was more than just chaos and death. There was good and light to be found amongst the darkness, and he had finally come to it.

For the sake of the fallen, he would protect Star Force in every facet to his dying breath, including himself. He was part of Star Force, and his own body was a battleground that only he could fight on. Saving and strengthening others was important, but it would never be more important than the battle within. He was a piece of Star Force territory, no matter what planet he was on or what circumstances he found himself in. Maintaining that piece was his sole responsibility, and he’d never compromise it.

Others would eventually tire of the training and fighting, ‘retiring’ to civilian life and gradually losing their self-sufficiency, perhaps to wake up and realize their mistake before it was too late, perhaps not. He would never go down that road, for it would be a betrayal of who and what he was, in addition to being a betrayal of all those who had fallen and not lived to see this golden age. He would not die for Star Force, he would fight until he was dead for it, always striving to survive, persist, and overcome…but never sacrifice.

For sacrifice was the same as surrendering, and was a betrayal of all that Star Force was. They didn’t stand for something, they were something. Something real and tangible, not an idea or belief. Star Force was the literal light in the galaxy, from every building to warship, every uniform to cookie, and every Scionate to Human. They were all Star Force, but each with their own path and purpose, right down to the shoes that were protecting his feet as he ran across the grasslands.

Bronsor wasn’t just fighting for the light, he was the light. And as such he could affect great things within the galaxy…or be consumed by the forces of darkness, whether they be an invading army or the insidious corruption of apathy and laziness. This was real, not academic, and for the first time he truly understood how closed off he had been after the fall of the old Calavari empire, with the parts of him that truly cared closing themselves off in virtual denial of the horrors around him.

But turn away from it as he may have, he was never out of the game. He was always live, and had found a way through it all, which is why this victory now felt visceral, for the threats were still out there. He wasn’t safe, Star Force wasn’t safe, and they never would be. Life was a fight, one battle to the next with no guarantees, and if the light of the galaxy was going to persist it had to earn its way forward, one day, one mission at a time. There would never be a finish line. Battles would be won, but the war would never end.

So what was the point of it all? Bronsor now knew, both from what he had learned and the perspective he had given his age and all he had witnessed. The purpose of life was to be the one in the right, to be the light and fight the darkness, in all its forms. Now that he was here and he knew what the light truly was he felt fulfilled, but not finished. Never finished. He was complete but always with more work to do, more enemies to fight, more workouts to complete.

Life was a neverending story, and the ultimate victory lay in being the light, moment to moment.

That is what Star Force was, and the transformative cleansing that Varasiss had undergone stood as a testament to a vital fact that Bronsor would never forget.

He was Star Force.

Ghostblade

1

May 18, 2783

Solar System

Arwen

Sophia sat on a short cliff edge, her feet dangling over and nearly touching the rocky ground below as she looked out at the tiny dot that was the sun on the horizon through her faceplate. She glanced down and ran her fingers through the sandy soil that covered the small planet on which a number of Clans had made their home centuries ago. Arwen was part of the Elvish cluster in high orbit around Sol, though that grouping was more nostalgic now than geographic given that their differing orbital tracts had slowly pulled them out of relative position to one another.

With the navigational advancements over the years it hadn’t mattered. Everywhere in the Solar System was easily accessible, no longer the huge distances that separated civilization from the frontier…though in truth the remoteness stayed the same and it was the growth of the empire that had made everything feel so small and nearby. That was why she was here now, outside the colonies that dotted the landscape and sitting in an envirosuit on the natural surface, feeling the low gravity along with the sense of just how empty everything was.

Inside the cities everyone was close, friendly, and working together for the benefit of Clan Snowstorm, but out here it was still empty space, with the nearest planet being beyond her reach. It was like the technology had given everyone a false sense of security, for Arwen was an inhospitable landscape despite the addition of a carbon dioxide atmosphere that Star Force had introduced to bring the freezing temperatures up to only slightly chilly. They were so far away from the star that little light reached this far out, and the planet was so small that it didn’t have sufficient internal heat production to do much of anything with.

Sophia was sitting on top of a giant frozen rock orbiting a hot star so far out that it looked benign to her sitting just above the horizon, soon to dip below it and usher in the nighttime sky. The ground around her was a mix of boulders and sand, most of which was colored grey with hints of red, and looked for all the world like one of the last places anyone would like to live, but to her it had always been home.

Funny though, because she’d rarely been outdoors to see the planet itself. She’d lived her entire life inside the colonies, having gone outside only during her maturia training some 140 years ago. She’d never even visited the other four Clans’ colonies on the planet, staying within Snowstorm’s holdings and never feeling the need to venture elsewhere, for there was always plenty to do right here.

But that was all about to change.

Sophia was about to leave Arwen, along with the rest of her Clan. While technically it was her choice of whether or not to go the fact that all the Snowstorms were leaving the Solar System left her with no real options. A few would remain on their Clan’s piece of Antarctica, but every other territory slot and orbital station they possessed here was being traded away to other Clans in exchange for resources, agreements, or whatever other deals Oni had worked out. Sophia might be a civilian tech, but she wasn’t sure about the wisdom of the trailblazer this time. Everything they had built up here in Sol was going to be wiped out in a single trade, including her home.

She’d been born on Arwen, gone through her maturia training here, and had lived amongst the other 3.2 million Snowstorms on the planet her entire life. And while it was true she’d only seen the interior of a colony city that entire time, this lump of rock she was now directly sitting on still struck her as home, no matter how lifeless and empty it looked right at the moment.

She knew she wasn’t the only one in this position, for everyone else in the Clan was having to make the same move all the way out to the Bsidd Region. Apparently Oni had decided to uproot the entire Clan for the chance of colonizing an entire system of their own, as only a few others had done to date. Snowstorm never had a planet to itself, let alone an entire star system, and up until now they’d consolidated all of their holdings inside Sol while others expanded outward, often trading the Snowstorms bits of territory or ships in order to facilitate that expansion. Sophia’s Clan was ranked #12 in terms of land territory owned within Sol after so many centuries of trades and shrewd maneuvers, but now they were going to give it all up?

But then again, therein lay the problem. That #12 ranking was the highest her Clan possessed in any field or subcategory. In truth the Snowstorms were at the bottom of the barrel, ranking 90th or worse in 73% of all tracked categories. Oni had stated as much when she’d explained the move to the entire Clan, intending for this to be a rebirth that could eventually catch Snowstorm up with the others, despite the fact that they’d have to start building from scratch.

But Sophia rejected that. Her Clan wasn’t bad at anything, the other Clans just happened to be as good as they were…and then some. Snowstorm had grown its population by 3% over just the past 5 years, with industry up 2% and resource collection up a whopping 8% over the same timeframe. They were a thriving little empire of their own within Star Force, but the way Oni said it made her think that she was disappointed with the Clan and that something had to change.

Abandoning everything they’d built up over the centuries to date seemed immensely stupid, especially since Sophia understood how long it took to build infrastructure like the cities sitting on the horizon and the much closer one towering behind her. It wasn’t something you could just buy, no matter how many credits you had. Clan Snowstorm might be rich as hell right now with all the trades Oni had made, but they were soon to be homeless and no amount of credits was going to change that.

Sophia knew she could transfer to another Clan without much trouble, but she was a Snowstorm at heart and couldn’t bear to switch allegiances, even if it meant her staying in Sol, or even on Arwen…and going Mainline was even worse. Their military might be able to hold their own with the Clans now and then, but their civilian populations were considerably looser, often to the point of dysfunctional. Everyone within her Clan, no matter what position they held, wanted to see Snowstorm rise in the ranks and become a larger power within the Star Force empire, and even the lazier ones would chip in now and then to help make that happen.

There was no such sentiment within Mainline. It was everyone for themselves, with a core group that held everything together while the rest of the population was made up of freeloaders. That excess baggage was a big reason why the Clans were better than Mainline in almost every way, save for in terms of population. Mainline numbers made the entirety of the Clans a minuscule minority and constituted the bulk of the Human population. As it was, there were almost as many Humans in Axius as there were in the Clans…which was something else that Oni had pointed out.

The trailblazer said she wanted to issue a request to the Snowstorm population, which included Sophia and every other female member of the Clan, to make every reasonable effort to start getting knocked up and pumping out more younglings. A lot of girls like Sophia had never given birth nor cared to, focusing instead on their self-sufficiency and increasing their skills, which in her case centered on computer software. She knew she could take a temporary hit, get pregnant, miss a lot of training and become a walking blimp for a few months, then give birth and move on without losing her self-sufficiency. She was strong enough now to take a lot of hits before pushing her under the regenerative baseline, and if it was for the benefit of the Clan she’d even consider doing it.

Oni has said that she had never issued that request because despite all of the territory the Snowstorms had acquired within Sol they were always boxed in, having to work with limited resources and space-saving measures. Sophia found that a little odd, especially sitting outside on the empty surface between colonies seeing how much unused room there was, but it was true that she couldn’t look in any direction without seeing cityscape at some point, even if it was just the tallest towers rising up over the horizon.

The idea of having an entire planet to themselves was appealing, let alone one bigger than Earth. The system Oni had procured for them had not one, but seven worlds that size or larger, with a total of 64 planetoids that were colonizable, plus a pair of gas giants, one of which was so huge it was near to becoming its own star. That meant this new home for Clan Snowstorm had more territory than every planetoid within Sol combined, and that stat literally blew Sophia’s mind.

But there was nothing there…at all. It was empty now that a Bsidd fleet with Snowstorm assistance had wiped it clean of the lizards, like they were doing across so many other star systems in their ever growing region. By now the majority of all Star Force troops were Bsidd, with their numbers continuing to skyrocket as all of Star Force, Clan Snowstorm included, funneled resources towards them in order for their civilization to be able to grow rapidly enough in infrastructure to accommodate such a population explosion.

And it was paying dividends, no doubt. The Bsidd had taken more worlds in recent years than the Calavari had, and were kicking the crap out of the lizards in a region where they had been claiming systems with only a handful of ships. Those easy grabs were being gobbled up by the Bsidd and the few other units that worked along with them as they simultaneously pounded the lizard strongholds beyond Alpha Region, adding territory to Star Force’s holdings while all the time expanding the border of the Bsidd Region with it blossoming upward and downward on the galactic plane simultaneously.

It was into that new region that Clan Snowstorm would be moving, and very near the border, far away from potential help should they be attacked or fail to set up the necessary infrastructure to house their population, but Oni has stated that was a challenge befitting the Clan and reminiscent of its early history when she had first founded it. Sophia had to take her word for that, for she had been born long after, and while she agreed this would definitely qualify as hitting the ‘reset’ button, the tech still felt it was a tremendous waste of everything they’d built to date.

Technically none of their colonies would be wasted, for other Clans would be taking them over and populating them with their own people…and the thought of someone else sleeping in her quarters and her bed just irked Sophia to no end, but what was she going to do? It was either move out with her Clan or abandon it, and she liked the latter a lot less than the former.

The move wasn’t going to take place immediately, but over the course of 7 years. The first startup elements were already on their way, with the population of Arwen starting to filter out somewhere in year two and finish up by year four. It would take nearly 2 months of travel time just to get to where they were going, and then they’d have to live in their ships for as long as it took to get suitable colonies on the surface of the third largest planet built. It had an environment much like Earth’s, only a bit on the warmer side, plus the view of the big gas giant that it orbited around, which technically made it a moon.

Sophia wouldn’t need an envirosuit to walk about there, and the planet was 12% covered with water, giving the Clan’s aquatics division a badly needed playground, for all of their training was accomplish in simulators and indoor pools…which was probably part of the reason they had hit that dreaded #100 ranking several times over the past century in that division, despite their individual scores gradually creeping upward. Again, the rankings were all about competition, not performance, for all the Clans were continuously improving.

The other planets/moons in the system wouldn’t be used for decades, if not centuries to come, but they’d be there for Clan Snowstorm to colonize down the road, with them not having to worry about expansion room for the next millennium. How many girls would respond to the call for a population surge when the time came was a question mark, but Sophia knew that many would. As it was some people only gave birth to continue the Clan without having any sentimental attachment, given that the infants immediately went into a maturia after birth…while a few others chose to make themselves baby factories, getting laid as often as they could and attracting the strongest and hottest guys for the purpose of ‘reproduction,’ or at least that was their excuse.

Either way, it seemed to work for most of them, but Sophia knew she’d never make a career out of it. If there was a need she might contribute one or two, but then it’d be back to normal training. The up side would be her software skills didn’t require a big deviation in lifestyle, for sitting in a chair working a console and sitting in a chair watching vids while you increased in volume weren’t all dissimilar. She could probably keep working on projects during the pregnancy, unlike others that had physical jobs. In fact, she’d probably have to in order to keep from going crazy from boredom.

The more she thought about it the less she liked the idea, but knowing that it’d only be temporary Sophia knew she could step into the stinger if necessary and take one for the team. It just didn’t feel right though, for the idea of her doing that in the past had always centered around adding to her home’s population…and now they were totally abandoning Arwen and the Solar System itself.

She just couldn’t get past that. Sophia felt so much of a connection to this world that she didn’t know how she could ever leave it, and scribbled some meaningless doodles in the dust to her left as the sun finally dipped below the horizon. The stars took over prominence within the sky, added to by the orbital habitats gleaming alongside them. They were mere specs from her point of view, for they were situated high up around the tiny world, but several starports were much larger when visible, though at the moment none were within sight range.

They’d be orbiting around soon enough, but for the moment it was just the stars and the lights of the surrounding cities acting as luminous beacons within the darkness. The ground beneath Sophia was covered in shadows, but even the lighted regions were dim, making her feel the isolation even more. If her own world felt like this, how would months away from here feel?

She didn’t know, and it bothered her right up until the first low oxygen warning pinged inside her helmet. Sophia checked the levels and saw that she still had over 3 hours left, but she knew better than to flirt with that deadline and picked herself up off the ground, accidentally throwing her body into a slight jump in the low gravity. She’d lived her entire life on this rock, but had always known normal levels within the colonies, making her home feel yet even more foreign to her, despite the pangs of nostalgia she was getting just looking off into the distance.

That was when she knew she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just walk away from this place one day heading off into the unknown, so as she headed back over the kilometer or so that she’d walked from the external gate she tried to figure out what the best option she had was. When she got into the airlock and the normal gravity settled her body her mind wasn’t dissuaded. This was her home and she couldn’t just abandon it, but in a few years’ time it was going to be filled with Clan Thunderfist. The location might be the same, but without her fellow Clan members it still wouldn’t be home.

“Have a nice walk?” the tech who helped her out of her envirosuit asked as she came through the airlock and disconnected her helmet.

“Did more sitting than walking…and no, not really.”

“Something wrong?” he said, taking the head piece and setting it on a side table before coming back to help Sophia unbutton the armored carapace covering her body.

“I hate this evacuation plan.”

“You’re not the only one with misgivings,” he assured her, “but you can’t argue that it’s a big challenge.”

“It’s the throwing away what we’ve got here that’s the problem.”

“Kind of has to happen if you want a clean slate.”

“Our slate is fine as is,” she said, getting out of the torso section. “I can get the rest.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, carrying the section over and sitting it next to the helmet in front of a row of booths that had dozens of other suits. “Are you going to try and get transferred to Earth?”

“No. Arwen is my home.”

The man frowned. “You’re not thinking of jumping Clans are you?”

“Never,” she said firmly.

“You think Oni is making a mistake?”

“I don’t know. She’s never steered us wrong before, I just can’t shake this bad feeling.”

“You’ve still got a few years to work it out.”

“No,” Sophia said, pulling her thin leg out of her right extended boot. “I’m not waiting. I’m going to volunteer to go now.”

“Why? If you don’t want to leave…”

“Because if I go now I’ll still have a home to come back to. If I wait, I’ll be walking away for good, and I just can’t bring myself to do that.”

“It’s a long trip out there.”

“I know, but I’ll be able to come back at least once.”

“And won’t have to leave facing an unknown future?”

“Something like that. I also realized that I can’t spent the next two years waiting to find out. I’ll drive myself nuts in the meantime.”

“What’s your specialty?”

“Software engineer.”

“Not sure they’ll have too many slots for that open right now.”

“I’ve got construction as an auxiliary skillset, along with six others. I’ll fill some slot they need.”

“Always on the move,” he commented, accepting the last pieces of the envirosuit from her.

“This time literally,” she said, friendly waving him goodbye as she walked out of the station and back into the rest of the colony.

2

October 15, 2783

Frost System (Bsidd Region)

Flake

Sophia rode on a Dragon-class dropship along with over 200 other Snowstorms down from the cargo jumpship watching the view via a series of wall-mounted displays and getting a view of their new homeworld as they dipped into the atmosphere. The moon was huge and covered in pinks and greens, for the natural foliage seemed to predominate in those two colors. There were a pair of ice caps on either pole and long streaks of blue that made up the planet’s narrow oceans that almost connected the two, bracketed by high mountain ranges easily visible from orbit.

The rest of the planet was more or less flat and covered with forest as far as Sophia could see. She’d run through the reconnaissance reports earlier, but seeing it here now, in person, was an entirely different experience. There was so much open space that it literally felt mindboggling, and for the first time since she’d volunteered for and acquired an advance slot on a construction crew did she start to wonder if Oni really did know what she was doing by orchestrating this move.

And the planet, or rather moon…she wasn’t going to get used to thinking of it as such since it was way bigger than Arwen…had been given a proper Clan name of ‘flake’ rather than one assigned prior to their acquisition of the system. In fact, all the planets/moons were getting fitting names, which was another sign that this was indeed going to become home as soon as they set down proper roots…which she was seeing none of from orbit.

There weren’t any cities whatsoever, and since her volunteering had occurred prior to any major construction reports getting back to Sol she didn’t know where they were actually heading. When the dropship decelerated and hit the thick lower atmosphere she was surprised to see them dart off across the water, leaving the land behind entirely and her wondering if her Clan had started with an aquatic colony. That would be very odd if they did, but at this point she and the others were just along for the ride and would have to wait and see.

About 20 minutes later a dot appeared on the watery horizon that eventually grew into a large island, on top of which a few spires were visible. When they got closer Sophia could also see a large structure jotting off the side and into the ocean, which she recognized as an aquatics facility. Smiling, she realized that for a startup this was in fact the perfect location, giving all aspects of the Snowstorms a chance to get up and running immediately.

As the dropship crossed over the wide beaches and into the vast interior it flew through a forest of pink with only a few dots of green here and there. Several more minutes and they finally came to an artificial clearing and landed on a dirt field, with instructions for the passengers to debark immediately. Sophia got up out of her seat with the others and moved out, having no personal belongings with her. As an advance team they couldn’t be burdened with extra cargo and wouldn’t have personal quarters, rather being bunked in a communal facility that would rotate people in and out.

She’d have a room, but a tiny one. How long it would be hers she didn’t know, but as more people came in she expected to get moved around so she and the others would be living off the equipment rooms rather than their own collections of clothing and accoutrements.

A trio of hovering vehicles stood waiting for them outside the dropship with the passengers splitting up for them as instructed. Sophia got in the line for the second one, noticing the dozens of other dropships and transports spread out on the field around them…and the proper spaceport beyond that was full of ships on the tarmac. This dirt extension had obviously been made recently, suggesting that her Clan was serious about getting this startup going as fast as possible, and she found herself beginning to share in that urgency and a bit of the excitement that seemed to be permeating the air.

The gravity on the planet was a bit heavy, but as soon as she stepped into the vehicle the artificial gravity took over and returned the feel of her legs to normal. She found a seat along with the others and before long the ‘bus’ was on its way, taking them to who knew where given the fact that there were no windows and only a panel showing what the drivers saw. They were in a forward compartment while everyone else was in the back, protected behind decently thick plating, as was standard for all Clan Snowstorm vehicles.

The ground transport moved off through the grid and eventually came to the forest edge, following a dirt road between the pink trees until they gained altitude a few kilometers later to overshoot a trio of construction mechs that were actively adding to the road. Sophia’s vehicle skimmed the treetops, flying the rest of the way out to a small patch of forest carved out of the mass of trees. There they found another dirt landing field settled up next to piles of crates and a few prefab structures.

When she exited the vehicle there was a processing station, so everyone got in line and waited their turn. When Sophia got to the station that was little more than an archway with a holographic terminal attached, her ID was confirmed and the attendant gave her a designator chip, then pointed in the direction she needed to go. With that being all the handholding that was going to happen, the tech walked in that general direction while fingering the chip and activating the holographic interface.

Watching to make sure she didn’t get run over or stepped on by some of the few mechs moving around, she ran through the instructions and saw that she’d been assigned to an excavation team that was carving out the bedrock at this site in order to establish the substructure of a mining station. She was going to be part of the material relocation rather than the actual digging, which meant she got to play with all the dirt and rock that came up.

Finding an exact location that she was supposed to report to, Sophia got her bearings and began jogging towards one of the distant prefab buildings, feeling her shoes sink into a few patches of mud enough that it came up to her ankles. One time she lost her shoe entirely, having to stop and go back for it. Luckily she hadn’t been wearing any socks, otherwise they would have been dirty as hell by now.

She slipped the shoe on and tried to do a better job of navigating around the muddiest spots, but with the trees having been recently cleared away there was no grass or moss or anything else to stand on until she got to her destination and stepped up onto civilization in the form of ground plates looking like huge, flat legos that had been connected together to create a solid base on which the building and several crate stacks had been placed.

Sophia jogged across it, leaving muddy footprints that were far smaller than the ones the mechs had left, and was waved over by a woman standing near the entrance.

“About time you guys got here,” she said, seeing a few more people trailing behind Sophia. “We’re half an hour behind schedule already, and that means the diggers have to wait until we clear out their transition piles before they can continue.”

“Where do you need me?” Sophia asked, handing her chip to the handler so she could scan it and read her file on a datapad.

“Equipment room. Get into a work suit and grab a bite to eat. We’re going to be pulling some long hours until we get more hands on site.”

“Got it,” Sophia said as she entered through the small doorway and went inside, stopping to pull off her shoes and go barefoot to keep from spreading mud on the mostly clean floor. She followed the hallway until she got to the first intersection, taking a right and heading for the equipment room that was based on a standard design that she was familiar with, for she’d lived in one of these structures before during training exercises.

She padded her way into the elongated bay and dumped her shoes in a cleansing bin where they’d be recycled into the communal closet, which she now walked over to and pulled out the items in her size, then took them over to a personal booth and shut herself inside. She stripped down and hopped in the shower, cleaning off all the mud before stepping into her clean clothes, first a set of underwear, then a thin shirt and shorts. From there she left her station and ran barefooted over to a nearby room that had a number of prepackaged foodstuffs. She grabbed and ate several quickly, finishing off with a bottle of water before heading back to her booth.

She used the restroom inside then pulled on her armorish clothing. It was entirely flexible, but sealed against the outside environment from the neck down if need be. She left the gloves and helmet back on the racks, knowing just how warm it was outside. Snugging up the boots to fit the exact size of her feet and ankles, Sophia grabbed her ID chip and put it in a concealed pocket, then headed for the lounge/information center that was only a few running strides down the short hall.

“Good to go,” she reported to the woman there.

“Take number 6 and get busy loading with these two.”

“Let’s get to it,” she said, glancing at the two men who got up out of their seats to join her. “I’m Sophia Brent.”

“Nathan Pergusson,” one said, giving her a slight nod.

“Jarod Grembly. Looks like we’re driving. Try not to ding the rim.”

“No promises,” she said with a smile as the three of them walked off and eventually out of what would be their home for the next few days at minimum. Outside there was a small parking lot nearby, in which there was a lot of open air cargo trucks and a handful of excavation mechs. She found the one with a big number 6 on it and climbed up the handholds on the right leg while the two men went to their trucks.

“Been a while,” Sophia said to herself as she got past the waist on the huge mech and climbed inside the cockpit that was located on the chest between two huge arms. It was open to the air save for a thin layer of transparent material. Had this been a military variety that would never have happened, but given that this mech had no weapons or armor it was best to keep it as functional as possible, with its design geared towards channeling all functionality towards earthmoving.

Sophia slid into the seat and strapped herself in, for this variety didn’t have artificial gravity. It was a big, beefy workhorse that stood twice as tall as a thor, with it literally swallowing Sophia up inside its chest cavity.

“Ok, big guy. Let’s get to work,” she said, powering up the mech and getting a comm channel from one of the trucks. She opened it and keyed to have all transmissions from that source automatically routed through to her cockpit, then did the same with the other truck.

“You ready, sexy?”

“So that’s how it’s going to be?” she asked humorously.

“All we have time for, unfortunately.”

“Awfully confident…mech checks out. I’m good to go.”

“Take the lead.”

Sophia blew out a breath and triggered the computer-controlled movements to begin walking the bipedal giant forward. The first few steps were jerky, but once a little momentum was built up it traveled smoothly with her turning on a heading towards the mountains of material next to the dig site about two kilometers off. She walked it over there, seeing not a single other mech in action, but noticing the drilling spigots silent as they held position over some of the mounds.

Had everything been up and running they would have been pouring material out for her and others to pick up and load into the trucks, and while they were silent that meant no digging was taking place on the other side in the pit.

“Time to get this show moving,” she said, walking up to the nearest mound and laying a waypoint down for where she wanted her trucks to position. The second one hung back, but the first one came up and sat square on the spot while Sophia positioned the mech in between the vehicle and the mound.

She shoved the left arm into the dirt/rock mix and activated the rotary claws which fed the loose material into a conveyor that ran through the shoulders of the mech, over her cockpit, and down to the other arm. Sophia set it in the bowl-like truck bed and began pouring material into the deep bucket, seeing the hovering vehicle bob a bit with the extra weight being added.

Using a hand control on the left, she swiped the receptacle across the nearest part of the mound in a line, then reversed direction for another before repositioning her giant metallic feet half a step closer as the material was being eaten up at a fast rate. The truck, however, was bigger than the mech, though only half as tall. It stretched out in a long rectangular barge style, and it took a fair amount of time for Sophia to fill up half of it.

At that point the drilling spigots began working again, but only two of them. They began adding material to an empty slot two down from where she was along with an almost full pile, anticipating that there would be more room opening up shortly so they could begin low scale continuous digging operations. That meant they could only operate as quickly as Sophia could move the material out, so she was the pace setter as long as her pair of trucks could keep up with her.

Eventually the first was filled and it signaled to her with a departure ping. Sophia shut down the feeds and lifted the arm up and out of the way, then pinged the truck back that it was clear. It floated off slowly, carrying a huge load, with the empty one sliding in right behind it to waste no time. Sophia began loading it immediately while the first truck headed for the forest edge where it lifted up over the treetops and carried the material several kilometers away to another clearing that a pair of mechs were in the process of expanding upon. Infantry units were in play and visible on the construction version of a battlemap, locating and chasing off any wildlife in the area so they wouldn’t get chopped to bits in the clearing process.

The truck passed over them and headed for the small open section that had been cleared and leveled, then it opened its bottom doors and dumped the full load in the center of it. The vehicle shot into the air a moment before the anti-grav compensated, then it closed its doors and headed on the return trip as a third mech woke from its statue-like stance and headed over to the pile, intending to work it down into a meter thick bed, compacting it with a series of rollers in order to lay the base for an artificial mountain they’d be constructing.

In the future that mountain would be cannibalized and eaten away by processing machines for raw materials, but right now those facilities hadn’t been built yet and wouldn’t be coming online for weeks at the minimum. Right now the digging crews from multiple sites needed somewhere to put the dirt, and this would be it.

Over the next 24 hours there would be more mechs and trucks coming into play as the influx of personnel arrived to run the machines, which would also be added to by subsequent orbital drops. It would be awhile before surface factories started making any useable products, meaning that right now it was all about earthmoving and setting up some basic, permanent facilities built from materials being shipped down from the jumpships sitting in orbit around the enormous moon.

And there were sites like this all across the island, most of which were just getting up and running. Sophia really had gotten here at the outset, and while this planet was definitely still on the frontier and very wild, with every bit of dirt she moved was helping to make it into their new home. The feelings of unrest at having to abandon Arwen would never totally leave her, but now having a hand in the construction of this world she was able to put aside the constant worry and dive into the work, for helping her Clan was her foremost priority, and if this was the course that Oni wanted for them, then so be it.

It might still be a stupid move but it was the trailblazer’s to make, and the Snowstorms would make it work eventually, no matter how much they lost in the transition.

3

December 2, 2783

Frost System (Bsidd Region)

Flake

Marquis Sheen sat at her workstation onboard the jumpship Polar Veil, a Clan cargo ship that was already half empty after only a week of unloading, which was quite a feat considering its size. It was a product of Clan Humungousaur and had been traded to Sheen’s Clan along with a lot of other equipment and payment promises going forward for part of their territory on Titan. The cargo ship design was the largest within Star Force, but had a disproportionate amount of its bulk dedicated to engines, making it more maneuverable and a touch faster than your traditional jumpships.

It wasn’t cheap, by any stretch of the imagination, and economically speaking you could have built 5 Mammoth-class cargo ships for the same amount of resources, which was why Mainline and most of the Clans had never bothered to go that route. As more technologies were unlocked from the pyramid the size of Star Force’s ships was getting larger and larger, but the Humungousaurs had taken the leap forward without the necessary tech and gotten around the lack thereof through innovation and by cannibalizing a good part of what would have been storage areas for additional engine power and other ship functions.

The Island-class design definitely lived up to its name, and while there were only 16 in existence this one alone had brought in its holds enough foodstuffs and collapsed prefab buildings to set up the next expansion site on Flake by itself. The primary site in the ocean was progressing well, but now that Sheen was here with a much larger fleet they were going to start construction efforts on a number of other sites across the moon. All would be resource gathering operations while the ocean island was going to be the focal point for the influx of population and technology to come. She knew she had to get its factories up and running before the surge of raw materials began arriving, and so far everything was proceeding according to the schedule she and Oni had worked out.

The trailblazer and several other Administrators would be overseeing the rest of the evacuation of their facilities in Sol while the Marquis was now here in Frost to stay. Oni had wanted her here early and she’d agreed that the events of the coming months had to come off without a hitch else they’d risk jeopardizing the transition. Cities couldn’t build themselves, and without proper infrastructure there wouldn’t be room to put Clan Snowstorm’s population when it fully arrived. As it was they were going to have to make use of a lot of prefab settlements just to get the people off the ships initially, with the permanent structures soaking them up as they eventually came online.

Oni knew this was going to be a camping trip these first few years, and it was imperative that they hold to the evacuation schedules that they’d negotiated with the other Clans. If they had to delay the others wouldn’t penalize them for that, for the Clans weren’t cutthroat with each other, but they were professional and not meeting the deadline was something that just wouldn’t do. Each Clan had its own objectives within the Empire and would be making schedules of its own with regards to the new acquisitions, so if the Snowstorms couldn’t hold up to what they’d promised they’d mess up a lot of other Clans’ plans.

That was unacceptable, for the Clans didn’t sabotage each other. They always wanted to outdo each other, but that was from sheer performance. The stronger each Clan became the stronger Star Force would be overall, so the impetus was always on improvement and success, never destruction and hampering one another. Sheen knew this better than virtually everyone else because she’d been running the Clan for the past 129 years. Technically Oni was in command, but as a warrior needed she was off fighting most of the time and only kept in contact to stay appraised of ongoing events and to troubleshoot new endeavors going forward.

The routine business of keeping the Clan running smoothly was the job of a Marquis, with the administratorial position requiring constant oversight. Having all Snowstorm possessions within a single star system had allowed her to micromanage to a far greater extent than the Clans that had pieces of planets across the ADZ in their possession, and it would be no different here. The lag in communications was mere minutes compared to the days and weeks elsewhere.

Right now there was a split, because the Frost System wasn’t even hooked up to the grid yet, meaning all communications had to come through courier ship. That necessitated her presence here and other Administrators back in Sol, for one couldn’t keep track of the other, even on relative delay, without the communications grid link. Here was the more important task so here Sheen had come, and the Polar Veil was making for the perfect orbital command post now that the cargo was flowing out of its holds and numerous prefab structures were being set up in the empty spaces, creating a makeshift city inside that would grow with select personnel as they came in.

And here she would stay until the primary surface site reached a prerequisite level of completeness…which wasn’t expected to occur for the next seven years. This entire move was a gambit that would have the Snowstorms reduced to a nomadic existence in the near future, and it was one that Sheen had not wanted to undertake. Oni had eventually convinced her of the long term advantage and the Marquis had agreed to accept it as a challenge, though they were giving up everything they had built up in Sol for the opportunity.

That development was what was now funding this opportunity. Director Davis was still masterminding all territorial expansions along with the trailblazers and had told Oni that he wasn’t going to allow for such a valuable and distant acquisition of the system unless they could do better at developing it than any of the other factions. In fact they were so close to the lizard border that well over 60% of the Clan Snowstorm fleet now sat in orbit to safeguard the construction efforts. The rest was out helping the Bsidd fight the lizards on nearby worlds and would continue to do so going forward, with their Clan literally putting down roots in this frontier region and taking a personal interest in its defense.

Such a determined effort was what had convinced Davis to agree to Oni’s request, but he wasn’t going to fund the transfer. The Clan had to do that on their own, and per the terms of the origination of the Clans they couldn’t trade with anyone other than each other. That stipulation had relaxed in times of need in order to benefit the overall Empire, but the principle held true to this day so they couldn’t hire out or purchase equipment from anyone other than their fellow 99 Clans, and vice versa.

The idea was to keep the Clans isolated from the rest of Star Force so that any disruptions in the overall economy, or even a massive invasion into the ADZ, wouldn’t affect them in terms of their production capacity. Relying on the larger economy was a strength at times, but also a weakness…and it was a weakness the Clans had been designed to circumvent.

Given that all of the trailblazers were essentially clones of one another, the Clans had developed along the same philosophies that they all shared. That said, competition between them had garnered alterations to be made that distinguished one from another. The choice to keep all territory within Sol had been one of those deciding factors for Clan Snowstorm, but there were also some structural differences as well.

Early on Oni had wanted Snowstorm to be self-sufficient, but above and beyond what they all had decided was necessary for the Clans. Originally the groupings had been developed to facilitate Archon training and advancement through competition, but when Davis had insisted that they be expanded into miniature empires of their own Oni had made infrastructure redundancy a top priority. She’d wanted them making everything themselves rather than having to trade with their fellow Clans, but then again that’s the way all of them operated.

What she had done differently was to instruct her previous Marquises to build planetary infrastructure with an obsessive redundancy and to keep their production levels at approximately 60% capacity. Rather than upping that productivity when needed, they’d build more facilities to compensate for the growth. From a certain point of view that had been wasteful, but she wanted the ability to absorb bad scenarios with their current assets rather than being forced into a situation where they had to deal with shortages or rely on trade with the other Clans.

Several other Clans had taken the same approach, each with a different percentage as protocol, but Clan Snowstorm, Clan Emerald Shark, and Clan Apex had collabed with each other on a development project that would take the infrastructure redundancy to the next level. Oni, Roger, and Wes had done most of the work themselves, in secret, and designed modular add-ons to the standard drone docking berths on warships and other carrier craft. These were more than just docked ships, and required a layover at a shipyard of scale to accomplish, but if you had one sitting ready it would allow you to convert a warship or hybrid cargo vessel into a mobile factory within days.

These pseudo MCVs were not designed to build new infrastructure from scratch, but rather to produce specific high end produce just as if they were a factory on the surface of a planet or an orbital facility. The three Clans hadn’t shared the designs with anyone else, though word of them eventually spread after a few decades of limited use and a few copycat projects sprung up, but neither the original mods nor their designs were ever offered up as trade, and all three Clans went about building their own industrial mods and quietly storing them away in stasis orbits should a time come that they would need them.

Over the years Clan Oni had sold off about a third of their mods to the Emerald Sharks and Apexes, given their Sol-only territorial move. The other Clans were able to put them to more use as they expanded to new systems, able to fly the factories there and have them continue production immediately so long as they were given the necessary raw resources via supply flow. Oni had instructed Sheen to always hold back a sufficient supply of them should there be a need…and now there was, more so than ever before.

The Marquis had been in negotiation with the other two Clans to buy or trade for more of the mods, resulting in a sum total of 245% of their original number, many of which had entered the system along with the Polar Veil and were already spinning up production. Everything from fuel to foodstuffs would start to be made locally to supplement their cargo stores, and the flow of raw materials would also be coming in as other Clans would be sending shipments to them in exchange for what Clan Snowstorm was leaving behind.

There were hundreds of deals that had been made, some by Oni herself, but a lot by Sheen on her behalf. Oni would often tell her what she wanted and the Marquis would make the contacts and see what was available, though sometimes the trailblazer could directly acquire things that Sheen never could, simply because of her relationship with the other trailblazers. Together they had spent more than 2 years hammering out deals, with many of them detailing that the production of natural resources within the territories being transferred would be shared at a rate of 50% for the first ten years, then 25% for the following five.

That would mean for the next decade several other Clans would be sending half their mining produce from the transferred territories to the Snowstorms, and would be responsible for the shipping themselves. That meant the Marquis wouldn’t have to be relying on just the infantile surface production to supply the modular ship factories with the materials they required, and other deals had been made for them to receive finished products from other Clans, giving them a supply flow to suck off of while they got around to building what they needed on Flake.

This entire operation had been designed, not as a startup operation, but an active transfer from one location to another. There was a lot of loss happening in the transition, but the Clan was still going to remain very active…or at least that was the plan, and Sheen was here to bring it to life as much as she could while Oni was off fighting lizards with the Bsidd or who knew what other projects she had cooked up with the other trailblazers. Most of the time her Marquis didn’t know exactly where she was or what she was doing, but then again she didn’t have to, for the relay grid sent out duplicate messages to every receiver station, on which they were then stored for infinity.

Sheen had her work and the trailblazer had hers, but together they were going to make this move happen, and if Oni was right, their Clan was going to shoot into the upper ranks a century or so from now. For a lot of people that seemed like forever, but to the Clan it wasn’t, and to Sheen it was a lot of work ahead of her but the timeframe didn’t seem unreasonable. In the meantime their warfleet would be working out of other ports, some Clan, some Mainline, some Bsidd, for refitting, rearming, and resupply in lieu of the fact that as of soon Clan Snowstorm wouldn’t have a shipyard large enough to accommodate anything larger than a drone destroyer.

They had brought along several MRVs that were jumpships that had been modified to act as small-scale shipyards, capable of repairing extensive battle damage on the smaller drones in short order, but they only had a handful and the larger vessels couldn’t fit within their tiny slips, meaning that any work done on them would have to be ‘by hand’ and would take forever, hence the deals made with the other Clans and factions within Star Force to compensate in the meantime.

That was already happening across Star Force territory, for Clan warships weren’t always returning to Clan facilities for repair work. They were all a team and helped each other out as necessary, so that didn’t violate the exclusion protocol for the Clans, but if the Snowstorms wanted to acquire new vessels they’d either have to produce them themselves or trade with the other Clans. New drones could not be supplied from Mainline facilities.

So deals had been made to compensate for that snag, because Oni insisted that the Clan was not taking a ‘timeout’ from the ongoing lizard war. She’d been adamant that they not scale back military operations at all, but they were going to start centering around this star system in the coming years. The sooner Sheen got a working shipyard built, no matter how small, the better Oni would feel, hence it was one of her top priorities.

Getting a major shipyard established was more of a dream at this point than a workable goal, but Oni had already slated one of the insane Sol-level facilities for their future plans, though Sheen knew that such a monstrosity was going to soak up so many resources that it wasn’t going to be viable in the next 50 years, minimum.

They’d talked for hours upon hours about what the trailblazer’s future plans for the Clan were, and they were nothing short of ridiculously ambitious. She seemed to think that with isolation came opportunity, and absent the few Trials they would be participating in back in Sol everything competitive here had to come from within, and with their own brand new oceans to play in, aquatics was going to be their first major push.

That was why they’d dropped a huge amount of resources into prefabricated surface facilities that had already allowed aquatics craft a home on the shore of the primary site. Even as initial underwater construction was ongoing training missions were being held and obstacle courses set up. Oni wanted to see them rise in the ranks within two years in that category, and was devoting a lot of resources to get the type of facilities set up that had been impossible to create on the barren, rocky worlds they’d possessed in Sol.

Had Sheen been making the call, training would have come in as a distant consideration, but Oni wanted it first and foremost, even before sufficient housing was built for the Clan’s population. The Marquis knew that getting basic quarters built for every single person was the right way to go before expanding out to other infrastructure projects and had argued against the fact that they could live on the jumpships for a considerable length of time if necessary.

Oni had nixed that, stating that they couldn’t let their people grow stagnant with the limited training facilities onboard the jumpships and that when they had a full planet to play with now they were going to take advantage of that from the beginning, reminding the Marquis that this was to be an active transition.

That word was going to come back to haunt her, Sheen knew, for what Oni wanted across the board was more than just a challenge…it was nuts. She had no way of knowing how much of what the trailblazer wanted was possible, for there were too many variables to consider. The only way forward was to get her ass on site and start working the problems one by one and see where it all led.

So now she was here, sitting in her orbital castle overseeing the ever growing army of workers beginning to transform a pinprick of the moon into a bastion of Clan Snowstorm civilization. Meanwhile the other Clans continued to grow, some by leaps and bounds considering what they’d just acquired from them. In the short term it seemed like a huge step backwards for Snowstorm, not just a transition, but Oni was adamant that this was going to work and that was enough for Sheen to pour everything she had into the effort.

But if this didn’t work, and work well, her Clan was going to be diminished to an insignificant blip within Star Force.

4

July 3, 2811

Solar System

Earth

Sean-939221 ran up to the entrance of the final chamber along with two of his teammates, Vlad-939228 and Sarah-939225, taking cover amongst the crooked halls as they scouted what was beyond…seeing the large open chamber with a low wall on the other side and the holographic icon floating over top of it, marking the end of the trainees’ Final Challenge and their graduation from basic training. They’d already spent more than a day surviving the twists and turns of the labyrinth they had to fight their way through, and now the 100 of them were almost to the end, with the rest mopping up some mobile drones that had sniped down a few stragglers.

Those trainees were being recovered and reawakened from the stun hits, for everyone made it to the finish line or no one did. That wasn’t a rule per se, but it was how everyone felt, and regardless of whether it was one of Sean’s 2s or any of the other teams, all 100 trainees were equally committed to completing this challenge and becoming Archons. In a rarity over the past three years, they weren’t competing against each other. This time they were all on the same side and the course was the enemy…and then some.

“Damn it, looks like Dash was right,” Sarah commented, seeing the lone figure in the room ahead waiting for them. “That bastard is just standing there waiting for us.”

“Wouldn’t feel right if he wasn’t here,” Sean commented, seeing the Black Knight waiting with stun sword in hand. Whether or not he’d spotted them peeking around the corner was unknown, but if he had he’d chosen to stay put, still as a statue, and literally daring them to come to him.

Which they had to.

Sean ran his pale fingers through his bleach blonde hair. “Let’s stay out of sight until we figure out how to deal with this.”

“There are 100 of us and 1 of him,” Vlad countered. “We just rush the mother.”

“You really think it’s going to be that easy?” Sarah asked.

“Probably not,” Vlad admitted, glancing around the room, or what he could see of it from his position. “Walls look clear, so if there’s any turrets they’ll be hidden inside.”

“He’s probably just the bait and that whole room is a kill zone,” Sarah floated.

“We need to find out for sure,” Sean suggested as another pair of trainees caught up to them and hunkered down behind them in their white with blue stripe uniforms, one of which had a pair of blue paint smears on his left hip more than 12 hours old.

“What’s up?”

“Our old friend is here,” Sean said, stepping back so they could have room to look themselves.

“Shit. Like this wasn’t hard enough already.”

“We think there’s probably concealed turrets,” Sarah said as more of them began to catch up with the scouts, some armed with pistols, others with stun sticks and grenades.

“I’ll go,” Sean offered. “Just be sure to drag me across the finish when it’s over.”

Sarah frowned. “Go and do what? You really think the turrets will come out just for you? If I were the trainers I’d hold them back until most of us got in there.”

“She has a point,” Krich-939281 said, placing a restricting hand on Sean’s shoulder.

“Got any better ideas?”

“Make it a trio,” someone else suggested, tossing a shield up and over the heads of the others that Sean grabbed out of midair.

“Thanks,” he said, bringing the 3/4th length narrow piece of armor up in front of him. It’d do well to stop any incoming stingers, so long as they were shooting him from the front and didn’t hit his feet. He could crouch down to cover but would have a hard time maneuvering around, though he’d done it before. Adding two more similarly equipped trainees would allow them to turtle up in a technique they’d developed early on in their training to beat the pesky hidden turrets that the trainers seemed to place everywhere.

That said, he still didn’t think they’d get very far.

“On my back and stay close,” Sean said as the other two got up to him and pulled their shields across one side of their back, with both looping an arm around Sean’s waist so they could pull close and maximize their defense while being able to feel where each other were. That way they could still walk without creating unnecessary gaps for the stingers to get through, though their heads were still open to ceiling shots or grenades. It wasn’t a good situation all around, but it was better than going in solo. Even on the run, all it would take was one lucky shot to Sean’s back and he’d be down and unconscious, leaving his teammates to find a way past this last roadblock.

“Just probe,” Sarah said as they began to walk forward around the last corner in the hallway. “We’ll handle the rest.”

The trio of trainees came into view with Sean peeking around the corner of his shield. A window in the damn thing would have been nice, but they weren’t designed that way. He caught a glimpse of the Black Knight ahead, but it looked like he hadn’t moved yet.

“Nothing behind us. Clear walls.”

“Black Knight is just standing there.”

“I don’t like this,” Sean told the others, but they all kept moving forward.

“If we make it halfway we split.”

“Agreed.”

Step by small step they moved forward, with not a sight nor sound evident in the empty room save for their own footsteps and breathing, which thoroughly unnerved Sean even though he knew more or less what was going on. They got all the way out to mid room and still no response, which was when the trio blew apart, running in opposite directions that left Sean heading straight for the Black Knight.

Still nothing happened.

Sean didn’t intend to actually fight him with only a shield, for he’d left his pistol with one of the others so it wouldn’t be lost when he got stunned, but he wanted to at least provoke a reaction before he ran like crazy, half expecting the big guy to track him down despite the heavy armor he wore. When he got within five meters of him Sean juked to the right and made a dash for the low wall ahead, while the other two likewise rushed it, intending to try and get over and to the finish so long as no one was going to stop them.

That called the bluff, for even as the Black Knight raced to his right to catch Chad-939245 a series of panels on the wall pushed out alarmingly fast and brandished stinger turrets that peppered the area ahead of the trainees with shots. Sean resisted the urge to try and stop them, but knew he couldn’t delay either, else the Black Knight would circle back to him within a few seconds. If he was going to make for the wall then this was the moment, else he would have to run back to the others and probably get gunned down in the process.

Tucking his shield against his right side, which was the slightly closer wall, he dove in a skid on his right knee, sliding a meter before popping up and jumping into the air to do a shallow flip, all the while his shield was getting peppered with hits. He was hoping to disrupt the targeting with the extra movement long enough to gain some distance, but as he went midair his right ankle got hit, numbing it so much that when he got his feet on the ground his right leg collapsed for lack of muscle control.

That sent him tumbling to the ground where he landed smack on his face, with his shield hitting him on the head as it laid over him. He expected to get covered in stinger shots momentarily, but the sounds of the increasing weaponsfire didn’t result in any more loss of function. He twisted his neck slightly, playing dead as he guessed they thought he already was, and saw the others running out into the room and attacking the turrets on the walls, neutralizing them one by one as even more revealed themselves and flooded the room with paint.

Bodies were dropping every second, but so were the turrets…and then there was the Black Knight moving amongst them, whacking them down with his sword or fists.

Sean mentally ignored his right leg, pulling himself up to a crawl and hobbling away from his shield towards the wall that was three meters in front of him. A turret on the left wall turned to shoot him, but it got hit with  a trio of sniper shots and deactivated, giving Sean enough time to stand up on one leg and hop up to get his hands on the wall edge. He pulled himself up enough that he could see over it and the finish pedestal beyond…then suddenly a giant hand grabbed him by the back of the neck and threw him back into the room.

He cracked his head on the somewhat soft floor when he landed, then there were a blur of bodies passing over top of him. He could see several of his fellow trainees hunkered up inside a shield turtle that blocked enough of the stinger shots for them to get up close to the Black Knight, then they broke ranks and rushed him, shooting him at pointblank range with pistols, chucking grenades in his face, and then finishing him off with a series of stun sticks as they were taken down by the surrounding turrets.

Sean reached out for the pistol laying near him, finding it a few inches short of his fingers and cursing himself for having to hold back. He crawled up onto his shoulder and got to it, miraculously not attracting the attention of one of the remaining turrets. Rather than shoot at one of them on the walls or ceiling, he took the pistol and shot the downed Black Knight, knowing that his armor would suck up the stun quickly and he’d be back to bashing them in no time.

Sean might not be able to run or fight, but he could keep the bastard down while the others did the hard work…that was, until the pistol eventually ran out of rounds. He tried to climb to his feet and hop forward, but was caught by the armpit on the way up and dragged forward by Sarah. She got him to the wall along with the others, then got underneath his feet and stood up, pushing him up and over where he unceremoniously fell to the ground.

The crawl over to the finish line was short, and the most blissfully rewarding few meters he’d ever crossed. He got there after a large group of the others, entering a blue-lit hallway that gleamed with what appeared to be dragon scales covering it on floor, walls, and ceiling. As soon as he touched those he officially became an Archon…then he turned back to look for the others who were still piling over the wall.

One of the other trainees came over to him and injected his leg with a de-stunning serum, one of the few they had left from their ordeal in the labyrinth, and he felt his limb return to life. He stood up and ran back over to the wall, hopping up enough to look over and see where the rest of them were.

There were a dozen left, shooting the last of the turrets as the Black Knight stumbled to his feet, regaining coherence with every second. Seven trainees lay unconscious on the floor, with the others moving towards them. With his limb now back in action Sean abandoned the finish and went back over the wall, picking up one of the injured and freeing up a trainee that was still armed…who then shot the Black Knight as he came at her.

The shot didn’t take him down, but two others dove on him with stun sticks and managed to knock him away from the last few downed trainees being carried over the wall. Sean got his passenger transferred to others that were standing on top to facilitate the process, then he ducked to the side as the Knight’s stun sword whipped through where his head had just been. On instinct he ran sideways, getting a step on him as a hand reached down from up top.

Sean took it and was pivoted up and over the wall with the help of three other trainees acting as a counterweight. He didn’t care that he fell hard on the other side, more concerned that everyone made it over…for if they didn’t, they didn’t graduate. The idea of having to repeat the entire basic training was abhorrent, which was why all of the trainees were committed to getting everyone across and they wouldn’t hesitate to all go back over the wall if necessary.

Fortunately that wasn’t going to be needed, and the last man over yelled ‘all clear’ prompting Sean and the others to walk back into that beautiful hallway and out the now open door on the far side, completing the hardest 3 years of his life.

Head Trainer Wilson was there, along with a pair of Archon Acolytes, but it was the big guy that spoke. “Congratulations…now on to the hard stuff. Your basic training is now complete, and you’ll soon be assigned Clans where you will begin your adept training. Next time we see each other will be under different circumstances, for now, these two will guide you through the transition process.”

“Let’s go younglings,” one of the acolytes said, waving the group of them forward down the hall. “First a badly needed shower, then some food, and then you get to see where you end up. Hope for Clan Mantle.”

The other acolyte scoffed at that but said nothing as the group moved on, leaving Wilson behind.

Sean stayed with him, drawing a curious look from Sarah and a couple other 2s, but Wilson waved them off and they left with the others. They walked down the long hall and disappeared around the corner before either of the two men spoke.

“I’m proud of you,” Wilson told him. “And not only because you didn’t slip up. I honestly didn’t think you had it in you until after that first year.”

“I wasn’t sure myself until just now,” Davis said, wiping the sweat off his forehead. “That is one hell of a training program you set up. The team camaraderie is so intense it surprised me, even after all these years dealing with Archons and the trailblazers specifically.”

“You were always an outsider and the guy in charge. It looks different from this perspective, in a way that I’ll never know. I envy you that.”

“Do you want to play Director for a while? I kind of want to stay Archon.”

“You never told them?”

Davis shook his head. “And they never suspected. I didn’t think the alterations would work, but no one ever made the connection.”

“It’s the voice more than anything,” Wilson said, referencing the genetic alterations made to Davis in the pyramid so he could enter basic training anonymously. “Are you going to tell them now?”

“No, I don’t want to disrupt the transition process. They’re splitting up, correct?”

“Probably. Some could end up together depending on which Clan they land. They usually keep in touch afterwards, so they’re going to want to know what’s up with you. I wouldn’t recommend lying.”

Davis frowned. “Never. Don’t take this personally, but they’re closer to me now than you are.”

Wilson smirked. “That’s one of the main objectives of the training.”

“I knew that going in, but experiencing it is something altogether different.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Davis nodded. “And then some. Did the trailblazers find out?”

“I had to tell Greg so he’d stop snooping around, but no one else knows. He promised he’d keep your secret.”

“I know it’s going to be difficult, but I want them all back here.”

“Very difficult. Why?”

“I’ve been living on the civilian side of Star Force so long that I know it inside and out, but now that I’ve got a foot in the Archon world I’m seeing flaws everywhere.”

“You suspected as much going in.”

Davis shook his head. “Not like this. It’s like I’ve been blind my entire life and now I’m just opening my eyes. We’re going to have to rebuild everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know for sure, that’s why I need them here, in person, so we can figure this out. Doing it by message packet isn’t going to cut it.”

“Spill old man, before I have to beat it out of you.”

Davis glanced up at Wilson, who was still several inches taller than him and who no doubt could carry through on the threat if he chose, Archon or not.

“We’ve been too soft, and I’m afraid our mindset has been centered on the lizards for far too long. The ultimate enemy is the V’kit’no’sat, and now that the ADZ is safe from the lizards we have to start tooling to fight a superior opponent, not a large numbered inferior one. That, and a lot of mistakes I’ve made with the civilian population. We have to have a segmented society rather than a single large pool.”

“Skilled based?”

Davis nodded. “I’ve got some ideas, but to make this work I need the trailblazers, you, and most of the senior personnel in on this. I’ve only kept up on the basics. How soon can we get all of them here?”

“If they directly recall, six months…if they want to leave their current combat assignments. Some are in pretty heavy actions along the Calavari border, last I heard.”

“We’ll make it a year then. I’ve got some research to do in the meantime.”

“After we get you fitted for your armor,” Wilson insisted. “You are an Archon now, so you need a custom set whether you plan to use it or not.”

“Lead on then.”

“Shower first.”

“Do I smell that bad?”

“You guys always do coming out of the Final Challenge.”

Davis smiled unguardedly. “It’s going to take a while to get used to that, but I like it already.”

“You earned it. I made sure of that. I’m just sorry you had to hold back. That’s not something we want the trainees to do.”

“Psionics would have been cheating, so there was no choice. Like you said, I needed to earn it.”

“Well you can kick that bad habit now, and I suggest you do. Adept rank or no, there’s no point in hiding the fact that you have them. And you’re not the first either.”

“I’m still staying Sean as far as the Archon ranks are concerned. The public isn’t going to know the Director is also an Archon, and I want it to stay that way.”

“Not a problem. Security was sound for your inclusion, so you can keep on as is with no problems so long as word doesn’t get around on its own.”

“Good.”

“You. Shower. Now. Talk later,” Wilson said, pointing down the hall. “I’ll take you to the fitting station afterwards.”

Davis bristled a bit at his tone, but brushed it off with a smile and a silent salute before jogging off down the hallway in typical Archon fashion.

5

July 19, 2812

Solar System

Earth

Davis walked into the amphitheater seeing the 100 trailblazers sitting in the first few rows almost identical to the way they had been centuries ago when he’d first met them all. The only difference was the blue stripe on their uniforms was darker and their bodies were razor fit…plus an assortment of oddly colored hair and genetic tattoos they’d been experimenting with. Those minor details aside, this was the first time in forever that they’d all been together in the same place at the same time, and as he walked up onto the stage and headed for the podium he felt a burning nostalgia that he quickly squashed.

Abandoning the podium he turned around and sat on the edge of the elevated platform, legs dangling over the edge as he looked out at them in a very Archon fashion. None of them said a word, merely waiting to see what they’d been recalled for and sensing a definitive moment coming.

“A long time ago I brought you all here, to this very room, to tell you of the V’kit’no’sat threat and how you would build and lead a Star Force military in defense of Earth. Fortunately that threat hasn’t shown itself yet, for while we’ve grown far more than I’d ever expected, we’re still no match for them. We’ve rightly focused on the lizards and Skarrons, for they were the ones knocking on our door trying to actively kill us and our allies, but during that time you all have been working towards the day when we eventually have to face our race’s past and fight the V’kit’no’sat.”

“I wish there was a possibility of that never coming to pass, but so long as we are here and they are out there a confrontation is bound to occur. Even if they don’t come searching this part of the galaxy and are consumed with interior matters I still don’t feel safe, and I don’t think any of you do either. My mistake in all this was my ignorance, for I’ve been blind to the magnitude of the threat. That sounds ironic, since I was the one to bring it to your attention, but as at least one of you knows I’ve been having subordinates take over most of my duties the past few years, up until recently.”

“As of now, thanks to carefully crafted duplicity and some genetic alterations that I’ve since abandoned, I am now Sean-939221. I completed Archon basic training about a year ago, and ever since I’ve been working on a new plan now that my eyes have been opened to certain realities.”

“Whoa...wait a second,” Jason interrupted him. “You’re an adept?”

Davis smirked. “Yes I am. A level 2, actually, as of last week.”

Morgan leaned forward, eyes wide. “When did this happen?”

“I wanted to keep it a secret, and even my classmates didn’t know who I was. I needed to earn it, same as you did.”

“Psionics?” Steve asked.

Davis nodded. “I had to refrain from using them. Which wasn’t easy when the Black Knight was busting my skull…even if it wasn’t Vermaire.”

“Holy shit,” Kerrie said with a laugh. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“It was something I needed to do for myself,” Davis explained, “but also because I knew I wasn’t seeing things clearly…all the way back to when Oni came to me asking permission to relocate her Clan outside of Sol. She made her case well, but I never fully understood her reasons. Abandoning that much infrastructure to start over from scratch made no logistical sense, but as always you guys operate on a level that I do not, and vice versa, so I trusted her judgement. How would you say it’s gone thus far?”

Oni blew out a slow breath, trying to pick the right words. “Mixed results to date, but the future looks promising. We’re going to be able to do more going forward than the limited territory here would have allowed us. That said, the transitional curve isn’t any less steep than I’d imagined.”

“Her Clan’s scores have gone up noticeably,” Paul pointed out.

“Not much,” Oni countered.

“But enough that I noticed as well,” Davis added. “You don’t have nearly the same level of training facilities that you did here, but your people have gotten markedly better. Why?”

“Isolation has its advantages.”

Davis pointed at her. “That’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until I became an Archon, along with many other things. What exactly is the isolation offering you?”

“Focus,” Oni said without hesitation. “While I still keep a sizeable team here for the Trials, everyone else is either off fighting or exclusively training, and I’ve tightened the requirements a bit to compensate. My people have adjusted to a higher level benchmark and our overall skill set has improved faster than a few other Clans in certain areas, though we’re still bottom of the barrel in most cases.”

“Paul?”

“I’d add that they have a greater sense of purpose now, given the all-or-nothing course she’s set her Clan on. We instituted the Trials so the Archons would have a chance to gain combat experience outside of a war, but also to stave off boredom. We need to have mission objectives, and rebooting her Clan seems to have added an element of fervor to the Snowstorms that the rest of the Clans lack, giving them at least a temporary advantage.”

“Not enough to catch the Sabers,” Oni commented.

“Who can?” Paul scoffed, but his merriment was cut short as Sara jabbed him in the ribs.

“I follow all of the Clans very closely, and have done so even more the past year,” Davis said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back slightly as he swung one leg freely. “What you’ve done with the Trials and expanding them out beyond the Archons and into every facet of Clan civilization is beyond impressive. It’s something that I could never have conceived of, but I have found a flaw in it.”

“Do tell,” Greg prompted.

“It’s all for the lower levels. You don’t have a program for the elites. I know you’ll say that most of your time is spent fighting the lizards or pulling duties with Mainline, but the strikers, padawans, and especially mages don’t really have any internal system in place to test and hone your skills. What you’ve done with the advanced training group shows how fast you guys can really improve if you go all-in on it, but you don’t as a matter of course. Its bits and pieces here and there when you can. You need to do better.”

“What would you suggest?” Liam asked.

“I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now, and I don’t have a full answer. You’ll have to figure it out, but I do want to lighten your burden, as far as the Clans go.”

“Wait,” Megan stopped him. “If you’re suggesting we abandon the Clans…uhuh. We’ve put way too much work into them to turn them over to subordinates or administrators.”

Davis smiled. “I had thought about that, then nixed the idea for the same reason. No, when I say I want to lighten your burden I mean to take the younglings off your hands. I’ve learned well that the company you keep has an effect on you. That’s why you created the sanctuaries early on to train in without having newbs and what not slowing you down. I think the same principle needs to be applied to the entirety of Star Force, with the Clans remaining as the highest tier, one that you can further sculpt into a more efficient and effective civilization.”

“You want merit standards for citizenship,” Rex guessed, “rather than people simply being born into the Clans.”

Davis nodded. “I know that differs from your current mandate, but when we first created the Clans we never intended for them to become anything like this. You wanted them as competitive teams and I added the civilian side to things, both to see what tweaks you’d make and to train high level administrators with the autonomy they afforded. We’re past that now, and a single Mainline system is more complex an operation than running one of the original Clans. Some are even more complex than running one of them now. Clan Dark Knight has the highest population of 2.2 billion, and there are 29 Mainline systems with populations greater than that.”

“Yet yours are interstellar civilizations, for the most part, which is a different situation entirely. And they are the home to all Archons, save for a few neutrals, such as myself. No, I’m not taking a Clan affiliation or participating in the Trials. My training will continue in isolation as a private side project, and though I’m tempted to go full Archon I know my place is still being Director, though I did appreciate the vacation.”

“Just do both you slacker,” Larissa quipped. “We do already.”

“Granted, but I’m nowhere near your league. There’s also a much larger problem looming on the horizon that I have to tackle, and reworking the Clans is only a part of it. Star Force is growing so large that our previous methods are becoming strained. There are successes across the board to be proud of, but one thing that going through Archon training has done for me is that it erased the past. With everything that we have done over the years, we’re the oldest Humans in existence…V’kit’no’sat aside. We remember what it was like before Star Force, and a part of me was always comparing the now to the then and seeing what a huge leap forward it has been.”

“I think that was because I was never a part of Star Force. I created it, guided it, molded it, but I was always the teacher, never the student. You all have been the guiding force behind the military and many other facets, but you began as cadets, in this very room, with me telling you what was coming. I’ve always been the leader, having to come up with new ideas and then pass them on to the benefit of others.”

“But when I went into basic I had none of that. I was the newb learning from the efforts of others. It was like finding a stack of presents under the Christmas tree and opening them as fast as I could, learning things I could never have figured out on my own. For the first time I felt what it was to be a part of Star Force, and having to earn my way into it. No one knew my identity, so I was literally a clean slate. That washed away the past from my mind, and good riddance. Now that it’s gone I’m seeing cracks and flaws everywhere within our structure that I had been blind to before. My standards were set too low because they were being dragged down with the memories of the past, but no longer.”

“Problem number 1 is Axius. There is a core group there that is holding all the rest together, but the balance of their population is nothing but slackers. This cannot continue, for the simple reason that people who are on the fence about what to do going forward often look to those around them for cues, and if they see laziness and apathy they are probably going to reciprocate it. We can’t, and never will, force someone to work. People have to have the freedom to do nothing without repercussions, but they need to earn their place in society. To date, Axius has just been a big party that people born there don’t have to earn their way in to above and beyond their maturia training.”

“I don’t think the maturia training needs to alter. We’ve got that pegged down pretty well for the early years. Canderous has pushed that about as far as it can go without negative effects. Anyone know otherwise?”

“I think the Human maturias are pretty solid,” Aaron answered. “The others not so much. We still need to dial in what the different races are capable of rather than just copy and paste off of our profiles. We’ve done that to a point, but there still needs to be a lot more improvement there.”

“A valid point, but is there anything new that is required, or just calibration?”

Aaron whistled softly. “I would say calibration, but I’m not the one to ask,” he said, looking towards Larissa.

“We still haven’t tapped the Bsidd’s full potential, but we’ve been allowing them to make adjustments on their own since we don’t have their bodies to experiment with.”

“That’s a mistake we have to correct,” Davis said firmly, to nearly everyone’s surprise. “We have to probe what they’re capable of and use our experience to troubleshoot. Anything they can add from their perspective is wanted, but we can’t waste time letting them tread the same ground we did. We have to use our experience to their immediate benefit. Same goes for the other races, right down to the wards. Axius is the worst, because they have so many races that are not part of Star Force, and the individual maturia programs are lacking.”

“I can see that now because I’m an Archon. I can do things that my old self never considered possible. I was a civie, pure and simple, and didn’t have what it took to be an Archon. That was stupid thinking. Everyone has the potential to do everything, it’s just a matter of each person finding their way there. Most won’t, because they don’t care or aren’t intuitive enough, but the potential is still there. We need to lay out a path for them to follow if they choose, whether or not we think they’re capable. Civilian life should not be the norm in Star Force society. It should be the B-team.”

Jason nodded. “And you want to strip the B-team elements out of the Clans.”

“More than that, but yes, for starters. I also suggest that all adepts and acolytes not be assigned to a Clan.”

“Make them earn their way in too?” Paul asked.

“I’m not sure about a lot of these things, so just treat them as works in progress, but I think we need the Clans to be the super elite, and not just in Archons. Military personnel down to techs. Everyone has to be operating at an insane level of skill and output just to keep their position. If they can’t handle the workload they may only be in a Clan for a year or so, then transition over to Mainline and bring the skills and experience from the Clans with them, further enhancing Mainline. But the Clans will have to operate like your advanced training group, only on a much larger level.”

“We have an opportunity now that we’ve never had before, in that we have numbers. From general population all the way up to Archons which are creeping near that million mark, and virtually all of them have survived to this day. We’re gaining depth, but we’re not tooled for it. We need to make adjustments, and we need to establish a top tier to Star Force in all departments that you guys can play in with peers, more or less. The Clans should become the sanctums of Star Force.”

“Oh, I’m liking this already,” Greg said, theatrically rubbing his hands together.

“Good, then I’ll pause there,” Davis said, hopping down off the edge and walking up the aisle towards the rear entrance. “Discuss amongst yourselves for the next half hour, then I’ll be back to continue this conversation…with donuts.”

The trailblazers watched him go without saying a word, then when the door closed Jason glanced around at the others, seeing they were thinking the same thing.

“Damn, he really has gone Archon.”

6

“Ok, Christmas lists people,” Davis said as he finished off a donut as he sat on the edge of the stage again, this time next to a stack of mostly empty boxes. “Oni, let’s start with you since you’ve already got a head start on everyone else.”

“Our construction crews are good, but not good enough,” she said immediately. “The lizards still build faster than we do, and that’s become painfully obvious for my Clan. The Voku also build faster. I’ve looked into some ways to make improvements but haven’t come up with anything big enough to close that gap.”

Davis crossed his arms over his chest again. “To my knowledge, they build round the clock with excessive manpower on well prescribed tasks that are utilized everywhere. No customization, just replicative redundancy.”

“They do, but when I’ve tried to have my crews do the same thing we still don’t fully catch up. We’re building better infrastructure, but that shouldn’t matter. We have better tools than them, yet we’re still lagging behind.”

“We don’t have much intel on their building process because we haven’t stuck around anywhere long enough to monitor it,” Paul pointed out. “I’ve been through their internal procedures that we captured previously, and there’s nothing there we haven’t already explored and done better. What they’re doing current day to increase productivity I can’t put my finger on either.”

“I can,” Randy said, tossing a crumpled wrapper at Paul’s head. “The Clans use Human workers. Lizards are better.”

“They shouldn’t be,” Paul said, telekinetically catching it and compressing it down into a tiny dot that he tossed off into one of the open boxes.

“They’ve been genetically engineered for specific tasks, Humans have not. Their standard variants aren’t designed as soldiers, they’re designed to be workers. Toting guns around and firing them isn’t much of a stretch, and the way they fight should tell you everything you need to know.”

Roger raised an eyebrow. “Kiritas?”

“Bingo,” Randy confirmed. “They outwork our Human techs by a mile because they’re good at completing one task and seamlessly moving into another with nearly unlimited repetitions. When you’re doing the same things over and over again you don’t have to troubleshoot, just get the work done reliably and fast. Our techs are trained to be quick but cautious, and our cities aren’t carbon copies of one another. We can build fast if we want to, but the races that are naturally more industrious are going to have an advantage.”

“They’re also using cheats,” Devan said. “They’re not building their big structures that quick, they’re basically constructing transitional infrastructure first to get their colonies established. If we took the same approach I don’t think they’d have an advantage. We build ours to last, they build theirs to function and function quickly to spur their snowball effect.”

“Do you want the Clans to remain all Human?” Taryn asked Davis.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Some of you have a handful of non-Humans in your ranks already. Care to comment?”

“It’s not any different than the Mainline troops,” Rex answered. “They met Human standards so we let them in. No reason not to.”

“Most of Star Force is now not Human,” Morgan pointed out. “Granted, we have psionics and they don’t, but if you’re wanting the Clans to be the upper tier we’ve got to have one for them as well, otherwise we’re cutting the legs out of our own plans.”

“If the ultimate focus of the Clans is to be on the V’kit’no’sat,” Jason added, “then we need to keep it all Human. Zen’zat are what we’ll be fighting against, and we have to be used to engaging on that level. I hate to say it, but every other race in Star Force will have their asses handed to them if they go up against Zen’zat. If we’re serious about building into anti-Vik, we have to stay separate.”

“The size of the Calavari and Bsidd are lost against the V’kit’no’sat’s larger massed races,” Paul added. “We can theoretically survive because of our nimbleness. If we went Bsidd against even one Hjar’at they’d be slaughtered.”

“For now,” Larissa countered. “I think I can find ways to get a few of them up to speed while negating the disadvantages. But you’re also thinking just infantry. I don’t see any downside to mechwarriors so long as they have the skill.”

“It’s all about the requirements,” Greg said, cutting to the heart of the issue. “What makes a person Clan-eligible or not. And I suggest we each write our own, taking what races we want, in what circumstances we want. For the bulk of the races, and even the other Humans, there has to be another tier just below the Clans for them to excel in. Actually, I think there needs to be multiple tiers, which I think Davis was hinting at earlier.”

“Yes I was. I’m just not sure how to structure them.”

“Start at the bottom. What do you want the civilian party zone to look like?”

“Preferably under 20% of the population, though I’m not sure how doable that is, nor how soon it could be accomplished.”

“Hold up,” Tyr said, raising a hand to add emphasis. “Are we going with Archon rules here? If you go soft you lose your placement, or are these tier advancements permanent?”

“I want there to be considerable lag with a person losing what they’ve obtained, but there has to be an active component. If someone really quits trying they’ll eventually land back in the bottom tier.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Taryn interjected, “but that’s not how you currently have the system structured, as far as quarter allotments and stipends are concerned.”

“I know. I’m going to have to rework it. Within the lower tier there will be some things kept for keeps after they earn them, but those things won’t transition them up to the next tier. In fact, let’s just say all advancement within the bottom tier…which we’ll just start calling the ‘civilian’ tier, will be permanent. The aspects that will allow a person to advance to a higher tier will run parallel with them and be perishable, say after a decade. That won’t put pressure on individuals who have setbacks, but it will clear out the stagnant and not allow them to poison the water, so to speak.”

“I’d suggest making the second tier a light tier,” Liam said, thinking ahead. “Will these be in the same colonies or separate?”

“There has to be separation in order to make these tiers distinctive. Not so much as in different planets, but the communal areas have to be located in such a way that transit isn’t banned for the civilian tier, but the most convenient places to eat and shop are separate.”

“How light?” Paul asked Liam.

“Those who are working for Star Force, even in a small application, so long as it’s current.”

“Not enough,” Greg differed. “Everyone should start in the civilian tier when they come out of the maturia, then have to work their way up. We don’t want it to actually become a collection bin for only the stagnant.”

“Greg is right,” Davis agreed, “but the Star Force work angle needs to be present. Say 5 years in a minimal position gets the bump up, faster if they land a higher caliber slot. Individuals will also be able to buy their way in with credits, giving the business class access. That will mean a disproportionate part of the people with credits to spend will be living in the second tier, so let’s just call it the ‘economic’ tier. This pair will make up the non-Star Force population, with the third tier reserved exclusively for experienced in-house personnel.”

“Are these tiers going to extend to the other races?” Megan asked.

“I’d suggest,” Sam said before Davis could answer, “that all races and Axius operate with the same, but separate civilian tier. Allow transfers in the economic tier, but keep all maturias with their respective races then allow individuals to move where they like. If a Calavari wants to live in a Mainline colony so be it, and if a Bsidd wants to live with the Calavari, same thing. Most people will stay where they began, but it will also reinforce that we’re all Star Force and that merit is what matters, not origin point or race.”

“Transfers from colony to colony or between factions?” Davis asked.

“Factions. If someone is born in Axius, they stay in Axius unless they advance to the economic tier, but they can always request relocation to another Axius colony or planet.”

“That won’t work for all races,” Jason warned. “We’re still going to have size issues, let alone atmosphere. There are going to have to be some blocks that can’t be breached. I don’t think an Irondel would be safe living in a Bsidd colony.”

“Easy fix,” Randy offered. “Make tier 2 moveable between the racial faction and Axius only. Tier 3 will have access to other factions given that it will be work related. That way you don’t have to put any blocks in place, because we’re not going to assign personnel to inappropriate locations.”

“I like that,” Davis said with a nod of respect.

“Back to the Christmas list,” Mark-084 brought up. “I’d like to see Mainline integrated with difference races where beneficial. Calavari operating as pseudo-Knights works well enough that we should explore implementing it regularly.”

“You tell me,” Davis said, deferring to the trailblazers’ military expertise.

“We need both,” Paul said flatly. “Integrated units where advantageous, not like Axius that uses a combined force out of need of numbers.”

“That begs the question who pairs best with each other,” Greg said, hinting at something more.

“Damn, you’re right.”

“What?” Davis asked, not picking up on the cues.

“There might be combos that don’t even involve Humans,” Jason answered. “Aside from Archons.”

“That brings us back to the question of whether or not Mainline is being geared towards fighting the V’kit’no’sat or others?” Taryn reminded them. “If we’re invaded, do we use them? If we’re invaded, will the V’kit’no’sat ignore them and only come after us? Or will they hunt down and destroy all of Star Force?”

“If we lose,” Greg added.

“If it’s tomorrow, we lose,” Taryn quipped. “I know we’ve all thought about this, but I’ve never heard a strategy talked about. If we fully integrate then we’re pulling the others directly into that fight, and without Ikrid blocks they’re sitting ducks for a slaughter. Against the lizards it’ll work. Against the V’kit’no’sat it won’t.”

“What’s their mental range,” Davis asked, “in naval engagements?”

“He’s got a point,” Liam said. “So long as they’re not sitting on our jumpships’ hulls they’re not going to be able to use that disadvantage against our naval crews, it’s the other four divisions of the military. And since we’re not using Ikrid between ships, we can even conceal the jumpships inside Ikrid blocking hull plates. We know that a fight with them is going to be virtually all naval unless we lose, at which point having non-Humans in a ground fight will be a slaughter.”

“And if we build a Calavari an Ikrid blocking helmet like Magneto?” Ace wondered.

“The Dsevmat have psionic capability,” Roger pointed out, “and there are probably other races out there. Are we going to hold back all but our Human troops if we ever have to fight them?”

Ace nodded. “We have to upgrade them, through equipment if not genetically. Or at least be able to if a sufficient threat emerges. Right now it’s lizards, lizards, and more lizards. We need to use our strengths to whack them down as fast as possible…while also building towards greater threats. I think we need parts of Star Force working on everything so we have options and flexibility if an unknown hits us.”

“Agreed,” Paul said, thinking ahead already to what Clan Saber was about to become. “We need to maintain separate armies for each race, where applicable. The Lacvamat aren’t going to be building aquatics and the Elarioni aren’t going to be fielding commandos, but the races that can field all 5 divisions need to do so and have independent units. We can, the Calavari and Bsidd can, Scionate maybe.”

“No, their swimming skills suck horribly,” Lens pointed out.

“I’m sure the Elarioni would say the same about us,” Megan countered.

“We can debate that later,” Paul said, waving off that discussion. “We may even want to elevate some of the wards that are physically capable of all 5, but that’s not the point now. We need that redundancy so each faction can operate independently of the rest of Star Force if disaster were to befall part of it, like say Earth and all the Human colonies were wiped out. That’s why we have separate economies, and the same should remain true for the military, Archons aside. That said, I think we need another level of military that integrates advantageous configurations.”

“We should expand Mainline,” Liam suggested. “Keep some units Human only, then add additional ones with whatever combinations we find useful.”

“That won’t be enough,” Steve differed. “There are far more Bsidd troops now than Humans. Mainline is and always will be Human-led, but we’re going to need combo units with few Humans involved, maybe even just Archons only. Calavari pilots coupled with Bsidd/Scionate infantry teams is just one example I can easily come up with. The key here is that this new faction wouldn’t be tied to any territory. Mainline has held the responsibility of going everywhere and doing everything for centuries, with the other races helping out when and where they could. That’s not the case anymore, so I think we do need a new format going forward.”

“On par with Mainline or above it?”

“I’d say on par, so far as newbs being able to join from the get go.”

“And this mixed fleet would use what ships?”

“Special construction per unit requirements,” Paul answered. “Our pick, not the factions.”

“Doable,” Roger added, “but it’d take a long time to set up and we’d have to commission additional shipyards specifically for it. I don’t want Mainline suffering production shortages to cover.”

“I can see to that,” Davis offered. “The fourth tier of non-military personnel will be segregated to exclusive planets. Those will supply the ships for this new fleet, as well as be exporters to the rest of Star Force. The populations will be there to work and nothing else, experienced individuals only that will live with like-minded people, and I believe that will increase production up another level, much like I experienced in basic training.”

“With the Clans being the next step up,” Jason asked, “for both civilian and military?”

Davis nodded. “Maturias will be a pseudo fifth tier that will feed all graduates into the civilian tier. The others will pull individuals up rather than have to worry about reproduction from inside. The new fourth tier colonies will have maturias on site as needed for transitional purposes, but the infants will be shipped off to other worlds as soon as possible. That way they won’t be burdened with younglings or rookies living amongst them, and the same method would be used in the Clans.”

“So much for a population surge,” Oni said sarcastically.

“I know that interferes with some of your Clans’ population pushes, but am I wrong in thinking that it will elevate the skill pool?”

“You’re right,” Morgan agreed. “And we’ll still be able to push our numbers, just through other means. We won’t have to try and stack the odds of a youngling buying into the Clan mojo when we can directly recruit those who already do and boot those that lose their way. I like this idea a lot, but it will require a lot of transitional headaches, biggest of which is the loyal Clansmen we already have that won’t measure up to the new standards.”

“Keep them if you want,” Davis suggested. “As much as I want the Clans to be the elite of the elite, I also want to maintain and even enhance your experimental status. Try whatever you like and see what works best. The Clans are your little empires, continue to tailor them to your wishes.”

“What of Canderous and Australia?” Mark-099 asked.

“With regards to Canderous, there is only one alteration that I see being necessary, but feel free to add anything you like. I think they’ve got to become not only a space-bound faction, but a nomadic one. If we are to face the V’kit’no’sat we need to have bases that they don’t know the location of, and the only way to do that in the face of a potential computer hack is to have mobile ones. All future sedas need to be constructed with interstellar gravity drives defaultly internal. No more reliance on jump cradles.”

“We’ve been thinking along those lines for some time now,” Paul admitted. “We were just waiting on the necessary technology to catch up. As it is now, we can order a redesign with a loss of a decent amount of internal space to accommodate the drives. It’ll lower their population count, but we can work on increasing it over the years rather than waiting for a prerequisite number. What about Australia?”

“They’re the weak link, by far, but so small in number I’m considering not even tinkering with them. Thoughts?”

“Let me handle them,” Remy suggested.

Davis raised an eyebrow, about to ask what that meant when Randy interrupted.

“Um, we’re overlooking the Kiritas/Kiritak why?”

Davis sat up a bit straighter. “I had assumed the Kiritak were good to go as is. As far as the Kiritas are concerned, the Kiritak are already their upper tier, and to date you haven’t wanted them involved in military operations. Are you wanting to change any of that?”

“I’m just wondering why, if we’re altering all the other factions to the same model, are we leaving them unchanged.”

“Frankly I hadn’t considered it because their civilization is so polished already that I didn’t want to mess with it. You know them better than anyone. Do you think they’ll benefit from an internal tier structure?”

“Not my point, exactly. But Mainline already has a large number of Kiritak in it, working mainly the cargo fleet. Are we expelling them to keep it all Human? And this new tier 4 you’re planning sounds an awful lot like what the Kiritak already are, minus the reproduction part.”

“I feel a criticism here. Just spit it out.”

“We can’t be split minded on this. Either we’re Star Force or we’re just the Human Empire. Humans and Kiritak integrate so well together in naval there’s no functional reason to split them up. If we’re worried about the V’kit’no’sat targeting them along with us, then shame on us. We can’t treat them as family and outsiders in the hope that the enemy will leave them alone one day in the hopefully distant future. We’re either in this together or not, and if not we need to split Star Force apart and give the various factions their independence and stop feeding them additional technology. That’s the only way they have a hope of not being targeted.”

There was silence for a moment, but then Liam blew out a long breath. “He’s right, and I would go forward to add that we can’t pretend that Humans are just one faction out of several. We are the core of Star Force so we shouldn’t try to isolate ourselves. We need to extend the Mainline fleet, not create a separate group. Same goes to civilian operations. We pull other races in where beneficial while letting them keep isolated groups as a supplement.”

“We can’t evacuate everyone out to the rim,” Davis said regretfully. “And if we fight it out here, we’re most likely to die along with them. I don’t see a good option in this, so please feel free to throw out ideas.”

“Let the Clans experiment and figure it out,” Randy suggested. “If the V’kit’no’sat come back now we’re screwed anyway. You work the present, we’ll fight the future.”

Davis looked around at the 100 trailblazers, realizing how simple that solution was. Not because it was a solution, but because he knew he could trust them enough to take that burden off his shoulders and find a way, if one existed, to make this monster of an empire they’d cobbled together work in the face of that potential doomsday.

“I can live with that,” he said simply, suppressing a grin for what he was about to say next. “So, the next question before us then is whether or not Kara gets her own Clan.”

“Ah…” Paul groaned, burying his face in his hands in visible complaint while several other trailblazers snickered.

7

July 30, 2812

Solar System

Earth

“Found something?” Jason asked, walking up behind Paul in the Zen’zat barracks in the pyramid as he was reading a vertical holographic display.

“Just trying to size them up with an eye towards where they might be in the present.”

“The others have gone already. Figured you would have been first in line.”

“Clan Saber is pretty set, so we won’t be heavily contending the territorial allotments. Why are you still here?”

“Same reason you are. Trying to find another angle.”

“Any luck?”

“I’m giving all my current people immunity to whatever standards we use, so there’s not going to be a turnover period,” Jason said casually. “The younglings will start being shipped out to Mainline colonies as soon as the message I sent arrives, so I’ve got time to ponder.”

“What about the race for the six systems?”

“You know as well as I that our Clans are more even than others. We don’t stand a chance of earning a major slot, so I’ve chosen not to waste resources overly prepping. I thought you might, given your naval dominance.”

“I’m working a different angle.”

“Care to share?” Jason asked, sitting down on the bench next to Paul’s.

“Territory defense only works if we can gain an advantage on the ground, otherwise it becomes a death trap. We can’t put down roots where the V’kit’no’sat can see them.”

“You thinking of moving your Clan rimward?”

“Even that’s not good enough. We can’t just hide, we have to strike and be on the move at all times. I keep running scenarios through my head and the only way I can see that Clan Saber can have a chance of effectively combating the V’kit’no’sat is to stay mobile and never fight a defensive battle. We have to be rogues, pirates even, as far as they’re concerned.”

“Rebels against the Empire?” Jason floated.

“Davis is right to worry about the masses. Until we can build planetary defenses sufficient to hold out against a modest fleet we’re sitting ducks. I don’t want the Sabers being sitting ducks. If we’re playing defense we can’t be protecting others. We have to be free to move. A Jedi has no attachments for a reason, and I’m seriously considering applying that principle to my entire Clan.”

“Like Canderous?”

“Yes.”

“That’s going to set you back so far you’ll be worse off than the Snowstorms.”

Paul smiled.

“Alright spill,” Jason insisted.

“Think Starcraft. The Terran structures built on the ground could fly if necessary to evacuate so you didn’t have to leave them behind to get destroyed.”

Jason stared blankly at the holographic text and diagrams for a moment, remembering back to the ancient game and realizing the genius in it. “Incredibly difficult to create, because you’d be starting from scratch, but you’d still be utilizing and living on the surface whereas Canderous does not. If your position is compromised you could evacuate in short order, then put down your infrastructure at another location and almost instantaneously have full production resume. Downside would be size. You’d have to have everything small and exchange mega facilities for hundreds of smaller ones, but it is theoretically viable.”

“Far more than viable.”

Jason frowned. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”

“It would make my Clan very hard to kill so long as we have forewarning. Everything would be naval. I’d build the structures into starships rather than mobile sedas. Quick to move, easy to replace if lost. Focus on a smaller fleet rather than having big chess pieces. The necessary few we could keep in deep space and safely anonymous. The problem is we’d become very, very small and give up the industrial base we’ve established. Against the lizards or even the Voku we’re better off proceeding as we are, but the V’kit’no’sat are so far ahead of us that this is the only way I can think of to give us a chance at survival. We have to be able to run and poke, no full-on engagements. No even fights. We have to be ghosts operating out of view when necessary.”

“And you’re thinking sooner is better than later? Which is why you’re not even interested in the territorial allotments.”

“I get the feeling that if we’re tied to any planet we’re not safe. We’ll make use of them when necessary, but we’re not going to stay anywhere permanently.”

“You’ve settled on this then?”

“We can’t all do it. It’ll leave us too weak. But I’m nearly convinced that this is the path Clan Saber has to go down. Not my first choice, but it has too many advantages over an enemy that typically holds all the cards. The more I review past battle records, the more I see the V’kit’no’sat being used to running over people through sheer tech advantage. They find out where you live then they pick the circumstances you’re bound to because you have a home to defend. If we become homeless they’ll have to fight in another manner, which they don’t have a lot of experience doing.”

“But there are some cases?”

Paul nodded. “They’re cagey, and almost exclusively utilize computer or mental hacks to get the information they need to track down those who hide or run away. If you leave a trail of breadcrumbs they’ll find and follow it, but the cases that interest me the most are those they never succeeded in locating.”

Paul adjusted the holograph telepathically, bringing up a list in V’kit’no’sat script along with a galactic map. “These are essentially bounties that were active at the time of the last update, citing races deemed for extermination that they knew had at least partially escaped their grasp. Those ships they’d tagged were still at large, including some seda-like colony ships. It seems that if you run, and run hard, you have a chance of getting away from them, and the Elarioni are living proof of that.”

“But you eventually have to settle down somewhere,” Jason pointed out, “and when you do you risk being discovered.”

“Which is why you have to stay ghosts, living in the anonymity that the galaxy is cloaked with. Always a rebel with no real territory…at least none that you can’t live without.”

“You’re thinking about fighting them in the here and now, not the future?”

“Surviving in the here and now. Other than some very low ground conflicts we can’t stand up to their weaponry for even a short while…but running is running, and I’d rather have the option now and not need it than keep hoping to go unnoticed while we continue learning from the database.”

“Your logic is sound, I just don’t think Clan Saber is the Clan to do it.”

“Who then?”

“I think we all should, piecemeal. That way a part of us could survive even if they came back tomorrow and live to rebuild the rest of the Clan. We need to be empires, not just fleets of roaming ships, but with that backup plan if things come to pass not in our favor. The Sangheili will help you develop this tech, for I think it’s worthwhile, and I’m guessing others will as well, but if we’re going to have a Clan go all-in and convert 100% to this methodology then I think it’d be best to start from scratch with zero population and build it up one ship at a time.”

Paul turned and glared at Jason. “You backstabbing bastard.”

“Am I wrong?” he asked innocently.

Paul squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think of a reason to disagree. “There’s a freedom to the strategy that is very appealing, and I want it for all of Clan Saber.”

“Is it worth losing your industrial muscle?”

“Depends.”

“We have the Tether colonies to fall back to. And even if we are invaded 10 years from now having a roaming Clan fleet of any size isn’t going to stop the carnage from ensuing. We need a Clan to pursue this as another page in the Star Force playbook, but Clan Saber is too important to other pages to focus on just this one.”

“But it’s such a cool one,” Paul protested.

“You can’t have two Clans, buddy,” Jason said, then did a double take as he thought through his own statement as Paul’s eyes widened a bit. “Or can you?”

“No reason she has to stop being a Saber,” Paul said as he stood up, knowing that he’d just found his solution.

“Where are you going?”

“We must move quickly if the Jedi Order is to survive. You in or not?”

“In for what exactly?”

“Maintaining our duo dominance.”

Jason grinned. “Always.”

“We can discuss it on a run around the command deck. Then I’m leaving the system to get to work before anyone else can get the jump on us.”

3 weeks later…

Kara’s dropship set down inside Paul’s command ship with the trailblazer waiting for her at the foot of the ramp as it descended. She eyed him curiously, wondering exactly what the fuss was about concerning this secret summons. She’d been hunting lizards on the far side of the Achkor Region and had to abandon a war fleet she’d been tracking to come back to Star Force territory to rendezvous with him.

“Now do you feel like telling me what the rush was?” she asked, stepping off onto the ship’s huge hangar deck.

“Big shake up across Star Force. Everything is getting reworked.”

“Yes, I know. Davis sent me a personal heads up.”

“He did?”

Kara nodded.

“Well, we’re still finalizing plans but Davis is handling everything non-Clan with some input from us, which is why we haven’t made a public announcement. There’s a lot of behind the scenes retooling that has to be done and we’re expecting it to take no less than a year before he starts reorganizing the civies. The Clans are going to be reworked into Star Force’s highest caliber factions, with all maturias being transferred to Mainline facilities so that our populations will be totally merit driven entries and no natives.”

“He said as much. Please tell me that’s not why you brought me all the way back here.”

“No. I could have sent you a message with that,” he said, thumbing towards the exit. What we have to talk about has to be off the record.

Go on, she replied telepathically so there would be no eavesdroppers.

Everything is changing for the Clans and our powerbase is going to evaporate if we don’t adapt accordingly. Davis is offering up territorial prizes for a series of elite level challenges…that you won’t be a part of. No offense, but your…

Is a cheat, I know.

The territorial prizes are so large it’s going to tip the current power balances along with all the other changes that will be happening. Each Clan is gearing itself towards facing the V’kit’no’sat threat while Davis is going to focus on the here and now, and from what we’ve been discussing with each other there are going to be some wildly different strategies employed, all of which will be centered around an enhanced competition between the Clans to get us better prepped for going up against Zen’zat.

Lizards don’t offer up much of a challenge, Kara agreed. Will that mean we’re pulling back on our combat assignments?

The theory is that with so many Bsidd and Calavari troops available the Clans can pick and choose where we strike rather than carrying as much of the workload as we have been. We will be keeping a higher percentage of our forces in training and Trials but we’re still going to fighting, with an emphasis on the heavier engagements.

Other than the maturias, what’s changing?”

We’re amping up everything. People either keep up or wash out back to Mainline. We’re cutting the newbs and slackers out and making the Sabers top of the line. Where exactly the benchmarks will land I’m not sure yet. The harder we make them, the less people we’ll have.

We’re kicking people out?

No, I’m not. Those already Sabers will remain Sabers if they choose. The standards will apply to others going forward and I’ll reduce the transitional training wheels over time. Eventually we won’t have any true civilian population left. Everyone will be working to advance the Clan in some fashion or they’ll expire their membership.

Sounds a bit harsh for some of the old timers.

I’m going to make sure it’s not, but everyone has to get up to running speed. No more walkers.

And what was important enough for you to come out and fill me in in person?

Clan Saber is going to have a lot of new projects in the works going forward. Some I’m working on now, others I’ll come up with later. A few of them will be co-op ventures with other Clans, and Jason and I will be developing one in particular that we’ll share with all the Clans after we get it smoothed out and a decent head start. We’re going to design and build mobile infrastructure so that we can land it on a planet and get a functioning colony up and running within days rather than years. On the reverse end we’ll be able to evacuate the infrastructure instead of just the population if we come under serious attack.

Isn’t that going to be ridiculously inefficient?

Yes, which is why we’ve got a lot of work to do on it. The up side is we can move our infrastructure around where the enemy can’t find us. If we’re tied to one location the V’kit’no’sat can simply come in and stomp on us. We need to be able to run, hide, and ambush with more than just our fleet. We need our industrial muscle to do the same.

For the entire Clan or just an addendum?

An addendum as far as the other Clans are concerned. I had considered moving Saber completely in that direction, but Jason and I have come up with something better. Instead of sacrificing our existing infrastructure in exchange for the transition, we’re going to build a mutual third Clan that will be entirely mobile. No sedas like Canderous. It’ll be all these new mobile structures and the warfleets they can build…and no one is going to know it exists. Everything we do from here on out is going to be geared to one day fighting the V’kit’no’sat, and if they can ever hack our computer systems this Clan isn’t going to be in them to find.

Kara’s eyes widened. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?

This new Clan is going to start with nothing more than an idea and have to be built from scratch. I’m overseeing it and working with Jason to develop the technology and methodology necessary. It will be comprised of Sabers and Sangheili, and on all records that will never change. This Clan doesn’t exist, and no one else will know about it. Not the other trailblazers. Not even Davis. But while me and Jason will be building it, I want you to run it.

So you’re giving a fake trailblazer a fake Clan? Kara said, noting the irony.

But here’s the good part. We’re not contributing resources to building this Clan, or territory. It has to be mobile and exist in the shadows. Once we get the key pieces built it’ll have to survive and grow on its own, pulling volunteer personnel from both Clans as necessary, but all industry will have to be its own and be fed by raiding the lizards for resources.

Hello.

Figured you’d like that part. It’ll pretty much be you pulling solo missions to grab cargo ships or hit small expansion colonies along the periphery of their territory, probably taking you far away from the ADZ, but the more you steal the faster the Clan will grow. You’ll be able to continue missions against them with a direct impact on the Clan’s success, so no administrative duties. This would be a private triumvirate, but you’d be the one in the field while Jason and me work to develop the Clan while we also rework Saber and Sangheili. That is your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Kara’s neutral face spread wide in a toothy grin. You had me at ‘raiding the lizards.’

8

July 30, 2812

Solar System

Earth

Gavin walked in the conference room doors of the Clan Metal Gear command tower in their territorial slot in Antarctica with his local senior staff of Archons and a few administrators and techs already present. He’d alerted them to gather as soon as he’d left Atlantis, but his Marquis and other top Clan members were outside the system at present. He wasn’t going to wait for them to get here before he got to work, though he’d sent out a summons all the same with instructions to get their butts back to Earth ASAP.

“What’s up?” a striker asked as the trailblazer walked over and slid onto one of the stools that surrounded the large flat worktable that already had a few holos sprouting from it, but when Gavin slid a datachip into a slot on the edge a whole forest of glowing data arose within the perimeter of the faces of those gathered.

“Star Force 2.0,” he said evenly. “Davis is reworking just about everything and has an altered mandate for the Clans. While he remakes Star Force with present day threats in mind, the Clans will focus on preparing us for the V’kit’no’sat. He wants us to increase our standards and cut the slackers out of the population by whatever means we want, but as of now all maturias are going to be shut down and the younglings shifted to Mainline facilities. Inclusion in Clan Metal Gear will be by invitation only.”

Another mage whistled, realizing just how big of a shift that was.

“You have no idea what’s coming, and we have to get on this sooner rather than later. All the other Clans are going to be scrambling to grab up the talent pool in the rest of Star Force, so we’re going to have to give them something unique to offer. One thing I’ve decided is that we’re going to remain Human only and press that combat front. When the V’kit’no’sat come we won’t be going hand to hand with Era’tran, we’ll have to take them with mechs, so virtually all of the commando combat is going to be us vs. the Zen’zat, so that’s what Metal Gear is going to focus on. How close are we to getting the holo simulators?”

All eyes went to the level 5 tech. “Not very, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking you’re thinking. The shield matrix is too weak to accommodate blows of even average intensity. We might be able to work up a useable training model for younglings, but not Archons. Our tech hasn’t caught up enough to their standards for us to even remotely copy their simulators.”

“What about the programs themselves?” Gavin asked.

“Copied and stored for future use. The processors will be the size of a room to compensate, but we can run them. It’s the holographic hardware that’s holding us back.”

“Put a team together to push that angle as a priority 1 project. We have to be able to train against opponents that fight like them, and the only way we can do that is with their own procedures. We’re Archons, not Zen’zat, and we need to get to know our enemy’s quirks so we can compensate and exploit them.”

“Even if we get matrix strength up to snuff, we’re not going to be able to simulate very many materials. It’ll be like punching glass, stone, or rubber every time.”

“Never the less, I want us using their training simulators as soon as we can, even if it is in a reduced capacity. In the meantime we’re going to keep personnel in the pyramid continuously. As long as we have the real deal we’re going to make use of it, then those individuals will come back and use what they learn to teach others. Going forward I’m instituting a split between training and field work. We have to have a section of the Clan that is on permanent training duty pushing their limits while others are out kicking the crap out of the lizards. Davis wants us to pull back in that area so we can pursue other projects, but over my dead body are we letting Mainline do all the fighting.”

“Percentages?” another mage asked.

“We’re going 30 field, 70 training and will hold to approximately that number through swapouts, but I want a core of at least 20% that are permanently training like our advanced training group here. We can’t have everyone taking turns. We need some to lead the way, and as much as I hate being a shut in, I’m volunteering myself for that. I’m the best we have, and if we’re going to pull the rest of the Clan up ahead of the others then I have to be the one kicking your asses to provide a greater challenge.”

“You’re giving up field work?” Jen-475 asked, who was the Clan’s third highest ranking Archon.

“I am. I know that’s something the others won’t do, so it’ll give Metal Gear an advantage. I’ll be training with the Clan mostly, and jumping in with the advanced training group time to time to learn from them, but eventually I want our core to be on par with that, if not better. Doing that across the board will be almost impossible, so I want to skew our training towards non-psionic hand to hand and press that hard. To that end, I also want to build and recruit the strongest Knight core in the Clans and work on using them in numbers rather than their typical unit support role. Zen’zat are going to be their size, so we need to get used to fighting teams of them. There are bound to be advantages we haven’t probed yet in that area, and I want us to find them.”

“Arc Knights?” a Baron asked.

“No. Others will want them badly, but we’re focusing on non-psionic combat. I want our Knight training core to be just that. Arc Knights have to split their time like Archons do, and I want them with a singular purpose. Get them strong and fast enough and the Archons will have to work hard to catch up while multitasking. We have to apply as much motivational pressure as we can to the training group, so much so that we’ll have people leaving the Clan because they can’t handle the stress. They’ll go back to Mainline and take the skills they’ve learned with us with them, so they won’t be washouts and I never want to hear you refer to them as such. I want Metal Gear to be tops in terms of commando intensity. That will help with our recruitment, though it will lower our numbers greatly at the outset.”

“If we have no younglings of our own,” the Baron asked, “we’re going to have to be recruiting our civilian population as well?”

“Yes, and though others are giving their current populations immunity we’re not. We’re going to institute a transitional period to give our current slackers and retirees a chance to get back in shape, but if they can’t pass muster they’re going to Mainline with everyone else. This is a train that ain’t stopping for no one. You keep up or you fall off.”

Gavin raised a finger in caveat. “However, I want our commando division to be the insanely hard one. The rest of our Clan will be amped up, but not to such a level. I don’t want to weed out a large number of our techs and reduce our industrial capability. We’re just going to get rid of the freeloaders there without much of a boost in standards. We’ll tweak it a bit, but I want that to be much more relaxed. Hand to hand is going to be our pressure cooker.”

“And Naval?” Jen asked.

“Same as always,” he scoffed. “Look at what Paul, Liam, and Roger are doing and see what we want to copy.”

When Morgan left Earth she took a warship directly to the nearby Sirius System in the Core Region where Clan Ninja Monkey had located its capitol, sharing the world of Everlast with a Mainline colony. Her Marquis was there, along with a handful of other high ranking Ninja Monkey Archons, though most of her Clan was spread out through numerous systems and deployed on active missions, whether they be Clan business or overseeing Mainline or other fleets.

Morgan called those present together in Marquis Falconi’s office for an informal chit chat, during which she began to give them a summary of what the trailblazers and Davis had decided on Earth and how it was going to affect Star Force and their Clan in particular.

“Also,” she continued, “all adepts and acolytes are going to be Clanless and coming out of basic they’ll be transitioning into a new program we’re developing, which we’re loosely referring to as ‘Null Clan.’ It will function the same way ours do with regard to the Archons, a lot of training and Trials mixed in with a bit of field work, but will be overseen by appointments the same way we assign Archons to the Mainline fleet. The catch is, we don’t get to draft any of them when they make ranger. We have to recruit them.”

“Oh hell no,” Gary-933 said, knowing exactly what that was going to mean.

Morgan held up a hand to stall the coming complaints. “The entire Clan system, from Archon down to accountant, is going to be recruitment based. Already the others are developing angles to attract key personnel and gaming their internal standards to either amp up the difficulty or keep it low and spread out to attract higher numbers that they hope to develop over time in exchange for the younglings they no longer have. We’re not playing that game, and are going to continue on the same way we have been.”

“How?” Falconi asked. “If Davis wants us prepping for a V’kit’no’sat invasion we’ll have to make alterations, and the lack of younglings is going to necessitate a variety of changes.”

“Not really,” Morgan said dismissively. “We all know that if the V’kit’no’sat come back now we’re toast, and that’s not going to change much going forward. The key to being able to fight them is and always has been the technology difference. Until that catches up we’ve got nothing more than our ingenuity to work with. Others are working that angle now and with luck will come up with a few tricks we can use, but the really effective stuff will have to be built down the road when we’ve got the tech we need, so the Ninja Monkey’s aren’t going to waste time with wishful planning.”

“What we are going to do is keep advancing, in all areas. Our commando strength is going to diminish in comparison to some of the other Clans based on what they’ve hinted at, and we’re just going to ignore that as best we can and focus on improving our marks rather than getting hung up on the comparisons. We need to be a well-rounded Clan, as we’ve already been working toward, and will continue to press that agenda even if we slip in the ranks in the interim. We won’t go down to the bottom of the barrel, for the specialists will end up there in their off categories, but I’m afraid our stature is going to take a hit going forward. Please feel free to surprise me with the contrary.”

“Why are you so sure we’re going to get our asses kicked?” Gary asked.

“Two reasons. First, several of the Clans are going to be instituting heavy training programs to the point of isolation, mimicking the advanced training program we’ve got going on Earth for Archons. They’re going to sink a percentage of their people into those to the exclusion of all else, hoping to make up ground lost and advance their core strength up to levels that will better be suited to fight the Zen’zat. They plan to lose a lot of people in the process, with them washing out and going into Mainline for the non-Archons, and risking Clan transfers for those who don’t like the intensity.”

“Second reason is they’re also going to be devoting the higher ranking Archons to the new Trials…and we’re not going to do that. Mainline and the other factions may have stepped up their military presence through numbers, especially the Bsidd, but we’re not abandoning the war front in exchange for Trials wins. I’m personally not going to be involved in many of the Trials but the others will be, and they’ll be bringing along scores of mages and padawans with them. We’re going to go heavy at the first trial that is scheduled to occur in two years, but after that we’re pulling our elites down to a handful and using rangers and strikers to fill out the balance.”

“We’re starting upper level Trials?” another mage asked.

Morgan nodded. “It’s been pointed out that we’ve been slacking off in that department by going out on field work too much. I disagree. We’ve got the advanced training program that is far more effective at amping up our workouts than Trials alone will do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m practically watering at the mouth as far as what this new system is going to be, because Wilson is designing all of it and I’m diving in along with the rest of the others. But after we get a good taste of it, we’re going back to field work…and that’s what the identity of our Clan is going to shift into.”

“As well as being our recruitment tool?” Falconi guessed.

“Exactly. A lot of people don’t like training non-stop. I can do it, and like doing it, but not when there is fighting going on out there. I can’t just sit on the sidelines when I know I could be making a big difference in the never-ending wars we’re plagued with. Some people need to take a break and train, but that’s not true of me or this Clan. We know how to train on the go and not fall behind, so we’re not making the internal alterations that the others are. We’re sticking with the program and adjusting for the lack of younglings and lazy personnel, which will boost the Clan in terms of professionalism. That will advance us enough on its own that we won’t need really hard standards for inclusion.”

“Where do our current ‘slackers’ go?”

“Mainline. We’ll give all our people a chance to stick around, but if they’re intent on going on permanent vacation there won’t be an opportunity to do that here anymore. That’s what Mainline is good for, and rather than drastically rebuilding our Clan like a lot of the others we’re just going to streamline it.”

“And?” Gary asked, picking up on something in her mood. Something that she was holding back.

Morgan let slip a wry smile. “We’re going to keep a good number of our Archons in Mainline leading it, but our combat operations are not going to be pairing with them anymore, nor the Calavari or Bsidd. Not even the Voku or H’kar. We’re soloing from now on and advancing our Clan towards fighting the V’kit’no’sat through combat experience gained. When the tech rolls around we’ll incorporate it, probably steal a lot of ideas from the others in the process, but our people are going to be the most combat savvy because we're going to be spending our years on the fronts rather than in pure training.”

“Pure training hasn’t hurt Vermaire,” Gary pointed out almost apologetically.

“Pure training doesn’t hurt anybody,” Morgan clarified, “but you don’t get the same edge you get from fighting in live situations. Those with extensive Trials experience might be more polished, but those with combat experience will be more savvy. Trials are explosive and intense, frontline combat is often grinding and one-sided with moments of intenseness the Trials will never match because of what is on the line. Losing is bad, but losing people is unacceptable. The Trials are meant to build skill sets and do so extremely well, but applying them in the field is a whole other trick that we are going to set the benchmarks for.”

“Define soloing?” Gary asked skeptically.

“A little arrangement I worked out with Davis privately. The others will know soon enough, but we’re not going to expand any more within the Core Region. We’re going to hold on to what we’ve got, no way we’re making the mistake the Snowstorms did, but any territory that we win in the upcoming Trials we’ll trade off. We need to focus what population we have at our new home.”

“New home?” Gary asked when Morgan didn’t say any more.

“Our borders are constantly in flux, with us beating back the lizards on most fronts and colonial expansions, even if in piecemeal, on the others…save for one. Our coreward border is fixed by the no-go line, and even though the Voku have a presence there that is keeping the area somewhat subdued, the more the lizards eat up the Skarrons and spread out through their back territory we’re going to have to counter them all along the line and hold it…without taking the worlds from them.”

“That’s a situation we’ve not faced yet,” she said with all sincerity, “and it defies our very drive to smash the enemy. We can’t chase them coreward. They have a safe haven to operate out of now, against us anyway. The Voku can go after them if they wish, but right now they’re busy with other matters, and even if they weren’t they don’t have the numbers to purge the galaxy of these bastards. As much as I hate to say it, we’ve got to put up with them being there on our coreward border, and how to do that effectively hasn’t been established yet, for they haven’t had a chance to truly strengthen those areas.”

“Even if we don’t colonize beyond the line,” Gary differed, “we can still mow the grass a bit.”

“Yes, and we will,” Morgan assured him, “but it’s just a matter of distance going back far enough to where we won’t visit that they can build up massive armies and have them sitting and waiting to hit us where we’re weak. Even if we turtle up well there’s always going to be a lot of tension there, especially if they develop another new toy and are willing to throw trillions of disposable troops at us testing it.”

“What are we going to do about it?” Falconi asked.

“Davis has granted Clan Ninja Monkey permission to take possession of as much of that border as we want and to hold it indefinitely, shielding the Achkor Region and everything else beyond. He’s not giving us any worlds or resources, but is letting us keep every lizard world we can take.”

“Damn,” Gary said with a laugh as he glanced at the others in the room. “That’ll one up the other Clans and then some.”

“Each of us is finding a way to contribute to Star Force’s future,” Morgan explained, only slightly suppressing a smile. “We can’t do it all ourselves, but we’re going to do more than the others. They’ll experiment and train, teaching us new tricks as we go along no doubt, but we’ll be the one fielding a well-rounded empire out of necessity. We’ll be picking a fight with the lizards on our own and holding the line on our own, learning and growing as we go. Whether you are an Archon or a tech, if you want to find the heaviest fighting to contribute to, Clan Ninja Monkey is where you go. That’s our recruitment incentive,” she said, looking at Falconi. “Use it to get me as much civilian support as you can. I’ll handle the recruitment of the troops…from multiple races. We’re not just sticking to an all-Human Clan. Anyway who wants in on the fighting is going to be welcome to join our ranks and help carve out our border territory.”

9

August 8, 2812

Retari System

Atlantica

Erin-016 literally ran through the Star Force colony city of Manaan coming off the dropship that had landed her here, having taken a jumpship directly from Earth as soon as the trailblazers’ brainstorming session with Davis was completed. She knew as well as the others that there would be a mad rush for recruits going forward and there was one in particular she wanted to get to before the others, having sent a message on ahead to forestall any remote grabs. Being the first to get to her in person, she hoped, would give Erin an advantage.

When Erin came to one of the air/water transition sections she grabbed a breath mask off a nearby rack, checked its functionality, then pulled her shoes off and stripped down to her underwear, leaving her clothes in a pile on the floor and diving into the aquatics section of the city. She swam through a myriad of tunnels, passing by a number of Elarioni and a handful of individuals from other aquatics races until she eventually came to where the city’s computer had logged Ariel’s present location.

The pale Human swam into one of the many workrooms that had several dozen Elarioni going about various tasks. They all looked similar, save for their hair which was a myriad of colors. She found only three emeralds in the room and pulled a quick mental search to identify which one she wanted, then swam across the chamber and up behind Ariel.

The Elarioni turned around before she got to her, hearing the crude swimming strokes of a Human, but she grinned widely when she saw who it was.

“Hello, Erin. I didn’t expect you here this soon.”

“Am I too late?” she asked, with her mask also handling the computer translation as she floated in near neutral buoyancy making small hand motions to steady herself about a meter off the floor as she slowly sank down, for all Archons were sinkers due to their muscle density and trim bodies.

“For what? I haven’t heard from any of the others.”

“Really?” Erin said, surprised. But then again maybe she’d just caught a break while they were pursuing other ends. Aquatics wasn’t high on most people’s wish lists, but she was really surprised Lens or Kyler hadn’t said anything to her yet. “Guess I’m just faster than them. I want your help.”

“Gladly. What is it that you need?”

“I want you to join Clan Alterra.”

Ariel blinked her glowing gold eyes curiously. “Join?”

“The Clans are changing drastically and we’re all scrambling to grab up whatever advantages that we can get. I want to grab you before anyone else does and have you help me add Elarioni to my Clan. We need to go above and beyond what Star Force has already done with aquatics, with an eye geared towards the larger threat…in the core.”

“Are they coming?” Ariel asked, knowing better than to use their name amongst others who probably didn’t have security clearance high enough to know about the Humans’ relationship to the V’kit’no’sat.

“Not that we know of, but while the rest of Star Force lives in the present, the Clans are going to work towards the future and I want your help.”

“I’m not sure how much further help I can be. I’ve already shared all I know with you.”

“I don’t know either. We’re going to be looking for ways of doing things that we haven’t tried before and I want you on my team. And now that we’re not limited to just Humans, I also want you to help me kick the crap out of the other Clans in the Trials.”

Ariel smiled. “And that’s why you thought the others would ask me as well?”

“I think it’s only a matter of time before they do, and I wanted to get to you first. Especially before Paul or Jason did. Their Clans are too dominant as it is.”

“Not in aquatics.”

“No, which is why I’m sure they’ll be after you eventually to join them, as will many others I’m sure. I’m hoping that me getting here first gives me at least a little edge in your decision?”

Ariel reached out a thin blue arm and gripped the Human’s shoulder with her three fingers as she smiled soothingly. “You can relax, sister. I’d be honored to join your Clan.”

“Sweet!” Erin exclaimed, jumping off the floor with an excited twitch of her ankles.

“When do we leave? Or are you expanding your Clan to this world?”

“I wish. Kyler’s been keeping us out, but Clan Alterra has some water of its own to play in on Demacia. Currently we’re ranked 38th in overall Aquatics, and any Clan that adds Elarioni is going to shoot up their skill scores. Some of the Clans are staying all Human for various tactical reasons and I really want to stick it to them in aquatics, as well as getting our Humans less slow in the water.”

“Less slow…good word choice.”

“Just being honest.”

“As always, but you have a funny way of putting things. Where are your clothes?”

“I didn’t take time to change and I didn’t want my air clothes slowing me down.”

“Am I really that big of a prize?”

“Yes,” Erin said flatly. “And you already agreed. No second thoughts allowed.”

Ariel laughed, which amounted to a melodic screech that the computer didn’t try to translate. “I am yours, Erin. When will we leave?”

“As soon as I can snag an aquatic starship. Give me three hours?”

“I will be ready, and rebuff any further requests that may come in in the interim.”

“Even if it’s Paul…and he’s begging?”

“Even if.”

Erin pointed a finger at her. “I owe you big time. Be back,” she said, pushing off the floor and awkwardly swimming away at decent speed from the Elarioni’s point of view.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Having doubts?” Randy asked as their dropship was flying down to the surface of Kirit.

“This is a huge alteration based on a whim,” Mara-677 argued. “Shouldn’t you think it through first?”

“You think I haven’t?”

“Not enough.”

“What am I missing?”

“If I knew that I would have said something by now. I just have a funny feeling.”

“I know the Kiritas better than anyone,” Randy reminded her.

“I’d feel better with a gradual shift.”

The Clan Star Fox leader shook his head. “No need. I’m sure about this.”

“Still think you’re jumping the gun.”

“The others are rushing to make changes too.”

“That doesn’t make it any smarter.”

“What’s the downside?”

“It won’t be our Clan anymore,” she said without hesitation. “Too many new faces…we’ll lose the essence of who we are practically overnight.”

“Like hell we will. What exactly do you think I’m doing?”

“The Kiritas don’t think like we do. We’re a Human Clan, who knows what we’re going to end up after this little experiment.”

“Badmouth it all you want, but don’t call it little.”

“Ah…you’re incorrigible.”

“Careful, your British is showing.”

“No such thing anymore.”

“A complaint?”

“No, just a statement of fact,” she said as they began to heavily decelerate against the thickest part of the atmosphere while simultaneously braking against the planet’s gravity.

“Bedazzle me with another.”

“You’re dragging me along just to gloat.”

“Half fact,” the trailblazer corrected her. “I also want you here to learn.”

“I already know you’re reckless.”

“You were never involved in our Beta Region colonies, so you don’t know the Kiritas any better than the other Clans.”

“I know the Kiritak well enough.”

“Same thing, yet not the same thing.”

“Thank you, that clears up so much.”

“Watch and learn, youngling.”

“Damn it, Randy, I’m as old as you. Stop with the youngling crap.”

The trailblazer just smirked and left it at that for the rest of the ride down.

“My friends,” Randy said, standing on the floor of the Kiritas High Council and staring up at the 58 members seated around the rectangular floor he was standing on. “Meesa back.”

Mara, who was standing beside him and a step behind his left shoulder did a visible facepalm, but Randy either didn’t notice or didn’t care to show it.

“You have not been on Kirit for a very long time,” one of the Kiritas said. “We are very pleased that you have returned to us. Is there something we can assist you with?”

“Yes there is. Star Force is about to undergo a major revision, with all factions affected. The changes to the Kiritas will be minimal, but I think I’ve found a few improvements to be made.”

Mara noticed all the Kiritas sit up a bit straighter, and she could feel their curiosity spiking as well.

“Please tell us what you want us to do.”

Randy clasped his hands behind his back. “First, the rest of Star Force is being restructured into societal tiers in order to reward those who are working for the betterment of everyone rather than pursuing business ventures or just kicking back and relaxing. That isn’t needed with you, for your race has a work ethic that puts most others to shame. With your permission, I will be making some structural alterations to increase efficiency.”

“The Randy does not need to ask,” another Kiritas said, almost taking offense by the politeness. “We will do whatever you want us to do without question. Have we given you reason to think otherwise?”

“No,” Randy said dismissively, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at Mara. “But I have more to ask of you than just this. I need your help.”

“What do you require of us?” another said with evident determination in his voice.

“The Clans are changing, more so than the rest of Star Force. We are no longer raising younglings of our own, but are increasing our numbers through recruitment of those sufficient to meet our standards. Such recruits will be volunteers, and may leave the Clan whenever they like, for our internal activities are going to be far more stressful than normal. All the Clans are amping up the intensity in order to make us stronger, and any individual that joins us for even a short time should benefit from the environment and take their upgraded skills back to other sections of Star Force.”

“As such we will be the elite within Star Force, pushing the boundaries and developing new strategies that we will then share with others. The competition between the Clans is also increasing on multiple levels. Clan Star Fox is one of the largest Clans, but with our new mandate I intend to make it the largest, and by a huge margin. Not just in terms of population, but in industry. There’s a nasty rumor going around that the lizards can out-build us. We certainly take our time and do things right, but are we really slower? I don’t think so, and I intend to prove it by growing Clan Star Fox into a giant.”

“Do you require additional resources?”

“Such outside economic assistance is still forbidden within the Clans. Star Fox has to build internally or trade with other Clans only, so no, I cannot accept any help from the Kiritas…at least not in such a way. All 100 Clans are taking their own route towards our new mandate and are diverging more than we ever have before. We each have our own goals and vision of what we want our Clans to become…and then we’ll see who prevails in the Trials and power rankings over the coming years.”

“Clan Star Fox has been a Human Clan up until now. I’m altering the makeup to allow for individual Kiritas to join the Clan if they meet a very high standard of measurement…and they must continue to meet these standards to remain in the Clan, just as the Humans will have to do. There is no longer any room for true civilians. Everyone has to work and keep working. If someone can’t handle that, or wants to take a long break, they will leave the Clan and land somewhere else, but knowing you as I do, I know that won’t be an issue for most Kiritas. The question is how many of you will be able to make the various standards I set forth.”

“Furthermore, I intend to experiment with integrating Kiritas into our combat units in addition to your obvious industrial aptitude. I don’t know what the end result will be, but already your advanced units have shown promise and I intend to probe your capabilities even further. Even if the combat angle totally bombs, I still want you guys as part of the Clan to help bolster our supply and transport units.”

“How many volunteers do you need?”

Randy smiled. “That all depends on how fast we can build, for I intend to take as many Kiritas that want to join and can qualify. I suspect there will be more willing than we have room for, but like I said, I want to kill this nasty rumor that the lizards can out-build us, and I figure the best way to do it is by expanding Clan Star Fox as fast as we can and literally putting all the others to shame. We have no additional territory as yet to work with, so we’ll have to work with the sites we currently control, but there are plenty of untapped resources there if we devote the necessary energy to go after them.”

“There will be new territory slots awarded for Trials success, but I’m not counting on us gaining any of them. If we do it’ll be bonus, but I’m planning to work with what we have and expand it rapidly. In order to do that I need an influx of qualified volunteers, and there is no one better at the supply game than the Kiritas. Not even the lizards.”

“May we volunteer the entire Kiritas race?” one of the High Councilors asked.

Randy laughed. “I appreciate the sentiment, but my Clan is too small to accommodate even a fraction of your numbers. Plus the standards I’m going to be setting down are going to be a stretch even for you guys in terms of productivity and fitness. Most of you won’t qualify initially and will have to work your way into a slot over the years to come, with more slots opening up the faster we can grow our infrastructure.”

“Oh, and if the other Clans ask for volunteers as well, feel free to help them if you wish, but I can guarantee you my standards for membership will be higher than theirs, for I know better than them what you’re capable of. And I’d prefer if the best of you tried to get into Clan Star Fox before you accepted any of their invites…especially after we show them what you guys can really do.”

“Thank you for giving permission for us to entertain their offers, but I can assure you that no Kiritas would choose to work in any other part of Star Force if given the option of joining your Clan, even if it was only for a week. We are humbled…”

Randy raised a warning finger.

“…honored by your offer,” the Kiritas corrected himself, “and will supply you with as many volunteers as you can make use of.”

“Good,” Randy said, cracking a sarcastic smile. “Humble workers are no good. Too lazy.”

10

January 3, 2814

Unknown System beyond Delta Region

Lizard territory

Kara crept along the low mountain ridge, staying within the nooks and crannies on the terrain as she magnified her vision of the distant lizard mining outpost. They had over 100 of them set up on the planet, all of which were feeding the development of two small but growing colonies in this backwater expansion. The local population was gone, but their corpses still littered parts of the planet giving Kara an idea of the timeframe of the invasion. She guessed the lizards had been here less than 2 years, with the most recent to have died within 4 months. Had she arrived sooner she would have been able to save them, and was silently cursing their luck.

That wasn’t why she was here, though. She’d come far out from Star Force territory, traveling directly up on the galactic plane until she reached an unmapped region that the lizards were casually pushing into with what looked like no resistance. She couldn’t be sure, having only lightly scouted a few systems along the way, but this planet only had three cruisers to defend it, suggesting that the locals had been primitive pushovers.

Kara could destroy the entire lizard occupation herself if she wanted to, but that wasn’t the mission. There were a lot of lizards closer to Star Force territory for her to go after if she just wanted to work on her kill count rather than spending 8 months traveling out to this distant lizard border. No, she was here to exploit their weak areas and do to them what they had done to Star Force so long ago…though technically it had been inept civilian contractors. They’d been blindsided by the presence of the invaders on Corneria, and now she was going to turn the tables and hit the lizards where they didn’t expect Star Force to be.

And she needed to do it quietly so not to draw attention, hence her sneaking around and approaching across land rather than just dropping down from orbit on top of them. The Clan Sangheili warship that she’d borrowed was tucked away safely around another planet and hidden from the lizard sensors, with her and a team of volunteers having come down via a fleet of dropships onto an uninhabited part of the planet. They were staying out of sight miles away while she crept in towards this isolated outpost, figuring out how she was going to play this.

Most of the complex appeared to be below ground, with several structures sprouting out of the sparse vegetation and marking the location like pillars. Kara could also see several adjacent buildings, but everything was pretty compact…which was to her advantage. She spotted no guard towers or turrets, but she knew better than to assume there would be no guards on station, though from this range she wasn’t going to be able to pick them out if they were concealed behind the scrub brush of ugly trees that were more thorns than leaves.

Scanning the terrain in between her and the outpost she plotted her course and began moving, walking/running where needed and flying spot to spot inches off the ground whenever possible. It was dark, so her shadow mode made her virtually invisible to the lizard eyes, but she could detect scattering traces of sensor beams reflecting down from the atmosphere, telling her that there was an aerial detection array in place. Kara didn’t know at what altitude it was operating, so she had to go in on the ground.

It was possible that her shadow mode and other countermeasures might be able to hide her, but there was no point in taking any chances this early in the game. Unnoticed wasn’t something that you could get back once squandered, so she was going to take this slow and easy, working her way up close to the lizard outpost and keeping an eye out for whatever surveillance they might have in play.

Kara wasn’t expecting much, given how low scale the lizard presence was on this colony, and she wasn’t disappointed. Once she got in close she found three scouts on patrol around the site and another two within. Accessing their minds she secured enough information to know that another shipment of processed ore was coming up from below within the hour and a flight of Kirbies would be here in approximately six to pick it and the others up. Right now the landing platform was only a fifth full of crates, so Kara decided to wait it out a bit longer and took the opportunity to sneak inside the perimeter and do some wall crawling.

She found the sensor array easy enough and hacked into it, inserting a program that would ignore a certain vector and allow free flight without registered detection, despite the fact that the sensor beams would still be going out as normal. With that built-in corridor established she commed two of her distant dropships and got them on the move, albeit slowly and over ground, much as she’d approached by.

While they were on their way the main cargo doors to the subsurface structure opened up and allowed an elevator platform rise even with ground level. On it were a few dozen lizards that proceeded to transfer the new crates full of valuable materials off the lift and over to a waiting area on the edge of the landing pad. The lift went down again and came back up three more times before they finally finished, with Kara holding the dropships off back beyond the ridgeline until they were done.

Reaching out with her Ikrid she scanned the surrounding buildings and started knocking everyone unconscious, having to move around a bit to get within range and doing it in a way that no one would see someone else just keel over and have time to wonder what was going on. She finished up with the perimeter guards, seeking them out and giving them the remote night tap before calling the dropships in at speed.

Two Falcon-class vessels zipped in over top of the lizard mining colony and landed on the pad with Kara standing watch via Ikrid and ready to subdue anyone that woke up or, more likely, came up from below ground. A crew of techs spilled out of the dropships and began moving the lizard crates inside using their own equipment. They worked quickly and got the two ships nearly full before all the cargo was onboard and the landing platform was clear of crates. Kara signaled them to leave by the same vector they arrived and held position until they were out of sight.

She dropped down from her perch near the lift and moved out closer to where she dropped the perimeter guards, taking control of their bodies and standing them up so that when she woke them they wouldn’t realize that any time had passed. It was a tricky thing to do, but each one shook off the disorientation and continued on about their patrols, minds focused on the present and washing away the bit of curiousness as to their momentary mental blip.

Kara kept to her stealth and moved over near the buildings, doing the same with those inside though it was harder, for they were doing more than walking. She tried to disguise their waking up as much as possible, but there was no way at least some of them wouldn’t realize they’d been taking a nap. Still, the more confusion she could sow the better, so she tweaked the waking patterns enough that with a little memory implantation she convinced them that some noxious fumes had escaped containment and rendered them unconscious.

It wouldn’t hold up to an examination of the facts later, but it would keep them preoccupied with internal matters for the moment, and with the perimeter guards swearing that a group of Kirbies had come in to take the cargo crates early, Kara figured she could cause a lot more mayhem before the lizard planet began to suspect they had unwelcome company.

Climbing up to the sensor array again Kara undid and deleted her programming cover so that it wouldn’t be around to be found, then dropped back to ground and distracted the scouts’ minds as she crept off into the night and headed back overland to the ridgeline, then from there on back to the rendezvous point with the dropships via direct flight once her sensor silhouette was blocked by the terrain.

“What did we get?” she asked as she landed inside the open ramp to one of the full dropships as they all sat parked on a dirt-covered plain in the middle of nowhere to the distant north.

“Nothing special,” one of her new Clan Ghostblade techs answered, “just some iron and carbon pellets.”

“I wasn’t hoping for special,” she said, retracting her armor back into her forearm jewel with the red scales vanishing to reveal her white with dark blue stripe Archon uniform. “Just useful.”

“It’s free,” another commented. “And I really like free.”

“So do I,” Kara said with a smirk. “That went well, but let’s hit a few other locations before they have a chance to think about what’s going on.”

“You want us to take this load back to the jumpship?”

“No. Stay here and we’ll all go back together. If we get spotted I’m your only defense, so we can’t afford to split up.”

“Right. Where to next?”

“Southeast of here there are a couple of outposts within 50 miles of each other. I want to hit them both. If that doesn’t fill the holds we’ll sniff around the others. I got the impression that there’s a regular shipment pattern and if we start catching them when they’re full we won’t have to make as many raids.”

“And when they do figure out what’s going on?”

“We’ll play it by ear, but we’re not tipping our hand and exposing ourselves. We have to be ghosts in this, no matter what they suspect.”

“Understood.”

“Give me a head start, then bring four empty dropships with you to the rendezvous point I lay down.”

Kara turned and walked two steps back towards the open ramp, then her body was covered in the red scales once again as she shot off into the dark.

“Damn, I really want one of those,” a tech said, with the others nodding their wholehearted agreement.

Kara and her crew continued to raid the lizard planet for the next 2 months, gaining both resources and information. With a map of the nearby lizard colonies she was able to pick and choose her targets more carefully, focusing on the slightly larger worlds and getting a wide choice of supplies to raid from for the following year then, with a hold full of stolen goods, she ordered her jumpship back to a predetermined rendezvous point on the edge of Delta Region.

When she returned she found a handful of other ships waiting for her…all of which were running under Clan Ghostblade IDs. None were new constructions, for per operating orders Kara had to build everything herself so there were no records to trace back to, meaning the jumpship she was on had to be returned to Clan Sangheili at some point, and the same was true of the six jumpships ahead that were waiting for her. Those, she quickly saw, were carrying brand new smaller vessels in their external docking holds, and they definitely weren’t drones.

“Greetings Clan Leader,” Lev-922 said with a smile as his holographic image popped up next to Kara’s command chair.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked with a laugh.

“I volunteered,” the fellow Saber admitted. “Thought you could use some more psionic help with your raids.”

“I’ll take any help I can get. You with or without padawan?”

“Without. She was ready to fly solo anyway, and with her being a Firestorm I couldn’t bring her in on this.”

“What else did Paul send me?”

“Archon-wise none, but Jason sent along a couple of rangers. As far as the ships go we’ve got prototype Ghostblade industry ships with jump capability within a system. We’re still going to have to ferry them around by jumpship, and these are just on loan until we can build our own.”

“I know. What about support personnel?”

“Got an army of techs for you and a scattering of Regulars. Paul and Jason will send more if you need them, but they figured you were going to be pulling mostly solo ops for a while.”

“Now that you’re here that’s not true, but I am looking at going after their shipping lanes if we can figure out a way to get the cargo transferred. I haven’t killed any lizards yet and I want to keep it that way for now.”

“Generous of you.”

“I’d rather trick and steal from the helpless rather than slaughter them.”

“If they’re traveling in convoy we can take two ships, swap one crew for the other’s cargo and let them go on their merry way while we take the other one off their hands.”

“That’s a lot of minds to freeze, and on two ships simultaneously. Until you got here that wasn’t an option.”

“And now?”

“How many drones you got?

“Six cutters, three corvettes, and a destroyer. But I thought you were thinking about taking them from the inside?”

“I can sneak onboard, if I’m lucky. You, not so much.”

“Piggyback ride?”

“My armor can’t expand coverage like that. Are any of those drones interceptors?”

“Three cutters are, but we’ve got some other mods onboard if you want to swap them out.”

“Good. If we’re going to be jumping convoys we’re going pirate, not sneak thief. What’s the timetable look like before we can start building our own drones?”

“Depends how much these babies are fed.”

“I’ve got a jumpship full of raw materials to start with.”

“The plan Paul sent along has us building a myriad of other ships, mostly duplicates, before we start trying to go for a mobile shipyard, but the plans for one are here and the segments break apart into individual ships…but we’ll need a secure location to set up in, and in theory the teardown time will be in the hours, not the minutes.”

“Ground or orbit?”

“I believe ground is preferred, but they’re also capable of orbital production.”

“Even for jumpship slips?”

“Haven’t got one of those out of design phase yet. Everything I’m referring to has been hastily built in prototype back home. What I’ve got here are the first and last of the production models. Everything else going forward stays with Clans Saber and Sangheili, while these were quietly misplaced in the construction logs. The crews that built them will be cycling out to us as they train others to replace themselves in the program, so we’re still ghosts in this, though the sooner these jumpships get back to normal operations the better, because we still have a trail until they do.”

“Paul really is worried about a computer hack, isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t say worried, just playing things safe. This Clan is going to be our ace in the hole should something unexpected happen, V’kit’no’sat or otherwise, and he wants us to live up to our name as soon as possible. Nice choice by the way. Pays homage to both Saber and Sangheili.”

“This is a joint op, so it only seemed fitting.”

Lev raised an eyebrow. “This is way more than an op, unless Paul has been telling me tall tales?”

“Right now it’s an op. I have to build the actual Clan along the way.”

“Are we basing outside of Star Force territory or just visiting to grab goodies?”

“We’re staying outside and out of sight for now, though we do need to establish a line of communication back home. We can’t build relays of our own, so we’re going to have to have proxy ships within both Saber and Sangheili fleets come out to meet us for information downloads. If we access a relay directly there’s an electronic trail to follow, while a ship can give us full access to records without any system flags going up.”

“Now you are just being paranoid.”

“Being thorough. Very, very thorough.”

“How are we going to communicate with our own fleet once it gets large enough to be spread out?”

“That’s one of many problems yet to be solved, but since we don’t have a fleet yet we’ve got time to chew on it…along with a lot of other things. Paul and Jason have promised to work most of it out from their end, I’m here to put it into actual practice.”

“And hit the lizards to no end.”

Kara smiled. “Exactly.”

Lev crossed his arms over his chest. “Why do I get the feeling we’ll be going after more than cargo ships in the long run?”

“Star Force has gotten very good at recycling lizard tech. It may not be as convenient as stealing their cargo, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than mining it ourselves.”

“Yeah, I’m definitely going to enjoy being part of this Clan,” Lev said with a smile. “We need somewhere to ground these puppies. Do you have a site selected yet?”

“Yep. Two jumps from here and a nice, quiet little frozen ice ball with a lot of untouched ore fields.”

“Ice?” he said, losing his merriment.

“The rebels didn’t choose Hoth for the scenery,” Kara reminded him. “Clan Ghostblade has to be invisible, which means going to the fringes and avoiding all the obvious vacation spots.”

Trials

1

August 18, 2822

Solar System

Earth

Jason ducked under a spinning holographic Zen’zat arm, dropping down to his ankles before jumping up and backwards into a flip, kicking out simultaneously into the opponent’s gut with both feet, but he wasn’t fast enough and the warrior twisted at the midsection and sidestepped causing Jason’s feet to miss. The trailblazer arched his back midair, not getting the backwards momentum he expected, then he created a Lachka field in between the two of them on reflex, knocking them apart before the much taller warrior could grab hold of him.

He dodged a kick by a few inches and rolled sideways onto his feet, deciding to stay low and launching himself back towards his opponent. Jason went for a grapple, throwing in a faint with his hands. He reached them upwards as he lunged, then snapped them back down and got hold of one of the giant’s legs. This one was bigger than most Knights by a good six inches and had the body mass to match. It would have been hard for Jason to move him if he hadn’t been so strong, but pulling aside and tossing a 320 pound mass wasn’t a big deal nowadays, even without a psionic boost.

Jason used it though, surging his speed using a Yetu boost as he stepped to the left and pulled the big leg with him as he also twisted and extended his grip, throwing the male Zen’zat simulation program across the ring near to the out of bounds marker. For this exercise it was activated, so as the very agile giant caught himself in a three point stance Jason launched into him, again feigning high but dropping low instead. He balled up just shy of the Zen’zat’s feet then exploded upward, shoving both coiled arms into the man’s pelvis in a Kamehameha-like shove that knocked the hologram up off its feet and backwards.

The green-clad hologram passed by the out of bounds line and the simulation ended with the man disappearing as if he’d been Jedi-ghosted. The control board on the other side of the room lit up with holographic stats as Jason walked over to it and read the V’kit’no’sat script. The point of this drill was to keep himself from getting thrown out of bounds, for the Zen’zat programs didn’t hesitate to use their mass against him and even one grip point was enough to send him flying into disqualification territory, which usually ended up with him bouncing off the surrounding walls.

Jason had to move quickly and not make a mistake, but so long as he could do that he owned this program, for his Sav made everything look like it was in slow motion. The fighting never overwhelmed his mind causing him to miss things, and even when he did get hit in the head or otherwise disoriented he recovered so fast he didn’t miss much. This challenge would punish him handily if he made a single mistake, but this time at least he’d come out on top, making him 11/5 today.

That should have been a clean score, but if these training simulations were accurate then the Zen’zat were beasts where commando skills came into question. There were 6 basic tiers to Zen’zat strength levels, which translated into status positions. Level 1 and 2 constituted the bulk of their forces, as of 100 millenia ago anyway. Level 3 was their elite class, with the others being rare to acquire and making up less than .5% of their number. Ironnsey had been a level 6 and over a million years old when the Zak’de’ron had killed him in an orbital bombardment during one of several civil wars, though it had also been their largest and most costly internecine.

There had been two more previously, with the known Raptor Rebellion later that had led to the abandonment of Earth. Jason knew most of the elite Zen’zat had been killed when the V’kit’no’sat had tried to destroy the Zak’de’ron, and thankfully so. With any luck the Rit’ko’sor had knocked off a few more, but even Zen’zat being born on the day Earth was abandoned were now more than 100 times older than Jason and the eldest Archons, which worried him considerably.

However, he and the trailblazers did now have an advantage on most of them, for it wasn’t typical for Zen’zat to possess as many psionics as the mages now did. Zen’zat had to individually discover each beyond the first tier and battlemeld didn’t exist as far as they knew. That meant an opponent with roughly equal hand to hand skills as Jason would be a pretty easy takedown with the psionics added on top…though it’d depend what the other guy had as well, not to mention to what level he’d adapted them, for the psionics had a great deal more potential than even Jason had attained.

The telekinetic wedge push he’d just used was such an example and was something that he could not have even attempted to do when he first developed Lachka, for he had to project the field independently of himself. That little trick had taken a long time to learn, then even longer to develop to sufficient levels, and there were many more in the database that he’d not yet figured out, plus who knew how many other applications that had yet to be discovered.

The Archons were basically writing the book on the battlemeld customizations since there were no records in the pyramid, but so far they hadn’t created any new tricks with the known psionics, for the Zen’zat had millennia to figure out, work on, and refine those. That said, Jason and some of the others were seeing potential in some places now that they had Sav to work with, and that was an ability that few Zen’zat had ever achieved.

The training program Jason had just used was a tier 3 level 82, and had he not possessed Sav there was no way he could have held his own. Though there was no true translation between Zen’zat levels and Archon ones, for they both trained and measured skills differently, a level 1 mage was roughly equivalent to the boundary line between tier 1 and tier 2 Zen’zat. Throw in the slew of psionics the mages had and that meant that, per their levels 100,000 years ago, the mages could best more than half the Zen’zat population…in theory.

Archons were smaller than Zen’zat, and that factored in heavily in a way that the V’kit’no’sat measurements couldn’t fully anticipate. Jason knew that with their smaller size they would have an easier time attaining the mobility and agility necessary to really put Sav to use, though individuals like Vermaire had shown that the extra bulk didn’t mean one was slow and the thought of Zen’zat like him coming after them really made Jason worry, for right now he couldn’t take him, nor could most of the trailblazers unless they were working together.

Now, that was because they weren’t using psionics when they sparred, and Morgan especially with her Jumat could take Vermaire down with little trouble, but in sheer hand to hand combat the Black Knight was superior and Jason knew he ranked somewhere in the 2nd tier of Zen’zat levels…and that was without Sav, which presently only the trailblazers possessed.

Their battlemeld skills gave the trailblazers the ability to take on higher level Zen’zat in groups, so Jason felt fairly confident that if/when they faced them they could hold their own, but the real problem now was the fact that the V’kit’no’sat wouldn’t just deploy a small team of Zen’zat, they’d deploy them in the millions if necessary. They were their infantry, and the Archons were not for Star Force. They had the Regulars and Knights for that, so when you compared apples to apples it was still going to be a slaughter.

Time. Time was what Jason and the others needed. Given that, he was confident they’d find a way to defend themselves, though how that was going to work he wasn’t sure. And the Zen’zat were the least of their problems.

Jason went through another 12 rounds in the small sparring chamber then left the upper levels of the pyramid, running down the ramp system until he got to what had originally been the Oso’lon section. Given the huge size of the Brontosauruses their chambers were likewise large, including their own holographic training chamber. When Jason got down there he coasted to a stop at the entrance and saw a group of Clan Metal Gear Archons going through some sort of joint challenge against what looked to be three Zen’zat.

“Jason,” one of the Metal Gears who was standing off to the side observing said when he finally noticed the sweat-drenched Archon. “You need this room?”

“Yeah. How close are they?”

“They just started a 45 minute drill.”

“Oooh, yeah. I’m not waiting that long. Sorry.”

“Not a problem,” he said, turning around and walking over to a very large control board that was set into the floor. “You’ve got priority. Mind if we stick around and watch?”

“Just stay out of bounds,” Jason said as the Archon brought up a much smaller holographic interface that was built for Zen’zat and deactivated the current program. The three Zen’zat disappeared and one of the Metal Gears who was throwing a punch at the time tripped forward when the blow hit air instead of body. He recovered going through a somersault and flipped back up onto his feet as he looked over to the side in question and protest.

“Clear the ring. Jason’s called dibs.”

“Sorry guys,” the trailblazer apologized as they walked off the parking lot sized sparring area and over to the control station near the door. Once they were all outside the designated area he stepped up to the holographic controls floating in midair and pulled up a different training program with the Metal Gear’s training officer’s eyes going wide when he saw which directory we was accessing.

“I thought those were banned?”

“They are, save for us,” Jason said as a 4 meter tall Voro’nam appeared in the center of the huge ring, which had been designed for combat training amongst the larger V’kit’no’sat races.

“Holy shit,” the Archon whispered, then turned to the others. “Grab a seat and some popcorn fellas…up next to the wall.”

“Thank you,” Jason said as he headed towards the holographic Pachycephalosaurus. Like the Zen’zat holograms this training program had no safeties involved, meaning this monster was quite capable of stepping on him and breaking bones in the process. Jason wasn’t wearing armor either, which made things even more dangerous, and was why the trailblazers had banned the use of any of the programs other than the Zen’zat ones.

As soon as Jason stepped into the ring the Voro’nam charged him, lowering the bony dome atop its head into a battering ram as the Human likewise ran towards him, crossing a football field before the two met. Dangerous as the head dome was, the spikes coming out the back of it were quite lethal, even if holographic, though with regenerators handy it was unlikely that any V’kit’no’sat actually died during training. Star Force kept several here and the medical staff running the facility were amongst their best, trying to decipher more of their secrets as well as to aid the numerous teams that were both training and analyzing the small city built inside the V’kit’no’sat structure.

Jason knew what recovering from that level of an injury would mean and didn’t want to go through losing more of his hard earned levels with new tissue having to be grown, so while he wasn’t worried about dying he really didn’t want to get jabbed. That said, he did have bioshields that could block him from getting spiked if he made a mistake whereas most Archons did not, but still this was risky and he was intentionally doing it without armor.

And it wasn’t the first time either, which was why he was confident that he could handle the basic level training programs of the much larger race. Voro’nam had a variety of sizes, growing larger with rank rather than years, and this one was a third tier, which made it larger than most of the skeletons found on Earth and easily outmassed him equivalent to that of an elephant, save this one wasn’t slow at all.

Voro’nam were amongst the most agile of the V’kit’no’sat races, and the head butt attempt the hologram tried was merely a feint with the biped twisting around on its feet in a level spin at the last moment, swinging its thick tail around and trying to roundhouse Jason. With his Sav and well-trained reflexes he could see it coming a mile away, for while the Voro’nam were fast by the big guys’ standards they weren’t nearly as fast as Zen’zat or even Rit’ko’sor.

But they were strong, and had that tail hit him Jason would have been sent flying and possibly cracked a few ribs. He jumped over it, then landed in a spring hop that brought him up and over the Voro’nam’s head as it rotated around to nail him a moment later. With his Pefbar on Jason could see everything as he flipped over in midair, knowing where he was coming down so he could juke to the right before that tail came at him again.

When it missed he shot forward, jumping into a kick that hit the Voro’nam in the left side of its body between foreleg and aft. The impact barely moved the big thing, and Jason had to retreat quickly to get out of range of either tail or head, which is what the program typically fought with.

Crouching down so that its front legs touched ground and it momentarily became a quadruped, the Voro’nam loaded its back legs into a power crouch as it oriented towards Jason. He held still for a moment then tweaked his Yetu to launch him into a power jump up and over the Voro’nam as it flashed horizontally across the ground towards him in its own power jump.

Its head crossed a meter underneath Jason and he came down on its flat back, for it had no spines or tusks other than the four on the back of its head. He landed well away from those and let himself slide off to the right before latching on with his left hand. From there he quickly pushed off with both feet and landed hands first on the ground beside the Voro’nam, springing into a second bounce that landed him on his feet and he ran for distance.

The Voro’nam’s tail swung towards him but missed, then it rotated around in a full circle and charged after him, head low enough to the ground to show Jason the tips of those spikes on the back of its domed head. While the training simulators couldn’t replicate psionics, neither could they replicate any energy expenditures, leaving them simply hand to hand practice tools, otherwise a ruby red beam of energy would have been coming off those and sniping him down.

It wasn’t the same type of energy as what the Hjar’at had, but a type of slow moving laser-esk bioweapon that could be used to shoot enemies off their backs or tail, but could also be used in a limited forward arc when they lowered their head such as this. Rit’ko’sor especially liked to jump and land on the backs of their opponents, and Voro’nam was one race that had been genetically engineered to counter that threat.

Jason knew that, but as long as this hologram didn’t have them then he was still going to hop on and off the thing whenever possible. He couldn’t beat this thing, and never had been able to pass even the first level tests due to his simple lack of concussive damage. Unless he could get some hard hits in the internal counting mechanism wouldn’t give him any credit for the light taps he was attempting to lay down now and the sparring match would continue indefinitely.

To Jason that was a challenge he couldn’t refuse, plus he wanted the practice for if he ever went up against one of these things in real life. It’d have its weaponry, he’d have his armor, so he figured this was about as fair of a training sim as he could imagine. And as a sim, none of his Ikrid tricks would work on the thing, so he was going to have to use brute force alone…which was laughable given the matchup he was in, for he had no brute force to work with, relatively speaking.

Jason kept playing with the thing, ducking and dodging for several minutes before he finally made an attempt to land a heavy blow. After getting use to the Voro’nam’s movement patterns he baited it into another spin then yanked down telekinetically on its tail as hard as he could, forcing it to drag across the ground and slow the spin to a stop. The Voro’nam’s legs got twisted up underneath it and it stumbled for a moment, dropping to a knee as Jason darted forward with a Yetu running burst and aimed directly for the top of its horizontal back as it sat head up and tail down.

His sprint arced ever so slightly into a jump that brought him elbow first down onto the place where tail transitioned into torso. Without armor on his elbow he impacted the holographic representation of a hard, callous plate that sent tingles up his arm on impact as he nailed his own funny bone, but the Voro’nam sunk slightly with the hit, which was enough time for Jason to whip himself away and kick off into another jump that got him clear of the damn tail as it swung around again to nail him as the Voro’nam sat on the floor, leaning forward with both arms and shuffling frantically to create the momentum swing.

“Check that hit,” Jason said to the Metal Gears as he continued to evade as the Voro’nam came after him again. He didn’t bother to look at the distant Archons, knowing that if he lost his focus and this thing even stepped on him with its small legs he’d end up in the med bay.

“Two point six!” he heard one of them yell back, but that number impressed him far less than the observers. He was hoping at least for a 4, with other Voro’nam typically registering 12 or better with even their light grazes against each other.

Jason kept trying for another half hour then stopped before he got too loopy and made a mistake. Rather than use the far controls he simply linked into the telepathic array, finding the node in the ceiling and shutting the hologram down directly. The dangerous Voro’nam disappeared in the blink of an eye with just a hint of pseudomotion as it vanished, then Jason walked back over to the very stunned onlookers.

“That’s why we need to shoot the things,” he explained to the rangers and strikers. “We can’t land blows that do more than tickle them. If you ever find yourself up against one of these things, run away, find a damn mech, then go kick its ass. You can’t do it hand to hand.”

2

August 20, 2822

Solar System

Earth

Jason’s dropship flew him across the planet to the opposite pole, taking him from the Antarctic pyramid up to a brand new city built in the Arctic Ocean. Technically it was sitting in the ice, poking up above the surface while its substructures went all the way down into the seafloor. The city was a third bigger than Atlantis and her copies that covered Earth’s oceans, but there were no civilians here, nor Star Force employees. This city had but one purpose, and that was to house the elite Archon Trials.

Davis and Wilson had designed it together, leaving the Archons out of the equation. The first major Trials had happened 8 years ago and were located in a number of other facilities reconfigured to utilize the new challenges Wilson had devised…but he’d gone all out on this facility and hadn’t let the Archons know what half of it contained. Part of the Trials was empire status marks, but Wilson had also added individual Trials so that Archons, like the trailblazers, could rack up scores even when they weren’t on Earth. Those Jason was familiar with, but everything else here was going to be a surprise.

The first Trials had resulted in Clan Sangheili gaining a chunk of the first prize system, which they’d then traded away to Clan Scorpion, but the biggest winners were Clan Joanna and Clan Badass Mongoose, who took the top two prizes. Megan and Bo now each had a planet of their own within the Neffa System, while the rest of it had been divvyed up amongst the other Clans that earned at least small victories. Given how many subcategories there were some 28 Clans had gained territory there, but the current system they were working on was Chorra and it had more than twice the territory to be handed out, with a good 60% of it coming from what happened over the next month in the primary Trials.

None of the Archons had been allowed within the Trials facility until today, which left Jason arriving more or less at the same time as the others. As his dropship approached the city that aptly was named Solitude, there were hundreds of others in the airspace with many more already on their way down from orbit or across the surface. Jason had arrived early to get some training in at the pyramid, but the rest of his Clan was coming down from orbit over the next three days, after which the first round of the Trials would begin.

He was bringing some 1,023 Archons, Knights, and Regulars with him, all of whom were upper level and arguably the best the Clan had. They would be doing what he didn’t know for sure, but as soon as he landed he guessed he would find out…unless Wilson meant to keep it a surprise up until the moment the Trial began, which was a distinct possibility knowing the man’s tendencies. The previous Trials had been his typical brand of challenging, with all the Trailblazers feeling like they were back in basic again. That had prompted them all to return for this one, including Morgan, who virtually never got involved in the ongoing Trials save for her individual marks.

Those she was racking up in one of the new Elite Sanctums that the trailblazers had collectively agreed to build. There were a scattering across the major Star Force systems like Sol and Epsilon Eridani, but most of them were within the Clans themselves. His Clan had only built one, which would service only mages and up going forward. That meant there were only 32 Archons within Clan Sangheili that could use it, yet it was the largest sanctum they possessed and held a lot of new training equipment and challenge courses, most of which Wilson was responsible for. He’d really taken Davis’ mandate to heart and was helping the Clans up their game by playing adversary and subjecting them to a whole new level of badassery.

And the trailblazers were losing to his challenges…which they totally liked. Not the losing thing per se, but what it meant was they had real challenges to overcome now and that was something they’d been sorely missing. When Jason and the others had built new challenges for themselves they always knew how to beat them, in theory anyway, once they got strong enough, but with Wilson you had no clue what was coming and had to figure it out on the go.

To put it simply, you couldn’t hide your own Easter eggs. And with this new mandate Wilson had taken the reins of Easter Bunny away from the trailblazers, for the most part, and returned them to being the searchers…which was why they were all coming here, eager to fight it out with the rest of the Clans, but just as eager to see what Wilson was going to throw at them.

The elite sanctums were restricted to the upper levels because, literally, they were too dangerous for any of the weaker Archons. There were tons of safety protocols in place, but everything was built for the expectations of strength, speed, and agility far beyond what an adept could produce. There literally weren’t any ‘easy’ settings on the basic challenges, meaning that though the sanctum held the same stuff you’d see in a normal version, it was all supped up to the point where lesser Archons simply couldn’t use it.

Jason liked that idea so much that he had started to see the normal sanctums as kiddy playgrounds. He used them when he needed, and they did have settings for mages and beyond, but he just felt at home in the elite sanctum and spent most of his training time there in isolation. Occasionally a few other mages would be training at the same time, but they were almost always off on missions, leaving the elite sanctums across Star Force territory empty most of the time. Clan Saber had the most mages of any Clan, currently sitting at 57, but that was going to climb greatly as the larger number of Archons behind them started to catch up.

Originally there had been only one class per year, if that, but now they were graduating approximately 30 Archon classes every calendar rotation and that number was rising along with the Human population. It was never fixed, for it was derived from the amount of candidates that passed the tests, but the further you went down the timeline the more Archons there were, meaning that eventually the elite sanctums would start to fill up with mages as they earned the rank. As it was, Jason and the other trailblazers were nearing the end of their dark blue armor status.

He was currently a level 498 mage and ranked 7th among the Archons. Ahead of him one level was Ryan, with the other five already having transitioned to the next 500 level rank of Titan that came with the golden armor. They were Greg, Kerrie, Aaron, Paul, and of course Morgan. She currently held a level 11 titan ranking, putting her 12 ahead of him. That was a chunk of training that would take him anywhere between 5 and 10 years to catch up to, though you never knew for sure how you were going to advance through each level. Some were harder than others, and with all 5 skill divisions having to be mastered it was always your weak area that determined your upgrade timetable.

For Jason and a lot of the Archons that was aquatics, but for Morgan it was currently aerial that was her lowest area. Her commando skills were 42 levels above Jason’s, so the Archon rankings were a bit deceiving as to who could beat who in a fight and really a mark of overall skill, but he was still surprised that he had held so close to her after all these centuries. Right now the lowest ranking trailblazer was mage 424 and that was Clark-066, with the next closest Archon to him being level 392. There was definitely a gap between the trailblazers and the others that was widening a bit with time, which was both good news and bad.

The second gen should have been closer than that, and aside from Kara they’d been losing ground slowly. On the up side Ginsi was continuing to tear her way up the ranks for Clan Croft. Her pace had slowed a bit from early on, but she was now a level 45 striker and pretty much leveling up twice as fast as everyone else. Her primary area of expertise wasn’t clear, for every time she gained a few levels in one area she’d shunt her training focus to the weak one, keeping all 5 marks basically the same. Jason doubted she’d catch up to the trailblazers, but it was impressive to see her working her way through the training so fast.

His own scores were increasing in pace now that Wilson was feeding them new challenges, and it was clear to Jason that Ginsi wasn’t so much a prodigy as much as she was a peer. The difference was that every level the trailblazers advanced was crude, for they were pushing the limits and actually writing the level requirements ahead of them. Those usually didn’t get revised, but the more Archons that passed through them essentially left notes for others to come so they could maximize their training effectiveness for all the tricks needed. Ginsi was getting the benefit of all of that, so if her badass skills were on par with Jason’s then she should be leveling up faster than he did.

Taryn had said she was bringing her to these Trials despite her lower rank, and Jason was curious to see if she had any magic in her. Archons loved a challenge and she was basically getting thrown in over her head. It would be fun to watch, but if she came up against Jason he was taking her down quickly. Clan points mattered, and everyone was going to be fighting for each and every one they could get, as they should be. Territorial allotments aside, this was the type of competition that they needed to really ratchet up their advancement.

When Jason’s dropship landed it came in through an atmospheric shield that kept the polar air out so that the crews could operate without wearing envirosuits. Jason stepped out into room temperature air despite the sky overhead being clear of any machinery. The shield was just a bubble covering the landing area, with a few other dropships coming down in through it as his unloaded him then took off again, heading back to where it had come. Only the crews necessary to facilitate the Trials would be staying here, meaning all dropship pilots would be stationed in nearby cities and called for when transport was needed.

Jason had come without gear, knowing he could get whatever he needed here, so he walked across the landing pad and into a wall entrance with free hands and a clear head, looking around almost like a tourist to see what Davis and Wilson had built. He ducked into a tunnel and walked down two levels until he came to a reception area with a check-in desk.

“Mr. Sangheili himself,” a male attendant said, pulling out a datachip from a special batch and handing it to him. “All instructions needed. I’m not allowed to say any more.”

“Who’s orders?” Jason asked curiously.

“Head Trainer Wilson. Please step into the car and insert the chip.”

Jason smiled and walked towards one of the three pod cars with open doors. He chose the middle one and stepped inside, pivoting around and finding a tiny slot on a wall panel but no other controls. He slid it in and the doors closed, taking him elsewhere in the facility.

He half expected there to be a holographic interface, maybe a brief explanation of where he and the other Sangheili would be billeted, but nothing happened. He couldn’t feel the movement of the pod due to the artificial gravity and IDF so he just waited in silence, not knowing how long it would take. After what seemed like a long time he began to wonder so he pushed out his Pefbar to look through the walls and see how fast the pod was moving…which was when he realized he couldn’t. He could see everything around him inside the pod, but not past the walls.

“What the hell?” he said, spinning about and looking with his eyes. He reached out to touch the walls but stopped short as a slight buzz sounded over his head. He saw the energy shield materialize there both with his eyes and Pefbar a moment before the floor dropped out from under him.

He fell fast, brushing up against his hip into the angled tube of a dry waterslide that was completely dark. Jason could make out the interior of the tube with his Pefbar though, but again he couldn’t see through it. His mind went through several scenarios in a split second, with him knowing in his gut this was Wilson’s doing even before the short ride ended and he exited the tube into freefall.

His Pefbar opened up around him just in time to make out the wall of water below him. He hit it butt first and smacked the back of his head on his way in, getting a jet of water up his nose in the process that he clamped down on. The pool was deep and he couldn’t find the bottom for a moment, but he could still see the surface with his Pefbar so he clawed towards it as he forced himself to tolerate the water in his airways knowing that his Hanme would start giving his bloodstream the oxygen stored in nodules around his body automatically.

Having no knowledge that this was coming he was caught off guard, but pulled himself together enough to get himself to the surface. When his head came up into the air he coughed out the water and used a telekinetic wedge to move it out of his nose that his Pefbar allowed him to see internally. Treading water he tried to get his bearings, unable to see the bottom of the water or anything else around him in the pitch black. Wherever he was it felt like a void, with only the distant ceiling just barely registering to him.

He kept his senses keen, not knowing what was coming next. If this was a test by Wilson then it was also a signal that there were no holds barred, for one didn’t mess with water in training situations unless one had knowledge of it going in. It was very easy to drown when you got dunked, for with the loss of air also came confusion and disorientation, with the submerged person not knowing which way was up. Jason’s mind flashed back to his childhood and the few times he’d dunked others in the pool and got dunked himself, never realizing how stupid they were being.

Wilson knew better, and even with Jason’s psionics this was crossing a line. Even if there were hidden safety teams nearby it didn’t matter. You did not mess with water in the lungs…period.

With that realization slapping him in the face Jason picked a direction and started swimming, his soaked uniform dragging him down as he moved. He wanted to peel it and his shoes off to make himself more agile, not knowing what was coming his way, but he relented for the same reason. He didn’t want to lose his clothes and then need them going forward.

Jason swam a good ways before he finally saw something in his Pefbar, coming up on a containment wall that he then followed to the left. It arced on a predictable curve, but there were no handholds or entrances within sight. Expecting it to be the edge of a circular chamber he knew to just follow the perimeter around until he did find an exit.

Jason spent the next half hour swimming, finding the ‘predictable’ curve to disappear within 100 meters and transition into a twisty curvy nightmare. He held to his plan and followed the outline, but without a battlemap he had no way of knowing where he was and the other side of the water was outside his Pefbar range, so all he could see was the nearest piece of the wavy wall that had several inlets, all without exits, ladders, or even a dot of texture. They were sheer and unclimbable without his armor tech, not to mention blocking his Pefbar…and Ikrid. If there were minds on the other side he couldn’t sense them, and his Ikrid range was much larger than his Pefbar’s.

Trying to measure his distance and location by mental plotting, Jason figured he went all the way around the water at least twice before the undulations in the wall became familiar. That frustrated him to no end, having spent the past half hour swimming around in a lumpy circle, but he knew it was probably part of the test. He’d looked everywhere he could swim, so what the hell was he…

Then he realized he hadn’t looked everywhere. Taking a deep breath he sunk himself below the surface and swam down following the wall and searching out the bottom of the tank, for there was no way this was ocean. Too warm and not salty.

His lungs began to burn mildly before his Hanme kicked in, and would remain that way letting him know he was on the clock. A second sensation accompanied them, as if it was a mental progress bar that was slowly diminishing, which to his point of view felt like a metallic bar that was being consumed. He could ‘taste’ how much of it was there, which was how he knew how much reserve oxygen he had. It was the biological equivalent of a status bar on a helmet’s HUD, and Jason knew he had a few minutes to work with while he was actively swimming.

That bar got below half before he finally found the bottom. As soon as he did he used his telekinesis to push the water around him out in such a way that a little bit of it vaporized and created an unbreathable atmosphere around him that he then sealed inside a bioshield. Releasing the Lachka and holding the shape with the shield only, his buoyancy pulled him up quickly, enhanced as he changed the shape of a shield into a cone to give him less drag.

When he got back to the surface he let go the shield and began to breathe in healthy gulps of air to recycle what was in his lungs as well as to start refilling his Hanme reserves, now even more frustrated, knowing that searching the bottom of the large pool was going to take forever.

3

As soon as he recovered enough he headed back down again, this time pushing his pace with the technique Paul had taught him using bioshield ‘tractor treads’ to provide propulsion along the outside of his legs. He hadn’t practiced it much and it was very tricky to pull off due to the control factors, but he managed to goose his speed in spurts, unable to hold the effort for more than a couple of seconds. He did manage to reach the bottom with some time to spare, then he began swimming laterally and scanning the bottom with his Pefbar.

He couldn’t stay down there long and found nothing in his limited search area before he had to come back up…then wait through another Hanme recharge period. If this really was Wilson’s doing then he guessed this was going to be a grinding process, with Jason setting his mind to the task of multiple dives with tiny search areas below in order to map out the base of the artificial pond. In the meantime he had to tread water one way or another, for there was nowhere to get a handhold.

He flipped over on his back and floated there with a slight leg kick to keep from sinking as he breathed in and recharged, keeping his Pefbar locked on the nearby wall to keep from drifting and losing his position. He had to be meticulous in his search else he could miss something on the floor. Without a map or light to see by he had to be very careful in this else he could be looking for something forever…and to make it worse he didn’t even know what he was looking for.

When Jason was on his 18th dive the silence of the dark chamber was broken by an impact overhead. It was too far up for him to see with his Pefbar, but the sound waves traveled down to him none the less. He jerked with surprise and lost an air bubble from his mouth, then abandoned the search and created another mist void bubble around him to bring him up to the surface as quickly as possible, for while his Pefbar couldn’t reach up that high his Ikrid could and he sensed a familiar mind.

When Jason reached the surface he took a couple of deep breaths then began swimming across the chamber for a few strokes before thinking better of it and holding position.

Over here, Jason said telepathically, not wanting to lose his orientation in the pond and waste all the mapping runs he’d already made.

What the hell is going on? Blade-097 asked as Jason felt his mental dot start to move towards him.

One of Wilson’s surprises, I’d wager. I’ve been around the entire perimeter and there is nothing on the walls to use. The bottom is deep and I’ve started mapping it out, which is why I don’t want to move or I’ll lose my orientation and have to start over.

How long have you been here?

I’d guess at least an hour, but I have no clue. And the walls are Pefbar and probably Ikrid blocked.

Noticed that, Blade said as he finally popped up on the edge of Jason’s Pefbar as he swam towards him with decent speed. More than decent, actually.

Do you have bioshield augmented swimming?

Yeah. I thought we all did?

Mine sucks, and the slower I go the less time I have to explore the bottom. It’s the only place I can think of to look for an exit.

What about up?

Can’t climb the walls.

Don’t need to now, Blade pointed out.

I’ve looked with Pefbar, but unless there’s some tiny switch I’ve missed there’s nothing up there. My money is on down.

Have you seen any of the others?

No. I walked into this trap as soon as I got into the city and I can’t sense beyond the walls or floor.

Well, if we’re going down let’s do this the fast way, Blade said, sending Jason a battlemeld prompt. As soon as the trailblazer accepted it he knew what his fellow Archon had in mind. Reaching out with his Lachka, Jason lifted Blade out of the water when he was still some 20 meters off and sent him towards the ceiling, tipping him upside down. As he did that Blade used his telekinesis to split the water below him, forming as long of a tunnel down as he could before Jason released him and he picked up speed from the gravity drop, sliding into the hole in the water and continuing down until he hit the bottom of the air column.

He split the water with a bioshield needle and covered distance quickly until the drag finally slowed him, then Blade transitioned to the leg augments and motored his way straight down to the bottom, barely hanging onto his battlemeld link with Jason due to the distance. Once down there he was able to see the flat bottom of the pond, then began moving around in a search grid using Jason as a navigational point. Eventually he came back up when his air ran out, helped by a telekinetic tug that pulled him up out of the water a meter, then Blade dropped down into a bioshield bowl that floated him like a boat.

“That is a long way down,” he said, sinking himself back into the water gently before fully releasing the bioshield as he lifted Jason up into the air and positioned him to the next search point on their little grid. When he shot him down in the same manner Blade stayed on the surface sucking air as he watched the results through their battlemeld link.

When Jason came back up he went again, with the pair alternating too many times to count before Jason finally found something. It was barely a finger-sized depression in the floor, but it held a button that he did not press immediately, choosing instead to come back up and recharge his air supply. Blade went down as he did, heading straight to that spot and finding the button again. He didn’t waste air and pressed it immediately…with a blinding flash of light shocking him as the bottom of the pond lit up in a variety of concealed lights.

Seeing through Jason’s senses more than his own, Blade saw the entire floor of the pool for the first time, for the water was crystal clear, though the outer lights began to wink off, shrinking the pattern until it reduced down to a spiral that eventually disappeared at the center…which was not where the button was.

What the hell was that?

I don’t know, Jason answered. Try again.

Blade hit the button a second time and the light show returned, diminishing down to the same spot on the floor before disappearing. Jason sensed that Blade was going to need air soon and felt him start to come back up to the surface while he mentally kept a plot on the spiral midpoint. Blade knew what he was doing, so when he got topside he swam over to where Jason guided him and sucked air for a bit as his counterpart swam over to the button location. When both were ready Blade picked Jason up at the edge of his telekinetic range and gave him the accelerated head start before heading down the old fashioned way himself.

Jason reached bottom a few seconds ahead of the faster Blade and pushed the button. The lights came on same as before, but as Blade followed the diminishing spiral down to its finishing point he found…absolutely nothing.

Not giving up he ran his hands over the smooth floor, hoping to find something his Pefbar was missing, but eventually he ran out of air and had to go back up top again after three more light cycles.

“I don’t get it,” he said across the gap to where Jason was treading water.

“We have to be missing something.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Maybe it’s a countdown rather than an arrow.”

“Could be,” Blade agreed. “But to what?”

Jason kicked himself around in a circle, extending his Pefbar out in spotlight mode to get more distance. “Go tap it again.”

Blade swam over to his position, knowing what he was thinking thanks to the battlemeld. Jason picked him up in a Lachka grip and sent him down torpedo style again, but instead of looking down at the lights he focused his Pefbar up and laterally. He still couldn’t see the whole chamber in spotlight mode, but the extra range he gained he used to make a quick sweep that he repeated through a regular oscillation.

Nothing showed up, so he swam as fast as he could over to another section of the pond and had Blade hit the button again before he ran out of air. Jason scanned that section of the wall and ceiling, still getting nothing. Blade came up and launched Jason down and the two switched roles, with two more section scans before they spotted a small anomaly on the wall just above the waterline.

“Got it,” Blade said enthusiastically as the lights disappeared and the small blip with them. Jason was still battlemeld linked with him and knew to press it again one last time before he ran out of air and came back up to the top. As he rose up he saw through Blade’s senses as he swam frantically to that side of the pond, then managed to shoot himself up out of the water and over to the wall the last few meters.

He smacked the wall and slid down, his hand running across a depression that vanished just as he got to it. He felt a handle disappear underneath his touch, then he slid back into the water and was out of reach of it by half a meter. Blade locked that spot firmly in his mind and waited out Jason’s recharge period, intending to get it the next time.

“How did you do that frog jump?”

“You saw it. Do you really have to ask,” Blade answered, referencing their still active battlemeld.

“I felt a shield and a reverse crash bag.”

“I didn’t use Lachka.”

“What then?”

“I jumped with a Yetu burst.”

“Off your own bioshield?”

“Sure.”

“How the hell did you do that?”

“I linked it to the water like an overlay. It helps get around the projector difficulty.”

“So you’re close to creating stair steps in the air?”

“Might look like it, but no. Unfortunately.”

“Funny, I don’t recall you mentioning anything about that in your training logs.”

“Really? Must have slipped my mind,” he said, giving Jason enough surface thoughts to read to know that he’d been working extra hard on aquatics for both himself and his Clan Cortana. “Now would you please press that button one more time?”

Jason sucked in a deep breath, mentally letting him know he and Blade were going to have a long chat on his little technique later. Being too far away for a telekinetic assist, Jason made his own conduit in the water beside him then ducked head first into it, not getting half as far as their original torpedo but still managing a bit of a head start. He wasn’t fully recovered yet, but he didn’t need to be to just get to that one spot and back again so he swam hard until he saw the blip on his Pefbar, then eased down to it and pressed the button after giving Blade an unnecessary heads up.

Up top the other trailblazer waited, ignoring the lights as they snapped on and focusing on the patch of wall above him. Like clockwork, as soon as the water lit up the depression formed, sinking into the wall to reveal a T-shaped handle inset into the hole.

Blade used his bioshield tractor treads to raise him up until his torso was even with the calm water. From there he reached up to grab the handle and felt for how it worked with a probing yank. When it didn’t move he experimented, finding that it did pull out laterally like a drawer. Using it as a handhold he pressed a foot against the wall to get some leverage and yanked it out a good foot before he heard a click to his right and a short doorway formed inches above the waterline.

Got it Jason. Get your ass up here, Blade told him as he swam over and climbed up inside the meter high tube. When the lights disappeared the hatch over the opening began to close, but Blade wedged himself into it and was ready to use both bioshields and Lachka to keep it open if necessary, though there was hardly any resistance in the mechanism aside from a gentle push.

Blade reached a hand towards the water and created a Bataf repulsor conduit down to Jason then retracted it rapidly, pulling him up through the water at an angle and over to his wedged position. When his head broke the surface Blade let go of the Bataf and the battlemeld.

“That bastard made it a binary,” Blade complained as Jason swam the last few meters up to him. “There’s no way one person could make it on their own.”

“Let’s leave it open just in case one of the others gets dunked in here.”

“Good idea,” Blade said as he slid in a bit further to give Jason room to climb in while holding the two halves of the hatch apart with his arm and foot. The other trailblazer climbed inside and Blade let go, sliding down the dark tunnel a bit more and unable to see anything beyond the straight tube.

“This would be easier if I could see inside the wall,” Jason said as he tried to bend the door segments.

“Just melt it.”

“Yeah,” Jason agreed, concentrating and summoning up a heat surge into his right index finger…then suddenly he and Blade were yanked down the tube. Jason’s hand caught him on the edge of the hatch as it move to close with his fellow trailblazer disappearing into the distance. His grip didn’t last long, for the hatch reversed direction and fully retracted into the tube wall giving him nothing to grip. He felt a force field activate on the outside of the wall so he couldn’t slide his fingers over the edge and latch on, then the last bit of hatch disappeared and he got sucked down after Blade.

The tube made a tight turn after a few seconds, then he was dropped into a larger one and got dunked into water again, this time the moving variety as he slid down what was essentially a pitch black waterslide with his Pefbar again not penetrating the walls. Blade’s mental signature returned for a split second before disappearing a second time as Jason entered a long straight section that had him falling at a steep angle before dragging him around a spiral that eventually ended with a bright light…

Jason flew through the air and landed in a telekinetic grip as Blade stopped his fall, bringing him down into the shallow pool of water alongside him with the overhead sun glaring down on both of them as they looked out over a huge forested valley from what appeared to be a mountaintop. Jason spun his head around, seeing the same thing stretching out behind him in all directions without a wall in sight and with the water splashing down behind them coming from a magical hole in the sky.

“What…the…hell,” Blade said, looking around and seeing miles of countryside stretched out before them and all at a lower altitude so they could get a grand view of it all.

Jason stood up and took a few steps forward, enough to see a piece of the pool spilling over the edge of a drop off into a long but thin waterfall that transitioned into a quickly flowing creek that disappeared into the greenery. “This has to be holographic at some point.”

“What the hell is Wilson playing at?”

“I don’t know, but…”

Run! Greg’s voice said telepathically with a mental arrow pointing them over the waterfall.

Jason and Blade exchanged glances then took the trailblazer’s warning at face value and dove over the waterfall as a buzzing sound suddenly overwhelmed the noise of the falling water.

4

Jason went over first, with Blade stepping off the edge of the waterfall as he clicked on his Pefbar and noticed a cloud approaching from their left. He didn’t have time to analyze it, for a moment later he was in freefall and landing in a churning pit of water half a step behind Jason, who slid down the incline and underneath the vegetation as he traveling along the water flow. When Blade hit he submerged up to his shoulders before being carried off in the flow between a series of rocks, noticing the cloud overhead coming down after them.

Don’t let them touch you, Greg’s telepathy said just as Blade saw the tiny little dots shoot through the leaves after him. Come to me.

Blade stayed in the water flow, feeling Jason just ahead as Greg’s mental impetus showed them where to go. He clawed at the rocks to get him more speed, for the amount of water was low enough that it wasn’t pulling him along rapidly and the cloud was catching him. Before they got to the second waterfall the first of the little bugs pushed through the thick branches and leaves overhead and into the tube-like tunnel that the water was flowing through underneath. There were dozens of them at first, with thousands more visible on his Pefbar, and they were all headed towards him.

Blade threw a telekinetic push back towards them, scatting those closest but they were coming at him from multiple angles. He seemed to still be ahead of the swarm but could feel another section of the cloud moving on ahead, as if they intended to ambush him further down the line. That was when he felt a battlemeld prompt and he linked up with both Jason and Greg. A moment later a repulsor conduit was created between Greg and him, with Blade jumping off the next waterfall and swinging on it like a vine. He put up a bioshield and rammed right through the little stun bugs, knowing from Greg that it would protect him.

But with each contact his shield weakened, for every mechanical bug carried a stun charge and they were all detonating against his bioshield. He made it through the open air and was reeled in partially as Greg landed him in a pile of brush 20 or so meters up from the water flow and near to where Jason had also landed. Back under the brush again, Blade scrambled to get his footing as he climbed up what was left of the small ravine until he came to a path where Greg was waiting, with Jason stepping into the open a moment later.

“Follow me,” Greg said, throwing several Lachka fields up into the open air above the path to knock back the stun bugs as he led them on the downhill portion of the dirt trail. “And knock them down every chance you can get. Smash them if there are only a few.”

“How long have you been here?” Jason asked on the run as the three of them moved single file with Greg in the lead.

“A few hours, but they got Dina. If even one of those things hits you it’s the same as a full stun shot from a pistol. They only have one charge, but if three of them land on your arm you’re unconscious. We didn’t know what was happening until it was too late and they got her. I managed to get a bioshield up over us but couldn’t sustain it and had to run.”

“Where is she?” Blade asked, throwing another invisible wall up over their heads and using it like a fly swatter. These stupid bugs were fast in air and looked to be able to match their foot speed.

“Captured. The bugs stun you then the drones haul you off. I couldn’t get close enough to stop them.”

“What the hell is going on?” Jason asked, linking up with Blade and using a combined Lachka field to encircle and then compact a few dozen of the bugs into a mechanical snowball. They double crunched it, making sure the damn things were destroyed, then dropped it and swatted away some more tendrils of the ever growing swarm that had to number in the hundreds of thousands.

“I don’t know,” Greg said, jumping over a log and taking a spur on the trail that led through a tunnel in the rock. Jason and Blade followed him in, then came up short as he stopped inside. “Keep a field on that entrance. They didn’t come inside last time, but don’t take chances.”

“Got it,” Blade said, throwing up a bioshield to cover the door-sized entrance.

“No, use Lachka. Your bioshield will trigger the charges.”

Blade deactivated the glass-like energy barrier and replaced it with a completely invisible one as the buzz of the swarm passed it by but, like Greg had said, they didn’t try to come in through the short tunnel that had an exit only 15 meters on the other side.

“I was exploring the lovely traps over there,” Greg said, motioning to the other side of the ravine, “when I felt you guys come in. This whole place is a cleverly sculpted nightmare.”

“What traps?” Blade asked, keeping his Pefbar extended out the way they’d come while lowering his Lachka field, ready to snap it back into place if anything tried to come through.

“Gravity traps, about two meters wide. I’d guess 10g. If there were bugs on that side they’d leave you a sitting duck. You can’t run anywhere without taking the chance of hitting one of them and falling flat on your face. I’ve been trying to map out and mark them, but have only had an hour or so.”

“Go back to the part where who took Dina?” Jason asked.

“Big flying drones. They came in and picked up her body, then flew off in that direction,” Greg said, pointing where he’d felt her mental signature disappear on the other side of the mountain. “You come in through a dark pond?”

“Yes,” Jason answered. “Button on floor, door in wall?”

“Same for us,” Greg answered. “And if the others will be doing the same once they arrive we need to get to them before the bugs do. I don’t think we can stand up to them directly. Bioshields won’t last for long and all they need is one of the little things to slip through to get us in the head or chest. I got hit on the shoulder and lost the use of my arm on the way down here, and I’m still a touch numb. No destunning serum that I’ve found yet, but this place looks huge and I wouldn’t put it past Wilson to have left caches of equipment hidden somewhere.”

“So this is some giant new test?” Blade asked.

“Has to be,” Greg said as he stepping through the tunnel and held up just from the exterior on the other side, with the artificial sun making his eyes squint. “Our Final Challenge was the same way. No heads up as to what we have to do and we have to work our way out of it.”

“The Trials are supposed to be Clan versus Clan,” Jason argued. “Seems like we’re all on the same team in this.”

“Or maybe its survival of the fittest,” Blade suggested. “No way out and it’s just a matter of who lasts the longest.”

Greg wrinkled his brow in disdain. “If it is we’re definitely not playing it that way.”

“We need to find Dina,” Jason insisted, “and hook up with any others coming in. Any chance that this isn’t the only entry point?”

“I haven’t sensed anyone else, and I’m curious to see just where the walls are. Some of that view has to be holographic.”

“Agreed,” Blade said, looking ahead. “How were you marking the traps?”

“Stick ‘X’. It gets squashed flat and is easy to see so long as you stay on the trails.”

“And off the trails?” Jason asked.

“The brush is so thick that you can’t move fast enough to evade the bugs. I don’t know if they’re programed for only the other side, but I don’t want to take the chance of getting caught out here. I’ve stuck to the trails and was working my way around the circuit when you came in. There are a couple points where you can jump from trail to trail, but it looks to be a deformed loop.”

“How far down?”

“There’s another trail below it, but my spidey senses said there might be a trap in the crossing so I haven’t explored there yet, but I did get around most of this loop.”

“And no bugs over here at all?”

“Not that I’ve seen yet, but it’s not very hard to fly up and over this tunnel.”

“At least we can see into the ground here,” Blade commented, able to stretch out his Pefbar below them and into the rock.

“There has to be more than one pond,” Jason said, thinking out loud. “No one knew when I was going to get here and the others will be coming in at random. That room was designed for 2 and I bet they keep it that way.”

“One of us needs to stay near the top to key in the others if they do enter the same way we did,” Greg pointed out. “I could sense you from here, but it’s out of telepathy range. I had to sprint up the trail a ways before I made contact. If you can find a hiding spot further up be my guest, but someone has to start exploring the immediate area. The Trials aren’t supposed to start for 3 days and we can’t assume everyone is going to arrive today. If there’s food out here we need to find it.”

“I’ll take care of the newcomers,” Jason volunteered. “You two go exploring. We’ll make this our base camp until we find something better. Looks like Dina is going to have to wait until we get a handle on the geography.”

Further down the mountain, following the water flow, the ravine spread out into a small crater with a lake in the center. The creek continued out the far side and continued going downhill at a much softer gradient, but left the mostly calm pool behind it mostly contained as only a small opening was available for the water to flow out through a pair of overlapping rocks. The nearly mirror smooth surface of the water suddenly rippled as a disturbance in the center pushed up a pipe to just over the waterline, then it sprayed forth a geyser of water well up into the air that arched over into a tree-like fountain and fell back down into the pool on all sides but with a slight list to the south.

A few seconds later a body came flying up with it and shot 6 meters up into the air before splashing down into the water beside it, then was followed by another as Paul landed on top of Brian, knocking the wind out of him and pushing him underwater. The two separated with a stern kick from the lower Archon and swam back up to the surface, with Brian spitting out a gulp of water then coughing out the rest.

“Sorry,” Paul said as he treaded water and got his bearings, seeing a wall of greenery all around the pond they were now in, as well as the bright sun overhead. “Where the hell did we go?”

“Gravity alterations,” Brian said, swimming over next to him. “There’s no way of knowing which direction that slide took us. I thought we were going down, but apparently not…unless we crossed to the other side of the planet.”

A slight rumble sounded as the tube that had spat them out shut down its fountain and retreated back below water level, with both trailblazers watching it go down.

“So now what?” Brian asked.

“Let’s get to shore and find out,” Paul said, beginning to swim over to the edge. Brian came with him and they got halfway there before they both noticed another mind nearby…and a familiar one at that.

Randy? Paul asked.

No time to explain. Keep swimming but don’t touch button. I’ll yank you out when you get close to shore. Ignore the fireworks behind you.

Taking his fellow 2 at his word Paul and Brian both kept swimming towards shore, then a few seconds later there was a huge blast of water behind them. Paul saw it in his Pefbar but kept swimming as instructed, seeing a small aquatic mech rise up from below the surface as not one, but four trailblazers jumped out from the trees along the shore and on top of it.

Just then he felt Randy’s presence run up near to them but still hidden behind the greenery, with Brian being lifted out of the water and deposited on the shore ahead. A second later Paul took flight through the air and did likewise, landing on a platform of moss just short of the excessively thick brush.

Randy telekinetically yanked them both through and into sight of him, with Paul seeing a worried expression on his face.

“Run!” he yelled, taking off through the tree trunks as a buzzing sound began to overwhelm the noise of the mech.

Paul and Brian both followed him, not having a clue where they were going but apparently he did, for Randy ran a very evasive pattern through trees and around rocks and overhangs that Paul couldn’t have guessed at, eventually leading them to a small creek that flowed into the pond.

“Under,” Randy said, diving in head first and disappearing beneath a bit of calm water.

Paul took a breath and dove in second, following Randy as he made his way through a rocky tunnel and into a submerged chamber. He came up into a pocket of air only two feet high but one that was large enough to hold ten people. Brian followed him in and the three wet Archons stood on their knees in the claustrophobic den with their chins just above the waterline.

“What’s going on?” Brian asked.

“A lot,” Randy said, relaxing for a moment. “What day is it?”

“Last I checked the 21st, but we spent a while in a dark pond before getting spit out into that lit one.”

“I’ve been here about a day then, and by last count there were 77 of us already in. You two make 79, but 11 have already been captured.”

“Captured?” Paul asked.

“Wilson’s got some wicked challenge set up for us this time,” Randy said, shaking his head with dismay. “The reason why I told you not to touch bottom in the pond is because some of the others entered the way you did and got swarmed by stun fish. We think it activates when you touch the shoreline. A few of those buggers hit you and you’re unconscious, with a lung full of water to boot. We lost Ben that way, but we’ve learned from it and several other mistakes.”

“Lost?” Brain emphasized.

“He’s not dead. As soon as he went under a drone flew in and yanked him out of the water. Same thing happens everywhere in this park. They’ve got traps and stun bots galore, including little flying bugs. You go down and you get picked up. We’ve tried to stop them but only succeed once. You can’t mess with those swarms, and the lemmings are the worst.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Paul said, not fully catching on.

“Little agile robot rabbits that stun to the touch…and they come at you with lizard-like numbers.”

“Sounds fun,” Brian said with an ironic laugh. “What was that back with the mech?”

“Multitasking. This little hideaway actually had a few prizes for us on those ledges,” Randy said, pointing at the empty slabs now. “Foodstuffs, a touch of destunning serum, comlinks…which will just lead the swarms to you, so don’t use them…a few weapons, ammo cartridges that don’t match, and a lot of other little challenges. We’re finding and collecting as much as we can, and that mech was guarding a big underwater stash. When someone comes in the fish congregate in a specific place in the pond and it draws them off from the mech location, so we had to wait until someone else came in to jump it. Look up.”

Randy tilted his chin upwards, with both Paul and Brian extending their Pefbar through the ceiling and thin layer of soil to the forest above…where a cloud of tiny objects was passing by.

“Those are the stun bugs. They fly in swarms and should leave this area shortly. We need to stay here until they do. They can move as fast as us and will drain your bioshields with too many hits. You have to use Lachka, but miss even one and you’re in trouble. Single charge, equivalent to a pistol shot.”

“Damn,” Paul said, realizing his day had just gone from bad to horrible. “What’s the objective?”

“We don’t know. We’re just trying to collect everybody and not lose any more newbs falling into traps we’ve already sprung.”

“Thanks,” Brian offered.

“Ditto,” Paul echoed.

“Do either of you know when Morgan was supposed to arrive?”

“Not specifically, no,” Paul said, with Brian likewise shaking his head in the negative.

“We haven’t found her yet, and I’m really hoping she didn’t come in first and get captured. We need her Jumat to take down these swarms. The weapons we’ve found are pretty much a joke. No area of effect. Just a tease from Wilson, we think.”

“Sounds like him. Is Jason here?”

“Yeah, he was one of the first in, and the sooner I get you back to link up with him the better. We really need the dynamic duo out here.”

“Guess that makes me a cheerleader,” Brian quipped.

“You’re not hot enough,” Randy said with a smirk as he sensed the area over them clear. “Let’s get moving, but stay tight and follow my lead until you get the lay of the land…and don’t touch any of the berries. They’re stun-laced too.”

5

“We’ve found where the others are being held,” Jace said, pointing to a scribbled map in the dirt with a few pebbles highlighting key locations as Paul, Jason, and a half dozen other trailblazers looked on. The rest were out continuing the scouting efforts and trying to locate supply clusters while the tunnel in the ridge had become their storage area, which they were standing just to the outside of on the ‘safe’ side away from the bug zone.

“Held?” Paul asked.

Jace nodded. “They’re unconscious and laying out on pedestals like prizes…and there are 100 pedestals in total.”

“That’s our mission fail,” Jason said with certainty. “And probably bait.”

“We didn’t get too close, but were able to make Ikrid contact. They’re the real deal, not holos, but the place is guarded to the hilt. We spotted every known trap laid out on this mountain and then some. It’s going to be almost impossible to get in there and out with them, and we might lose more than we rescued.”

“Highlights?” Sara asked.

“They’ve got dinobots.”

“What?”

“Oh crap,” Jason said, knowing what he meant even before Jace sent the telepathic memory to all nearby so he wouldn’t have to explain in words. “That’s something Jax was working on with Cora. They’re experimental mechs they’re using to try and map out the movement idiosyncrasies of the V’kit’no’sat so our own mechs don’t get blindsided.”

“And they’re both prisoner…wonderful,” Sara said with a sigh.

“Well these were patrolling the perimeter and we could hear more inside the compound. All Rit’ko’sor and Era’tran models with no obvious weapons.”

“They’re not automated,” Jason said. “That much I know. They have to be remote-controlled using a neural interface, and I bet Wilson has a host of trainers on the other end just waiting to pound…oh shit, I bet he even got the ones that we had in basic. That’d be just like him.”

“The patrols looked automated.”

“Maybe for walking in a circle, but if they’re going to fight they have to be driven. Next gen rovers I’d guess.”

“The old rovers couldn’t step on and squash you,” Page pointed out. “Don’t suppose they have a target sphere?”

“Not that we saw,” Jace said regretfully, “but then again, nothing here has. I think Wilson wants this to be live.”

“The weapons he gave us aren’t stun,” Paul added. “Let’s just hope these dinobots are.”

“Still begs the question of what’s our mission goal?” Sara reminded them.

“Until we find the edges of this park there’s no way to be sure unless we stumble across it,” Jace said with a touch of awe. “They really went all in on this one. There’s at least a 2 mile radius around the mountain.”

“Did you get beyond here?” Sara asked, pointing to the pebble that he’d used to mark the holding facility on the plain to the northeast.

“We couldn’t. Everything past this line,” he said, dragging a telekinetic finger through the dirt in a very precise fashion, “is dino territory. I don’t think they’re just there to guard the prisoners.”

“Our endgame is probably in there,” Paul said, rubbing his left knuckles with his right hand.

“Or everywhere around the mountain has them,” Jason added as a mental signature popped up above them.

“Incoming,” Kent said, running back through the tunnel and up the mountain on the other side as a pair of Archons fell from the waterfall in the sky down into the collection pool.

“Get them out,” Jason said as he sprinted up behind Kent with Paul trailing on his heels, “we’ll hunt the bugs.”

As Kent made mental contact with directions for the Archons to flee down the creek, Paul and Jason ran further up the trail as the stun bug swarms gathered near the top, but one group nearby the Archons spotted them and diverted their way. Paul and Jason both ducked into the thick vegetation and got off the trail, using their bioshields to push through the thorns and branches at decent speed and met the bugs further in where the darkness kept the vegetation a bit more sparse, though the varieties that had been planted were used to little sunlight, so both Archons were mired in growths that came up to their waists as the bug swarm came down through the canopy above them.

The duo linked up and stood back to back, then Paul threw up a bioshield around them both while Jason corralled the bugs with cup-like telekinetic walls. When those cups overflowed and the bugs came in at them Paul added his own Lachka and pushed as many away from the bioshield as possible so they wouldn’t drain its charge. Meanwhile he pulled a small grenade off his equipment belt and passed it through the bioshield where Jason then grabbed it and held it aloft nearby.

After he had gotten most of the bugs where he wanted them both trailblazers used the linked Nemsa ability to combine and enhance their Lachka skills, granting Jason enough power to fully enwrap the bulk of the swarm into an invisible sphere…into which he primed and sent the grenade. As Paul kept the other bugs off them, both of them squeezed the sphere down as tightly as they could before the explosion, which overloaded and broke their telekinetic hold, as well as destroying most of the bugs.

“Well that worked,” Paul said as the pair took off running back the way they’d come and telekinetically squishing a few isolated bugs that zipped off after them.

“Unfortunately they have friends,” Jason pointed out, literally, with a mental prod to their right. The stun bugs that had been going after the others had finally gotten around to coming back to them, suggesting that the others had gotten to safety and were no longer priority targets.

Both Archons busted out of the brush and onto the trail simultaneously, with them turning left and running down the path just in time to see the other threesome duck around a curve below them. Having gotten used to the trail intimately by now, Jason and Paul caught up with them before they made it to the tunnel. Jason threw up a bioshield over the entrance just in case as they slipped inside, then flinched as a whole swarm impacted and overloaded his shield.

“Shit,” he said, throwing a telekinetic wall at the bugs to push them back. “They’re coming through.”

“Other side,” Kent yelled, getting Kian and Hans moving and smashing his map with boot prints on the other side…only to realize that the bugs were also coming up and over the ridgeline.

“So much for predictable,” Sara said, with her and four others linked up and pushing them back with massive invisible walls where they could spot them, knowing that all it would take would be one getting through to really mess up her day. “Grab some gear and run!”

“This is fun,” Hans said, grabbing a container of who knew what and taking off down the trail following Kent.

“They touch you, you’re unconscious,” Kent explained. “So stay with me until you get up to speed. Kian too. And don’t step near the Xs,” he said pointing out one ahead and running to the left through a section of brush that had been cut out and piled to form an X that was smashed flat save for the extreme edges.

As he ran around the detour a whole new swarm of stun bugs came up from somewhere in the vegetation to the left and flew directly into him. He threw up a Lachka wall and bioshield, blocking most of them but a few came through and released their charge on his inner barrier, draining it of power. Paul and Jason threw a combined wall up covering him and the others across the detour, allowing them to continue on sheathed in bioshields from head to toe, then the pair threw the wall back into the vegetation and smashed it all back two meters as the last of the Archons passed the by.

“They’re everywhere,” Jace said in a grunt’s voice as he ran past, prompting a quick laugh from the duo despite the seriousness of the situation. Once Sara was by they brought up the rear, flicking off the stun bugs wherever they could with their Lachka but unable keep them all off their bioshields. As they ran down the mountain and through the twists and turns of the trail that barrier got weaker and weaker, with most of the bugs getting blocked by the telekinetic walls but almost always some would sneak by the cracks, for it was impossible to keep a ground-tight telekinetic wall as you were running and difficult enough to do when standing still.

Bioshield wrapped around Paul instinctively, with the Lachka much better at remote grapples and flat walls, but it seemed the designers of this little horror park had anticipated that, for no matter how many bugs they stopped more would slip through, and this time there were so many coming out of the vegetation that he honestly didn’t know if they were going to get away from them or not up until they hit the bottom of the loop and jumped across a small hillside of meter-high brush between two marked gravity traps and landed on the opposite trail below.

“Hold up,” Sara said as they came down, but her eyes were focused behind them. “They’re stopping.”

Paul skidded his foot across the dirt as he stopped and turned around, adding his normal vision to his already active Pefbar and seeing the cloud of bugs stop like a layer of fog against an altitude temperature barrier, for they literally spilled out above them and did not come any lower on the mountain.

“There goes most of our supplies,” Jace said, kicking a rock off the trail in frustration, then he and the others all got an Ensek relayed message, for the trailblazers had spread themselves out across the park with various individuals in between the base camp and the scouting teams so they could bounce Ikrid messages across them and cheat the distances involved. It reported another two trailblazers had been discovered, including Morgan.

“Finally,” Sara said with relief.

“That’s all of us,” Jason noted, glancing up at the swarm. “And I think we’re entering phase two of this little game.”

“You think they’re going to drive us to the dinobots?” Paul asked.

“I think they’re just going to keep us off the mountain top for now, but I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

“How long have you guys been here?” Kian asked.

“We all got grabbed as soon as we came into the city,” Paul explained, thumbing a finger at Jason. “He was one of the first lucky enough not to get stunned and hauled off to our little prison facility…long story that we’ll get you caught up on later. Right now let’s put some distance between us and those bastards,” he said, pointing to the dark cloud of tiny flying machines as he turned and started walking along the trail to the left and into another curvy mess of path that tried to confuse the heck out of you at every turn.

“What the hell is going on?” Morgan asked when she finally got to a large group of her fellow trailblazers, though more than half of them were missing from the stomped out section of forest that they’d carved into the underbrush a few dozen meters from the trail edge, and in the center of which was an open hideaway with an array of supplies.

“About time you finally showed up,” Greg said, walking over to her while the others stood around, some keeping an eye on the surrounding area and the others here to hear what was going on as they figured out their next move. “You had to wait to the last day to get here, didn’t you?”

“No point in sitting around waiting for the Trials to begin,” she argued, having come straight from her Clan stronghold on the lizard border. “Then again if somebody had mentioned there’d be a pre-party I might have shown up a bit earlier.”

“None of us knew about this.”

“What is this?”

“That hasn’t been told to us, nor has anything else,” Greg explained. “We’ve got search teams out mapping the boundaries of what is a multiple mile park and looking for additional supply caches like this one. We’ve recovered a lot, then subsequently lost them when the top of the mountain was taken over by the stun bugs. We need your Jumat to deal with them, because they eat up bioshields quickly and can slip past our Lachka. One bug is the equivalent of a stun shot, and there are millions of the things swarming the top of the mountain right now. They were holding to a specific sector, but when the last of you arrived they took over the whole thing.”

“There were three entry points,” Paul added. “One in a lake, one on the top of the mountain, and the one in the cliff wall that you came out of.”

“What about the prisoners?”

“They’re being held northeast of the mountain in a fortified area, and this mountain alone has a lot of nasty little traps. Short story is, if you get stunned a drone comes and picks up your body, and you get added to the trophy case.”

“Trophy case?” Morgan asked, frowning.

“From what we could see,” Jace answered, “all the prisoners are still unconscious and laid out on pedestals.”

“Well that’s rude.”

“And probably a trap,” Greg added.

“So you need my help rescuing them?”

“That’d be nice, thanks.”

“Bigger problem,” Jason continued, “is we don’t know why we’re here yet. If we all get captured that’s obviously the fail point, but if there is a finish pedestal somewhere we haven’t found it yet.”

“Any live opposition?”

“Not that we’ve seen. And the weapons we’re finding are all lethal, so I doubt we’ll be going against anything other than machines.”

“Are theirs lethal?”

“All stuns of some sort. Including gravity traps.”

Morgan’s face darkened.

“We estimate about 10g and they’re only 2 meters wide, but if you’re running from the stun bugs and hit one of those they’ll swoop in and nail you before you can recover.”

“Ambrosia?”

Jason laughed. “Not a drop so far.”

“Now that’s just crossing a line,” she said, balling up her hands into fists.

“Most of us are low or out now.”

“My Jumat feeds off of it. I won’t be very powerful if it has to recharge naturally, so if there’s something you want me to bust up now is the time.”

“I would say take down some of the swarms,” Paul added, “but it looks like they’ve got an unlimited number, so thinning them isn’t going to be an option.”

“Why do you say that?” Sara asked.

Paul glanced at her. “It’s Wilson.”

“We assume,” Greg corrected.

“No one else would have the balls to do this to us,” Morgan said definitively. “And going in cold just makes for another element to neutralize our abilities. If you do find any ambrosia I non-greedily suggest you send it my way, but I doubt there is any. He’s taking us back to day one as much as possible.”

“There are also dinobots,” Jace added with a smirk.

“Fitting,” Morgan said, rolling up her left sleeve and snugging it above her elbow, then doing the same to the one on the right to expose her forearms to make it easier to throw Jumat blasts without having to take her clothing into account…that and it was plenty hot, not to mention that her clothes were still soaked. “Did anyone get a bundle through? Mine was yanked off me in the transition from tank to tunnel.”

“I got yanked when I tried to melt the door open for the rest of you,” Jason said after there were a few nods of agreement from the others. “I think they wanted us here without any goodies or help.”

“How are we on food?”

“Low now that we lost the mountain stash.”

“You said it was guarded by these bugs?”

“A whole lot of bugs,” Paul corrected. “I don’t think even with your help we’re going to fight our way through them.”

“How about I fight and one of you sneak your way up and grab the stash?”

Jason and Paul exchanged glances.

“We don’t know where they are or how many there are,” Greg answered.

“Or if they’re going to stay put,” Ace pointed out. “I volunteer to play rabbit and try on our terms before they make a move.”

“I’m game,” Morgan said, flexing her arms, “and on the clock.”

Paul sighed. “Alright, but we all go…everyone here anyway, save for one. That one stays just below the threshold and yanks you out if you go down. No reason to make this distraction anywhere else. We can preposition and do some sneaking up through the brush, then give you the signal to unleash hell on the swarm. If you get bit we can at least recover you before a drone swoops in to pick you up.”

“Lovely,” Morgan said, tossing her hand palm up in an open gesture. “Lead the way.”

6

Mark-084 stepped up to the null void in his Pefbar and touched the open air in between trees with his hand, finding nothing. He took a step forward and his fingers touched the soft wall that an intricately designed hologram was placed over. The more he pressed the deeper his hand went, but the stiffer the resistance he encountered.

The Archon pulled his arm back, with it returning to view and the jungle brush ahead looking very real to his eyes. He guessed it was overlaid onto a restraint field, and at least that meant if someone ran full on into it they wouldn’t smash themselves against a hard surface. This was more like a rubber band and would throw you back out after impact, but the field was also invisible so it allowed the hologram to set up in real space rather than having to try and put it on an actual wall.

As Mark looked past the nearest brush he could just faintly detect a misalignment in the trees. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to know that they were in fact holographic rather than the real ones behind him. He glanced to the right, then the left, seeing that there were no trunks on the approximate border line, but there were some branches sticking out. He walked sideways over to them and reached for the invisible wall…but it wasn’t there.

Backtracking he found the original point and ran his hand along it as he walked until it suddenly disappeared. Feeling it out he found that the field made a sharp turn inward, and following it he discovered that it was a nook in what otherwise would have been a flat wall that ran around the circumference of this tree and its branches.

That was smart, otherwise there would have been a line of daylight marking the edge where the branches failed to meet the hologram. The deviation would be minimal, but it might be detectable from above. Wilson had gone to great lengths to make this park as seamlessly real as possible, but Mark had just found one none the less.

He reached out with his Ikrid and found Nik where he’d left him, then sent him a telepathic report of what he’d just found, including images, that the other trailblazer viewed and copied with Ensek, sending out the same Ikrid message to everyone within his range…who then in turn sent their own copies, making for a Human relay system to cover the vast stretches of the park. It was hard to measure with all the varied terrain, but Mark guessed he was somewhere between 5 to 7 miles away from the mountain at this point and only now was encountering a boundary wall.

That easily made it the largest interior park in Star Force, and gave the now less than 100 trailblazers a huge region to explore looking for supplies, threats, and their mission objective. With this point finally plotted Mark continued to work his way around the perimeter, keeping a hand on the invisible wall at all times and seeing where it led.

Rafa was also out on scouting duty, but on the opposite side of the mountain and nowhere near a boundary wall when he stumbled across a clearing in the forest. Approaching it carefully sensing a trap, he scanned everywhere he could with his Pefbar and slowly walked out into the daylight towards the single object at the center…or rather buried beneath the grass. It was hidden underground and when the trailblazer neared it a hologram formed in front of him in the image of Obi-wan Kenobi.

“Greetings, younglings,” it said in a reasonable knockoff of the original. “By now you’ve obviously realized that these aren’t the Trials you were looking for. Be that as it may, it was decided that the lot of you deserved a greater challenge. And for any proper challenge you must have a mission objective, which I will give you now. Be wary, for I will state this only once, then you’re on your own.”

“Find the heart of the storm and quell it at its source, then the light of day will guide your path onwards…oh, and did I mention you should run now? Farewell, and may the Force be with you,” the hologram said as the dirt beneath its feet burst up through the grass and a series of tubes emerged, out of which flowed little mechanical quadrupeds by the dozens.

“Shit,” Mark said as he turned and ran, diving into the underbrush and pushing through it with his bioshields. He wasn’t near a path so he was just going to have to improvise. The lemmings were damn fast and if he couldn’t get out in the open he wasn’t going to be able to evade them.

Then again, if he delayed to fight them more would catch up to him, so he decided to just try and make a run for it.

The first little rabbit-sized machine that caught up to him got picked up and hurled backward telekinetically, followed by others as Mark pushed his way through a wall of vines. He’d been trying to run the way he’d come, but these hadn’t been there so he must have already veered off course. The forest was so dense off trails that it was almost impossible to keep your bearings without a battlemap and right now all he had to work off of was a pair of mental signatures that were both more than a kilometer away.

As he ran Mark relayed the hologram’s message just in case he did get caught and stunned, then did his best to lose his pursuit, hoping like hell they didn’t have any flanking units ahead of him or he was going to run square into a trap at the pace he was being forced to move at.

“Heart of the storm?” Paul repeated, exchanging glances with the others in their new base camp.

“Like…cloud storm?” Kerrie suggested.

“Oh hell no,” Morgan said, realizing what she meant.

“There’s still a lot of the park we haven’t searched yet,” Greg pointed out.

“She’s right,” Jason disagreed. “It means the mountain. We have to go back up there.”

“We barely made a supply grab. We can’t go exploring up there.”

“We’ll need everyone,” Kerrie insisted. “And maybe some specialized equipment is hidden out there somewhere for us to find. If a return to the mountain is the endgame, then the size of this park suggests us doing a lot out there before we get to it.”

“It didn’t say endgame,” Paul pointed out, drawing a few cringes of agreement.

“Regardless, it’s where we have to go eventually,” Morgan said, dropping into a crouch and resting on her ankles. “But we’re going to need everyone, which means a prison break has to come first.”

“I get the feeling we might be in here for a long time,” Rio said, sitting down on the ground next to Morgan. “I’d prefer getting the others back sooner than later, so if it’s possible at this point, we need to get them out now.”

“If it’s possible?”

“There could be time locks, in the form of unbeatable challenges. Or like Kerrie said, maybe there’s something else out there that we need to earn first to be able to take those dinobots down.”

“Oh we can take them down,” Morgan said dangerously. “We just have to link up into a massive battlemeld.”

“Which puts us all in the same place at the same time,” Paul added.

“Let’s start with the small ones and see what happens,” Jason suggested. “And let’s split up what supplies we have in case we lose this firebase as well. I don’t want to have to make another bug run, especially with Morgan low on ambrosia.”

“I’ll be out within a day, two tops if I don’t use it again.”

“When’s the last time you trained dry?” Sara asked.

Morgan shook her head. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, that’s a big middle finger from Wilson,” Jason said, punching his palm. “He trained without ambrosia for so long he’s used to it. Us…not so much.”

“We’ll adjust,” Paul said with a reassuring tone. “We always do.”

“Meanwhile the others are stuck in nap time,” Sara reminded them. “I agree, we get them out first.”

“At least we finally determined one thing,” Andre said as he suppressed a smirk.

“What?” Greg asked.

“There are only 100 trailblazers. Kara’s not here, so apparently Wilson doesn’t consider her one of us.”

All eyes turned to Paul.

“She’s busy, and if I used her in the Trials you’d all complain about her jewelry anyway.”

“Just saying that Wilson didn’t con her in here either.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Morgan said dismissively. “He got us without our armor. You can’t disconnect hers.”

“Short of lopping off her hand,” Greg added.

“Just saying…we’re back to old school,” Andre clarified.

“Yes we are,” Yori agreed. “So let’s get the others and figure out how to beat this thing.”

Dina woke up groggy as hell with a telepathic shout echoing through her mind and a person standing over her. As soon as she moved her body it hurt from stiffness, but it was more the urgent emotions pouring into her from Larissa than the pain that woke her up enough to sit up and see where she was.

“Don’t ask, just move,” Larissa said, throwing a telekinetic wall behind Dina and knocking back a rogue lemming. “Now!”

Dina was yanked to her feet with her fellow trailblazer’s Lachka grip and the Archon stumbled her first step off the stone platform where she had been laying…but it was the sight of a pair of mechanical raptors running towards them that shot adrenaline through her body that flushed out a chunk of lingering stun energy.

“Get behind me,” Larisa said as she stepped in front of Dina just in time to block a mouth shot of stun energy from the closest raptor. The blue dot spread out into a ring that was over a meter wide by the time it hit Larissa’s bioshield, but she took enough of the blast to keep both of them clear…then all of a sudden Dina saw the raptor lifted off its feet and its legs and arms crumple into its body with shrieks of metal breaking.

The other raptor charged them and Dina stepped up beside Larissa, throwing a small Lachka hold around its left foot and yanking its leg to the side. It stumbled and nose hit the ground as it very agilely got its balance again and jumped at another nearby trailblazer…who dove out of the way after deflecting it with another invisible blow.

“Don’t touch them or you’ll be stunned,” Larissa told her as she pulled a still groggy Dina her way. “Run with me.”

“Oh this is fun,” the green-haired Archon said as she kept a wobbly pace behind Larissa, dodging another row of flat pedestals as she saw a few others being revived. The rest of the Archons were spread around the area engaging what looked to be an army of metallic dinosaurs…including a huge brontosaurus that was just now tromping its way into the clearing out of a jungle path.

“Not that way,” Larissa said, throwing a hand against Dina’s bare chest to stop her as a swarm of stun bugs flew out of the formerly clear section of forest they’d been running to. “Damn, we’re going to have to do this the hard way. Hope you’re awake.”

“More or less.”

“Link up…and cross your fingers.”

Dina accepted the battlemeld link and the pair ran off across the chaotic battlefield as there were Archons moving about everywhere confronting any number of threats that she didn’t recognize, but what little she remembered from her entry she figured everything here was equipped with stun weapons.

From the information flowing to her through Larissa she sensed the threats each posed, along with the plan to run directly at the worst of them, which was the brontosaurus. Even as they took off the long necked dinosaur sprayed a curtain of stun shots down across the ground like a broom, hitting two Archons that survived beneath bioshields, but Larissa knew they couldn’t last long under that amount of energy and now so did Dina, yet that was exactly where they were heading.

Dina knew Larissa would match her speed, so she tried to pump as much juice into her waking legs as she could while linking her psionics and pushing away some more rabbit-sized machines as another raptor came at them from the right side, sprinting across the clearing surrounding the pedestals. It fired as it ran and both Archons created a telekinetic crash bag between them, forcing them apart to allow the stun ring to pass through the gap, then Larissa pulled Dina through a hop leap with a short lived Bataf conduit as Paul and Jason sprinted in from the opposite direction and punted the raptor back with an invisible clothesline as they ran on either side of it, yanking it away from Dina as Larissa was doing her best to get her to safety on only a partial destunning charge.

The girls headed directly for the brontosaurus again, intending to take the trail it had come up on, but the dynamic duo circled around and got ahead of them, drawing the next head blast while leg turrets opened up and fired smaller, rifle-sized rounds at all four of them. Dina slid in behind Larissa and they used their Cerden to link bioshields in order to increase their strength, with the first trailblazer’s silhouette blocking all the incoming fire. Dina could feel how each stun shot ate away at their shield strength and knew that they couldn’t stand up to the rain that was coming down on Jason and Paul.

There was no time to wait and watch, with the girls suddenly up near the giant’s legs and darting left directly past the walking turret shelf. Dina got hit once, but the speed of both Archons made them hard to target and they flashed past the rear legs…then Dina found herself being thrown up into the air by Larissa as the tail whipped around into their faces.

The fully awake trailblazer dove underneath it, then launched herself into a Yetu-enhanced jump as it reversed direction with a flick and swung its tree trunk thick limb back at her. It passed under and made one more reverse, trying to flick her with the tip, but Larissa shoulder dove over it at the last moment before somersaulting back up into a run next to Dina as she got hit with a rear turret.

Their shared bioshield held up and they raced off down the trail, but they weren’t out of trouble yet.

“Don’t stop running,” Larissa insisted, leading her down the length of dirt road and scanning ahead with her Pefbar as a giant roar sounded from behind them.

“Wasn’t planning to,” she said as Larissa darted off the trail and into the brush. Dina followed a step behind and dived in with the brush sliding over her bioshields and not tearing into her exposed skin…for sometime during her nap her clothes had disappeared, which she groggy head barely noticed until she stepped on a rock and did a half jump into the air, after which she shunted some bioshield beneath her feet, though that made her movements slippery and even slower.

“Almost there,” Larissa said while sending her a telepathic warning. “Just gotta get past the sentries.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Dina said as they broke through the edge of the forest and onto a sandy beach that stretched a good quarter mile up to a body of water separating the forest on the other side. There were three T-Rexes out there with a host of smaller raptors, all of which seemed to be holding their positions until the two Humans hit the sand.

“Blow through and jump. Do…not…swim,” Larissa said a she slowed a bit so the pair of them could share one shield again as the beach erupted with various forms of stun blasts. The raptors sprinted towards them while the T-Rex nearest on the left turned its giant head and blew out a stream of air at hurricane speed, kicking up a wall of sand that threw down a line in front of them. She sensed from Larissa that they had to go in, but as soon as they hit the wall of moving air and grit Dina was knocked off her feet and cartwheeling to the right.

Larissa formed a Bataf conduit with her and that kept both of them from spinning completely out of control, so that when they hit the ground again they were able to walk through the storm slowly, then when it stopped they took off running again, but not before a trio of raptors got to them. Larissa ran towards them, distracting them away from Dina as she signaled for her to sprint on ahead as the trailblazer began to dance around the mechanical bipeds in a series of jumps and flips, all the while avoiding touching them to avoid the stun charge their body plates would render on contact…which would knock her immediately unconscious with even the slightest brush.

When Dina got within a few steps of the water’s edge she knew it was too far to jump, but she was determined to get as far across the moat as she could and launched herself up into a pathetic leap having no shoes and with her feet sinking into the sand and sucking away her pushing power. As soon as she was airborne she got a shove from Larissa, then a Bataf conduit that telescoped out and delivered her to the other side.

The nude Archon dropped into the sand and turned around, ready to help Larissa get across. It took a few seconds for her to evade the raptors, then another sandstorm covered them all. Thanks to their battlemeld she could still sense where Larissa was and vice versa, essentially giving the other Archon her senses to use. A moment later she hit the shore and jumped, with Dina pulling her across as much as possible.

It wasn’t enough and Larissa splashed down three meters from safety, landing face first in the water and scrambling to get back up as a swarm of tiny machines swam up towards her. Dina pulled her out with their invisible rope, but not before Larissa got ‘bit’ on the leg by two of the little fish bots.

That broke their battlemeld link and sent Larissa into a wash of dizziness worse than what Dina was still feeling, so the less groggy trailblazer pulled the other the rest of the way up and out of the water with her Lachka until she got a physical grip on her arm and hauled her up a safe distance onto the sand, watching the robotic dinosaurs to see if they could come after them or not, not to mention the forest behind them that was an unknown.

“Da eet,” Larissa said, her words slurred by the stun as she tried to shake her dead leg with her loopy right arm.

“I’ve got you,” Dina said, picking her up in a fireman’s carry and almost losing her balance. She held it together enough to get them both up the short sandy incline to the forest and set Larissa down against a tree trunk a few dozen meters inside as Tom contacted her telepathically inquiring as to their status.

She told him where they were and how incapacitated Larissa was, with him telling her to stay put until someone got to them.

Dina hunched down on her bare feet, keeping the rest of her smooth, pale skin from touching the dirty ground as she took a series of deep breaths and tried to slip into a bit of Sesspik to clear the rest of the grogginess from her body. She had no idea what was going on, nor where her clothes had gotten to, but she got the feeling that some major badassery had just gone down to get her out.

Then her full bladder finally registered and she slipped over behind a bush to take care of that problem before the others arrived.

7

Morgan peeled off her uniform top and flicked it to Dina, who caught it telekinetically from two meters away and pulled it to her as Morgan stripped down to her underwear but kept the shoes for herself, with several other Archons doing likewise to give the escaped prisoners some clothes.

“Thanks,” she said gratefully, pulling the uniform on and looking around at the others who were clustered in a clump of trees not far off from where they’d been held while most of the Archons were deployed in a distant perimeter looking for threats and buying some time as those who were stunned recovered. Five were totally unconscious, with six others being partially awake but numb like Larissa, but everyone had been pulled out, bringing their team strength back up to a full 100. “How did we end up naked?”

“Probably our fault,” Morgan said, standing in a jog bra and skin tight short shorts. “When we first found you laying out there you had clothes, but we didn’t want to risk a rescue until we figured out where the dangers were. I think losing your clothes was a penalty for us not acting sooner.”

“Look on the bright side,” Jason said, walking up beside Dina as she flicked her long, loose green hair out of the neck of Morgan’s uniform. “Probably made some trainer’s day getting to take them off you.”

“I feel so much better now,” she said dryly, stepping into the pants but still being barefoot. That was going to be a problem going forward, bioshields or no.

“What’s the situation?” Boris asked as he pulled on Paul’s uniform. “And how long have we been out?”

“None of us has a watch,” Jason answered, “and the sunlight is on constantly, so we don’t know how long we’ve been in here. The situation is we’re a cold insertion two at a time, with those getting snagged by the stunbots being hauled off by drone and deposited in the prison we just sprung you from. There are supply caches hidden around this very large park, but only a handful of destunning serum injections. We used all that we had to wake you guys up, so those who got hit on the way out are going to have to sleep it off.”

“Ouch,” Dina said, knowing that meant a load of pins and needles. Fortunately she’d skipped that stage, but was still feeling a touch groggy despite the wakeup run. “No extra shoes in those supplies?”

“Unfortunately not, but I think we can make some crude sandals. There are enough thorns around here that I wouldn’t want to risk going barefoot even if it meant slowing me down a bit.”

“How crude is the question,” Landon asked.

“Depends how inventive you are. But big picture, we’ve finally got a mission assignment, delivered via ghost Obi-wan. There’s a big mountain full of stun bugs and apparently we have to find their lair to disable them, then we’re supposed to know what to do next.”

“That’s it?” Dina asked, finishing tying her hair into a knot on her head in lieu of the hair tie that had also been stripped off her body.

“More than we had previously, but yeah, that’s all we know.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Getting you guys out…then going from there.”

“Peachy,” she said, throwing in a few stretches, for her body was very tight after lying on that rock for who knew how long.

“We need to investigate the area beyond the mountain,” Morgan said, getting down to details. “There may be items to be obtained that will help us assault the mountain. We recovered some grenades from taking down an aquatic mech earlier, and I’d bet there are more goodies out there.”

“Stun grenades?”

“Nope. All the weapons we’ve recovered are the real deal…and next to useless against the swarms. Wilson’s mockery, we think.”

“Why didn’t you use any against those robotic dinosaurs?”

“Smash and grab op. We weren’t sticking around long enough to try to take down any of the big ones, and if we so much as touch them we get stunned.”

“Now that’s just not fair,” Dina added, stopping her overhead stretch to glare.

“Not much here is,” Jason added. “Which I think is the point. There’s also no ambrosia, so we’re all running on empty by now.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said, looking at Morgan.

“Tell me about it.”

Dina huffed. “Where do you want me?”

“Same,” Zak said, with the others waiting to hear or simply nodding in agreement.

“We’re splitting up by teams and going after what objectives we can find,” Jason said as the last of them finished dressing and walked over to the group that was forming. “We’ll get to the mountain later. Right now we’re going shopping…and the 2s are going to try and bag a raptor.”

Megan sprinted out across a dirt path that held numerous lemming holes, drawing a stream of the speedy little bots out of the ground and heading towards her as she jumped over a boulder, tapping the top theatrically with her hand mid flip, then landed and kept running into the perimeter of the dino zone that surrounded the prison.

When the lemmings followed her Dan and Brian came through at nearly the same spot, crossing the dirt and heading off into the forest in the opposite direction towards the raptor bot they’d scouted. There were probably more of them in here than just the one, but they’d adjust as necessary to what they found…which didn’t take long, for a partial stun ring flew out from the left, hitting Dan’s bioshield and sucking a good measure of strength out of it as the pair pushed their Pefbar to the max and saw two more raptors nearby heading to their direction.

“That one,” Brian said, changing targets and running directions, sending a mental ping to the team as they raced towards the raptor closest to the dirt boundary. They ran quickly, dodging trees and brush while spreading out slightly. When the raptor got within line of sight it fired at them once before jumping into an aerial lunge intending to land on Brian, but the Archon was quicker and rolled to the left as he ducked, causing it to overshoot with the help of a telekinetic shove from Dan.

Both Archons used their Nemsa in battlemeld to shove it down into the ground for a moment, but they couldn’t hold it there for the machine’s leverage was too strong. It stood up and shot at them again as the other two raptors got close to firing range themselves.

A ping from Paul told them to hold position, and before the raptor approaching on the left could get to them he and Jason emerged from behind and knocked it away with another of their invisible clothesline attacks. Jack and Randy came up on the other side a moment later and did the same thing, diverting the other raptor while Ivan, Emily, and Kip linked up into a 5-way battlemeld with Dan and Brian. As one they lifted the pinned raptor up off the ground where it could only kick at the air, then they threw it through the trees all the way out to the lemming dirt clearing.

The Archons followed, but Emily and Kip split sideways to push back the lemmings coming at them from even more holes in the ground. The other three Archons lifted the raptor again and chucked it across the boundary and into the trees on the other side before sprinting across the gap and going after it before it could get away.

Megan showed up and joined the trio after circling around and losing her lemming horde. The four of them pinned the raptor in place again, then got close to it and carried it in the air through the trees another 60 meters before they lost strength and had to put it down. It staggered in place while they restrained it partially while their mental strength regenerated. It lunged towards Dan, but came up short and got its face planted in the dirt so it couldn’t fire off another stun blast.

A moment later Randy and Jack caught up and they added their strength to the battlemeld and carried it again, this time more than 100 meters and further away from the dino zone. After another pause they decided to throw it again, with Dan and Brian going ahead to ‘catch’ it when it landed and hold it there, more or less, until the others caught up.

Bit by bit they moved it through the forest for nearly a kilometer until Paul and Jason signaled that the others had finally retreated, apparently giving up on it or sensing a trap…with the latter being more likely if there were trainers on the other end remotely controlling the things.

When the duo caught up with the others they all linked up and pinned it to the ground as Randy used his Pefbar/Lachka to look inside the thing and start pulling bits apart. It managed to shoot another stun ring into the ground near Paul’s foot, but shortly thereafter Randy was able to cut power to the weapon. A minute after that the entire thing went slack and was pancaked to the ground by the combined telekinetic power of the 2s.

“I think that did it,” Randy said, continuing to poke around inside.

“Who wants to touch it and find out?” Emily asked.

“No rush,” Paul insisted. “It might take a while for those plates to fully discharge.”

“Easy fix,” Ivan said, telekinetically snapping a thin branch off the nearest tree and floating it over to the raptor.

“Poke it with a stick?” Megan asked with a laugh.

Ivan smiled and moved the broken part of the branch into the side of the raptor. He tapped it three times, then rotated the entire branch over and whacked it a fourth time. “Looks dead.”

“I’ve cut the power feeds to the armor plates,” Randy said. “But the welds are solid. I can’t pry it open from here.”

“Do you see what I see?” Emily asked.

“An Easter egg,” Paul confirmed. “Let’s get this thing open.”

“What’s in it?” Ivan asked, tossing the stick aside.

“I think it’s shielded. I can’t sense anything.”

“Booby trap?” Megan wondered.

“Let’s find out. Stand back,” Randy said as he walked up to it and the others scattered. “If I wake up naked I’m blaming Megan.”

“Twit,” she said in a whisper as he knelt down beside it and pressed a finger to the head. He didn’t fall over, then proceeded to tap it a couple more times ensuring that there was no stun charge left, then he held his finger over it a couple of inches and waited for more than a minute. Finally he touched it again, this time with his finger sinking into the thin armor plates amidst a cherry red glow of melted material. He punched through then pulled his finger across it slowly, cutting open the mechanical raptor and creating several seams.

“Pry these please,” he said, working his way down towards the tail.

Paul and Jason linked up again and telekinetically pulled apart the metallic petals that Randy had exposed, bending them back and exposing the inner mechanisms. As Randy moved on the duo pulled more and more apart until it looked like a gutted tauntaun from Star Wars.

Randy pulled his finger out and theatrically blew on it, then he reached inside and started pulling apart the exposed machinery that they intended to make use of however possible. “Make like Legos guys.”

Dan, Brian, and Megan stepped in and helped him along with Paul and Jason while the other four stood guard. There were some more small melting cuts that had to be made, but between their physical leverage and their psionics they were able to disassemble the thing without too much delay, eventually exposing a small canister tucked away inside that had no obvious purpose within the raptor, though it did have a button on the casing.

Randy pulled it out and walked away from the others, not knowing what would happen. A stun grenade would be poetic at this point, or a summons for a swarm of stun bugs or a T-Rex to come and stomp on them. But the only way to know was to press it and find out, so after he got about 80 meters away he held it out as far away from his body as possible and pressed the biometric button that required flesh rather than telekinesis to trigger.

Waiting for a bang, he was puzzled when it simply clicked and the shell cracked a hair. He pulled the top open with one hand and saw a small vial inside with a label that read ‘500 doses.’

“Guys,” he said, jogging back over to them. “It really is an Easter Egg.”

“Candy or money?” Jason asked.

“Better,” Randy said, holding up the small vial of reddish liquid for them to see. “Ambrosia.”

“Son of a bitch,” Emily said. “Then they did expect us to tear one apart.”

“Wonder what one of the big ones has inside,” Kip commented.

“Box of donuts would be nice,” Megan quipped.

“More like truck,” Paul amended.

“Don’t suppose they stuck a suit of armor out there somewhere,” Ivan asked.

“That’d be too easy,” Emily said dismissively. “The stun soak would give us too much endurance. And armor without it wouldn’t do us a lot of good here.”

“Wilson might have thrown a set in just to taunt us,” Randy added, “just like the weapons.”

“I still think we can make use of them,” Paul insisted. “And a little live fire test on this one should answer some questions.”

“So we’re hauling this whole thing back?” Dan asked.

“Waste not, want not,” Emily said, prompting the others into a team-wide battlemeld link to make the carrying easier. “Let’s get going before the carcass attracts any more critters with the smell of hydraulic fluid.”

The others turned and looked at her as the pieces of the raptors flew up into the air and back into the main body.

Emily frowned. “Sorry. That sounded better in my head.”

“We did kill the transmitter, right?” Jason asked.

“I got it,” Randy assured him. “Intact but without power.”

“Good,” he said as they started walking with their floating cargo between two rows of three while the other four circled around as skirmishers but still close enough to help share the telekinetic load. “Don’t want anyone crashing our party when we get back.”

“I think the trainers already know every move we make,” Megan commented. “This whole park is probably full of sensors.”

“No need to invite trouble,” Jason cautioned. “And if Wilson is willing to punish us for tardiness by denying us clothes, then I can imagine him sending something after us if we failed to silence a transmitter.”

“True,” she conceded.

“You still think this is all Wilson?” Kip asked. “Or are you wondering if it might be a bit Davis too?”

“This is Wilson,” Paul said with certainty. “Davis may have given him permission, but this level of ‘kick you in the balls’ is definitely telltale Wilson.”

Just then a thought struck Jason that was profound enough that all the others heard it through the battlemeld link.

“Oh my god,” Emily said with dread. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

“It fits,” Randy admitted. “And if he’s here he’ll have armor, I can guarantee it.”

“What about the weapons? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Decoy?” Paul guessed.

“They won’t do much to him anyway. We need a game plan if he does show up,” Ivan said, knowing how bad this could get if they were right.

“In the meantime,” Jason cautioned, knowing they were getting ahead of themselves even if they were right, “we’ve got some dino hunting to do. Let’s bag some more prizes and hope Wilson isn’t as devious as he could be.”

“Wanna put credits on that?” Emily scoffed.

8

“Look what we found,” Greg said holding his hand out as he came back into the trailblazer’s camp where the 2s, 3s, and 6s were either sleeping or building, using the components from trashed dinobots to create a variety of tools, including some physical shields to help block stun blasts.

Jason raised an eyebrow at seeing the six senzu beans. “Where the hell did you find those?”

“Inside a T-Rex.”

“You took down a Rex on your own?”

“Nobody takes down a Rex,” Rex said with a sarcastic smile as he walked past Greg and pulled a makeshift bottle of water out of a stash they’d made and hauled up here from one of the creeks.

“The 8s helped,” Greg answered. “A little.”

“Perfect,” Morgan said, telekinetically pulling all six beans out of his hand and flying them across into hers, which she then cheeked.

“Hey!” Greg complained. “That’s all of them.”

“You won’t need them, hopefully,” she said, pulling off her left shoe and tossing it to Dina who’d just returned with the 7s. She took off her right and did the same, then proceeded to take off her jog bra.

“Whose birthday is it?” Rex asked, staring at her as she also pulled off her pants and rolled both garments up in a bundle and stashed them next to a tree, now completely nude.

“I’m going up the mountain,” she said, glancing at the others who were giving her questioning glares.

“Jumat or not you’ll never make it,” Greg said, not sure what she was thinking.

“Continuous emission?” Jason asked.

“That’s the plan,” she said, not caring one bit that she was naked, knowing her clothes were going to get in the way of her Jumat.

“You don’t know where to go,” Dina said, slipping on the second shoe and giving her bare feet a badly needed break from roughing it. Both she and the other former prisoners had a variety of cuts on their soft feet, with a generous bioshield usage the only thing keeping them from being totally torn up and their attempts at raptor hide sandals failing badly enough that she’d chucked them earlier.

“We know what sector,” Morgan said, looking a little like a chipmunk with the beans stashed in either side of her mouth. “The only one the bugs have been in this entire time. The others we got a chance to look around before they swarmed the top. That leaves the few places in that sector that none of us have ran through to look.”

“You haven’t been up there at all,” Paul reminded her.

“Show me what you’ve seen, but I’m the only one that can go short of fighting a war that we very well might lose.”

“And if you get caught then what?” Greg asked.

“At least they won’t be stealing my clothes,” Morgan said as she started to walk out of camp.

“How long can you sustain with those six?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, pausing and glancing back. “Depends how much force I need to use. I’ll turn back before I run dry, and at least get a scouting run out of this.”

“Don’t you think we should wait until everyone gets back so we can be standing by at the border?” Greg insisted.

“No, but I’ll take Rex with me as an Ensek relay. He can stare at my butt on the way there, and if I do go down he can let the rest of you know to come break me out of prison. Just don’t try it on the mountain. I think this is Wilson’s way of thinning our numbers, and I think I can counter it solo.”

“Have to now,” Greg said deadpan. “You just saliva claimed the senzu beans.”

Morgan smirked and looked at Rex. “Come on.”

“Alright reckless, I’ll humor you,” he said, jogging up next to Morgan with her matching pace as she stayed a step ahead and ran barefoot out through the surrounding brush, with her nude form and Rex’s white uniform disappearing from sight.

“It’s days like this that make me really wish I had Jumat,” Greg said after they’d left.

“Ditto,” Paul echoed.

When Morgan and Rex reached the bottom of the bug zone a swarm of the bastards moved in to greet them, spilling against the low altitude barrier as if it were a glass wall rather than just a geographical line. The path they were on ran laterally, with the higher one doing the same across a gap and uphill. When Morgan had shoes on she could have jumped it easily, but now she was going to lose some power given that her size 8 feet were already starting to get sore and didn’t give her as flat of a platform as she needed, with the balls of her feet sinking into the partially soft soil given the mist showers that had blown in from a nearby waterfall.

“I could use a boost,” she asked.

“Sure thing,” Rex said. “Just jump and I’ll do the rest.”

Morgan repositioned one of her six beans between her teeth and chomped it up, swallowing the very dense ambrosia dose to start the overload process that would kick in after a short delay. She’d already filled up on ambrosia to her normal levels drinking the limited supply of liquids they’d obtained from hunting raptors, meaning that as soon as this bean hit her bloodstream it was going to start giving her overload headaches…but those would diminish rapidly as soon as she started using her Jumat as extensively as she was about to.

“Might want to step back a bit,” she warned Rex, who took two steps to the side. “Maybe just a little more.”

He laughed and retreated another two steps, then Morgan closed her eyes and focused. She needed to emit from all parts of her body else some of the bugs might slip through and make contact. Typically she didn’t do this, summoning up strong blasts from specific regions, usually her arms, and pooling the energy in a transfer state outside her clothes or armor. This was going to have to be a direct feed and trying to pool it through a transition phase would have been adding too much difficulty. She was going Amazon on this and had to fully commit, else a lapse might form and she’d end up stung into unconsciousness in short order.

Rex felt a gentle push of air hit him as he saw Morgan’s ponytail lift up off her neck. It was tied up using a bit of wire from the raptors and held its form, but her bangs flew about wildly as the invisible energy flowed off her, quickly increasing strength. A moment later a surge hit him and he took another step backwards as Morgan was pushing the leaves on the surrounding trees back and bending the branches like a micro hurricane. She dipped down into a crouch then launched her naked body up into the air, with Rex grabbing her telekinetically and pushing her up into the stun bug swarm as requested.

When she hit it the bugs parted against the storm winds, part from the moving air, part from the concussive energy that was tuned to hit and move large objects rather than air molecules. The atmospheric pressure forced many of them to slip back in through the blasts while the much large stun bugs had no such luxury, being pushed back and thrown aside gently, not hard enough to damage them unless they flew into a rock or tree.

Morgan’s air supply also diminished due to the lessened pressure. She was pushing out so much that she was essentially thinning the air around her, but enough of a blowback was occurring that she still got the oxygen that she needed, plus she wasn’t doing anything that physically strenuous so she wasn’t going to be requiring a lot anytime soon.

She landed on the upper trail and didn’t look back, blowing bugs, dirt, and leaves aside as she jogged to the right and disappeared into the tree line from Rex’s position, but she knew he would still be following her mental signature. If she discovered anything she’d send him an update so he could pass the information on in case she didn’t make it back, but right now she didn’t worry about keeping track of him, for all her focus was on the stun bugs and how close they were getting to her.

The first few wisps of ambrosia overload were now gone and she pulled back her Jumat flow a bit as she ran through the crooked trail. The terrain made it difficult to monitor the bugs, for her body movement affected where they were knocked and every stride she took repositioned her emitters into different alignments, leaving her with a chaotic energy pulse that she didn’t hope to predict. Reducing it as much as she thought prudent, Morgan tried to conserve as much energy as she could while crunching up another senzu bean to stay ahead of the ambrosia need.

By the time she reached the cave tunnel the headaches were manifesting themselves, which she took as a good sign. She’d never sustained the flow this long before so Morgan was in unknown territory and was glad she hadn’t burnt through two senzu beans already. She ran by and hopped over a half empty crate of supplies that had been left behind and ducked into the tunnel, temporarily reducing her Jumat output now that the walls were covering for her. The air in her lungs dipped a bit and she found herself out of breath, but as soon as she reached the other side the airflow upped again back to the formerly thin level.

But as soon as she got to the other side she had to pulse a much larger blast into the continuous flow, for the air was so thick with stun bugs that she couldn’t see the trees ahead. That was a good sign to her, despite the danger, meaning that this was where she had to go and she hadn’t guessed wrong. Add in the fact that the lower trail in this section didn’t connect to any below and that meant you either had to hack your way through the brush or enter via an adjacent sector. The memories of the others who had been here guided her up to the top of the mountain, but that’s not where she needed to go so she headed downhill, plowing a path with her Jumat flow as her Pefbar allowed her to navigate through the dark cloud of tiny machines.

As she jumped half a step down her foot hit something sharp and she reflexively bent her knee to cushion the blow in a one-step limp. When the object stuck in her foot she telekinetically pulled it loose and let the concussive energy toss it aside before her next step, unable to stop or cover her feet with bioshields. Right now it was total body emission or something far less. She couldn’t do 95% and had never bothered to train herself for that, though she was adding it to her future workload because right now it would have been damn handy.

Twenty meters down and the trail split, with her now being in unknown territory. She took the right fork that ran lateral rather than down the mountain and pushed her Pefbar out further, not wanting to miss something in the forest nearby the trail if that’s what she was here to find. Fortunately she was able to multi-task both psionics, but her body was already starting to buzz a little from the continuous Jumat production.

Morgan ran as fast as she could without tripping, following the trail and trying to keep some semblance of her position…which was nearly impossible with all the switchbacks, so she just memorized where she’d come so she could go back if necessary. Get lost here long enough to run out of ambrosia and she’d be toast.

Traveling the path and racking up meters Morgan looked for something, anything that might be the source of these things but there was nothing to be found. She moved through two more intersections before the density of the stung bugs dipped a bit, which was her first clue. The Archon coasted to a stop and started to backtrack, heading for the last intersection and heading the other way. The density of the stun bugs increased again and she used that as her guide, finding another intersection and guessing wrong only to have to retread ground and go the other way, crunching another senzu bean and putting herself on a mental countdown to when she’d need to start back.

She kept looking and looking, starting to get dizzy from the sustained effort that she had to keep increasing due to the number of bugs pushing back against her concussive energy, especially across the ground where they tried to slip in under her waves, but they’d always get repulsed when they got near her feet, for they were continuously emitting a mist of blood from the cuts on thorns and rocks as she bled out and the concussive energy wicked it away from her skin.

Morgan hardly noticed the pain save for when she stepped on something new. She was getting near to her return window when she came back across her own trail, realizing that what she’d just run had been a circle, bringing her back to her previous fork in the trail. It was hard to tell from the geography, but her footprints were there to be seen and settled her fatiguing mind. This region had the highest concentration of the bugs, literally with so many that she could have reached out with a hand, swiped it through the air, and came away with a fist load of them.

Crunching her fourth bean and knowing she had about 2 minutes before turning back she dove off trail and into the brush and getting all kind of cuts on her naked body as branches whipped back at her after being repulsed by her hurricane. She couldn’t put up a bioshield for it would block the concussive energy, meaning her smooth skin was about to turn into a bloody mess of cuts and scrapes.

It wasn’t as bad as she expected, for the Jumat kept most of the contacts off her body, but those that did hit were always strong ones, branches rather than leaves, and some of them definitely had thorns on them. Morgan had to dislodge a few that the Jumat didn’t push out of her body and was beginning to question this wild goose chase when the concentration of stun bugs, momentarily diminished by the closeness of the forest, escalated beyond anything she’d encountered yet.

That told her to press on, even as her mental clock guessed it was time to head back. Saying to hell with it, Morgan decided to go all-in and gave up on the retreat option. Upping her flow rate to compensate, she literally pushed aside buckets of stun bugs out of her sight, which was virtually gone. Between the trees and the bugs she was walking naked through brush in nearly pitch black conditions despite the overhead sun. Her Pefbar allowed her to see through it all, but with so many objects moving about in chaotic fashion she had to mentally filter out the moving stuff else start to suffer vertigo from the sensory overload.

She focused on the ground and tree trunks, walking blindly through the brush that she could no longer see, but what was still scraping her up, even stopping her when she walked into a bush that wouldn’t move out of her way. That set her back, having to backtrack a few steps and find another way around, literally stumbling in the dark trying to see any large objects out there in the aptly titled ‘storm.’

So numbed up from the mental mess and Jumat fatigue, Morgan took her next step and fell right into the source of the stun bugs, dropping some ten meters down a tube to land on a hard floor onto her left shoulder…that popped from the impact that she couldn’t see coming. Her head also banged into the ground, disorienting her into a state of punch drunkenness, but fortunately that made her mad and she reflexively upped her concussive energy flow, blowing back so many stun bugs that they literally ran into each other and broke, for there was so little air for them to move about in.

Morgan coughed, with a senzu bean stuck in her throat as she rolled over face down. With a telekinetic tug she pulled it out and chomped down on it, chewing it and the last one up and finally clearing her mouth. Her shoulder hurt, but far less than it should for being dislocated, telling her just how doped up she was right now. Turning off her Pefbar for a moment the mental storm disappeared, letting her focus on her energy flow and her major injury…as well as the sum total of all the cuts across her formerly attractive body. She couldn’t see it now in the pitch black conditions, but she was a sliced, nasty mess.

Getting a telekinetic grip on her shoulder she tugged it back into place, but forgot to pull her tongue in. She bit it with the pain spike, tasting blood and cursing herself for being so dumb. The Archon rotated her shoulder around, finding it hurt but was still functional as she stood up and turned her Pefbar back on and saw the snowdrifts of dead stun bugs on the floor around her and a snowstorm of active ones surrounding her at no more than a meter distance.

Morgan held position and scanned the area, finding three tunnels heading out from the vertical tube she was now at the bottom of that was itself the size of a small room. Walking on gratuitously flat floors she headed down one of the hallways and came to a dead end some 50 meters away…or so it looked until she got closer. There was a large room that spread out sideways from the tunnel width, and on both sides of that room were equipment banks in the wall that had numerous vents that were spewing out more stun bugs.

In the middle of that room was a circle on the floor that Morgan almost missed save for the fact that she stepped on a slightly raised ring, bringing her attention down to her feet. Depressed below the surface of that circle was a hidden switch that could only be accessed via Lachka…or by breaking through the floor. She used the former and flipped it, with the vents on either wall shutting and cutting off the flow of stun bugs.

With an angry sneer she threw her arms wide and punched the entire room with a much larger Jumat blast, throwing the tiny bugs into the walls and crushing most of them. They scattered around in the maelstrom like bits of debris, eventually working their way to the floor and piling up there as Morgan walked back out to the center tube and headed down another of the three hallways. She found an identical room and switch there, turning it and the stun bug production off before heading over to the last chamber.

When she hit that switch the vents closed but the swarm around her was still active. She sent out another burst and took down most of the ones in that room, but there were so many coming down from aboveground that the air was still thick with them, though she had a tiny respite that she did not allow herself to linger in. Morgan kept up the Jumat flow, knowing now would be an ironically bad time to let one slip through and take her down, as she headed back to the entrance, not sure if she could jump high enough to get out in her present condition.

When she got back there she noticed a new circle in the middle of the floor. As she walked towards it a pylon rose up from the ground with her first thinking it was a step up to get out of the hollow, but then she saw that it was made of crystal with a glowing icon in the center…that was blue.

There were no visible buttons to press, nor internal ones, so Morgan just summoned up a directional blast and threw it off her good arm, hammering the crystal and cracking it. She repeated the attack four more times until it broke apart and the blue light likewise disappeared…with every stun bug in the air suddenly shutting down and dropping to the floor, save for the fact that she couldn’t see that with her battering them all over the place. It was the lack of additional ones coming down from top that first clued her in, not to mention the bits of sunlight coming down onto her mauled up body. She eased back on the Jumat flow and the remaining bugs flew into the walls and piled up on the ground, adding to the black snowdrifts.

She took it down another notch and the air finally cleared. Morgan let go her effort but kept her Pefbar active, just in case something else was going to happen, and felt the blood begin to seep out of her in small rivulets. She nearly fell over with the effort release and stepped forward off the circle in the center. She noticed the rim in her Pefbar just before she fell, not remembering it having been there, then when her foot hit the ground and a piece of crystal dug itself into the center of her foot the floor fell out beneath her, crumbling into hundreds of pieces as a bright gold light burst through the cracks.

Morgan wheeled about mid fall, grapping the edge of the platform with her bad arm and feeling it wrench again. Her fingers held on past the pop as her eyes squinted against the glare from below. Forcing herself to twist on her dislocated shoulder, she got her other hand up to the rim and one armed herself up until she got her chin on the edge, then worked her way up over the edge mostly with her good arm, slithering onto the shattered crystal and cutting herself up further, but avoiding the fall.

Come to me, she shouted telepathically, not even bothering to try and find Rex’s mind to send a direct message. I need help.

9

On my way, Rex told her, immediately leaping up the gap between paths and sprinting over the black snow on the ground and crunching the little stun bots with every step. He had a fix on her mental location, and with the stun bots no longer an issue he was able to run freely aside from making detours around the gravity traps.

It didn’t take him long to get to the cave tunnel, then from there he was in unfamiliar territory and asked Morgan for directions rather than just guessing or trying to claw his way through jungle. She replied with the first turn instructions, then after that her memory was hazy but she said she hadn’t encountered any gravity traps.

This side of the cave was covered in stun bots like patches of a giant puzzle laid down in various locations wherever a swarm had been at that time. When Rex crossed over a patch of clean ground he was sucked down into a faceplant, smashing his nose into the compact dirt for a moment before he did a slow pushup and got his legs under him enough to crawl out of the gravity trap…which told him Morgan hadn’t come this way.

Sensing her closer now he decided to abandon the trails and head straight for her location, so summoning up a bioshield he dove into the brush and disappeared beneath the trees. At least this way he wouldn’t run into any more gravity traps, for they’d pull down the brush with them and give away the location. Previously though there had been other things off the trails to worry about, and about halfway to Morgan he found one of them in the form of a little mound in the ground that a slew of lemmings came up out of.

They chased after him and nearly caught him in the ankles before he telekinetically threw them off, then he broke through onto another trail and kept to it, heading in Morgan’s approximate location with the things nipping at his heels for a moment before he got up to speed.

Rex lost them eventually, then came around full circle on the path before realizing that Morgan was in the center of it. He got confirmation from her of that and dove in, eventually coming to a hole in the ground that was brightly lit from below with the telltale light that the hologram had spoken of. When he got to the edge he found Morgan at the bottom on a narrow platform around which was the light coming from somewhere below, though he couldn’t make out where with his eyes or his Pefbar, for it was being blocked below a certain level.

He also noticed that Morgan was covered in blood.

“What the hell?” he asked, with her glancing up at him.

“Pull me up, please.”

Rex got a telekinetic hold on her waist and lifted her up through the opening, though there was an audible groan from the trailblazer as he did so. Her bloody, nude body came up out of the hole and he set her to the side…and to his surprise she let herself drop to the ground rather than standing on her feet.

“What did this to you?” Rex asked, taking a knee next to her.

“Running naked through sticks and thorns.”

“You ran out of bioshield…oh crap, you couldn’t use it.”

“Nope.”

“You need to slip into a healing trance.”

“Already have. Can I ask a favor?”

“Sure,” he said, knowing it was virtually unheard of for Morgan to ever ask a favor.

“Take your shirt off so it doesn’t get bloody and carry me on your back under your bioshield while I heal.”

Rex raised an eyebrow. “I can do that, or we can just bring everyone here and go through that portal when you’re ready.”

“No,” Morgan said, keeping her body locked in a lounging position so to minimize movement for the sake of the Sesspik. “It’s shielded from psionics. If there’s something nasty waiting for us on the other side we have to be ready first. That means more hunting parties collecting ambrosia and whatever else we can find. That’ll take at least a day and I’ve already lost a fair amount of blood. Most of it blew off with the Jumat, so I need to heal this as soon as possible.”

“I can stand guard here so you don’t have to move.”

Morgan sighed. “Just get me back to camp.”

“As you wish,” he said, pulling off his shirt and rolling it up into a bundle that he held in his left hand as Morgan stood up and climbed on his back. The blood made her warm skin slick on contact, but between his arms looping through her legs and a little telekinetic reinforcement he got her snugged up against him and made sure she could just sit there without having to hold on much.

“Just veg, I’ll get you back,” he said, slipping a bioshield around both of them and walking off slowly through the brush with it passing harmlessly around her naked body.

“Thanks,” she said, trusting him enough to close her eyes and her senses and give herself over to the healing trance.

Many hunting parties later all 100 trailblazers gathered at the portal carrying their weapons, shields, and other knickknacks that they’d constructed out of the debris as Kerrie jumped up over the hole and froze there, tipping face down in midair as the others held her aloft and slowly lowered her down into the chamber below. She had a battlemeld link with Aaron so he could see what she saw as her head dipped into the energy field that was further down around the central platform below and glowing a blinding gold.

Kerrie passed into it, for it wasn’t a thin layer and her vision was bathed in light so much that she had to shut her eyes. Her Pefbar told her that she was in a short tube, at the bottom of which was a hatch that snapped open as she approached, probably expecting her to fall through rather than float above it.

With that physical barrier gone she could sense but not see what was below. There was an arching tube curling to the right like a dry waterslide, beyond which she could not sense…

Suddenly her body was jerked out of the Archon’s telekinetic grip and she disappeared from sight and sense.

“Damn, I lost her,” Aaron said.

“So much for intel,” Morgan said stepping up to the edge in her underwear and reclaimed shoes. “Any reason to wait?”

“Nope,” Bo said, diving in ahead of her. He landed feet first on the platform below then hopped off into the golden light with the others following at slightly staggered intervals.

Greg came down with a full length shield, tucking it up against his back and riding it through the curved tunnel like a rough surf board made from metallic dinobot hide. He could see Dina ahead of him a few meters and could sense the others behind him as they slid down a long straight decline in the dark until it corkscrewed through one last hurricane-like twist before dumping them out on a short drop of 4 meters into a large chamber.

Greg landed on top of Kerrie’s unconscious body, seeing her just in time after squinting his eyes against the brightly lit chamber to arch his back and land on all fours overtop of her…which fortunately kept his shield strapped onto his back as a stun sword swung down onto him.

With his Pefbar adding to his eyesight he knew he and the others were being ambushed as they came in, so he grabbed Kerrie in a telekinetic hold and shot her body away from the landing area as he sprinted away from the guy with the sword, noticing two other Archons already down before he realized that it was an Arc Knight waiting for them.

The man was fully clad in black/gold armor and had one of the wicked stun swords that the Black Knight had made infamous in their training days. This guy was using it to whack the trailblazers unconscious as they came down, and had it not been for Greg’s shield he would have been taken unaware as well.

Knowing that had to change now, Greg threw a Fornax blast back behind him and into the Knight as he ran, causing the giant to stumble as another trailblazer came down. He missed Jace by a hair when he swung next, which was when Greg sent a quick telepathic message out to all within range letting them know what was happening. The others would relay it up the slide, he knew, so hopefully they’d be ready to fight the moment they dropped out of the ceiling.

After getting Kerrie clear he turned around behind his shield and ran towards the Arc Knight as Jace held him back with a telekinetic grip for a moment, only delaying him until he activated his Rentar and melted the Lachka tendrils holding him in place. That delay was enough for Greg to get to him and ram him off his feet with his six foot tall flat shield, knocking the Arc Knight to the ground in an armless tackle and clearing the exit for the others to come down.

Jace stepped up next to Greg and held position while Erin came down and pulled Bo’s body out of the way and began to work on the others. Seeing that he was now outnumbered, the Arc Knight rolled to his feet and telekinetically pulled his dropped stun sword towards him as he ran off…but Jace was too quick and used his own Rentar to break the grip on the Knight’s sword, causing it to drop to the ground a meter away from him, then jerk back towards Greg as he got his own hold on it.

The Knight tried to disrupt that but was too slow and the sword dropped to the ground with Jace running forward and scooping it up in his hand before it could hit. Seeing that there wasn’t a lot the Arc Knight could do now with a fourth trailblazer dropping down behind him he chose to run rather than fight, for which Greg was grateful. Getting hit or kicked by a guy wearing full armor was painful, plus the only way they were going to disable the Knight was through psionics, for there was no way they could hit hard enough to get through that armor.

Greg backtracked as the Knight ran off across the room that was the size of 6 football fields and disappeared into a door that opened for him. It shut after he went through, leaving the trailblazers in command of the circular chamber with four of their number unconscious already.

“That was close,” Jace commented, checking the power level on the stun sword and feeling much better for having it.

“So much for a finish line,” Greg scoffed as more of the others fell down through the opening. “Good thing we took down that Brontosaurus, otherwise we’d be down four right now.”

“Yeah, Morgan made a good call there,” Jace agreed, knowing that the generous amount of destunning serum hidden within the monstrous beast was worth the headaches they’d had taking it down. “And I’m loving this little baby.”

Greg glanced at the sword. “You know their armor will have stun resistance.”

“Just means I have to hit them a lot…and what do you mean by them?”

“You think there’s only one?”

Jace frowned. “Probably not. I just hope the mother isn’t down here.”

Greg winced. “Don’t call him that. It’ll just piss him off.”

“Come on, Braum. Let’s see if there are any traps in here to set off,” Jace said as he jogged off towards the door the Knight had escaped through.

Knowing that there was a trap waiting for them, Paul and Jason had come down together and dropped out onto the floor with two short shields blocking their backs as they were essentially hugging each other when they landed. They got the ‘all clear’ mental signal from Oni a moment before they came through so they didn’t spring into action, merely letting go of one another and walking out of the drop zone as they got their bearings.

Most of the Archons were here already, with about 10 left to come through, though it looked like four were already down. Paul knew the destun and ambrosia carriers were coming through last so they didn’t risk losing those precious supplies, and he was glad it was just four of them, for they’d already used a chunk of the serum after that big raid and trying to wake someone with psionics alone was troublesome. They needed to flush their system of the energy rather than circumvent it and leave them a walking zombie for the next half hour.

“Where’d he go?” Paul asked.

“Ran off through the wall,” Morgan told him as she met up with the dynamic duo. “No gravity traps or other little surprises that we’ve found yet. And the door won’t open from the inside.”

“Walls shielded?” Jason wondered.

“Of course.”

“What now?” he said, looking at the ceiling and visually scanning the entire chamber as the last of the trailblazers came through. There was nothing here, for the walls were entirely smooth without so much as a hint of texture and pure white, emitting a low glow that lit the area. Jason couldn’t even see any doors, guessing that they were built with the first level transforming tech that Star Force had begun employing based on a Voku homage.

“At least there are no more sticks and rocks to step on,” Morgan said as Olivia dropped out of the ceiling, bringing them back to a full 100. Morgan gave her a telepathic heads up as to the ones that needed waking with the destun serum just as the room exploded with sound.

Everyone jerked from the transition, with the music playing so loud it immediately shot their adrenaline up, for it was a song that many of them were familiar with.

Define your meaning of war, to me it’s what we do when we’re bored, blared from the speakers as Olivia took off sprinting towards the downed trailblazers, knowing that she had to get them woken up as fast as possible.

Jason and Paul linked up in battlemeld and moved to the outside of the trailblazer group as the others around the perimeter scouting out the walls fell back in towards the center.

I feel the heat comin’ off of the blacktop and it makes me want it more.

Jace twirled his stun sword as he flicked the power switch back on, stepping up alongside Sara who had a metallic bar the length of a doublebladed sword and linking up with her to form a swords pair as Greg ran over to group up with the other 7s.

Because I’m hyped up out of control. If it’s a fight, I’m ready to go, played as a giant holographic clock appeared over their heads with 20:00 gleaming in bright blue, then twelve man-sized doors opened up around the perimeter of the room with bright white light shining out behind black silhouettes of Arc Knights as they casually walked out together.

I wouldn’t put my money on the other guy, if you know what I know that I know.

Then a thirteenth door opened up, revealing another silhouette of black armor with a stun sword…except when this one stepped out into the open his armor had no golden trim. It was full black.

It’s been a long time coming, and the table’s turned around. ‘Cause one of us is going down. One of us is going down.

“Fuck,” Morgan said, her ponytail flicking up as she sent out a Jumat pulse in anticipation as the clock flicked over to 19:59 and started to count down. “He’s mine. Paul, Jason, help me!” she said as all thirteen of their heavily armored opposition started running towards the unarmored trailblazers at the center of the room at Archon speeds, indicating that there was no more theatrics or holding back. They were going to beat the crap out of them if they could.

“Don’t get cocky,” Jason warned as they joined Morgan into their personal battlemeld, forming a trio that jogged towards the juggernaut sprinting towards their group. Morgan took the lead and came to a halt with Paul and Jason fanning out to either side as she summoned up a huge Jumat blast and held it contained in front of her, waiting until he was close, then flicking it towards him in the hopes that he wouldn’t dodge the invisible Kamehameha.

She caught him with a partial hit, for he was so fast even in armor that he twirled to his right in a moving sidestep that got exaggerated from the blow. He got tossed off balance but found his feet easily enough until the trio forced him to the ground with a Lachka wall that formed over his head and crushed down on top of him.

That wall melted as he activated his Rentar and jumped up, closing the gap with them and swinging his stunsword down on top of Morgan as she staggered backward in her casual shoes, which weren’t the best for quick movements, but Paul yanked her to the side with a Bataf conduit so that the sword blow missed by about a foot. Vermaire pivoted and went after Jason but another conduit pushed him clear of the next blow, then Morgan yanked him towards her in another redirect that left the Black Knight whiffing with each hit.

There was no way they were going to take down the thirteen of them in armor, and the countdown clock made it clear that their objective was to survive until completion…with the Knights doing their best to take out as many of them as possible and needing only a single hit with a stun sword or gauntlet to disable them enough to make a quick takedown, even if that blow fell on a finger or toe.

Vermaire knew this too, so as soon as he saw that this trio was merely diverting him he made another lunge at Paul as a feint and sprinted through it, crossing the next twenty meters and coming up on Greg from behind. Rex saw him coming and threw a Lachka wall at him, which barely slowed him before melting into nonexistence. Greg was dodging an Arc Knight’s sword at the time and only had time to accept a Bataf link from another nearby Archon that tried to pull him away from the Black Knight in time, but failed.

That big stun sword came down on top of Greg’s shield, bathing it in stun that numbed his arm a bit with the bleed through, but the physical power behind it knocked the Archon to the ground and a swift boot kick tore the shield from Greg’s grip. He tried to pull himself free with another Bataf from Rex, but Vermaire brought a fist down to the ground in an overhead punch that caught him in the foot as he slid away, numbing his entire lower body.

The next thing Greg knew his momentum stopped as his midsection crumpled in a telekinetic grip that held him in place just a split second, which was more than enough for Vermaire to dash forward and smack his sword tip across Greg’s head, knocking him out instantly.

10

The Black Knight turned and went after Nik as a slew of Lachka fields wrapped him up, but aside from a slight hesitation they didn’t stop him, for he melted through them all and closed on the Archon rapidly, jumping up and coming down with an overhead strike as an Arc Knight stopped Nik with his own Lachka grip onto the Archon’s ankles.

Nik tripped up and turned it into a somersault to keep his momentum, then the Black Knight’s sword came down on his back and he was out, but just as the sword blow fell Paul came flying into the back of the Black Knight’s legs as Morgan and Jason mutually hurled him towards their target. Vermaire went down and Paul scurried away, sending a Saven flash into his mind to temporarily overload his Ikrid and hopefully distract him. He could still see with Pefbar, but the locations of all minds around him would be momentarily lost during the sensory overload.

That and a Bataf yank from Jason got him clear as the Black Knight snapped around on him with a kick/punch combo just before Morgan got up to him and did a full Kamehameha into his chest. That was something he couldn’t block with Rentar and Vermaire went flying through the air as a pair of Arc Knights came to his aid and went after Morgan…which was a mistake.

She balled up pools of Jumat on her arms and ducked under the first sword slash, dipping down to the floor then jumping horizontal in a Yetu flash to land her left palm into the Knight’s abdomen. He went flying off to the left as Morgan rolled under the other Knight’s sword and quickly reversed her momentum, soon to do the same thing to him.

Jason and Paul knew they had to stay on the Black Knight at all times or he’d wreck them all, so they’d followed him through his tumble and added to it with a few Lachka pushes midair before Bataf yanking Morgan back towards them like a slingshot. With the help of Mark coming in behind the Black Knight as he was standing up and hitting him with as strong of a Fornax blast as he could, Vermaire stuttered ever so slightly, which was just enough of an opening as they needed.

Both of them yanked on his sword telekinetically, freeing it from his hand an inch before he grabbed it again…just as Morgan slammed into him as she put a shoulder into his chest and released another Jumat blast from her own torso.

Mark ducked down and turned himself into a log, catching the Black Knight’s legs as he flew backwards and using the man’s momentum to flip him head over heels with Morgan eventually ending up on top of Mark. He telekinetically pushed her up to her feet so she could keep hammering on Vermaire, but as soon as she was off him and moving forward an Arc Knight came in and jabbed Mark while he was still on the ground, cleaning up the bodies that Vermaire was dropping and taking another Archon out of the equation.

Paul and Jason ripped the sword out of his hand as Morgan hit him, momentarily disabling his Rentar. Paul let Jason have it, with the Archon immediately taking off towards the Arc Knight that had downed Mark. They went through a slew of blows and counterblows, but the Knight was no match for Jason’s skill with a sword and he slipped a blow in on the man’s upper left hip. The stun soaked into the armor and did little to slow the giant, but every little bit made him slower and slower with the small hits adding up and allowing Jason to make bigger and bigger ones as the other trailblazers covered for him.

It didn’t take long before the Arc Knight went down and Jason telekinetically kicked the sword out of his hand and into Megan’s as he delivered one more stun blast into the man’s helmet before running off towards another Arc Knight…but only a few seconds later this one stirred, his head clearing as the armor soaked the lingering stun energy up, but he wisely stayed on the ground until he was ready to fight again. Waiting for the proper moment, he let one of the Archons get close to him, running away from Vermaire, then he jumped up and tackled Andy around the left leg, stunning him with his armored glove and taking him to the ground as Vermaire finished him off with a punch to the chest.

Then Morgan was on him again, knocking the Black Knight 10 meters away where he rolled onto a knee and got back up again, not even trying to engage the top Archon and going for the weaker ones instead as the Arc Knights made plays to set him up with kills. It was clear to Paul and Jason what they were doing and it was working, with 8 of the trailblazers already unconscious.

But they had his sword, and two of the others, with the dynamic duo deciding that’s where they needed to focus their efforts as others helped Morgan. With Jason taking the lead the pair headed towards the nearest Arc Knight with a sword and Jason engaged him while Paul used his psionics to disable or disrupt him enough that Jason didn’t need more than 10 seconds to take him down…then Paul got his own sword.

Both of them got a prompt from Kai, then after linking him into their battlemeld he pulled both of them across the room as if they were on skis and up behind two other Arc Knights that were chasing down a group of 5s. Paul took the one on the left and Jason the one on the right, with Tyr throwing the metallic ball he’d brought with him into the back of Jason’s, knocking him forward and into the sword tip of his opponent. A few more quick disarming slashes and the trailblazer was able to kick his sword loose, then proceeded to stun him up enough that he eventually went down.

Tyr let the basketball-sized metallic lump of junk bounce off the Knight then telekinetically picked it up and threw it towards the other one, but he saw it coming in time to evade both the ball and Paul’s blade. Tyr stopped it midair once past the Knight and redirected it back towards him, catching him in the right leg and knocking him off balance…which was all Paul needed to disarm him as well.

Then the lucky bastard telekinetically grabbed Paul’s leg and yanked him towards him, getting a feather’s brush of his armored fingertip on the trailblazer’s leg.

Paul jabbed the sword down into him multiple times as he fell, his leg completely missing from his mind’s eye and his head more than a little wobbly. Someone else yanked him away from the Knight and he gave up his sword to Kerrie as she swooped in beside him and finished off the Knight, albeit temporarily.

A prompt from Olivia ended up with her dragged Paul across the room and over to her, where she administered the destunning serum a moment before Vermaire got over to them, intent on not letting them undo the damage inflicted. Morgan reacted instantly, letting others fling her like a weapon through the air towards him before he could get to Paul…but that’s just what he wanted. Expecting the attack he turned into it, head down so that Morgan flew over his head. She battered him into the floor with her Jumat as she did so, but he got a hand on her and she rolled uncontrollably when she landed on the ground, now unconscious.

“Damn,” Paul said as his leg returned to working order, then he saw the Arc Knights all coming towards him and he realized it was Olivia they were after. “Run!”

Kerrie stepped in front of Paul and flicked him his sword back while linking with him, then they both grabbed and threw one of the Arc Knights so fast that he didn’t have a chance to break the Lachka hold. After that she was off elsewhere and Paul was exchanging blows with another Arc Knight, parrying each and knowing he could own one of them if he just had a few seconds to work with, but Vermaire was headed directly for Olivia and two Arc Knights were now standing guard over Morgan’s body so that no one could wake her up.

Then Rio pulled an insane backdoor move, sneaking up on them using Kgat until he was so close that he Yetu jumped the last few meters in between both of them, stepping on Morgan’s bare abdomen in the process but knowing she wouldn’t care afterwards. With only a moment to use before they twisted around and took him out, he surged his Lachka as quick and as forceful as possible, forming two ‘crash bags’ and expanding them off of each of his hands as he touched the armor on both Knights.

The result from Brad’s perspective was a sneak jump in on top of Morgan with Rio blowing both of them off and away from her, then pushing her body even further away. Brad grabbed it with a Lachka hold and dragged her over to him where he got hold of her wrist and picked her up, running her across the room to a safer area where the ‘hot potato’ of the destunning serum was eventually going to end up as the Archons passed it from person to person after Olivia chucked it away just prior to going down.

Rio took three sprinting steps away from the Knights as others with swords came in to counter them then he froze, not because of anyone doing something to him, but because of what was happening inside him. It took him a moment of hesitation to be sure, then he was suddenly knocked to the side by Scott as another Arc Knight lunged for him with his stun gauntlets.

“What’s wrong?” Scott asked, grabbing him by the shoulder and pulling him away as others intervened seeing that Rio wasn’t fighting anymore.

“Ascension trigger,” Rio said, fighting a huge surge of instability that made him trip once and Scott had to catch him again.

It took all of a tenth of a second for Scott to realize what was happening, for all of the trailblazers had shared all of the known triggers, meaning that whatever Rio was getting was going to be a new ability and they couldn’t squander that, so he pulled him into a telekinetic hold just above the ground and moved him like an anti-grav cargo crate away from the center of the room.

Seeing an opportunity to down a weakened opponent, an Arc Knight shot after them at full sprint with Scott putting out a mental ‘help’ call to all the Archons along with a priority marker on Rio. Within 3 seconds four bodies flew across the room to hit the Arc Knight. He stunned one of them, but the others knocked him down and away from Rio, trusting in Scott’s judgement even though they didn’t know what was going on just yet, though that would change shortly as he transmitted to everyone in the room what was happening.

The Black Knight stopped instantly, raising an arm and calling off the Arc Knights. The trailblazers stopped when he did, then Vermaire ran over to Rio, pulling off his helmet mid sprint. Scott stepped aside as Rio was kneeling on the ground trying to focus on the instability, letting Vermaire get to him. The giant pulled the tiny biomonitor off his own forehead and put it on Rio, then stepped back and watched.

“I could use some help,” Rio asked. “This is worse than I’ve ever had.”

“I’ve got you buddy,” Scott said, grabbing his wrist and linking to him mentally and feeling the huge storm surging throughout his entire body, meaning this was going to be tissue growth in more than just his brain and those were always the nastiest ascensions to go through. He gave Rio a firm point to center himself on and he felt Rio latch onto it desperately. He needed to let this go and try again the next time it manifested, but there was no way the trailblazer was going to let a brand new trigger get away, for there was no way to know when or if it would come again.

“Hang on to it,” Kerrie pressed, with Scott transmitting to all of them so they knew what was happening internally. “3 red.”

“Oh this is going to hurt,” Rio said as it bumped up to 4 red and he laid himself down flat on the floor in anticipation. 18 seconds later it went to 4 flashing red and the pain of tissue growth suddenly exploded inside of him.

He yelled, both mentally and verbally, suffering through an insanely painful 8 seconds before he went limp and nearly passed out.

“You got it,” Scott said, trying to numb up some of the residual pain for him as well as clear the whirlwind from his mind. “Easy now,” he said, looking up at the others. “He is cooked head to toe.”

“Worth,” Vermaire said, pointing to the wall that opened up with a doorway. “Challenge over. We’ll call it a draw, but it looks like we all just won a new ability.”

“Well said,” Jason agreed as Scott picked up and carried Rio towards the exit, then he looked up at Vermaire’s helmetless head. “So whose brilliant idea was all of this?”

“You needed a real challenge. It was Wilson’s plan, though I made a few suggestions.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Morgan said, walking up behind them with a slight limp after getting destunned and still having a few pins and needles working through her right leg.

Vermaire raised an eyebrow and looked at her standing there in her underwear, as were several of the others. “For what it’s worth, he never expected you to be able to get through the swarms on your own. That was supposed to be something all of you had to work together to defeat, which was why he amped it up so much.”

“You saw?”

Vermaire nodded. “I didn’t think you could sustain the effort that long.”

“Was this the end of the challenge, or did we have something more to do?”

The Black Knight looked up at the clock that had 1:32 remaining. “This was to be your finish line, though you weren’t going to get there. I had you down. The rest were just a matter of time.”

Paul mock coughed.

“We’ll agree to disagree on that one,” Jason added, sharing the same sentiment. “Are there any more surprises awaiting us?

“The scheduled Trials, but nothing like this,” Vermaire said, putting his helmet back on and walking towards the exit along with the rest of the Arc Knights. “Though Wilson has some worthwhile tests for your Clans that you won’t easily pass.”

Morgan walked up behind Jason and put a hand on his shoulder so he wouldn’t follow the others out. “What happened to Rio?”

“Not sure, but it was a full body ascension.”

“Think he got Jumat?”

“We can only hope. If not, it’s something totally new.”

Morgan switched to telepathy so no one else could eavesdrop. That aside, we are going to get even with Wilson for this one, right?

Jason smiled. Oh, we’ll think of something over the next few days. I can promise you that.

Rio lay on a flat bed in the med bay with a host of equipment around him scanning his new tissue that, from his perspective, was so on fire that he had no idea what it did. He was in total body pain, but it was easing ever so slightly and from past experience he knew he just had to weather it for a while until it dissipated. He was in no condition to fight, let alone train, but was more than thrilled to have gotten a new ability, though the grimace on his face attested otherwise.

“We have a match,” the medtech said to Scott and the other six Archons in the room with them, then swung the monitor over to show him. The tissue growths were not Jumat, as many had suspected, but were an enlargement of his Lachka tissue in his brain and duplicate particles across his entire body. There was only one psionic that had that structure, so it was an easy diagnosis to make.

“Tier 3,” Scott told Rio.

“Jumat?”

“No. You got Ubven.”

Rio laughed, which shot a super jolt of pain through every part of his body. “Damn. And I always hated Amumu.”

“You’re our mummy now,” Scott said with a smile, realizing what the lingering Lachka field drop ability was going to mean for hand to hand engagements, especially large numbered affairs like they’d just been in. “And you’re going to absolutely wreck team fights.”

iTunes: "You're Going Down"

Starchaser

1

February 26, 2825

Jartul System (Calavari Region)

Daka

Mark-084 stood on the mountaintop that held the remains of the old Alliance base, looking out at the surrounding geography that was a mix of small mountains and plains, the latter of which held a number of lizard cities. Smoke was rising from them even now weeks after they’d been assaulted by Star Force troops. The battle for the planet was over, but the cleanup mission was going to take years to disassemble the lizard infrastructure.

But they had time, and Mark was going to be personally overseeing the reclamation of Daka for Star Force. Clan Gunstar was going to get a small piece of it, but the bulk of the planet was going to be one of the new tier 4 worlds, housing the best of the best of Star Force personnel when it came to the aerial division and all supporting assets. Under Mark’s leadership the planet was going to become the premier industrial producer of aerial craft and the test bed for future prototypes, as well as the most intensive and extensive training available for all of the empire’s various factions.

Likewise there were 8 other tier 4 worlds planned, though none had been tagged to date save for a waterworld in the Bsidd Region that was going to house the tier 4 aquatics stronghold. Already the reorganization of Star Force was beginning to show dividends, with the tier 3 sectors that had already been created on Earth and Corneria having begun to generate a new ‘feel’ to the civilization there. Everywhere from the residential sections to the entertainment facilities was more mellow, focused, and purposeful. The chaos of the general population was gone, as were the dysfunctional citizens.

Roam a tier 3 region and there were no fat people, no old people, no cutters, anorexics, gays, addicts, loudmouths, egotists, zealots, etc. Everyone here had earned their way in, and that trial in and of itself had allowed them to solve their personal problems and rise above the rest of the citizenry…and now they no longer had to see the problems of others on a daily basis. The ‘normal’ was now perfection, in that the people here had no personal problems dragging them down with the focus being on improvement, both personal and communal, and a striving for excellence rather than coping with flaws.

The synergy that had resulted surprised many by its suddenness and intensity, with the go ahead for the tier 4 worlds coming quickly thereafter. The basic theory was to create an advanced core group that would bring the rest of Star Force up with it, much like the Clans were, except that these tier 4 worlds would be skill specific and essentially the poster model for others to learn from. Mark had wanted Daka for the aerial specialty for that was what the planet had originally been tasked for when the Calavari had owned it prior to the lizard invasion, not to mention its strategic location.

It was on the very edge of Star Force territory at the moment, but with a coreward boundary line essentially fixed the further push against the lizards would be rimward, eventually making Daka centrally located if all went according to plan. The ADZ was going to be displaced as the geographical center of the empire as they ate up more and more lizard worlds, with Davis already commissioning the placement of Epsilon Eridani caliber systems at various points along the current borders. Those so designated would be receiving supply shipments from across the empire to fast track their development, with Daka being one such planet.

The first convoy wasn’t due to arrive for another month but Mark wasn’t in a rush. There had been so many lizards here that it had literally been a blood bath. The widespread usage of the Keema weapon batteries within the drone fleet had given them the range advantage they needed, and most of the destruction of the lizard civilization had occurred from orbit, but there had been considerable ground fighting for the limited troops the Archon had brought with him to cleanse the planet of the longtime invaders.

The base beneath the mountain had been repurposed for the lizards, leaving nothing of the original behind, but Mark recognized the location just the same. He’d fought here against the Nestafar when they’d backstabbed the Alliance and joined with the lizards over 400 years ago, and though the grasslands had been burnt away the rest of the topography hadn’t changed.

It felt strange to be back here, for when he’d left the Calavari had been the larger and more powerful race with Star Force being a junior member in the Alliance. Now the Calavari were the smaller faction within Star Force, with the Bsidd likewise having joining them and the Kvash having been wiped out. The Nestafar were likewise all but gone, with only a small ward colony left that was also part of Star Force now. The founding members of the Alliance, once the huge, powerfully dominant races, had receded, with even the Hycre now taking a backseat to the Human-led empire. Mark and his kin were now in the driver’s seat, and doing a far better job of fighting the lizards than the Alliance ever had.

Mark knew that criticism wasn’t entirely warranted. The other races didn’t have a pyramid of highly advanced tech to continually leech off of, but that aside the old Alliance’s methods had been inadequate and rather than repeating failure Star Force learned and adapted…which was necessary against an opponent that did the same. Mark knew that they’d never be beaten, for the lizards had grown so large and vast that they could keep spreading throughout the galaxy faster than Star Force could hunt them down, so the mission was to be better than them while staking out a ‘safe’ chunk of territory for themselves and others to take shelter within.

Daka had just been added to that list of star systems and its inclusion was long overdue. Now that Mark was here he was going to be leading numerous other invasion fleets against the surrounding systems, carving out another section of lizard territory while others did likewise at numerous locations throughout the local section of the galactic arm. Eventually they planned to move all the way over to the new Voku stronghold and place a line there, allowing their new ally to fight the lizards beyond and protect their own designated ward races while Star Force became the link between their territories.

It was now a common sight to see an occasional Voku convoy passing through the ADZ, despite the fact that they didn’t own any territory within it. More and more resources were coming forth from the Voku empire and being sent out to Cal-com’s new territory and Mark welcomed the help, for not only were they defining the spinward border of what would eventually be Star Force territory, but they were also holding a bit of the coreward line as well. And though it was going to be a very distant goal, Mark knew that Star Force was also going to have to expand up and down all the way to the edges of the galactic disc in order to cut the lizards off from further expansion in their area or they’d just skirt the edges and surround them.

There were so many systems out there that Star Force couldn’t save because they were too far away that it left Mark feeling a bit hollow inside, but he and the others had decided to grow their empire as large as they could in order to save as many races as possible, and the stronger the lizards grew the less able races there were that could defend themselves. Star Force was winning their corner of the war, but virtually everyone else was losing and fueling the growth of the lizard juggernaut.

The number of races fleeing into Star Force territory was growing as well, with some coming from the coreward area that had made their peace with the Skarrons only to now be displaced by the lizards. Others were coming to them for a myriad of reasons, some because of other threats, some in the hope of preventing doomsday from coming their way. Few were the races that could stand alongside Star Force as their equals, and those known were far away from here. The Nexus, for all its power and size, was so far rimward that they didn’t have any claim to this region aside from the H’kar fleets that were still fighting alongside Star Force, and that was more on their own merits than any edict from the Nexus leadership.

The Skarrons were the other major power, but as far as Mark knew they were getting their asses handed to them by the lizards and despite the information digging that Star Force had been doing for centuries there didn’t seem to be any other major powers out there within any proximity…meaning that this region was essentially an all you could eat buffet for the lizards when and where Star Force couldn’t stop them.

It wasn’t fair. Nobody chose when or where they would be born, and many new races he’d come to know were fairly honorable and industrious but there was no way they could stand up to the tech level of the lizards, let alone their numbers. Some of those races had been wiped out, others had seen survivors flee to Star Force. They’d done nothing wrong, hadn’t made any missteps, and still they’d gotten obliterated. That frustrated Mark to no end, because he hated no-win scenarios.

He and the other trailblazers had been facing one their entire life with the V’kit’no’sat, but rather than give in to despair they’d devoted themselves to finding ways to do the impossible, and although that day hadn’t come yet, fortunately, they’d progressed so far that it had brought them into a dominant position over the lizards…but that made the situation in the region even worse, for Star Force could stop the slaughter. The trouble was, they couldn’t be everywhere at once.

“Not enough good guys in the galaxy,” Mark said to himself as he looked out over the planet through his helmet’s faceplate. Clan Gunstar was pretty much on autopilot right now, for aside from a few tweaks here and there his second gen Archons were handling his development plans while leaving him free to work on whatever he needed to. Right now that was going to be Daka and building this planet up for all of Star Force, then inviting the top pilots and aerial engineers here to train as they continually refitted the empire’s equipment and combat techniques.

He’d been doing much the same thing within Clan Gunstar ever since its creation, but Daka was going to be a training world that all the Clans could use, not to mention the other races within Star Force and even some of their allies. With the change in lizard tactics and them deploying huge swarms of wisps to counter everything from infantry to warships there was a growing need for aerial craft and this planet was going to begin producing them in crazy numbers…or at least that was the plan, and his plan, for Davis had left Daka up to his discretion while feeding him all available resources that he requested over the next 50 years.

Mark toed a bit of dry dirt with his dark blue armored boot. There was so much work to do here and none of it fighting, assuming they really had cleared out the last of the lizards. He doubted they’d make a second invasion of the planet, for that was no longer something they felt like doing. They hadn’t taken a planet from Star Force in ages and were no longer trying. Their plan seemed to be to turtle up along the border and make themselves as hard of a target as possible to delay Star Force when they eventually came for them, all the while expanding elsewhere and preying on those too primitive or too weak to defend themselves.

Daka was staying in Star Force hands from here on out and Mark was going to make this home for a lot of people. People who earned being here, and who would literally feed off of the attitude of their like-minded peers. Freedom was essential for any civilization, but while you had to let people make their own mistakes you didn’t have to be dragged down by them. People could learn and grow elsewhere, or not, but in order to get here they had to prove themselves worthy…then Mark would take over from there.

Aerial training wasn’t so much a thing of learning various techniques or developing skills as it was of sheer repetition. A commando improved by upgrading their body through training, but a skeet didn’t become more powerful with more missions. It was mechanical and static, meaning the pilot had to advance in terms of reflexes, endurance, and mostly the mental applications. Experience was the key factor and Mark knew that Daka had to have people flying, both for real and in simulators, on an exhaustive schedule. Only that would give his trainees the chance to learn and adapt while he and a few handpicked others worked on improving their equipment.

One of those advancements coming down the line was the neural interface. So far it’d been used in naval and mechs, but aerial was a bit different and Mark had insisted that they still use hand controls until the technology became more streamlined. It was going to be far superior, if for no other reason than being able to see all around you in a way similar to Pefbar, save you’d be using the craft’s sensors instead of your body’s.

Mark was already using the tech in an effort to goose along its advancement, but during this latest assault he’d piloted a standard hand controlled skeet. The new models just weren’t reliable enough yet, though that time was coming soon…and when it did, aerial combat was going to change drastically, which was one reason why he wanted to personally oversee the development of Daka so he could gear it towards that new reality from the ground up rather than having to do a refit later similar to what would be occurring on many other worlds after the transition.

One of those items was going to be a subsurface comm grid that would allow fighters to be flown remotely the same way that naval flew drones, allowing them to be used as disposable assets in various circumstances. Mark had already decreed that they weren’t going to use actual drones, with every craft having a pilot’s seat just in case you needed to manually fly it, but now his pilots would be able to sit inside a city and fight the battles anywhere on the planet from relative safety.

That was, assuming you got a grid to cover the entire planet. He wasn’t going to trust orbital transmissions, plus the lag effect would always give an actual pilot in the seat a slight advantage, but he saw value to this new concept and was going to use Daka as a planetary test bed for it, then it’d be evaluated and used on other worlds if deemed advantageous.

But setting up relays across an entire planet was no small feat, nor was building the cities that would eventually cover the planet. Decades would not be enough. This was going to be a centuries long endeavor trying to rise to a level of Epsilon Eridani or even Sol, though with every year that passed those systems were growing stronger and larger themselves.

But you had to start somewhere, and this planet’s return to allied hands was that start, bloody as it had been. Mark would be basing here for the foreseeable future but he’d let the engineers handle most of the construction after he gave them the basic plans. While they did the tedious work he’d be leading warfleets doing the harder, more dangerous work of cleansing and claiming additional worlds. Some of those they’d keep, others they’d leave bare yet monitored. As it was Star Force had more worlds in its technical possession than they could fill, and that was becoming a big political rub with a number of races that wanted to colonize them.

Twice already Star Force had to forcibly evict squatters, and Mark was glad he wasn’t having to deal with that task. It was insulting to have to waste time and resources with so-called ‘allies’ when every world Star Force took from the lizards could mean that another one out there beyond their reach could be spared, for while the lizard empire was vast it was not infinite, and even they had supply limits.

The stupidity of those in the ADZ was not something to underestimate, but here on Daka he wouldn’t have to deal with that. Not from general citizenry, and definitely not from any non-aligned race that they were graciously babysitting. Everyone coming to Daka would be here for a purpose, and that was the kind of atmosphere that he and others could genuinely think of as home…or so he hoped, if he did his job right and built the planet up into the aerial mecca he hoped for.

Mark took off his helmet, holding it in his hands as he breathed in the toxic air. It had the necessary oxygen he needed, but a lot of other stuff that didn’t agree with his lungs so much. It’d been a long time since he’d tasted this air and wondered how much his advanced physique would be affected, hence this little test.

His lungs didn’t detect any problem in his first few breaths, but that wasn’t abnormal. It usually took a little time before they started burning, but the feel of the air was the same as when he’d first come to Daka. As the minutes passed he continued to look around at the horizon, seeing the junked lizard cities and their smoke plumes, then turning around to see the mountains behind him that had a fair number of concealed hideaways within them, but from here it looked all natural.

The burning sensation started to manifest itself again, and after only a few minutes. Mark sighed and put his helmet back on, cycling the air out to clear it completely and return the internal composition to the desired setting of oxygen and nitrogen.

“So much for being fitter,” he chastised himself with a bit of chagrin. “I guess some things don’t change with time, short of terraforming.”

Nostalgia or no, the air was going to have to change, with giant scrubbers on the to-build list a number of decades down the line. This was a Star Force planet now and the atmosphere was going to have to agree with Human lungs eventually, no matter how much of a hassle it was going to be to filter out all the noxious stuff.

They had time, after all, and Mark was going to see that this world was built right…and as fast as possible without compromising that first tenant. Patience was a learned trait for Archons, for faster was always better, no matter what you were doing.

2

May 17, 2825

Shaleth System (Voku territory)

Inova

Cal-com sat on an elevated platform in his private oracle, reserved only for the Dafchor and select staff as he saw fit to permit entry, though to date that list held 0 names. This was his personal sanctuary from which he oversaw most of the operations within the local annex of the Voku empire. On occasion he would lead a mission personally, but most of those days were now behind him since the other 8 races had been reached and moderately secured on the far side of lizard territory.

Shaleth sat in the middle of it, cutting across the narrowest region in what was now shaped like an hourglass, for the core lizard worlds sat on one side in an ever-expanding sphere of systems and the conquered Skarron systems sat on the other, with that region expanding even faster and further as the lizards seemed to be devoting most of their resources there against the biggest threat they faced.

It might have been the biggest threat, but it was not the most dangerous. The Voku were that, with Star Force coming in a close second and eating away at the middle of lizard territory and bringing them closer and closer to Shaleth as he and Paul had planned. That day would not be in the near future for a lot of lizard territory remained, but the advent of some new technologies for the Humans had increased their pace of conquest, along with a population surge from their servant Bsidd giving them the raw numbers of soldiers and workers they had previously lacked.

The lizards could not expand in their direction and were losing territory all along their borders. On the far side where the Voku had reached the 8 races that Cal-com had been ordered to protect, he was taking possession of every lizard system he could in an effort to link the various locations in a spindly grid. The various servants of the Elders were not geographically close to one another, but none the less Cal-com knew that he had to pacify the entire region in order to truly protect them. Allow them to become isolated and swallowed up in the expanding creep of lizard conquests and they’d be perpetually at risk.

So the Voku were hacking out another chunk opposite that of Star Force and diminishing the lizards’ ability to spread in that direction, poaching their startup colonies before they could get established and pinching their massive empire at the middle, with Shaleth sitting right in the center of it in a gesture of defiance, for no matter how hard the lizards tried they could not retake the system from the Voku and they’d lost hundreds of thousands of ships trying. It was the link between the two regions and one that Cal-com had to hold, so he’d poured resources into strengthening it years ago, now giving him a fortress that the lizards could not touch even with their steady flow of technological improvements that were making it harder for the rest of the galaxy to cope with them.

Inside his oracle there were maps upon maps displayed as if they were artwork above holographic pedestals along with numerous worktables that had his personal plans laid out in the open. He had no fear of a security breach here, so he never bothered to lock away his work when he left the chamber. It had sentries at the entrance permanently, allowing him to let go any concerns of the immediate area and fully sink himself into planning and analysis sessions.

Right now he was combing over new intel reports that had made their way back to him. The 8 races that he had been tasked with guarding were now taking orders directly from him and given the mandate the Elders had placed upon him he was actively restructuring their societies so that they could play a part in their own defense despite their limited technology. What he was working on was creating an Alliance of sorts, similar to what Paul had done with Star Force, to secure the vast region that encompassed all 8 races and hold back lizard expansion into those areas beyond. He could not do this with the Voku alone, so he had been weaving an intricate industrial and economic base within the 8 races he commanded that was going to accommodate the incorporation of other locals who were more than eager to ward off the coming storm.

His intelligence reports were coming in from an army of scouts that were probing far beyond the lizard borders, even some going coreward of their furthest expansion. Cal-com knew Star Force would not go there because of the distant threat that lurked in the shadows, but the Voku didn’t fear it for the simple fact that the Elders hadn’t warned them off. Cal-com needed to know what the lizards were doing and where, with one of his maps detailing the chunk of territory that had been carved out of this portion of the Skarron empire.

It was the same Skarron empire that his people had come into conflict with before, only near their home territory. The Skarrons’ empire dwarfed that of the lizards, with it exceeding all current and previous scouting missions, though from captured intel he knew that it extended over into the next galactic arm, with its mass of holdings in this one merely being colonial expansions. The lizards were effectively fighting and conquering them here, but Cal-com figured it was just a matter of time before the real hammer blow fell on them. When that would occur was the question, though if the Skarrons had other, larger threats to deal with then the lizards might actually seem like a small matter that they could deal with at their leisure.

Cal-com knew that was a mistake, for the lizards’ greatest strength was their ability to spread and spread rapidly. Everything they were consuming within Skarron territory was just feeding their industrial engine and from it they were reaching out into neighboring systems that even the Skarrons hadn’t gotten around to conquering yet. It was those near his wards that he had been scouting out heavily, with a long list of races ready to join with the Voku and form the defense pact that he was painstakingly crafting.

Like his wards, the other races mostly were inefficient and primitive, with a handful that had or could defend themselves against the lizards for a fair amount of time. The issue was always the numbers and the ability of the lizards to keep sending replacements in without end. Cal-com was going to counter this by using his own troops for most of the fighting and defensive emplacements, creating little Voku colonies everywhere, even sitting in the capitols of other races, to establish the backbone of this pact while the other races supported them militarily where they could, but largely through the collection and processing of raw materials that they would then feed to the Voku.

Cal-com could build new ships quicker than the lizards could given available resources and there was only so much he could suck in from the home territories via cargo shipments, though those were having a significant effect already. If he could get this pact firmly established and funneling resources to him in the amounts he needed, then he could begin placing more strongholds on the map to counter the lizard advance.

That was the game he was playing every day. A huge effort across thousands of star systems that saw his own hunting fleets bouncing from location to location to eliminate the soft lizard worlds that his scouts tagged and to hit and eliminate some not so small ones to keep the flow of lizards ships away from certain areas. To the untrained eye it would have seemed an easy assignment given their technological edge, but the galaxy was a vast place and even this little corner of it was huge. There were only so many places the Voku could go, with the lizards taking advantage of the fact that they could go everywhere once their numbers reached a certain point.

What plans the Elders had for his ward races he did not know, so Cal-com didn’t meddle with them much other than to eliminate inefficiencies and get their civilizations geared up towards the resource race that they’d be thrown at. Beyond that he left their internal development to the Elders and their timetable, aside from several Voku cities built amongst their own planets to safeguard them and provide an example of what potential they had should the Elders find them worthy in the coming millennia.

Conscripting them into the Voku military was not an option, nor was it one that the Voku had ever used before. Their forces were comprised of one race and one race alone, unlike Star Force that had shown Cal-com the benefits of a combined force. The Voku had and would fight alongside Paul’s people in a similar manner when necessary, but the Voku would not taint their own civilization by incorporating others. They’d come a long way together, with the newest elevation of his race being seen as a well-deserved reward for their loyalty during the long absence of the Elders. Giving another race access to that would be a cheat that would diminish all the gains they had made.

No, the Voku were on a path of their own from here to infinity. They would help their friends and allies, fight and die alongside them if necessary, but the Voku would always remain Voku and would never meld with another race short of an order from the Elders to do so…and from everything they had taught the Voku, Cal-com knew that was not the path they wished them to take.

A keen interest to Cal-com also lay in the races beyond the lizards, with a significant portion of his scouting fleets probing what lay far beyond the new protected region and into areas where the lizards had not even been mentioned. His forces had to go pretty far to find advanced races that were not aware of the storm devouring everything in its path, but they had found several new threats out there of their own accord, as well as bastions of strength that he intended to make diplomatic contact with.

As he read through the recent reports he found that one of them had come to him first, with a diplomatic envoy from an previously unknown race wanting to have a direct discussion with the Voku’s leader…and a tech tree that was on par with his own, based off the limited analysis his scouts had made of their small fleet that had sought them out.

Along with the message came their credentials in the form of a territory map, linguistic database, and a sufficiently detailed historical record. They were known as the Preema and their territory sat well down the length of this galactic arm…with their numbers rivaling that of the Skarrons. That combined with their level of technology immediately put Cal-com on guard, and with that spike of trepidation his implants unlocked a new bit of information the Elders had stored within them.

What followed a burst of knowledge that confused Cal-com. The Preema were, per his new memories, an isolationistic race that maintained a very tight hold on a limited region of space, dominating virtually every system within their geographical boundaries as opposed to the Skarrons that skipped over most to cherry pick the ones they wanted. Most races did the same, but the Preema were able to pour so much population into a ‘small’ region that what happened within it was virtually unknown to outsiders, for no transit was allowed within or through, making it a gigantic black hole of information.

The Preema were benign as far as the Elders were concerned, keeping to their own systems with little concern for others. ‘Private’ was the word that best described the avian race, which made this unsolicited diplomatic contact far beyond their borders confusing…but also one that Cal-com knew he had to follow up on. Currently the ships that had brought the message were holding position at one of the Voku colonies that he’d recently set up in the gaps between the ward races’ territories. That was where they had made contact, and that was where they were awaiting a response.

Cal-com read through the whole of their data packet before issuing any orders, finding buried within it all the records of a brief conflict with The Nexus. For reasons not mentioned The Nexus had invaded their territory and, after a war that lasted only a handful of years, given up the task after being met with too firm of a response. The Preema had not pursued them beyond their own borders, deciding to only defend their own rather than try to conquer their attackers, but Cal-com found it interesting none the less.

The Elder had said The Nexus was reckless, and this was the first evidence of that that Cal-com had seen. He’d been keeping an eye on the distant empire that existed primarily in the next galactic arm out on the rim, but had not tasked any scout fleets in that direction, save for their nearest border with the lizards. He’d sent a few ships there to confirm the reports Paul had been getting from the H’kar and to measure enemy strength levels around the lizards’ core systems, but aside from a few delicate information hacks into the ships passing through H’kar space his forces knew little of The Nexus besides what was detailed in their public records.

The territory they watched over was larger than what the Skarrons possessed, but as the Elder had said they were reckless in that they did not own but a handful of systems within it. It was more a patrol zone than owned territory, with them dictating to others rather than taking physical possession or responsibility. They were almost always involved in some war within their borders, so for them to travel outside them to invade a race that seemed to keep to themselves on principle was a datapoint that he was not going to overlook. Something important had happened there, and more importantly The Nexus had not scouted out the true strength of their target, otherwise they would not have been so easily thwarted.

The Elder had told him that The Nexus would not last, and if they were actively pushing beyond their already oversized borders and picking fights with others then he could see one of them pushing back and wiping them out. He wasn’t sure if the Preema were capable of that or not, but The Nexus had been given a break when they did not counterattack…or had they anticipated that and the invasion been a probing mechanism?

There was conflict there regardless, and given that Cal-com was an ally of an ally with a member race of The Nexus could potentially be an issue, but again, the Preema were seeking the Voku out. They had to have a pretty big reason to do so and since it hadn’t come on the back of an invasion force he didn’t think it was with hostile intention. Nor were his forces anywhere near Preema borders, so a warning was probably not at issue either. Cal-com had put out an open call for allies against the lizards, but the Preema were so far away from them it didn’t seem likely that they would take issue with the distant enemy…especially since the lizards’ tech level was so low as to not pose a significant threat to them.

Whatever was going on was important, for this was not a low level race. That meant Cal-com needed to meet with their emissary personally rather than rely on an intermediary. With language issues being ever-present with first contact situations the less ambiguity involved in the process the better. He didn’t want to bring the Preema here, so he decided to go to them after he finished the review of their data packet.

Cal-com transferred up to orbit and boarded one of his conglomerates, taking it and it alone out of the system and across lizard territory. Between the weaponry and the speed of his ships he had nothing to fear from the lizards so long as he didn’t enter planetary orbit. Stopping a conglomerate as it transitioned around a star was something the lizards just couldn’t do, so even though he was in the middle of enemy territory it did not matter. Most of the galaxy was empty space, and if you knew how to navigate you could stay clear of the real ‘territory’ that races possessed, for dots on a map were one thing, but the actual geography of a star system was mostly unclaimable space.

And if the lizards happened to have an ambush fleet waiting along Cal-com’s course he wouldn’t mind a short delay to destroy some more of their ships. The less they had the less danger they posed to his wards and allies, despite their building capability. It might look like they had an infinite supply of ships, but he knew that wasn’t true of anyone. Illusions factored heavily into life, and the ignorant often took them at face value. Every lizard ship he killed mattered in the grand scheme of the war even if he never personally knew the implications of it.

3

June 19, 2825

Djaret System (Voku territory)

Djar

Cal-com stood on a neutral platform having been constructed by the Preema on the surface of the Voku planet to serve as a meeting place, for neither race could exist in the atmosphere of the other and facilities on either’s ship were not accommodating to the needs for this occasion. The Preema had anticipated this and brought the construct with them, then having landed it within the oxygen-rich atmosphere once Cal-com had given them permission.

It had been inspected by his troops to ensure there were no snares or hazards prior to his landing, with him walking up onto the spherical platform that was bisected with a clear energy shield. His side held the planet’s native atmosphere while the other held a pocket of the dark brown tinted air that the Preema breathed. When the allotted time came within 30 seconds a spec appeared in the sky above Cal-com that resolved itself into a trio of small craft descending towards the platform, save for the fact that they weren’t craft, but rather the Preema themselves.

Cal-com didn’t realize that until the first of them came within the atmospheric shell and its metallic wings folded up along its torso, then the material molded into the body of the Preema and the front of it split apart, revealing glowing white flesh that stepped out of the armor and into the open. The other two landed alongside it but remained within their armor, much as Cal-com had guards of his own with him, though they were stationed outside on the planet’s surface and these two were on the platform itself.

Cal-com wore the protective shields that his race favored over armor, so he had a measure of defense if something in this meeting were to go the wrong way that the Preema couldn’t see, though they might have guessed from the small pieces of equipment he wore over his bodysuit.

“I offer our greetings, Voku,” the Preema said through some form of translation software, for the words he heard in his own language were slightly delayed from the sounds the Preema was uttering. “We are pleased you agreed to meet with us personally.”

“Why are you here?” Cal-com asked, getting straight to the point.

“It is customary for us to make introductions when a race of sufficient caliber crosses through the local region, though our purpose here is twofold. We have heard your warnings of a primitive but dangerous race slowly approaching us and have investigated the matter from afar. We know little, but enough to see that the threat is not in sheer force, but through uncontrollable numbers spreading and consuming more worlds than anyone can safeguard. If this threat is to eventually make it to our borders, we would prefer to counter it sooner rather than later, if possible. We are here to discuss possible avenues to do so,” the Preema said, sitting down on the ground so that its head sat just a touch lower than Cal-com’s

The Voku stared into its six green eyes and could feel the physical power of the flying quadruped. Unlike others he’d come across, this avian was not fragile. Light perhaps for its size, but far outmassing him with enough musculature that he could tell it could handle itself in ground combat…and with the way its real wings tucked in along its sides he wouldn’t have known it could fly had he not seen it for himself.

The ears were barely noticeable, mere pinpricks along the sides of its large head and also six in number. Its skin was truly white, but also seemed to glow a bit despite the overhead sun. Bioluminescent he assumed, and the claws on its feet were just as pale, though they seemed less luminous but razor sharp and the length of Cal-com’s fingers. It had two on each foot, with the front pair sticking out between the Voku and the Preema’s head as it sat, giving him a good view of the tattoo-like grooves carved into them.

“At present we are simply trying to protect a designated region,” Cal-com explained. “A full victory over the Li’vorkrachnika appears to be untenable short of eradicating them from the galaxy. We do not have the strength or numbers for that, and it would be difficult to know that we’d gotten them all. Their civilization appears to be redundant, and no matter how small a piece of it survives can result in the regrowth of the whole. We’ve seen this in small scenarios when a single ship takes possession of a world then populates it entirely from local resources and personnel that they grow on site.”

“A worthy opponent given their lack of technology.”

“A menace that must not be taken lightly.”

“We do not take anything lightly, Voku. And we rarely leave our own borders. The fact that we are here discussing this now should be testament to our seriousness.”

“This enemy is also devious beyond measure and not afraid to spend lives to test theories or achieve objectives, no matter how great the loss. This is battle experience that I have with them and you do not, hence my warning.”

“Your caution is noted.”

“From what I know of you, your empire is larger than that of the Li’vorkrachnika, though condensed into a somewhat small region of this galactic arm.”

“Correct on both counts.”

“You obviously have a great deal of resources at your command, more so than even I do. How do you think to implement them?”

“However is necessary to keep this race from ever reaching our borders.”

“You can do that on your own merits. Why have you sought me out?”

“As you have said, this enemy is far too widespread to counter directly. You are seeking allies to contain their spread. So too now are we, and we wish to begin with those who have already seen success against the Li’vorkrachnika. Even now there is a race that is pushing them back. True?”

“We are, where our limited territorial acquisitions have taken root.”

“Our information spoke of another that you have ties with. There are rumors abound near the front lines of ones called Human.”

“What you refer to is a conglomeration of factions led by Humans and is called Star Force. They are an ally of the Voku, but their territory is on the far side of the Li’vorkrachnika domain and they will not be able to assist in efforts to contain their spread on this side.”

“We also hear that the great Skarron empire is falling to this enemy. Can you confirm this?”

“The Skarrons have lost a significant number of systems, but percentage wise it is minimal to date, though the carnage continues mostly beyond my ability to monitor.”

“And this small conglomerate ally of yours succeeds where they have failed?”

“Yes they are, and I believe they will continue to do so, but the Li’vorkrachnika will spread to more systems faster than Star Force can take them away. They cannot stop them, but they are no longer victims of them and appear to be able to conquer what they will.”

“And what of the Voku?”

“We are here for other purposes.”

“Safeguarding distant allies?”

“Yes we are,” Cal-com admitted. “And the best way I have found to do that is by decreeing a border against the Li’vorkrachnika that we will hold, regardless of whether or not we possess the systems under threat. It is not a solution, but a stopgap measure that achieves our current goals. The larger an area we can patrol and protect the better, though our own ship count is lacking, mostly in terms of reconnaissance. The Li’vorkrachnika can spread where we are not looking with little cost to themselves, and such easy victories we cannot allow. We need eyes and ears throughout the galactic arm, in addition to warfleets to enforce this border.”

“Never-ending wars are not to be entered into lightly,” the Preema cautioned.

“The Li’vorkrachnika offer no less. Perpetual fighting or submission, the latter of which almost always results in annihilation. They rarely coopt other races, though it has been documented on occasion.”

“Your information did not specify a homeworld.”

“They may have one for nostalgia sake, but their redundancy makes it a moot point. We do know that they have a region of higher density population and infrastructure, from which the rest of their empire is spreading out. That group of systems is far from here, and even if we managed to destroy each and every one it would not end the threat. Already worlds of similar caliber are under construction within what had once been Skarron territory, and every Li’vorkrachnika world has the potential to upgrade into such given enough time. They do not have a central point for us to strike at.”

“Am I to assume they are not interested in diplomacy?”

“Nor in surrender. Star Force offers it as a matter of principle in every engagement, and to date they have never accepted. Those prisoners taken try to do whatever damage they can and, failing that, attempt to end their own lives. The Li’vorkrachnika civilization seeks to consume all it encounters. They cannot be reasoned with, for theirs is a race built and bread for conquest.”

“So we have been told,” the Preema said satisfactorily. “That is why we are here now rather than waiting for the situation to worsen. Our sources have also said that the Li’vorkrachnika have obtained technological enhancements in recent history, enough to tip the balance in some regional conflicts. The longer we wait and the more races they conquer the stronger they will theoretically grow on that front, which is why a strategy must be developed to counter them above and beyond mere containment, for time appears to be their ally. Our own people have not discovered a potential solution, so we wish to consult with those who have fought and are currently fighting with them…especially those that are succeeding in those conflicts.”

Cal-com studied the Preema for a moment. “You are not here to waste my time with unnecessary pleasantries.”

“No.”

“You understand the unusual threat they pose and the challenges in battling it, and like us you don’t see a solution.”

“Not an obvious one, but their existence has only recently been brought to our attention. Their primitive technology makes them beatable, how to go about doing so in a final solution is the question at hand. If a purge is required then the price is going to be a steep one to pay in years, but if it has to be done we need to begin now, for exponential growth will only risk delay long enough for them to feast off their conquests and raise their technology level enough to take away our outright dominance. We will need to destroy them quickly and easily to combat their numbers. Even a small advancement will diminish our ability to do this. Where the failure mark lies we do not know, but so long as the days progress we are slowly approaching it. If the Preema wait until this threat is at our borders, we fear it will be too late. Hence this is why we have responded to your general summons and sought you out.”

“How long have you been aware of the Skarron empire?”

“A very long time.”

“They have been an enemy of the Voku for some time. What is your standing with them?”

“None. We know of them, but have never interacted given the distance between our territories.”

“Theirs was spreading in your direction prior to the Li’vorkrachnika invasion.”

“Which was why we took notice of them from afar.”

“I would like to know how many other strong empires you know of, for I do not believe that anyone is safe from this menace, and the more systems we can deprive them of, either through prevention or reconquest, the less difficult this monumental task will become.”

“We only speak for ourselves, but we can arrange introductions to others if you so wish. I would not wager they would involve themselves until the threat is upon their doorstep. We are more proactive than most.”

“This is a region of the galaxy that the Voku are new to, so even a simple map would be of use to us.”

“That we can and will provide to you before the day is out. But make one thing known…while we will fight the Li’vorkrachnika out of necessity, we will not be claiming any territory beyond what we currently possess. That is why we cannot fight this enemy on our own. Systems purged must be consolidated, else we risk them being reacquired by the enemy once we move on. We can assist in fighting them, but we will not become stewards of the galaxy to prevent their spread. Our borders are fixed and will remain so.”

“Neither can the Voku afford such expansion,” Cal-com agreed. “A collaboration must be achieved from the current races under threat in this region before they are exterminated. Those in former Skarron territory are beyond our reach.”

“Yet to defeat the Li’vorkrachnika we must purge them from everywhere?”

“Therein lies the essential problem.”

“To which you have been addressing it in what manner?”

“We have selected a region of territory and are seeking to deny the Li’vorkrachnika access to it. A stepping stone, both to secure those allies within and to block the spread of the enemy through the region. We detailed as much in the information packet we sent out.”

“So you did. I am curious to know if you have other avenues of assault.”

“We also have roving fleets seeking out and destroying the smaller enemy incursions before they can develop, as well as disrupting their shipping lanes as often as possible.”

“You have the tactics, but no master plan for victory?”

“One often cannot see the conclusion to a fight when it has barely begun.”

“And it is often the fights you cannot see the conclusion to that reckless races kill themselves on.”

“We do not have a choice in this one. The Li’vorkrachnika will be fought, either on our timetable or theirs. Recklessness would be doing nothing.”

“Something without purpose may still be wasteful. This enemy must be fought, but it has to be fought wisely and by all those affected. You have already set the foundation for such an alliance, and we will contribute to it so long as it remains feasible. How, when, where, and what remain to be determined. Are you the sole commander of your race?”

“I am.”

“Then on behalf of mine we request a temporary territory allotment on one of your colony worlds near the Li’vorkrachnika border. A shared world, and one that we will not retain possession of indefinitely, but we will require a staging base to operate out of. All we need is available landmass and safe passage through the system. We’ll take care of the rest as we work out the dynamics of how to battle this new enemy as a united front.”

“Request granted. The Yishmur System should suit your needs. Our planetary colony has an uninhabitable moon that may be breathable by your standards. We have not yet put down contained infrastructure there. If it is agreeable to your physiology I would cede it to you for the duration of this war.”

“Whether the atmosphere is breathable or not we shall make use of it. I will send a message and our race will come immediately with the material to reshape it to our garrison needs. Though this agreement is in its infancy I see no reason to delay. We are of an accord then?”

“I sent out an invitation for allies. You have responded. Accord concluded.”

“We take such matters seriously, and expect no less of the Voku. Do not mistake alacrity for insincerity.”

“We are of the same mind,” Cal-com assured the Preema.

“That you are,” it said, bowing its head slightly. “I would ask that you take no offense, but I have an admission to make that many would find disturbing.”

Cal-com stared at him evenly, though confused. “Offense at what?”

“Preema are telepathic. I have been watching your mind and comparing your thoughts to your words. You are genuine, and I needed to ascertain that before any accord could be forged.”

A thought flashed through Cal-com’s mind and the Preema flinched in reaction.

“Is this to be standard practice?” the Voku asked, trying to shunt all sensitive information away from his surface thoughts as Paul had taught him to do.

“Only when duplicity is suspected. These Humans. They have powers that you do not?”

“I will grant you the need to ascertain our intent, but I cannot allow you to pull secrets from my mind…nor can I trust in your good will. I am not angered, but I have responsibilities to maintain. From here on out our interactions will be technological in nature.”

“As you wish,” the Preema said passively. “I apologize for the intrusion, but we had to be sure before committing our fleet regardless of the alacrity needed.”

“Summon your ships and build your staging base,” Cal-com said, only allowing a few more seconds before forcing himself to leave. “And while you are doing so we will compare lists of potential allies.”

“Agreed,” the Preema said, standing up and backing into the erect, plied armor that quickly concealed its glowing visage. “Thank you for your understanding.”

“If I had the ability I would have done the same.”

“And if I didn’t, I would have been perturbed. We will take ourselves out of range and meet only again in person at times of your request. And should we be on the same battlefield simultaneously, we will not pry without just cause,” it said as the two escorts took flight first, then the Preema ambassador followed with a hefty flap of its long wings that sent it shooting up high into the atmosphere, ostensibly with an anti-grav component in the armor.

Cal-com kept his mind frozen as if it were ice until the Preema were out of sight, then he exchanged glances with his honor guard.

“That I did not expect,” he admitted. “We are going to hold them to their word. They don’t come within physical proximity to me again unless I invite them to do so.”

“What range do you want?” the Voku standing next to him asked.

“Out of sight…out of mind,” he said, throwing one last glance into the sky before walking off the platform and heading back to his transport.

4

August 2, 2825

Irten System (Gamma Region)

Ior

“Alright, ready for a headache,” Tom-008 said from the back seat in a Morpheus-class mech as it walked across the frozen tundra of Ior’s southern ice cap.

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” Victoria Jenson said, not having a lick of psionic ability nor the full understanding of what the trailblazer was about to do. She was a mechwarrior Regular and had been assigned to this research project along with her Clan leader for reasons she didn’t entirely fathom, but he’d said it was important to both Clan Skystrike and Star Force on the whole, so she’d eagerly accepted the mission despite the live fire nature.

She was piloting the two seat mech from the front in one of the manual control harnesses rather than using the mental interface, which had her standing in front of Tom half naked and strapped into the rig but just out of arms reach so she couldn’t clobber him in the head accidentally as she swung her arms about. A lot of the regulars still weren’t as efficient with the mind reading tech though most of the Archons now used the interface. Theirs was more advanced because they could speak to the computer directly, whereas everyone else simply had it monitoring their thoughts and reading impulses. The system worked, but it wasn’t quite refined enough for Victoria’s tastes, so she was going with the manual controls for this challenge in order to be in top form.

They’d been working together in this tandem system for months now but this was the first real test of Tom’s tech, whereas everything else had been in computer simulation…and this time the danger was actual, with the weapons they would be firing and being fired at with being the genuine deal in order to gain an accurate analysis of effectiveness. Her job was to protect Tom and do a little damage of her own when practical, making her big mech essentially a football offensive lineman protecting their quarterback in this upcoming game, though she and Tom were the only living players on the field.

“You’ll have to, because there’s no way I’m trusting anyone else with this,” the trailblazer said, readying himself for the mental overload to come. “Even with Sav, I’m going to barely be able to keep up. Hit the ‘wake up’ button if you have to, because I’m probably not going to notice where we are or what we’re doing…and if I do it’ll be external.”

“I’ll keep us safe,” Victoria promised. “You just do your thing like always.”

“Not like always,” Tom said regretfully.

“Meaning?”

“New unknown stimuli.”

“Right. So you don’t know how much of a headache you’ve got coming?”

“Not really, no.”

“Pull down before you fry yourself.”

“You know Archons.”

“Exactly my point. If you’re the only one that can do this, don’t want to set back the project while you veg.”

“Your concern is underwhelming.”

“Just trying not to flirt. Don’t want to get demoted,” she said sarcastically.

“Compliment taken,” Tom said, sending a signal out from the mech. “Get us moving. We’re live.”

Victoria twisted in her control harness and the big biped mech took an awkward first step as it broke its standstill, but once she had a bit of momentum she smoothed out the motion and began strolling across the ice pack, sinking down an appreciable amount but nothing that was going to trip her up.

As she did so Tom closed his eyes for a moment then opened them again barely seeing the status displays before him as his mind was flooded with information. He was linked directly into the onboard Nexus and seeing through the weird ‘overmind’ perspective that the technology afforded. He’d done this numerous times in naval training and actual battle, but controlling ground units was much more difficult because you had terrain involved. Space was empty, and with emptiness came lack of detail.

The detail of the ice pack, the ridges dotting the immediate area, the atmosphere, the steps of the morpheus, and everything else involved in the area flooded into his mind and he began filtering it for the information he wanted, finding the four escort drone mechs standing behind them and prompting them to catch up and form a box around the morpheus while he likewise got the six huge Leonardo-class heavy mechs underway. They were the replacement for the Hoth line and were the medium sized variety of the hexped walkers, with the smallest version being the Donatello and the larger two being the Michelangelo and the Rafael.

A lot of the trailblazers hated to retire the Hoths, both due to the nostalgic aspect and the amount of heavy modification that had been made to them over the years. They were no longer the lumbering behemoths that the first prototypes had been, but like the Star Wars machines that had inspired the design they had a big weakness…and that was if they were flipped over they were virtually impossible to right on their own. Adjustments had been made to allow for a slow means of wiggling their way back over on top of their collapsed legs, but the process was long and tedious and completely unacceptable with the revised mandate going forward.

Another reason they’d been hesitant to replace them was because they worked so well against the lizards, who had nothing in their arsenal to tip them over with. That said, running the simulations against the V’kit’no’sat was essentially a cow-tipping affair, and in light of that the trailblazers knew they had to make a change and had decided sooner was better than later. The new hexpeds had their legs set on a ring around their turtle-shell like bodies with there being no top or bottom. Both compressed halves were identical, so if the leonardos trailing the morpheus were knocked off their feet or even flipped over their legs would just pivot around on their ball-like housings and stand the heavy mech up again with the former underside now being the top.

That wasn’t going to be an issue today, because there was nothing out on this ice shelf that could flip them, though it was possible that the ice could collapse beneath their feet in some places that didn’t have dirt a few meters down. That was a minor concern, for these six heavy walkers were here simply as carriers, with Tom linking to them from his nexus and causing their exterior doors to open.

His mind lit up with contacts and his Sav went to use consuming all the control signals from the tiny craft inside as they began to spill out onto the ground in metallic waterfalls on either side of the bottom halves of the headless walkers. When they hit the ground they floated on tiny anti-grav cushions with Tom sending them out to wherever he wanted them, not through group waypoint allotments but by controlling each individual Spark-class drone the same way he piloted a mech.

His head filled up with processing clutter, which his well-trained mind sorted out with the help of the Sav. He’d been pushing his limits over the past year trying to up his number of simultaneous remote controlled units, but of the 20,000 units he’d brought with him down to the surface he couldn’t handle more than 12,400 of them. The remainder he ordered through group tactics into a holding pattern around the leonardos, knowing that their programming wouldn’t allow them to fire unless they had a ‘manual’ command to do so.

That was standard Star Force protocol, for while they used automated commands on naval vessels there was too much clutter on planets for a computer to handle in the way of potential bystanders and the trailblazers weren’t going to tolerate so much as one person being wounded in an accident. Machines could only do what they were programmed to do, and there was always a limit to that programming no matter how advanced. There had to be a person at the controls to make sure weapons fired at the proper place at the proper time, and that was why ground-based drones had never been used in infantry applications.

It was true that a commando could have been linked to an individual drone like the fleet controllers in naval engagements, but that would have left far too few units in the field. A commando could kill hundreds of lizards in person far more effectively than one of these little sparks, so the only way this technology was going to be effective in large-scale battles was if multiple units could be controlled by a single individual…and done so without cutting corners and getting sloppy.

Tom still preferred using actual troops on the ground, as did the other trailblazers, but with the number of booby traps the lizards were setting up to try and kill even one Star Force soldier it was getting more and more difficult to assault their worlds with zero deaths. Often they had to pull back and sniff around with Archon scouts rather than diving in and kicking ass as they’d prefer to do. When you didn’t have expendable troops you had to fight in different ways, so the idea was to give Star Force some disposable ground troops to send in and trigger traps or to reinforce units in distress and have the machines take the brunt of the damage.

Despite all the advances they’d made in communications there was still a detectable lag in transmissions coming down from orbit, even if it was just over 50 miles. That would have been unnoticeable to most people, but with the mental interface and Tom’s Sav he could feel it, and when it’d been programmed into simulations he’d realized he needed to be on site to circumvent that problem. If he didn’t have the lag to deal with he could control more units, for everything that required him to think even the slightest bit extra diminished his controlling ability.

Even now he was using cheats by assigning sparks into small groups to fire on individual targets and a lot of other things that helped spare his mind additional stress, but to have the sparks operate on internal programming would mean mission failure so every movement they made had to come from him and him alone, which sent his mental processing levels sky high from the outset as he moved the swarms of little metallic spheres off across the ice field and out ahead of the mech that he was riding in but barely aware of in his overmind view.

He didn’t even realize Victoria was right in front of him, for while his eyes saw her his mind was too occupied that he might as well have been in the Bahamas and lying on a beach for all he knew. He was completely disconnected from what was right in front of him, and even his own body felt absent for the most part with his mind extending out through the nexus and into the fighting machines, making them an extension of himself and far more effective than mere programming could ever hope to be.

He saw hundreds of thousands of enemy contacts pop up on the battlemap starting 4 kilometers ahead and gave Victoria a new waypoint via the nexus controls, now unable to speak without dumping several hundred of the sparks in the process. The morpheus adjusted their track slightly to the right towards a rise rather than heading through the shallow valley as planned. The other mechs and walkers followed them as instructed in a short convoy while Tom sent the sparks out ahead and spread out the leading elements into skirmisher teams that almost immediately came under attack from concealed turrets.

Those turrets popped up through the ice, breaking the natural camouflage and shooting at the sparks with the ‘phaser’ tech the lizards now used along with a few rocket turrets. Tom felt the sparks get hit as if they were a part of his own body and moved the skirmisher teams around, firing the limited weapons each one of them had. One spark was the size of a jacuzzi, making it small enough to push its way through all but the thickest of forest, but the anti-grav took up more than 40% of the interior space in order to give it full time flight capability. Using mechs with legs saved so much space and power that Star Force preferred using walking machines, but in order to keep the mental processing power down they needed simple hovering tech on the sparks, not to mention the advantages that gave them with rough terrain.

Had Tom tried to mentally walk 200 units he’d have been overloaded, and driving the same number of walkers on their own programming meant they could potentially step on someone without him knowing…which was totally unacceptable. They had to float, but the tradeoff meant they had less internal space to utilize on other systems like weapons. A good chunk of their weight also came from armor and shields, leaving only a small cluster of plasma emitters linked to a single power source for each spark to fight with.

That meant they were ill suited for taking down turrets, but the vast majority of the targets ahead of him were infantry-class drones meant to simulate lizards with a phase rifle or rocket launcher. They were all little tanks with the appropriate weaponry and no defenses save for a bit of armor, but small enough that they took up no more room than a standard variant lizard did, meaning they could swarm you in a very small area just as the real enemy could.

Mixed in with them were tanks, also similar in size and make to the lizard varieties. Those along with the infantry bots were being controlled by Humans in orbit, meaning that if their internal programming failed in some way they wouldn’t let Tom exploit it, making adjustments as necessary but otherwise letting the little bots fight and swarm according to known lizard tactics.

And like lizards they had booby traps arrayed before them, with one of the skirmisher bots being taken out with an explosive detonation below the ice pack. It sent a huge plume of steam up into the air marking the position visually for Victoria to see, but from Tom’s perspective one of his many appendages was lost, though he could see the steam as well through all the little sensor eyes he now had.

Those sensors were minimal, as was the comm systems in order to keep the sparks small enough to be effective and not the equivalent of warships in atmosphere. He knew that increased their ability to be hacked or jammed by an opponent, but the lizards weren’t going to be doing that and these were just the prototypes. Besides, one couldn’t have a drone that did everything, so Tom had had to make a choice as to what specific role he wanted these for…and that had been anti-infantry and scouting missions.

The tanks and turrets ahead of them were going to make him pay for that design limitation, but he had five mechs and 6 heavy walkers to compensate, meaning he wasn’t going to just sit in the rear and direct the battle. Victoria was going to have to fight in it while he rode piggyback inside the cockpit.

That was where the danger came in, and if necessary he could cancel the entire exercise on a whim, but he needed to know how these sparks worked in actual combat short of using an invasion of a lizard world as a test bed. That would have been stupid for a number of reasons, but Tom also wasn’t going to use the lizards as research targets. They may have been enemies seeking to slaughter everyone else in the galaxy, but they were people too and he was going to treat them and everyone else with a measure of respect regardless of whether or not they reciprocated. If he had to kill them it’d be quick and efficient…and because they chose not to take the out he’d give them, either through retreat or surrender.

And likewise the little bots on the horizon weren’t going to hesitate to try and kill the mech he was in. Star Force rarely used live fire exercises, but with his mental finger on the kill switch Tom knew it was worth the risk. They had to really fight to see how this would play out, then they could build better simulations going forward.

To that end he linked with the leading leonardo and had it target the nearest turret and fire the small, clear Keema beam weapon that it carried over range, blowing apart the armored casing and killing the stubby raised bunker with a single, precise hit.

5

When Tom sent the order to fire the weapon he subsequently lost control of 12 sparks, reacquiring them a split second later and realizing he was already maxing out. There was no way he was going to be able to fight with this many so he dialed back and released 600 to automated functions, giving them a waypoint back to the walkers where they’d join in the nonfighting formation with the others. He’d pull units up from that pool as he lost others, but as soon as the heavy fighting started his mental processing power was going to be even more taxed and he didn’t want to go into it already stressed to the snapping point.

The ‘snapping point’ typically occurred in one of two ways. The first was what had just happened, his mind would release sparks to keep the others functioning properly and units would just drop off his mental map. The second was that all his controlling functions would lag and he’d get sloppy, not fully seeing them or what they were doing and losing the crisp, reflex-like synergy he had with the machines now. That was the worse option and he’d been training himself into a habit of letting units go rather than degrading his entire army, but the numbers were off today.

He should have been able to control this many units without too much difficulty. The sustained neural interface would give him the headaches due to prolonged activity, but the simulations he’d run had him handling this number of sparks before with reliable accuracy, else he wouldn’t have grabbed so many of them right off. For some reason reality was diminishing his control capability and he couldn’t put his finger on why. As a piece of his mind started to reflexively run through possibilities ranging from mechanical issues to sensory overload a full 1300 sparks went offline and just hovered in position waiting for instructions.

Mentally kicking himself for that…and losing another 50 in the process…Tom cleared his mind of all other thoughts and put himself into the battle trance with the sparks coming back online and consuming every part of his waking mind. He was them and they were him, with his mind pressing its limits to be able to see so many viewpoints and feather the mental trigger on so many weapons and navigation options. Normally an Archon in a nexus had to keep perspective over everything that was happening, but for this controlled experiment it was just about the combat…targets and kills and nothing else. He needed to know what he and the system was capable of before scaling back for more reliable operations.

As he maneuvered the skirmishers around he triggered more explosives, losing a handful of them but clearing the path for the mass of others to move through in clusters. There was a band of hidden turrets and traps stretched across the landscape that had been arranged by another Archon so Tom didn’t know of their locations, but once a corridor was punched through it there was a stretch of what appeared to be clear space leading up to the swarms of infantry bots.

Suddenly that clear space grew a spread of targets as more turrets popped up, having ignored the skirmishers and made themselves visible only when the masses of sparks were above them. They fired into the hordes with phasers and rockets, hitting many simply by firing without having to aim and getting multiple units with some of the explosions. The armor on the sparks was decent, but they were so small that they couldn’t pack much onto them for lack of available space…and the rockets’ yields were considerably high, enough to level a building and were only slightly smaller than a lizard debt pack.

Tom reacted immediately, pulling the sparks away from each of the turrets to create a clear zone that would allow the sparks to fire on them without hitting each other. He raised up the sparks into rows on top of one another, forming a wall around each turret as they pummeled them with plasma streaks save for the few he left open for the walkers to target. The clear Keema beams shot across the distance and tagged them slowly, for the recharge on the weapon was considerable and only the first walker was in position to fire.

He changed that up, having all of the leonardos fan out to get into firing position. Meanwhile a lot of his sparks were dropping offline from the damage and Tom began pulling a dozen or so out of the ‘waiting pool’ as needed…then the infantry bots accelerated across the landscape, coming up over several ridges like a flow of ants. They charged directly into the skirmishers, firing on them and taking several down as Tom surged the sparks forward, knowing this was going to stretch his mental limits. He stopped pulling up reinforcements as units went offline to the turret damage and waited for the snapping point to come as he started firing the weapons of more and more sparks.

He was targeting each one of them manually with a bit of aim assist from their computer programming as well as guiding their movements, all individually. That allowed him precise attacks as well as unparalleled unit cohesion for all of the sparks were fighting as if they were of a single mind…which in this case was literally true, for they were all an extension of one trailblazer.

Tom’s mind began to fog up immediately, forcing him to cut loose another few hundred. That brought the crystal clarity back and allowed him to cut through the infantry bots with a variety of tactics similar in nature to naval combat, save these happened at a much faster pace. Damaged units were cycled off the front lines and into support positions while clusters were used to separate and flank the enemy formations. They too tried to use tactics again the sparks rather than just coming at them in a blind horde that fired on the nearest targets, but they couldn’t coordinate as effectively as the sparks could, leaving Tom’s forces with a decided strategic advantage.

But they didn’t have a weapons advantage…or at least not much of one. They did have their armor and shields, but since the enemy was patterned off the lizards there were far more infantry bots than there were sparks, not to mention the tanks that were holding back behind a ridgeline. When the leading edge of the sparks crossed it they moved in, using the terrain to block the firing lines from the mechs.

When that happened Tom sent Victoria a signal to take them in, with him bringing the escort drone mechs along with her. They would need to take the tanks head on, or otherwise their greater armor would allow them to eat up the sparks. In the future they’d try to develop anti-tank variants but right now all these could handle was anti-infantry, with massed attack as the only hope against heavier targets.

That was one of the primary challenges for Tom today, to see what he could do against them. The sparks were little more than floating micro turrets that could be taken out with a single tank blast, so it was going to be in the maneuvering that he gained an advantage rather than through any shield recharging strategies that the Archons used heavily in naval combat. Virtually everything Star Force built had that longevity in mind, but Tom was going to have to go a different way against the tanks his mechs couldn’t take down.

He barely noticed as Victoria opened fire on the closest one, seeing it through the ‘eyes’ of the sparks and not the mech’s telemetry. He was viewing the other four but not the morpheus, allowing him to handle more of the drones in lieu of keeping in the loop as to what Victoria was doing. If his mental control were a hurricane, then the morpheus was the calm center of that storm that he was completely blind to…which made his copilot even more invaluable in keeping him alive.

Tom knew he was being crude with his control, but right now he was using only three options for each spark. Target and fire, position change, and altitude change. When he needed a lot of plasma beams on a tank he’d raise up and stack the sparks into a wall, or form a brick of them that would push into the infantry bots, flaking off dead sparks and driving well into their formation in order to disrupt it. He’d send reinforcements up that corridor so they could fire on the others from the sides, getting more guns on target and managing the flow of bots that kept increasing with every minute.

Had these been Regulars, Knights, and Archons on the ground they would have necessarily turtled up and worked to kill off those closest to them, weathering the storm through armor and shields and rotational strategies in order to keep anyone from getting killed, but since the sparks were just machines Tom could be more aggressive and abandoned most of the shield recharging formations and just hammered the opposing infantry. One on one the sparks would win easily, and it was important for Tom to keep the bots from massing too densely, else their combined firepower would eat through the sparks quite fast.

To do that he sent clusters shooting out into the enemy formation like fingers, then spreading them out and sending units right into the midst of the enemy formations expecting to lose them, but not before they killed many bots and thinned the lines…at which point he’d surge the others and wipe them out using traditional cycling strategies to preserve the rest of his mechanical troops.

It worked well enough that he saw the infantry bots start to pull back after about 12 minutes of fighting…then the tiny bit of his brain that was still left to wonder realized it was because the walkers had just gotten up over the ridge and into firing position. These leonardos were configured mostly as troop transports, but the defensive weaponry on them was more than sufficient to do damage to armored targets at range, not to mention some point defense weapons for if the bots ever got close enough to start chipping away at their legs.

Suddenly there were more targets popping up, which Tom only noticed due to their proximity to the walkers. He and the mechs were up with the tanks now, leaving the walkers in the back with the extra sparks tagging along in preprogrammed navigational mode. He wasn’t seeing through them, only the walkers, when the hidden doors under the ice opened up and broke through the cold camouflage and spilled out swarms of the infantry bots right into the midst of the neutral sparks.

Not one of them fired back, for they couldn’t without Tom’s control…forcing him to choose between fighting up front or disengaging his mind from those so he could defend the walkers…who couldn’t very well shoot down into the swarms of sparks without destroying them as well.

“Damn,” he whispered, losing control of over a thousand for a second when he uttered the word and lost concentration. It took him another second to decide to send the neutral sparks off to distant waypoints, having them run away from the walkers rather than switching control over to them or abandoning the front lines. They were faster than the infantry bots and quickly cleared the area, letting the leonardos have clear firing lines down near and around their feet.

A handful of Sammy turrets opened up on the bots, killing several with showers of yellow energy spurts that were actually a very high cyclical rate of the same beam firing tiny bits of bolts. Each turret bathed an area where the infantry bots were, for Tom couldn’t precisely target them without abandoning more sparks on the front lines, instead using area of effect commands and having the onboard computers handle the distribution patterns.

Instead of running or chasing the sparks the infantry bots ran under the walkers and fired on them with their tiny phasers, doing no damage to the armor with the walkers’ shields covering them. Those were virtually impervious to the small weapons…up until some of the bots began ramming the legs and detonating against them.

The shield strength dipped in chunks with each explosion and the phaser bursts only added to it in the hundreds of strikes per second. Tom forced himself not to calculate how much damage was being done and how much time he’d have, else he’d lose control of more sparks. He made the choice to let the walkers fend for themselves and ordered them to group up closer and share their point defenses as he continued to press the assault against the main infantry wave.

There was no victory end to this engagement. They were meant to fight and that was it, with the results being measured afterwards to determine weaknesses and efficiencies. His opposition was going to do as much damage as they could and they’d just found a way to mess up his plans, so rather than aid them by scrambling to make changes he continued on, letting them chip away at one of the leonardo’s legs as he kept the most number of sparks engaged as he could.

Meanwhile Victoria was hauling him around in the morpheus kicking the crap out of the tanks with her maulers and stitching the infantry bots with her anti-air pods whenever she could get an angle forward. A lot of anti-air defenses, whether they be man-sized or planetary, did not lower to ground level to avoid being disabled from such strikes. A big orbital battery tipping over to target things like Skarron walkers could be a huge boost to a city’s defense, but likewise that battery tip would bring the sensitive pieces of that weapon into the firing line of the ground troops.

That was why they were normally covered in a shell of armor or building that would keep them safe from all but air assets while they exclusively targeted the same. Some units like the mechs had experimented with shoulder-mounted pods that could tip over and double as anti-infantry mods, and that’s exactly what this morpheus had been outfitted with. The small sammies roasted the infantry bots with single hits, allowing Victoria to keep the little det pack bots from getting up to her mech’s legs while their numerous phaser hits kept chipping away at her mech’s shields.

She didn’t know what Tom was doing other than what the battlemap showed her, but there was a beehive of activity all around and she just did her job and focused on what was affecting her mech and what targets she could hit without jeopardizing their safety. There were a lot of tanks out there, in the hundreds, so she chose the ones that were separated from the others and took them on while the flanking drone mechs stayed alongside or drifted off slightly to go after other targets, always cycling back around into formation.

Tom was controlling them as well and it made her wonder why she was even here when he could have controlled this mech just as easily. It would have meant a few less sparks under his control but she didn’t really see the need for her to be here up until a large group of tanks came straight for them and the infantry bots shifted, heading kamikaze towards the drone mechs and firing some unknown weapons mods at them…which amounted to tow cables wrapping around their legs.

“What the hell?” she said, turning her maulers at the infantry in addition to the sammies to try and thin those around the morpheus and prevent any of them getting close enough to fire the cables, for they all looked the same externally so she couldn’t identify which they were and pick them off prior to firing their concealed weapons.

But as it was there were none coming at them anyway. They were meant to disable the morpheus’s escorts while the tank formation headed to pick off the quarterback.

Victory knew that as long as she kept them moving and in play that Tom would take care of it, so she didn’t try to head towards the tethered mechs as the enemy would expect, but rather went the other way and waded out into the infantry battles expecting the leonardos to pick off the tanks or the sparks to swarm to their defense…except that the help wasn’t coming. There was no change in the flow of battle other than the enemy tanks moving faster than they were and encircling them with the infantry actually being stepped on as they tried to slow the morpheus through sheer numbers grouping around its feet.

She turned the mech’s torso and blasted two tanks with her maulers, one shot each, then got slammed with a series of blasts in the mech’s back and the shields nearly breached. Twenty seconds later they did go down as the tiny little phaser blasts added to the continuous tank hits and the rear of the mech was exposed, now taking armor damage.

And still there was no help coming to their aid.

“Tom, we’re getting cooked!” Victoria warned, hoping her voice would bring his attention to them. She waited, fighting it out but still seeing no response. She was about to ping him on the battlemap but decided to go the drastic route since this was a training fight and used the emergency override, pushing a button that momentarily severed Tom’s connection to the army around them.

“Feel like covering our ass?” she asked as he snapped back into awareness of his body and what was around him.

“What happened?” he asked, quickly seeing the status displays around him and noticing the mess they were in. “Why didn’t you ping me?” he said, reconnecting to the sparks nearest him as well as the leonardos, with two of them popping tanks immediately.

“Why did you see it happening?” she countered, then remained silent as they both had to focus on what they were doing. Tom got them the reinforcements they needed before their armor was breached, then they pulled back and recharged their shields before diving back in for the last round of fireworks before the enemy forces were spent and the battle wore down to a few handfuls of units.

Eventually the end signal was given by the opposition and Tom put all his remaining units into standby as he pulled out of the intense control mode and returned it to a chess game, telling units where to move and letting them float there on their own.

“I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened.”

“How’s your head?”

Tom didn’t respond for a moment, flicking away several layers of numbness before the pain materialized. “Worse than I thought. I think I zoned that out too.”

“That was very untrailblazer-like of you,” Victoria noted. “You guys are usually on top of everything before it happens.”

“No argument there,” he said with a sigh as he massaged his forehead with a pair of fingers. “I guess we’re a lot further away from a working prototype than I thought.”

“You can’t fight like that,” she warned. “You have to know everything that’s going on or we’re going to get slaughtered.”

Tom smacked the back of his head against his seat in frustration. “I know. I know.”

6

August 11, 2825

Hyperion System (Zeta Region)

Yert

Mina Delari stood on the stage in front of the crowd of some 238,458 people singing the last song of her concert, hand reaching toward the sky boxes overhead as a waterfall spilt out over her, drenching her from head to toe as the chemical it was laced with dissolved her hair tie, her shirt, shorts, shoes, and every other thing on her body over the course of the following 15 seconds, leaving her fully nude and ‘exposed,’ as the song was titled, in her signature finish to her performances.

The Human female stood there as the last of the water washed the scraps of clothing off her and the crowd roared so loud she could actually feel the stage vibrate. She stood there smiling as she dropped her arm and posed, letting them get a good look at her as the song music ended and a finishing theme took its place, signifying the end of the concert and her farewell to the crowd. Mina lingered for more than a minute, then walked back to a circle on the ground that only she could see and turned to give them one final pose, this one an X with arms raised and legs spread wide, then columns of steam rose up from the stage floor obscuring her for several seconds before dissipating and revealing her to have vanished.

Mina rode the lift down into the floor, stumbling slightly as it had to accelerate fast to get her clear and the hatch covered, then it slowed to a stop and she stepped off into the prep area below with assistants waiting for her. Per usual she didn’t accept any clothes from them, for once she ended a concert in the nude she remained that way until she got back home. One of her maturia handlers had told her during sexual training that if you had ‘it’ don’t be afraid to flaunt it, and she’d taken that advice to heart over the past two years.

She did accept a mug of Xerta, which was one of the current soda pop flavors popular amongst the Axius colonies that she was a native of. It had only been 6 years ago that she’d graduated from the maturia without a credit to her name and only a small, basic quarters module to live in and now she was touring the ADZ in her own private jumpship.

Mina took a couple gulps, knowing it would help her slightly sore throat from getting any worse and looking forward to a day of travel so she could get some sleep. This was the 18th concert on this planet in the past 10 days and her voice was nearly spent, but she’d made it through and would have a bit of respite until her next concert series on Priot, including two on the new tier 3 continent. She’d never performed for the ‘elite’ before and had actually thought they just worked round the day without any entertainment facilities but apparently she’d been wrong. The professional concert circuits were starting to go through the new regions now that they were getting established and that meant there were credits to be made, else they wouldn’t have bothered.

Mina’s team escorted her through the stage facilities with lots of workers pausing to take a few seconds of awe at seeing her naked. Nudity wasn’t banned in Axius or Star Force, but most people still chose to wear clothes enough that going in the buff got a lot of attention…then again she was also in insanely good shape and that never hurt. The floors were clean, as was the rest of the facility, so she didn’t mind walking around nude and did so as much for her reputation as for herself. She’d been sexually shy in the beginning, but now reveled in just being herself and not hiding anything.

She didn’t get a buzz anymore, just a sense of freedom that felt refreshing. The bath she’d just had helped too, washing off the concert’s sweaty sheen and leaving her with dripping blonde hair that she didn’t bother to ring out. It left a trail on the floor but there were no carpets so it didn’t matter. It’d dry, she’d dry, all was good.

After sucking down half the mug she was led to an exclusive autograph signing for 500 lucky individuals. She smiled and engaged in a brief bit of chit chat with them and the press as she speedily got through all of the signings then bid them and the planet farewell as she was taken out onto a nearby private landing pad that had thousands of fans standing on nearby rooftops to see her depart. They roared in the brightly lit night sky when she emerged, shocking her for a moment at how many of them had found vantage points.

Mina waved at them and blew a few kisses before walking up the ramp and into her dropship. Once inside she retreated up to the third level while her people finished loading up. There were two other dropships on the pad that would be packing up their gear and following them up to orbit but Mina’s left right away. Before it lifted off she was able to walk onto the clear upper deck and slide into her private jacuzzi that was not so much right now for most of the high placed onlookers could see down into that exposed part of her ship through the glass bubble covering it.

She settled in, smiling but not interacting with them anymore as the warm water soothed her sore feet. The shoes she had to wear in order to make the dissolve possible didn’t fit well and always left her toes a bit raw, and that was one small reason why she didn’t put any shoes on afterward until she got back to this blissful tub. She looked out the bubble at the surrounding buildings as they finally began to lift off. Her fans disappeared from view leaving nothing but the tall spires that probably held a few more with telescopic lenses.

Those last bits of cityscape finally vanished and she was left with just the stars above her as the dropship headed up through the atmosphere and into space, giving her a bit of much needed privacy. Her team knew not to disturb her after a show and would stay away until she called for them, which wouldn’t be for some time. Per her usual instructions the dropship took its time climbing to orbit and then over to the position where her jumpship was waiting, giving her a good two and a half hours to soak and relax with nothing but starlight and the occasional passing ship or station to keep her company…and those were too far away for anyone to snoop on her, not that they were going to see anything new. That was one advantage of getting exposed on a regular basis. You had nothing to hide, and when you had nothing to hide there was no need to worry.

It was a kind of freedom that she’d discovered after her first nervous nude show. She’d done a short one completely in the buff her first year, which had ironically put her in the spotlight and sent her career off at a sprint once people finally got a chance to hear her music en mass. A hot body wasn’t enough to get ADZ-wide recognition, for there were many of them and most of the races didn’t find Humans attractive anyway, but they did like good songs and that was what she was good at. The nudity was just an extra and something she did more for herself than the fans…but if it made their day so much the better. She didn’t mind sharing her sexuality, visually anyway.

It was in these transition periods from planet to orbit that she often did a lot of thinking, still with too much adrenaline to sleep and no more requirements to rigidly constrict her mind. She often wondered where she went from here. As a minor star in the ADZ she already had over 4 billion credits to her name and that would easily buy her inclusion in a tier 2 colony of her choosing for infinity or one of the private luxury residences in Australia, but neither of those was really a big deal now. She lived on her jumpship most of the time, traveling from system to system and racking up the credits for herself and her supporting label. The ship was hers, as was her team now, though the label still organized her performances and marketed her music, but they no longer gave her orders.

Not that long ago Mina had worked her ass off to earn her freedom by graduating from the maturia, and now she’d earned her freedom from her label, able to do things entirely her own way and being too valuable as a credit-earning asset to be argued with anymore. She had enough currency to stop singing and do whatever she wanted, which often made her wonder what she was doing this for now. There were bigger names than hers, a lot of them, and the challenge of rising up to that level did appeal to her, but she sensed she wanted more than that.

And it wasn’t a guy. She could have as many guys as she wanted, and that kind of ruined the appeal right there. She might be sexual, but she hadn’t had sex since the maturia and planned to keep it that way. Too many people she’d followed had gone off course once they’d coupled with someone, and her maturia training had made it clear that maintaining one’s individuality was key to achieving self-sufficiency.

That was her primary goal, and anyone who thought otherwise was just plain stupid. But there was something else nagging at her, and though she had a well-defined schedule ahead of her plus next year’s concerts to choreography and a list of other important to-do items, Mina felt like she was treading water and not really headed anywhere. That thought kept nagging her as she soaked in the jacuzzi, with her dipping her head under the water and coming back up into the cooler air with a sense of aloneness.

Her team was just below decks, meters away if she needed them, but it finally dawned on her that they were all here for the job and not her. They were her friends, for sure, but if she stopped singing they’d move on to assist others and that’d be the end of that. Mina was around people constantly, so much so that she’d never really felt alone, but now that her maturia classmates had gone on to do whatever with their lives she’d been so busy with building her career she’d never thought about it.

With trillions upon trillions of people in the ADZ she didn’t matter. If she quit singing and just disappeared a lot of people would be upset, but they’d move on. No one really knew her as a person, just a celebrity, and for the first time she really felt the aloneness…and the fear that came with it. The fear of no safety net and the galaxy being wide open before you. The openness was more intense than her first nude concert and it made her feel truly exposed and alive.

It was scary too, but she wasn’t going to turn away from it. Even though she had people around her constantly, in truth she was alone navigating a sea of strangers and she wasn’t going to let her mind veer from that into the delusions that the masses lived their lives by. Mina clung to the feeling, essentially placing a wedge in her mind to keep that viewpoint open as she sat up, bringing her small but chiseled breasts up above the water line and looking around as the cool air hit her wet flesh.

There was a sound dampener on the doorway so she couldn’t hear anything from the rest of the ship, so aside from the sound of the water and her breathing there was nothing else to hear…which was why she belatedly realized she liked it so much. It was a sanctum away from the hive mind of society…but that hive mind was an illusion that she was now able to see through. Even with people around her she was always alone, and that epiphany was not something she was going to forget.

Mina settled back down into the water as the tiny pinprick of light ahead of them began to grow into the silhouette of her jumpship, but even the sight of it didn’t strike her as ‘home’ anymore. It was a place she stayed and worked out of, traveled on, but her real home was her body. Wherever she went she was home within the confines of her skin.

No wonder she liked disrobing so much. The clothing was essentially a hitchhiker on her journey through life.

She continued to ponder her new insights as the jumpship grew outside the clear canopy. It wasn’t as large as the Star Force models, nor as fast, but the Kefron produced Nightstalker model was more than sufficient to get her from system to system in a timely manner and avoid the hassles of having to book transit on the ADZ grid. It was her private possession, and since Star Force owned all property on planetoids the only way you could get your own bit of turf was by building it in space. Stations required permits and were harder to obtain, but buying a ship and moving about gave you a little island of your own where you could do your own thing.

There were no monitoring devices in the corridors like in the Axius colonies. Star Force might respect a person’s privacy in their own quarters, but public movements and actions were always monitored so they could track down problems after they happened by going back through the exhaustive records…and it worked too, with almost no violations whatsoever in the colony she’d lived in after coming out of the maturia. But there was something about being away from observation and on your own that was appealing to many people, hence the extensive ship building industry outside of the Star Force line.

But now Mina realized that even in the Axius colonies she was still alone. Watched via people and technology, but still alone. It was a very freeing realization that stayed on her mind as the jumpship grew to fill almost the entire forward half of the bubble dome over her jacuzzi and interrupting her bathing in the stars.

Knowing that they had only a minute or so before landing in the bay, Mina stepped out of the tub and walked down to the lower level of the dropship and the exiting ramp, dripping a trail of water all the way through the ship and out onto the jumpship’s bay floor that tracked across to the entry door before resolving itself down to a random drop here and there as her body slowly dried off. While her team dealt with unloading and other measures she headed off into her ship alone, always liking the idea of dripping as she went.

It was messy, but totally clean at the same time. It was just water. It would dry so no harm done, but it did seem to mess with the unspoken rules of society and she liked that, even onboard her own ship where she could set the rules however she liked…except she couldn’t, because her crew brought with them their own expectations and culture and whatever else you wanted to call the hive mind that society operated off of. Mina had always been slightly put off by it, and now even more so as she seemed to finally make the mental disconnect and realize what it really was to be an individual in both mind and body.

She walked through the ship’s corridors to her private quarters, dunking herself in a shower tub for the autowash’s scrubbing cycle that scoured off what grime the concert dunking and jacuzzi had left on her, then she walked into a drying tube that left her with a pine-like scent when she stepped out and into some silky soft pajamas. From there she headed over to the ship’s dining area and the chef whipped up an array of small portioned items that she favored in only a few minutes, giving her an opportunity to get into bed without much delay.

Mina fell asleep quickly, exhausted from this planetary stint and having already cycled the adrenaline out of her system. Dreams would ensue but she wouldn’t remember them when she woke, for she rarely did…not to mention the circumstances of her waking would wash away any lingering memory as sheer panic set in.

7

Mina woke to a loud bang on her door so intense and quick she wasn’t sure why she sat bolt upright in bed, thinking for a moment it was all in her groggy mind’s imagination until the second thud sounded. Then a third and fourth came in quick succession and she scurried out of bed and over to the door, pressing the button on the wall that slid the panel open into the midst of a scuffle between one of her security guards and a non-human…someone that was definitely not supposed to be on her ship.

She took a step back as they tussled, then the green-skinned biped that stood a good six and a half feet tall got her guard in a headlock and began choking him out with a knee into his back to keep him from wriggling away. Seeing that he was losing, Mina ran out the door and jumped on the pair of them, wrapping her own thin arms around the Fahmren’s neck and feeling its skin plates slice into her skin as she pried it back using her weight and her own knee in its back.

She succeeded in pulling it off her guard, but was pancaked as it fell backwards and something in her left knee popped under the weight. Unable to move with the Fahmren’s mass on top of her she was pinned and could do nothing, hoping she’d done enough to help the guard get free as she still clung to the attacker’s neck.

The next thing she knew her head slammed into the ground again, knocking her half unconscious. The weight on her chest disappeared and she heard a plasma blast, feeling a trickle of heat wash over her before two more sounded and the Fahmren fell to the floor a meter past her feet...then the guard was standing over her and pulling her to her feet.

“Get back inside,” he ordered, standing over her protectively as she tried to step on her injured leg and yelped from the pain. He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her inside, tossing her on the floor as a red plasma bolt shot down the hallway and they both ducked inside her quarters. He shut and locked them in, then pulled her out of the way so he could have a clear line of fire.

“What’s going on?” she shouted, with the guard’s answer cut off by two huge bangs on the door. Instead he pulled out his stun pistol and pushed it into her hands.

“I hope you remember how to use this. That door isn’t going to last long,” he said, with his prophetic words being followed up with a glow mark popping up about a meter off the ground as it was hit from the outside with a plasma blast, quickly followed by many more as they began to burn their way through into her quarters.

Mina saw that he held some type of rifle she wasn’t familiar with, ostensibly the same one the Fahmren shot in the hall had been carrying. “How many are there?”

“At least three…probably more,” he answered as a small hole was torn in the door and a bit of red leapt across the room and into the far wall, thankfully below the skylight that led directly into space. Melt that and the whole room would depressurize and they’d be dead, though in theory it should be made of material more sturdy than the door. “We’ve been boarded. I don’t know how or why, but we should have jumped out and didn’t. I can’t reach the bridge and barely got to you before that bastard did. The rest of security is down or missing.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked, wincing against the pain as she held the stinger pistol at the ready. All Humans had a decent amount of combat training in the maturia and she had always been a good shot, but she’d never expected having to put those skills to use onboard her own ship.

“Unless there’s somewhere to hide in here that I don’t know about, we just shoot as many as we can. They’re here for you.”

Mina swallowed hard as a fist-sized chunk of her door blew out. “I can’t walk on this leg.”

The security guard glanced at the door, then decided to make a quick change. “Grab my neck, I’ll swing you over to better cover.”

She did as told, making sure not to tip the barrel of her pistol into his head just in case the trigger got pulled. It wouldn’t kill him if it fired, but the last thing she needed right now was to stun her only protection. In truth he and the other six were here to guard her against rabid fans, but they’d all had far more extensive combat training than her for a situation like this. Mina just didn’t know if he’d be enough on his own and hoped the others were still alive elsewhere in the ship.

Swinging from his neck like a child, he walked her over to the other side of the main room and into a walk-in closet. She grabbed a hold of one of the shelves to steady her, then he left and headed over to another portion of the room and fired a shot back in through the door that was now more holes and smoke than a barrier. The red bolt hit what she didn’t know, for it was out of her line of sight barely, but anyone coming more than two steps into the room would be in her firing line. Holding onto the shelf with her left hand and aiming with her right, she stood ready on one leg to get at least a few shots off.

A sound of sudden cracking preempted her guard’s return shots and then all hell broke loose as two more Fahmren came into view, one falling over as he was shot by her man before he had to duck down on the other side of her bed for cover. She nailed the other one in the left arm, causing it to go numb and the next plasma blast to hit the floor as it suddenly couldn’t aim. Mina fired twice more, knocking it down before her view was obscured by black uniforms and more green flesh as she was hit in the face and her weapon knocked from her grasp.

Mina fell to the floor, her knee exploding again in pain, then suddenly she was spun over and face planted into the carpet as her arms were bound so tight she felt like her wrists were being cut off. A few more plasma blasts sounded then all was quiet, which was a very bad sign.

She was yanked up off the ground by her arms that were now locked behind her back, then she crumpled over again when her leg wouldn’t hold her. Mina yelled in pain, then was picked up and carried over the shoulder of one of her attackers out of her quarters with her able to catch a glimpse of the smoking corpse of her guard on the floor next to the bed.

After that it was a pain-ridden ride through the hallways, with most of her vision being of the floor and the backside of the Fahmren hauling her. They took her down several levels, then when the flooring changed and she recognized they were on the hangar deck she realized with horror that she was being taken off her ship. Not knowing what else to do she began bucking and kicking with her good leg, but all it did was make the thing mad enough that he tossed her down to the ground and grabbed her by the neck, dragging her forward and out of reach of any of her kicks.

She could barely breathe in his grip, but she had to do something. If they were willing to kill her people to get to her then there was no way of knowing what they’d do to her.

The pressure on her neck disappeared a split second before several ‘pings’ filled the air, followed by dozens of plasma blasts crossing over her head. She was laying on her back, hands bundled up between her and the floor as the red and pink crisscrossed over her head for a moment before another Fahmren grabbed her and dragged her over to the doorway of a ship she didn’t recognize…only to get hit in the chest with a pink glob of energy and fall face forward on top of her.

Mina had no vision and had to twist her head to the side to get any air as she was once again pinned down, but she knew there was another firefight going on and those pink blasts weren’t the stinger pistols that her crew carried. She was left there underneath the body of one of her attackers for what felt like an eternity until it was rolled off and she was looking up into the faceplate of a dirty white armored Human that she knew was from Star Force security.

“Relax,” he said through the external mic as he sized her up then turned her over so he could get to her bound hands, “you’re safe now.”

“Thank you,” she said, crying with relief. A moment later her hands were free and she balled up on the ground, cradling her hurt leg and not even trying to stand. “How many…are dead?”

“We’re still searching the ship, but I’m staying here with you and to guard the hangar. Nobody is slipping back out.”

“They killed one of my security team. I don’t know about everyone else,” she said, letting the tears flow freely and not thinking she could stop them if she tried.

“If they’re here we’ll find them,” he said, but the angle of his helmet had his eye line on the surrounding area. “Do you know how they got onboard your ship?”

“I just woke up…I don’t know anything.”

“Your leg?” the commando asked.

“Something is broke. I can’t put any pressure on it.”

“We’ll get a medtech to you as soon as we can, but right now you’re just going to have to hold on. We’re sitting in stellar orbit and had to get to you in a puddle jumper. We’re just a reaction team and I can’t leave this position to grab a med kit just yet.”

“How many of you are there?” she asked, closing her eyes and wincing against the pain…which just squeezed out more tears that were adding to the puddle on the deck beneath her head.

“Two.”

Mina sucked in a quick breath, suddenly feeling at risk again.

“Relax. They can’t take us down with a few plasma shots. Not in armor. My teammate will clear the rest of the ship and I’ll be here to guard you and make sure nobody gets off until reinforcements arrive. We’ve got a ship headed to our position, ETA about 40 minutes, and no other hostile vessels in sight. We’re good, so just stay where you are and ride this out. They’re not getting to you again.”

“Thank you,” she repeated, but kept her eyes open and scanning as much of the hangar as she could, seeing the ugly transport sitting in her hangar bay next to her own dropships and the small, gleaming Puddle Jumper-class Star Force ship sitting just inside the energy field covering the hatch into space. That hatch should have been closed, making it impossible for anyone to board short of boring a hole in through the hull. How the hell did the attackers get onboard?

“Caught your concert via relay. You’re damn good at those vocal spikes.”

Mina laughed, a mixture of anxious breath and tears being blown out like a grenade explosion. “Thank you,” she said automatically, but it was obvious that she didn’t care about anything right now except her current situation.

“Have there been any threats recently?”

“No, nothing,” she said, trying to think and finding her head still swirling in panic. “Not that they told me.”

“There’s no damage to the exterior of your ship. And aside from the distress signal we received, there was no indication that this rendezvous was unplanned. Your ship held in stellar orbit and allowed this one onboard as far as we can tell. I hate to say it, but unless there was some technical wizardry going on this looks like an inside job.”

Mina’s eyes became lasers as she turned her head and looked up at his helmet, knowing in her gut that he was right but not able to suspect any of her team.

“We’ll find out one way or another,” the commando said, “we just don’t usually get hijackings inside a Star Force system when they know we’ll be all over them. The dumb ones usually try fast hit and runs before they’re caught, but boarding a ship takes so much time there’s no way to pull it off under our noses unless you have backup and a very good plan. Doing it in stellar orbit never happens.”

“Too much maneuvering room,” Mina said, remembering navigational lessons from the maturia.

“Exactly. Even if your hangar door was open you could still run and they wouldn’t be able to dock with this ship on the move. You just sat here and let them come over, and they would have got away with it if it wasn’t for your distress signal. As it was we got here about 2 minutes before it would have been too late. We still would have ran their ship down, but with you as a hostage it would have been a lot harder to deal with. We don’t give up on a mission, no matter how difficult, but whoever sent that signal saved you.”

“Can you put me on your ship?” she asked, almost pleading. “I don’t want to stay here.”

“I need to stay in sight of the door so none of them can slip back onboard their ship, but if you can hop or crawl over there you’re welcome to sit inside.”

“Give me a hand up?” she asked, tears still flowing.

With his stun gun in one hand the commando reached down with his other armored glove and pulled her up by the arm, letting her balance on her good leg for a moment before letting her go. She took a small hop, not touching her bad leg to the floor but sending a spike of pain up through her with the jolt anyway. Mina pushed through it and hopped across the deck all the way near to the exit into space where the Star Force craft was sitting, blocking as much of the blinding sunlight behind it as it could and just to the inside of the warning zone that amounted to a few meters of deck painted with no-go markings to keep people away from the field so they didn’t accidentally fall outside the ship.

Feeling a little leery about getting anywhere near it with her balance being so bad, Mina headed in as straight of a line as she could over to the open personnel ramp, then let herself collapse to the ground so she could crawl up it, keeping her bad leg on top as he pulled herself up the length and over the top bump, finding the bit of Star Force territory to be immediately welcoming and feeling safe.

She curled up there and waited, crying out more tears than she knew she had in her until the reinforcement team arrived and the medtech got to her.

Mina woke to find herself in a Star Force med bay as an armored hand shook her shoulder, snapping her out of the little nap she’d lapsed into.

“Hey, you awake Starchaser?” the commando asked, using her professional nickname.

She blinked her eyes open and saw him standing next to her, still wearing armor but missing the helmet. “Yes.”

“We’ve found some survivors. 3 in total. The rest were killed by the Kripcha.”

Mina coughed, both in relief and horror. Some had survived, but only 3?

“Kripcha?”

“They’re a known fringe unit, more criminal than mercenary. That’s who the Fahmren belonged to.”

“Why?”

“Not sure yet, but there was a fight on the bridge, we think prior to their arrival. Everyone was dead, four to poison and a fifth with a crushed windpipe. We’re guessing that was the rat who betrayed you, and whoever got the distress signal off got him before they finally succumbed to the poison.”

“Who was it?” she asked, sitting up and dragging her numb leg across the bed with her, for it was wrapped up in some kind of healing cradle that was locking her knee joint in place.

“ID matched to Iryna Chordag. No history of bad behavior or links to the Kripcha, but I’d put my money on him. Without any internal security cameras there’s no way to be sure, but we’re having an analysis team go over the ship thoroughly to see if there’s anything else to find.”

“Are you the one that saved me…back on the hangar?”

“Yes I am.”

“Come here please,” she said, motioning him towards her with two fingers.

He stepped closer and sat down on the bed next to her. When he did so she reached out quickly but gently and pulled his head to her, giving him the biggest kiss of her life before transitioning into a stranglehold hug overtop his hard armor and feeling like she never wanted to let go.

“Thank you,” she repeated in a whisper, with more tears flowing.

8

September 16, 2825

Epsilon Eridani System

Optimus

Mina laid out on the wide beach beneath a pair of sunglasses and nothing else, soaking in the sunlight and trying to burn away the nerves she’d had ever since the attack. With most of her team dead and her head a mess, she’d canceled her upcoming concert schedule and disappeared from society, heading to the tiny Australian piece of Star Force that had been quickly transforming into the commercial elite. If you had credits you could probably buy it here, including seclusion, which she desperately needed right now.

The beach she was on was half full of people, but all were guests of the resort facility she was living at indefinitely and none were adoring fans or murdering kidnappers. She’d booked her stay under an alternate identity and even dyed and cut her hair so she wouldn’t be recognized. As it was no one here was interested in anyone else, for everyone had bought their way into the resort to get away from the mass of people out there and didn’t feel like mingling or meddling.

Every day Mina would come to the beach, strip down, and lay out for as many hours as her skin could take without burning trying to make some sense of what’d happened. She was so lucky that one of her team had got that distress signal off, otherwise she would have been dead by now, or maybe worse, and she still couldn’t shake that sense of dread. The brutality of it all, her injuries aside, had stunned her.

They’d killed her people just so they could take her…and for what? Ransom or some perverted pleasure? She didn’t want to think about it but she couldn’t stop herself, making her days at one of the most luxurious resorts in all of the ADZ feel decidedly uncomfortable, but every now and then the sunlight would bake her into a numb drowsiness that would allow her a few minutes of a blissful nap…only to wake up and have the mental simulations resume.

Lots of people had offered her assistance afterwards, but she’d have none of it. Whether they were trying to help or push their own agendas she didn’t know, but she didn’t feel like talking to anyone or doing anything other than wrestling with these thoughts and nerves until she could get a handle on them.

Try as she did, she hadn’t been able to shake them for a month now and was worrying that she might never be able to. Not having a clue what to do, she just kept up her simple routine of coming to the beach, getting nearly burnt, then retreating back into the indoors for more time alone and constantly looking over her shoulder at every bend of the corridors. Mina tried to make herself stop, but she couldn’t help it. Everywhere she went felt like a trap was about to be sprung…save for out here in the open. Being so exposed seemed to negate the danger in some way that she didn’t understand, which was also why she came out here so often. Hiding in plain sight, her subconscious told her.

Today was no different, and when her body had soaked up all the radiation it was going to tolerate she forced herself to roll onto her knees and stand up, grabbing her clothes and pulling on a pair of shorts and shirt before grabbing her towel and sliding her sandy feet into a pair of sandals. Forcing herself to look around and see that there was no one following her, she spun a full 180 before walking up the shallow slope until she got to the soft walkways where the sand ended.

From there she headed left and walked a while, not wanting to go inside just yet and following the beach perimeter. Most of this planet was ocean, with only a tiny bit of landmass on its surface and nearly all of it having been given over to Australia centuries ago. There were Star Force cities out in the ocean, some even visible if you looked at the horizon really close on a clear day, but their denizens were banned from the Australian territory and didn’t migrate or mingle here save through proper channels that allowed the Australians to pick and choose who they let in…mainly those with credits to pay their way.

In compensation the Australians had made sure to make their accommodations far more luxurious than what Star Force offered, which was a tall bar to reach, but they achieved it through keeping a low population and giving everyone more room and resources than was standard in Mainline Star Force colonies, enticing people to migrate here and their other territorial possessions to boost their population and power within the ADZ.

This resort and others like it were even higher up the ladder, specializing in luxuries that Star Force never touched. Had she wanted to, she could have rented or purchased a set of quarters that was the size of a starship and had an interior waterpark. Mina didn’t want any part of that nonsense, so she’d taken one of the other options the resort provided…which for her was a small treehouse set inside one of their forested parks far away from everyone else.

There was a tunnel link underground to get to it, but no ground access on site, meaning unless you climbed a tree you couldn’t get up to where she was staying, keeping even the idle forest wanderer away from her, though there were no paths or other treehouses within 500 meters of where she was staying. But she didn’t want to go back there just yet and stagnate. In fact she hated that, for her mind would spin even more and bog her down, so she did the next best thing and kept walking, towel rolled up and pinned under her arm, and just wandered the spacious grounds.

She walked for so long that the sun eventually started to set, and with the rays no longer burning into her skin she worked her way to the northern beach and spread out her towel again as the other guests were leaving. She stripped down and laid out, forgoing the sunglasses and soaking up the slightly cool breeze coming in as she watched the sun start to dip below the horizon.

It felt more dangerous now, but she stayed almost as if to invite trouble. Part of her mind wanted it to happen now if it was going to rather than waiting for it to come later. Mina didn’t know if that was stupid or not, but she really didn’t want to go back to her treehouse so she made herself stay until the sunlight was gone and the stars came out.

Along with those stars were brighter dots on the ocean marking the location of distant cities. Behind her there were more lights breaking through the trees from the surrounding buildings and from the small security lights on the paths. Those were little more than glowing rocks and just enough illumination to see where you were stepping. No broad flood lights to break up the pleasant atmosphere. It was dark and was meant to be dark, but not so much that you’d go stumbling around not able to see where you were going.

Mina relished the change, wondering why she hadn’t done this sooner, but her thoughts wouldn’t settle down. She kept replaying what had happened over and over again, trying to find some mistake she’d made that could have averted all of that…for the last thing she wanted to be was helpless, and if she’d made a mistake that was something she could change, putting her back in control.

But she wasn’t. She’d been caught completely off guard and had only survived through a sheer stroke of luck. Star Force security had saved her, but they hadn’t prevented the attack from happening. For as large and dominant as their grip on the ADZ was, it was obvious that things could happen under their noses that they had no idea about…bringing her back to the fact that she was alone despite being around so many people.

But that exhilarating openness and fear had soured into panic and paranoia. She couldn’t go on like this, but saw no way out. It felt like she couldn’t bear five more minutes of this jumble of emotions and conflicting thoughts in her head, but the clock would tick on and she didn’t die or explode, she just suffered…and in a place where suffering was the last thing that should be happening. The guests here were happy and relaxed, but no matter how luxurious her surroundings were her threat was in her head and she couldn’t shake that no matter where she went.

When a wave of goosebumps hit her toes and traveled all the way up to her head she sat up, realized how cold it had gotten but she refused to put her clothes back on…then on impulse stood up and walked down to the water. She was scared of it, despite the fact that there were energy fields further out keeping the unwanted debris and critters out, but the claustrophobic and vulnerable position she’d be in in the water terrified her...but right now she had to do something, and stupid or not she was going to make herself freak out even more.

She walked into the edge of the gentle waves until it got up over her ankles, then sat down in the water and scooted herself out, arms and legs rigid with fear, and inched her way in deeper and deeper until the waves lapped up and tickled her chin. Mina sat there shaking, and not from the water which was warmer than the chilling air. The coiled fear inside of her was coming to the surface along with the threat the water posed and she kept expecting someone to push her head under and kill her right there.

It didn’t happen, but the fear didn’t diminish. She held herself there and eventually the tears started to flow again…the first time since the day of the attack. With them her walls came down and she felt everything fresh again, this time letting herself internally collapse into a wad of pathetic Human rather than fighting it all. She held her head up so she could breathe, but her will was gone and she just suffered through a few minutes until her arms got so tired of fighting the waves that her head dipped under enough for her to get a mouthful of water.

With that real threat manifesting she surged a little remaining energy and crawled up the slope until the water was only half a foot deep. She stayed there on all fours, head down and continuing to cry as the weight of the galaxy seemed to finally come off her shoulders and she realized just how messed up she really was. Accepting that and the truth that she had been denying the past month, Mina sat back on her submerged feet and looked up at the starry sky wondering why she was here.

Not here as on this planet, but here as in being alive. What was the point of it all? She was helpless, truly helpless. If certain people wanted her dead she couldn’t stop them. If a moon fell down on top of her she couldn’t stop that, or if her food was poisoned. She couldn’t check everything she ate. Every piece of clothing she wore…though there was an easy way to fix that. Every room she slept in, every shower she used, every bottle of water she drank.

Mina just had to admit to herself that she was constantly vulnerable, and there was no right way to do things to make herself safe.

Flipping over and pushing her way back up the shore a bit she laid back in an inch of water and let the waves wash over her as the tears finally stopped, and with them the thoughts as well. Everyone lived and acted like life was scripted and they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t. It was a giant delusion they were playing and clinging to. Pretending they were safe and that things like credits or family mattered most, but that was just a part of the delusion and a way to avoid looking at the harsh reality around them.

Mina didn’t know why she’d been born or what she was supposed to do here. She’d been winging it since day 1. Star Force had never told her why, nor pretended to know, telling her that she was alone as were all of them and that they needed to work together to help each other, with the maturia lessons being knowledge passed on from others that had come before for her benefit, but her path was always hers to figure out and that she should use what she learned as she saw fit.

Those lessons flashed back in her mind now with an entirely new meaning. There hadn’t been the danger evident back then, confined within a maturia and knowing nothing of the outside world, but now they rang truer than ever. The day she left the maturia and entered society there had been a different vibe, that of the delusions that people lived their lives by and it had crept into her somewhat. There was an apathy to it, a denial that bad things were or could be happening. Star Force had everything under control, and the few situations where something did happen were minor and didn’t affect you.

Well they had just affected her and now her eyes were open. She felt like she didn’t deserve to be rescued, like she should have been taken off her ship and faced whatever it was that was coming her way because she didn’t see it coming and prepare, but now she felt the opposite. Those commandos had saved her and given her another chance, stopping something horrible from happening not by predicting and preventing it, but by reacting and fighting when it did happen.

And therein lay her answer. She couldn’t stop people or things from attacking her, and it was possible that she could end up in a no-win scenario that she couldn’t get out of. All she could do was face what came her way and fight it however she was able, and she wouldn’t know that until it happened.

Mina coughed, feeling an ache in her chest that was more emotional than physical as she seemed to hack out some of the darkness hanging around inside her. She started coughing so bad she had to sit up and turn over face down until she cleared her lungs of whatever it was. When she finished her head felt clearer than clear and she realized she was still live.

Not alive, but live. If everything was a game she had just nearly lost, and it had felt like she had, but she hadn’t. She was still in the game and had been wasting time this entire month. She’d felt like the walking dead but she wasn’t. Never had been. Just a trick of the mind and her messed up emotions.

Mina slammed a fist down, splashing out a quick lived hole in the water and cursing herself for being so stupid…but rethinking her actions since that day she found that she really could find no fault with herself. Her head had been clouded, and honestly she didn’t know what had just changed now to clear it. Maybe it was just a cumulation of time or the fear of the water had kicked something into place, but whatever it was had pulled her out of a very dark place, and had she still been in it right now she didn’t know what she could have done differently than she’d been doing over the past month.

Her head was clear and she needed to keep it that way. That was her one priority right now.

Mina splashed at the water with her left hand, feeling it more than seeing it as her wet body began to thoroughly chill in the breeze. She relished the feeling, but knew she needed to take care of herself and not get sick…or sicker, for that cough didn’t come out of nowhere. Fearful that even moving might cause her head to fog back up again, Mina gradually crawled up onto the dry sand, moving slowly and letting her head adjust.

Fortunately the dark doors didn’t close back in on her mind and she decided to take her good luck and run with it, literally. She stood up and began jogging down the dark beach, not having had a workout since the attack and remembering all those maturia lessons about running and how it could be used as a reset of both your body and mind. She felt a little stupid, running around naked on the beach in the dark, but no one else was out here so she didn’t care. Running the full length of the beach and making a total of six circuits back and forth, Mina ran her worries about her mind closing in on her away for good and ended up back by her towel, dropping to her knees in the sand and feeling like she’d just dodged a huge bullet.

Those commandos had saved her, and while some people would say she needed to return the favor by helping someone else in need she immediately disregarded that. If someone was in need she’d help them because she could, not because she owed a favor. That was petty thinking. No. She had been the one that was saved and the emphasis was on her, not someone else. She may not have earned it, but she was still alive and needed to make use of the save rather than squander it away.

Now that her head was clear she needed to move, not away from the resort or even this beach but internally. She needed to heal and that fog in her head had been preventing that, but now she felt the blissful movement inside and knew she had to act on it.

Pulling on her clothes and grabbing her towel, sunglasses, and slipping on her sandals, Mina walked away from the beach and through the grounds until she got to the tunnel network that led to her treehouse, climbing the short ladder up to the door that led to a lift chamber. Once inside she locked the door with the keypad and the emergency barricade slat, ensuring that no one would disturb her privacy.

Mina walked into the lift and rode the slow ascent up until she was standing in the middle of her treehouse quarters. Walking around and locking every door out to the encircling balcony and closing the shutters on every window, she sealed herself in then hopped into the shower to rinse the sand and cold off her body. Not lingering there, she dried off after a few minutes and pulled on some pajamas before diving under the covers of her bed and pulling herself into a fetal position as she let herself begin to shake a bit as the lingering paranoia worked its way out of her body and the rest of the mental toxins she’d been accumulating did likewise.

9

When she woke up the next morning her nerves were settled and her body was, well, more tired than when she’d went to bed the night before, which she oddly took as a good sign. She felt alive again rather than in a perpetual stasis, and even the fatigue was welcome so long as it was real.

Mina ordered room service and had a tray of food arrive on a conveyor inside one of the cabinets within minutes. She ate a large, warm breakfast then immediately began packing up. Whatever she was going to make of her life going forward would be accomplished by action, not sitting on her ass. She wasn’t going back on tour just yet, but she needed to start recalibrating herself and that run last night had been a good first step…as well as showing her just how out of shape she’d gotten over the past month. She hadn’t put on any weight that she could tell, but Mina had definitely lost some of her well maintained fitness.

Accessing the computer in the treehouse she booked reservations at another Australian facility on a nearby island then called for a porter to get her bags down to the dock where she took a private boat over to the exclusive training facility. No one did training better than Star Force, but then again they never charged anything for access to facilities either. Everyone could use them and was encouraged to do so…which was a problem for people like her that needed to avoid crowds and the attention they drew. Like everything with Australia, if you had the credits you could buy an upgrade, and the same went with training facilities.

They had one reclusive one on Optimus, which serviced not just their own small territory in the system but everyone else as well. If you wanted to train in private, this is where you came. If you wanted to hire specialists to put you through your own personal boot camp that was available as well. Most people, if they wanted to advance their skills in a formalized way, enrolled in an advanced maturia but Star Force only trained in ‘responsible’ ways and some people wanted to do something more reckless, like losing 50 pounds in 4 weeks or body building for appearance rather than skill and power.

Star Force was no nonsense when it came to training and, basically, everything else. For those individuals who didn’t like that approach and wanted other ‘variety’ there were corporate options for that if you had the credits and Australia had surged to the forefront in that subcategory as well. Though they were very much a part of Star Force they’d emphasized their differences whenever possible and today Mina was glad for that, for when her boat arrived she was greeted with a personal attendant that took her inside the mountain-like complex and directly to her quarters without having to see or hear from any of the other guests.

Mina had booked the most expensive training suite, which gave her basically an entire mini facility on the island to herself. It had a track, pool, obstacle courses, fitness rooms, sparring equipment, and various challenge scenarios similar to what Mainline Star Force used. She hadn’t wanted any formalization, so once the attendant dropped her off and made sure everything was in order, Mina was left to herself and she got to work right away with a stretching regimen followed by a few swimming laps in the long pool.

Those were far more taxing than they should have been, plus she was having to fight some claustrophobia from being in the water again. It wasn’t so bad as before and mostly wore off by the time she finished, but she was thoroughly drained by the time she was done and that disappointed her. Normally she could have done a lot more, which testified to just how out of whack she was.

Mina took a crash nap, then ordered some room service that included a stack of pancakes and colored nutrient drinks. She’d save the sugary stuff for later after she did a second workout in the day, but while she digested she took a dip in her own hot tub and tried to work out some of the soreness from the prior night’s run.

After an hour there she tried some light weights but didn’t make more than 10 minutes before she had to quit for the day. Mina had no energy, but at least her head was still clear. She retreated back into her quarters for another nap then allowed herself to wander out into the commons area of the facility and took a perch on a sunroof where she stripped down and worked on her tan a bit more with a handful of other people doing the same.

They didn’t talk to her and she was glad for that, but over the following weeks as her energy level slowly came back up to normal Mina continued to mingle in the commons and even got into a few conversations with people that seemed not to know who she was. They were here to train as well and that offered a common topic of conversation. Most people here were Human, but a handful of them were not and she was curious as to how they trained, especially one of the Bsidd that stood shorter than she was and looked to be a living bush.

Turns out he/it was a businessman that owned a shipping company than ran supplies between the various races on the Alliance worlds that were not part of Star Force. Apparently there was quite a market for independent shippers so long as they could undercut the prices on the ADZ transit grid. The Bsidd said that was easy enough so long as you owned your own fleet of ships, and therein lay the hard part. One had to have the ships to generate the credits…but you needed the credits to buy the ships. He/it had taken more than 80 years of doing other work to save up enough currency for his first purchase, then from there he’d made a living out of hauling cargo and expanded his operations as quickly as possible.

He/it was another entrepreneur like herself, self-made and taking advantage of the possibilities Star Force had sculpted within the ADZ. No one had to work to live, but if you wanted to prosper you had to work your ass off to do it. Didn’t matter what race you were, everyone had options. She knew that more than most people, having grown up in an Axius colony, but it was reassuring to meet someone else who was in a similar position to her.

Mina didn’t share any details about her recent history, and the two talked for quite a while about the idiosyncrasies of being wealthy within the ADZ and the unique perspective and challenges it presented, with her hearing similar ideas to what she’d already experienced personally and feeling quite relieved to have a peer, even if in a drastically weird sense. Person or not, the Bsidd was still a walking bush, so there was only so many similarities to draw, but in a weird way she could connect with him/it more than the Humans she encountered in the music business.

Mina actually made a habit of meeting with him and a few others on a regular basis, or irregular actually, given that they never planned any get-togethers. They just bumped into each other in the commons at similar times and she got to get their perspectives on a wide range of topics. The more she related to them and their stories Mina realized that she needed to get back on tour sooner rather than later. She was a singer and building her career, and one common theme amongst all of her new friends was that when they had trouble they didn’t quit what they were doing, but found themselves along the way as a byproduct of the struggles.

Mina realized she had begun to feel like singing was a petty thing after so many people’s deaths, but now she realized it wasn’t. It was what she did and a big part of who she was. Those commandos hadn’t saved her so she could wallow away and live half a life. They saved her so she could continue going on doing what she wanted, and Mina realized that she was just cycling garbage through her head. Probably stuff she’d picked up from others accidentally. She’d have to pay closer attention to her own thoughts going forward to avoid that again. Going with the flow of society was never a good idea, for there were always more stupid people than wise, regardless of the efforts Star Force made to give people the tools they needed to learn and grow.

Some people just didn’t want to, and those were now floating to the bottom of the tier 1 pool after the ADZ-wide restructuring. Here though, you had to have credits to buy your way in, and in such sums that you more than likely had to earn them and stupid people didn’t earn anything. They leached off of others in one form or another, letting Star Force take care of them and it seemed Star Force didn’t mind. They were now scooting them off into their own little corner along with the newbs coming out of the maturias, letting those who earned their way into better crowds.

Mina went where the credits were, so often her followers were amongst the ‘stupid’ but a good number of them were not, and in fact her upcoming tour…before she’d canceled it…had been going to more of the tier 2 sites than previously because they were considered higher class and, frankly, more profitable because those citizens had more credits to spend. She’d cut her teeth doing free or cheap concerts for anyone who would come, but now that she was established she was gradually moving up the status ladder and made a choice to, when she did go back, cut out the lower class performances regardless of whether it made monetary sense or not.

She’d never thought about it before, but now that she was actually hanging around with people that were more or less her peers she found that she felt more like herself. Even with her old team she never felt like one of them. They were there to service her as part of their job rather than being on par with her. When Mina put together her new team she was going to do it herself, no more label execs assigning people. She liked this feeling of having peers, and there were many musicians and support staff out there for her to choose from. There had to people out there of like mind, it was just a matter of finding them.

Her jumpship was her home after all, and if the rest of the ADZ was living with their ‘peers’ now and greatly preferring the change then she should probably give it a try herself. There was no rush getting back on tour and she could take as long as she needed assembling a new team…which she could start from here while she continued training. She needed to be in very good shape if she was going back to stripping on stage, which she used as her measuring stick to make sure she never lost her self-sufficiency. That was her true priority, with the public exposure being a way to make sure she never deluded herself into thinking she was better off than she was like many other people did who hid behind their clothes.

When she was walking back through the commons area one evening intending to get in one more short workout before bed she heard footsteps behind her in the hallway and glanced back, seeing a woman walking briskly whom she recognized as another of the guests but one that she had never spoken with. Mina moved aside to let her pass but as she did so the woman slipped her hand around her arm and latched onto her. In a fluid motion she pulled Mina into a side alcove and through a doorway.

Her feet caught and she tripped, but the strong arm kept dragged her along as she fought to push the other way. Suddenly she was thrust up against a wall and unable to scream, for her vocal chords refused to utter a sound as the woman pinned her bodily against the cream/white colored paneling beside a large potted bush.

“You’re in danger,” the woman whispered. “The people who tried to kidnap you before are in this facility and trying again. I’ve been assigned to protect you. Understand?”

The woman eased her grip slightly but did not let go, but Mina’s vocal chords were back under her own control. “Who sent you?”

I’m an Archon, the woman said inside her mind. “And we need to move now.”

Mina found herself pulled off the wall before she could respond, but she didn’t fight her. There had always been rumors about the Archons having special powers, but she hadn’t actually thought someone could speak mind to mind until just now. That was all the proof she needed, so Mina started jogging alongside her as the woman pulled her through the room and down another corridor. They were halfway down it when an alarm sounded twice, followed by a voice being transmitted everywhere within the training facility.

“All guests please report to your quarters and stay there for the immediate future. We have a security breach and the facility is going on lockdown until the situation is resolved. Do not try to leave, just get out of the hallways and let our security teams deal with the problem. Stay down, stay put, and stay out of the way.”

“Keep moving,” the Archon said, never having let go of Mina’s arm. The pair jogged down the hallway then as they came to a set of closed double doors the Archon pushed her out of the way and into the nook outside a closed side room just as the doors opened up and two Humans came through wearing Australian uniforms and carrying weapons.

The Archon moved so fast Mina couldn’t see what happened, but the two men were on the ground in a flash and their weapons were removed from them…then Mina was pulled off the ground by an invisible force and over top of them, landing in the open doors as the woman grabbed her by the arm again and forced her into another jog.

“Sorry about this,” the woman said, grabbing hold of Mina by the waist and wrapping her up in a hug a moment before she lost all coordination. Her body suddenly went twitchy and out of her control, and she would have fallen had the Archon not been holding her up. By the time her head came back into alignment and her feet responded the woman had already pulled her into another room, keeping them on the run.

Mina didn’t ask any of the questions she wanted to, recognizing the danger of the situation even if she didn’t understand it. She just kept moving as instructed and within a minute they burst through a small door and climbed up a twisting stairwell that led to a roof exit. The hot sun was gone, replaced by evening twilight and a cool breeze as the Archon shut the door behind them and pushed Mina across the roof towards the edge where several large trees were just poking up over the edge.

“Trust me,” she said as they got to the edge and Mina pulled up, then the Archon pushed her off the roof into freefall.

Mina screamed, but that invisible force pinched her around the midsection and slowed her fall into a gentle drop that her feet could have handled if she’d been paying attention. Instead she got dumped to the ground with a not so soft bump on her head, but at least she hit dirt rather than pavement.

Above her the Archon jumped, landing beside her in a crouch that rolled out into a somersault…then the woman was on her feet and pulling Mina to hers as they got back into a run again, this time heading off through the forested section of the island. When they came across a trail they sped up, with Mina running as fast as she could without tripping and the Archon finally letting go of her arm but staying right on her shoulder the entire time.

10

“Stop here,” the Archon said as they came to a curve in the trail and stepped off under some curling branches and mostly out of sight.

Mina coasted to stop alongside her, breathing hard and barely able to speak. “Who is…after me?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” the Archon said, casually standing next to the tree trunk and looking around. “Name’s Ginsi.”

“Mina.”

“Yes I know,” the Archon said with a smile.

“What now?”

“I have a few friends nearby. They’ll clean up the garbage while I keep you out of their hands.”

“How did you know I was here? And how did you know they were coming for me?”

“I’ve been watching you since a few days after you arrived on Optimus, and I expected they’d try again. Hijacking a ship is a big deal, and if they went to that much trouble to get you an infiltration job here would be a lot easier.”

“I used a fake name,” Mina said in mild protest.

“But paid with your own account.”

Mina squeezed her eyes shut, mentally kicking herself. In retrospect that was really stupid.

“Relax. You’re not used to doing this sort of stuff, and the name change was a good idea.”

“And you are?”

“I’m an Archon. I do lots of stuff.”

“Why did I rate an Archon…or anybody watching me?”

“We like to catch the bad guys before they can do bad things again…and I volunteered for the assignment.”

“Volunteered?”

“I like your music and wanted to meet you. Plus I didn’t want some Regular screwing up the assignment and letting them get to you.”

“Regular?”

“Someone who’s not an Archon or a Knight,” Ginsi said as a chirp sounded from her pocket. She pulled out an earpiece and slid it in on the right side of her head and listened to the message. “We’ve located their ship and I need to get to it before they can run.”

“Go ahead. I’ll hide here.”

“Like hell you will. You’re coming with,” Ginsi said, pulling her by the arm but Mina dug her heels in and wouldn’t budge. “I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise. Besides, I figured you’d want a little payback.”

“How?”

The Archon smiled. “Let’s see what we can manage, shall we?”

Mina hesitated, then gave in to the firm grip on her arm and the two of them started running through the trees again, this time off trail as they moved across about 300 meters of forest. There they came up on another trail but they avoided it, turning and following it a few dozen meters inside the trees as they headed towards the location Ginsi had been given. The trail led to a section of the island that was urbanized and had two large landing pads that were segmented into grids. Most were empty, but a handful of spots were filled with various dropships and aerial craft.

One of those spots had been filled recently, but was now missing its ship. A check of the navigational grid indicated it had not left the island vertically or horizontally, but where it had gone was much closer to the training facility and had put down in a clearing that was only a short jog away…ostensibly to stuff Mina in without having to carry an unconscious body with them any further than necessary. This was meant to be another smash and grab operation, and the longer they had between the grab and their escape the harder it would be for them to evade pursuit.

If they’d done it right Mina would have been gone without anyone missing her and the out of place ship being little more than a curiosity to the few sets of eyes that had seen it. The reason why Ginsi hadn’t revealed herself to Mina earlier had been because she wanted to bait the attackers in so they could capture them in order to find the source of these hits. The first group, or those that had survived the run-in with the commandos, had left some clues but didn’t know who had hired them. Ginsi intended to find a trail here and run it all the way back to the source, which was the only way that Mina would be safe, for there was no way she was going to personally guard her indefinitely. Her training was taking a big hit just being here, but this was a rare enough occurrence that she wasn’t kicking herself over it. This needed to be done and it was better for an Archon to do it than a security officer any day.

Ginsi could feel the mind of the ship’s pilot before the yellow/gray dropship came into view through the trees, with her stopping Mina behind a large one before they could be seen.

“Ok, there’s one guy onboard. Human. We go in, take him down, then wait and see who the cleanup crew misses and comes back here.”

“How? You’re not armed.”

Ginsi raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think I need to be?”

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

Ginsi smiled then turned her attention off through the trees. “I like you. Not the scared little girl most people expected.”

“I’m plenty scared, trust me.”

“But you’re not letting it overcome you. That’s the point. Now come on, follow me in and watch my back. I’ll take this guy down in under 5 seconds. Time me if you like.”

“Are all Archons this…”

“Impressive?”

“Not the word I was going for.”

“It just gives us something to do when we’re waiting on the action. Come on, I know what I’m doing.”

“Alright,” Mina said as Ginsi crept forward and she matched her footsteps as best she could. They wound their way through the trees until they came out into what was an outdoor exercise platform. Oddly enough it was in the middle of the forest with only trails connecting to it, which was probably why it wasn’t being used much. The Archon grabbed her wrist again and pulled her out of cover with the both of them running across to the side of the ship and skirting around it until they came to the open boarding hatch.

Ginsi held up five fingers and gave Mina a wink, then she grabbed the handle on the side of the doorway and swung herself inside. Mina followed her hesitantly, then heard sounds of a scuffle before seeing a body hit the floor in front of her just as she got in through the entry cupola and turned the corner into the central shaft that ran the length of the small ship.

“How long was that?” Ginsi asked.

“Under five,” Mina admitted a she stared at the man lying unconscious on the ground with a trickle of blood flowing from his forehead.

“Yeah, forgot to take the ring off,” Ginsi said, pulled off a relationship ring and tucking it into a pants pocket.

“I didn’t think Archons had boyfriends.”

“We don’t. But wearing one of these in public avoids people hitting on you, mostly, and my job here was to protect you, not pick up dates.”

“Thanks, by the way.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Are you really a fan?”

“I’m not a fangirl over anything, but I do like your music and your style. You obviously keep yourself in decent shape, and a lot of other musicians don’t.”

“Living forever has its appeal.”

“Damn straight,” Ginsi said, dropping down onto her heels and rolling the guy over so she could reach inside one of his pockets and pull out a datachip.

“What’s that?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe something. Have a seat, we’ll stick it out here and see if we can trap anyone else.”

“You mean you trap. I’m just the helpless observer.”

“You came from a maturia, right?”

“An Axius one, yes.”

“Then you’re not helpless either.”

“I can’t do that,” Mina insisted, gesturing towards their quarry that the Archon was now restraining using a small cord that she’d pulled out of another pocket in the civilian training garb she was wearing.

“What did I do?”

“You knocked him out.”

“And you can’t knock someone out?”

“I can’t hit that hard.”

“I’m a lot older than you. I wouldn’t expect you to. That doesn’t mean you’re helpless.”

“Feels like it,” Mina said, stepping back from the now restrained man and leaning against the sidewall and lowering her voice as she glanced out the hatch, not wanting to alert anyone to their trap if they did come back to the ship. “I couldn’t do anything the first time they attacked, and those weren’t even Human.”

“It wasn’t exactly a sparring match. They meant to hit you when you were off guard. Don’t let that convince you you’re helpless. Even I can be ambushed.”

“I can’t protect myself against this.”

“Some fights are like that, which is why you need help. I’ve been put into fights that I’d get my ass kicked in, and did get it kicked in, without help from others. It’s safe to assume that there’s always someone else out there stronger than you, and if you meet them in battle the key to victory isn’t in beating them, but surviving to fight another day. You’re alive, so you won that bout.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“I didn’t say it was fun, but you made it through. That’s the point.”

“You my counselor now too?” Mina asked.

“Why, you need one?”

“Don’t know what I need. I thought this was over, now it’s happening again.”

“If we get the intel we need, we’ll make it the last time.”

“How do you know that? Everywhere I go, even under a fake name, they can still get to me. I don’t even know who wants me or why.”

“You’re not in this alone. We’re going to pursue this until it’s over.”

“Don’t you have something better to do? Not that I’m ungrateful, but there has to be a lot of people out there that need help.”

“There’s always bad guys doing bad things, but not that many try it in Star Force territory because they know we’ll come after them and won’t stop until we find them. They’re on our radar now, and that’s not somewhere they want to be,” Ginsi said, raising a hand before Mina could reply. “Get ready. Someone is coming. Get by that wall and when I signal you, I want you to stick your leg out across the doorway and trip them.”

“What!” Mina whispered.

“Just do it,” she said pointing to where she wanted her as the Archon pulled the body out of view and into the cockpit. “8 seconds.”

Mina didn’t know what she was thinking but she did as was told, watching Ginsi as she stood up and took position on the other side of the door. She held up her hand with four fingers, then pulled one down, then another giving Mina a countdown. When she balled her fist up Mina balanced on her hands and kicked both legs out sideways, making herself a barricade and feeling a foot slam into her right calf. Her legs got pushed over and she was pinned down for a moment as Ginsi’s head fell beside her as she tackled the guy.

“Nice job,” she said, rolling off the unconscious Human.

“He’s out?”

“Yep,” Ginsi said, getting to her feet and kicking the guy off Mina.

“What’d you hit him with?”

“A little Archon magic. He’ll be unconscious for at least an hour.”

“No really, what did you do? It looked like you just knocked him down.”

“No, you did. I just took him down the rest of the way and got my hand on his head,” Ginsi said, waving her fingers in the air. “Like I said, magic.”

“Telepathy or something?”

“Actually yes. I had to touch him to do it, but I was able to put him to sleep.”

“So why’d you hit the other guy with your fist?”

“They’re trying to kidnap you, and that ticks me off.”

“So you hit him even though all you had to do was just touch him?”

“Pretty much,” Ginsi said, extending her hand to Mina and helping her to her feet.

“You beat up people for fun a lot?”

“I beat up people a lot, and it’s usually fun, but it’s not for the purpose of fun so I’d have to say no.”

Mina laughed in spite of herself. She was still scared and aware that she was in way over her head, both with these attackers and this Archon, though Ginsi seemed friendly enough.

“Like I said, you’re young. I’ve had centuries to get used to this sort of stuff. You not so much.”

“Are you reading my mind?”

“Don’t need to. Your face is easy enough to read.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You wear your emotions on your sleeve.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“For an Archon, kind of. I can’t do it. I want to, but I’ve put on so much emotional armor that I have trouble taking it off. You’re totally out there, and even when you’re freaked out its refreshing to see that kind of openness. I envy you…a bit.”

“Wanna trade? Or can I buy that emotional armor somewhere?”

“You have to build it yourself, but I can let you borrow mine for a few seconds if you’d like.”

“What?”

Ginsi held out her hand. “Let me show you.”

“You’re going to put me to sleep too?”

“No.”

“Then what?” Mina asked skeptically, looking at her hand and recoiling a bit.

“Come on you wuss, just trust me. I’m trying to help you.”

“By holding hands?”

“I can’t access your mind without physical contact and I want to show you something.”

“Show me what?”

“What this looks like through my eyes. I think it will help.”

Mina bit her lip, unsure what to do.

“Do I have to quote your own song lyrics?”

Mina blew out an exasperated breath in surrender, then reached out and grabbed her hand. “I don’t think this is…” she said, suddenly having her mind alter. She didn’t understand what was happening, but suddenly everything looked different. The images she was seeing were all the same, the sounds were the same, the smells were the same...but they all felt different, as if in a different context. The dangerous situation she was in suddenly seemed routine and kind of pathetic with the fear being stripped out of her.

“This is how I see things,” Ginsi explained. “How are your emotions now?”

“They’re…gone.”

“Not gone. Look closer.”

“They feel gone…and I feel so badass, like I could take on the galaxy myself.”

“Close,” Ginsi admitted. “And what about your attackers.”

Mina looked down at the man she’d tripped, no longer seeing an overpowering monster but rather a poorly trained thug that was all weapon and little skill. “They don’t seem dangerous.”

“Because I know how to handle them. To you they’re an unknown, but sharing my, call it knowledge, you can see them in a different way.”

“This is so cool,” Mina said, genuinely thrilled for the first time in what felt like years.

“Think you can trust me now?”

“If you’re inside my head you already know the answer to that.”

“Say the words please, so you’ll remember them later.”

“I trust you,” Mina said, reveling in this…whatever it was. She didn’t even have a word for it.

“And just remember, I’m not the top Archon. So this isn’t as good as it gets,” she said, letting Mina soak in the sensations a bit more.

“I’ll take your word for it, because this is nutsy awesome.”

“Everyone lives in their own little ship otherwise known as your body and mind. You can customize and upgrade them in an insane number of ways. Some good, some bad. This is a peek at my mental customization. Take a good look and remember to trust me.”

“I’ll remember.”

“It’s going to change when I let go. So I need you to make a memory now that you can choose to trust in later.”

“Meaning what?”

“You feel and see through the customizations you currently have. Mine are going to disappear from your mind.”

“Five more minutes?” Mina pleaded, looking around at the ship and everything, drinking in the context, for she even knew what all the little buttons and switches in the cockpit did.

Ginsi laughed and let go of her hand…with the world suddenly shrinking and becoming a lot less stable.

“Hold onto as much of it as you can,” Ginsi prodded as Mina stumbled a step with her emotions ramming back into the forefront of her mind. Everything around her also felt dull and colorless, with the badass feel gone. Looking down at the unconscious man she was afraid again, but just a moment ago she hadn’t been. Which was real and which wasn’t?

“Trust me,” Ginsi said, waving a hand in front of her eyes to get her to focus. “Remember? Even if you can’t feel it, choose to trust me based on the memory.”

“I trust you, I trust you,” Mina repeated unnecessarily. “What do you want me to do?”

“Quit worrying. We’ve got this.”

“But you don’t even know who’s sending them yet?”

Ginsi glared at her, raising her chin slightly but saying nothing.

“Trust…right. If the badass says so, then that’s good enough for me.”

“Make it happen, girl. Words are cheap. Put them to use.”

“How?”

“Start living and let me worry about your security. Seriously, don’t even think about it. Trust that I’ve got your back.”

“You won’t be with me forever.”

“I’ve got your back on this threat. The rest are yours to deal with.”

Mina felt something ironic with that statement, but the memory betrayed her and she couldn’t put her finger on it. Was it one of hers or something from Ginsi left over?

“That feels reckless, but ok. I’ll try.”

“Good,” Ginsi said, lightly kicking the guy on the floor. “Security team is on the way to pick them up. Should be here in a few minutes, then we’ll get going. Time to get you back on tour.”

“Tour? That takes more than a simple call to set up.”

“Never said it was simple. But it’s what you’re going to do.”

“Wanna come with?”

“Until we find the source of this threat I’m sticking with you.”

“Really?”

“It won’t take that long.”

Mina frowned. “Can you sing?”

“Not really. More of a yeller.”

“Yeller?”

“Yeah, like being loud and guttural.”

“That’s not singing.”

“No, but it’s useful in training.”

“It is?”

“Helps to get your combat emotions on your sleeve.”

“I thought you had trouble with that?”

“Combat emotions, no. It’s the rest that are locked down. When I’m fighting I’m loose and freely flowing.”

“Interesting.”

“How so?”

“Ever stripped in public before?”

Ginsi laughed. “No.”

“Scared?”

“Archons aren’t scared of being naked.”

Mina shrugged. “If you want to get your non-combat emotions on your sleeve, I’d suggest you start there. Sounds like you just need to get exposed. If you stick around long enough, come on stage with me and try it out. People would like to see an Archon naked.”

“I’m sure they would,” she said with a smirk.

“Just a thought,” Mina said, looking down at the unconscious man. “Can I?”

Ginsi nodded. “Sure.”

Mina took a step towards him and kicked him in the gut, then stepped back and did it again harder.

“Feel better?”

“Yes, thank you,” Mina said, trying to hold to her word and not worry anymore.

“You are an odd one.”

“Me?”

“Yeah you. You’re not what your publicists make you out to be.”

“Disappointed?” Mina asked sheepishly.

“Not a bit. You’re actually more intelligent than I thought. Still a youngling, but that will solve itself with time and experience.”

“How old do I have to be to stop being a youngling?”

“Ha…that’s a good question. Taryn still calls me a youngling sometimes.”

“Taryn?”

“The trailblazer.”

“What’s a trailblazer?”

Ginsi’s eyes went wide. “Wow. You really don’t know?”

“No,” Mina said innocently.

“The trailblazers are the first Archons and the ones responsible for building Star Force along with Director Davis.”

“Oh. Didn’t know they had a special name.”

“Damn, I’ve got a lot to teach you in the next few days.”

“Or you could just leave me ignorant.”

“Oh no. Ignorance has to be destroyed. Like Death Star destroyed.”

“What’s a Death Star?”

Ginsi face-palmed as footsteps became audible outside as the security team arrived. “Tell you what. I’ll help you get up to speed with what’s going on in the galaxy outside the civilian realm if you let me soak in your unrestrained emotions and work on loosing mine up.”

“Sounds fair. Boy you like?”

“No,” Ginsi said as a female security officer walked in on their conversation and she threw the Archon an odd look. “I just need to be able to relax on cue so I can be more efficient in my downtime between workouts.”

“That’s what they all say,” the security officer quipped.

“There’s another one in the cockpit,” Ginsi said, pointing as two more security officers walked into the ship. “Get them tucked away then get the ship impounded and searched,” she said, motioning for Mina to follower her outside.

She shared a smile with the security officer then followed the Archon out and the two began walking one of the trails back to the facility, with Mina having a small spike of fear at not knowing what was out there but making herself forget about it like Ginsi had told her to.

“Can Archons really get laid only once a year?” she asked after they were out of earshot.

“Ugh. How many stupid rumors like that are there?”

“Twice a year?” Mina asked.

“Archons don’t date,” Ginsi said simply.

“At all?”

“Nope.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Long story.”

“My ignorance is calling,” Mina said, feeding into the playful conversation as a way of avoiding the lingering fear as well as toying with what seemed to be her new friend.

“Fine,” Ginsi said with a bit of mock disgust before beginning a long conversation explaining the realities of life and debunking the myths about Archons that had built up in pop culture over the centuries.

Revulsion

1

February 17, 2826

Trium System (lizard territory)

Nefti

Krimja Hakti reclined on a small bench with his numerous appendages draped over the sides as he studied the tactical displays that detailed the progress of the orbital bombardment of the lizard world. The Bsidd monitored all 17 ships involved in the attack, seeing them firing their clear Keema beams down at the distant planet’s surface while numerous phaser beams were fired back towards the drones, though their range limits were passed and the enemy beams were losing coherency, meaning they did considerably less damage than normal.

But the shields on Krimja’s drones were still dropping, not that fast, but with the amount of time it was taking to punch through a lizard shield plate there was no way one drone could sustain that much cumulative damage. That meant standard rotational patterns had to be employed with the Bsidd remote pilots cycling the drones in and out to maintain a constant rate of fire while not losing any of their ships.

The Bsidd Admiral preferred to be on the bridge as much as possible during the assault, but they’d already been at it 2 days now and had only destroyed a handful of colonies. The planet had hundreds of large scale cities and thousands of smaller settlements covering its surface, but the more they could take out from orbit the better to not expose their ground troops to any unnecessary fighting…the downside was these orbital assaults took forever because there were only so many drones equipped with Keema strong enough to outdistance the lizard planetary defense phasers, with the rest of the drones and even the jumpships sitting back and waiting patiently while a handful of Star Force ships ate away at the lizards with impunity so long as they kept the shield rotation strategy employed.

But this is what had to be done. No longer were they assaulting expansion colonies, but worlds that the lizards had been on for a very long time and developed in depth. That meant heavier defenses, and aside from the newer planetary defense guns there was a whole lot of nasty stuff on the ground should they need to invade and take out the rest of the cities the hard way. Krimja’s troops could do it, he knew, but only if they had to. The lizards had to be purged from this world, but it wasn’t worth a single limb off of one of their ground troops to get in a rush. They had time and would use it, while the lizards had to sit and wait while their civilization on Nefti was taken apart piece by painstaking piece and made all the longer due to their continual shield upgrades. They weren’t enough to stop Star Force’s weapons from eventually breaching and destroying the emitters beneath, but with every new model employed it took them longer to do so.

Krimja expected this orbital assault to last months at the minimum, but he still wanted to be overseeing as much of it as he could just in case something went wrong, and with the deviousness of the lizards that was always in play no matter how controlled a situation looked.

On the status boards before him the Alpha watched the firing status of the Battlecruiser-class drones. The Keema built into them could be fired indefinitely so long as power was available, unlike plasma weapons that required a matter component in each charge, and these drones had been doing so non-stop save for swap outs. Right now there were two additional ones sitting back out of range recharging their shields while the 17 currently engaged were hammering away at one colony in particular with individual batteries, for each battlecruiser could only hold 1 Keema.

That was because the range needed had required a massive battery to be built, and even it was too large to fit on the heavy cruisers. A new, larger class of drone had to be created, with adjustments made to the carrier jumpships in order to fit them inside the hold for they were longer than it was deep. These had been carried horizontally rather than vertically, then stacked over the top of with additional drones. Each battlecruiser was 3 times the size of a heavy cruiser, making them almost too big to be classified as drones, but fortunately the size of jumpships they were using nowadays allowed for them to be fit inside regardless.

Krimja saw each of the batteries charging and discharging as expected, knowing that these few weapons were the only way to take this world without excessive loss of machinery through a typical orbital assault, blasting away with a large drone fleet and in return losing many ships to create a hole in the planetary defense grid. They’d then take out the cities via a ground campaign and remove this infestation the hard way, as they’d done many times before, but these handful of battlecruisers were allowing them another route to victory and that made Krimja want to keep an eye on them constantly, even if there was no obvious concern.

With his main two legs straddling the bench, Krimja used his other appendages to manipulate the control boards as needed, though most of what he was doing now was just oversight and that required watching rather than acting. He was an Alpha-variant Bsidd, which meant he was their ‘standard’ variety and stood just a little shorter than a Calavari. His musculature was average and his appendages numbered only 14. Most of the naval division was comprised of Epsilon and Theta variants, with him being one of a small minority of Alphas to rise through the ranks of the smaller Bsidd to become one of the 378 Admirals in the current fleet.

Bsidd population was managed by the Humans, with them determining how many of each variant to hatch per year, and Alphas were low in number. Most of them found their way into niches dominated by other variants with none to call their own. That didn’t matter to Krimja because Star Force was designed around the individual rather than groups and allowed him to go wherever he could earn his way. A lot of Alphas went straight civilian, but he’d wanted naval because the war against the lizards was largely being fought on that front…and if they ever lost their advantage there it would doom Star Force into turtling up and holding onto the systems they already had.

That would be a win for the lizards, with their only hope at defeating them coming through conquest of those systems they already possessed. The Bsidd and their Star Force allies were busy cutting out a whole new region of territory for their empire and they were doing it strictly out of lizard systems that the old Alliance wouldn’t have dared to touch. That’s why the density of the targets was increasing, along with their difficulty to take, but with each victory came another world, another system for Star Force…and with the Bsidd able to reproduce so quickly, so long as they had sufficient material resources they were populating a lot of those worlds themselves while acting as caretakers and watching over the empty ones.

The Bsidd Region was quickly going to outgrow the ADZ itself, but they were still a long way from the lizard core systems that had an equally impressive number of conquered systems on the far side. Lizard territory was huge, and that wasn’t even counting all their conquests from the Skarron empire and everything coreward of Star Force. Krimja knew the key to victory lay in taking it one invasion at a time and denying the enemy their prizes while Star Force grew ever stronger, with the Bsidd taking a greater and greater share of the workload with their surging population.

Krimja took pride in that, but knew that the Humans were the key to it all. They were the ones who had rescued the Bsidd and gave them a place in Star Force, along with many other races, and they were fighting to protect everyone they could. Had it not been for them the ADZ would not have existed and all those who had taken refuge there would have been wiped out or forced further on, trying to stay ahead of the lizard advance for as long as they could.

Unfortunately not everyone in the ADZ felt that way. Krimja wasn’t well connected to the non-Bsidd portions of Star Force territory but all were interconnected through the relay grid with communal information databases and news services, so he had some idea of what was happening elsewhere and had studied the other races with interest, especially those that had taken refuge within Star Force’s boundaries without joining them.

A great many of them were ingrates, complaining of this and that but offering no solutions themselves. Almost all of it centered around a lack of control, citing that Star Force and the Humans had too much and the races under their ‘care’ had no say in their own future. Krimja knew that was absurd, for those races hadn’t earned a say. If simply having population numbers gave you authority then the Bsidd would rule everyone else. It didn’t work that way, and the reason the Humans were in control was because they had responsibility for everyone and had seen to it that they not only had sanctuary from the lizards and other threats, but an opportunity within the Star Force economic system to grow and advanced as they were able.

Did the Humans rule? No, they didn’t it. They led, with the difference being that they allowed freedom that many of these other races wouldn’t if they held dominance. Star Force set some ground rules, and many people didn’t like those, but beyond that you were free to do what you wanted. No one was entitled to success, only life, for which Star Force provided a comfortable existence. Anything beyond that you had to earn, whether you were an individual or a race.

Some didn’t like that, wanting to be given status and resources that they hadn’t earned simply out of birthright or because they thought that protesting would entail them with appeasement. Both were laughable, and at the end of the day anyone who didn’t like being a guest of Star Force could leave their territory and take their chances elsewhere.

Almost all of them chose to stay, however, so their mindless protests had no real merit. Star Force didn’t censor them, and there was almost constant news coverage of discontent here and there in the non-Star Force races, but those people who had earned their way didn’t care. The whiners would whine and the protesters would protest. If they went beyond speaking their mind and into disrupting traffic or vandalizing they were shut down instantly by security…with more complaints about the militant attitude of Star Force.

Stupid people. The reason why they were alive was because Star Force was militant. People used that word as if it was a negative but here, in orbit of a lizard world that they were in the slow process of retaking, ‘militant’ was a prerequisite. Pacifists held no power, and anyone thinking to negotiate or appease their way out of the lizard threat were fools. You either stood up to them and fought, or you were run over and obliterated.

Unfortunately that attitude wasn’t only present in the lizards, and had Star Force not been so dominant some of the races under their protection might have been doing similar things to others. Some people wanted their way no matter what, whether it was logical, reasonable, or true. They would fight, cheat, con, and kill their way into dominance…then when they lost they cried foul and tried to demean the responsible ones who stopped them.

Krimja was glad that the Bsidd were a Star Force race, for he could see the vast difference between what he grew up in and what else was out there…and he knew it was probably worse outside of Star Force territory. That only went to prove that it wasn’t your race that dictated your behavior and potential, it was mainly your culture. Nobody chose when or where they were born, but those lucky enough to be born into Star Force had a huge advantage over everyone else, for their training programs were so advanced that Krimja couldn’t understand those that had been born outside them. They were everything to him and the others, and as a result the culture within the Star Force races was so much more unified than the others.

And Krimja knew that was because they had each been told the score and earned their way, like he had all the way up to a position of Admiral. That journey of advancement through merit, not appointment or promotion, gave him and the other Bsidd, as well as the other Star Force races, a sense of kindredship above and beyond them being in the same empire.

It was a major advantage that Star Force had, but the lizards likewise had their own unity…and since theirs was accomplished through restrictive means it was far stronger. Not better, but stronger and seemingly without deviation. The lizards fought as one team, sacrificing themselves for their race’s goals no matter how small. They’d die just so their civilization could test a theory, and that bond was not something to underestimate. It was wrong, but it was impressive none the less.

As the bombardment continued Krimja’s comm officer was periodically repeating an offer of surrender to the lizards every hour during times like this and more often than that during heavier action. So far in this assault they hadn’t received a reply back, and in all the other campaigns he’d been a part of had been the same. Surrender wasn’t an option. They would win or die, and they were all of the same mind.

Star Force had people that didn’t agreed, wanting to do things differently and often stupidly. Rather than suppress them through various means of control they were left alone, with those like Krimja having to earn their way into the ranks of those that held the power and responsibility. In that way those within his fleet here were just as united as the lizards, leaving the dissenters back in the civilian wings of the empire.

But there was one other factor to consider, for while the lizards rightfully appeared to be superior as far as unity was concerned because they didn’t have a portion of their population that wasn’t in sync with the rest, they had a high turnover rate. Star Force, because it stressed individual advancement, had the luxury of self-sufficiency. That wasn’t something that could be bestowed upon someone, it was something that had to be earned. Those who achieved it outlived those who did not, with the dissenters’ ‘opinion’ amounting to nothing. Reality was not based on opinion or point of view. You were either right or you were wrong, and in the case of self-sufficiency those who were wrong didn’t sustain themselves and died out, leaving larger and larger numbers of responsible people behind.

That was a sad reality, but one that Star Force was built upon. Everything was geared towards the objective rather than the subjective so people could measure and learn the truth. Opinion for the sake of opinion was pointless and worthless. The truth mattered, and anyone who had attained self-sufficiency understood that.

As far as Star Force knew the lizards did not attain self-sufficiency. Little was known about their inner society, but their computer systems had been hacked enough times to gain some knowledge of how they operated and there was no mention of self-sufficiency or its equivalent. Strength seemed to be based off of natural attributes and the only training they did was to maintain their abilities rather than enhance them.

Of course when you spent personnel so freely the idea of trying to extend your life was somewhat counterproductive. Theirs was a civilization that grew the society rather than the individual, whereas Star Force was a civilization that upgraded the individual in order to expand their society…and therein lay the conflict between the two in a nutshell. The lizards would attack without concern about losses, but Star Force wouldn’t allow so much as one death if they could prevent it, for the longer their troops lived the stronger they would get, meaning it was better to let go an immediate objective in order to play for future gains.

Star Force didn’t like losing, but knew that the death of a soldier was its own defeat and that trading one life for another was insanity. Star Force fought for everyone and sacrificed no one. That more than anything gave them a type of unity that the lizards would never have, and coming from a race that reproduced just as fast, Krimja was very fortunate that the Bsidd had found their way into Star Force rather than taking on the expendable philosophy that would have probably seen him dead long ago.

One of his status boards pinged with a visual marker as a new ship entered the system. It was one of theirs, a jumpship that had been on scouting duty further into lizard territory ahead of their invasion corridor. It was cycling back to rejoin the fleet and report, though it was odd that it was coming here rather than to a world on the grid so the info could be sent out immediately.

Krimja got his answer a few minutes later when a message from the ship crossed his console. It wasn’t directed to him specifically, but to the invasion fleet. He was in command at the moment so he read it, seeing the reason for the scout ship’s diversion. One of the systems they’d been sent to explore was not lizard territory…at least not yet, for it seemed there was a race there that had not yet succumbed to their attacks.

2

Krimja tapped three of his appendages together in a cyclical pattern making rhythmic noise as he read. This unidentified race was occupying a major system that contained 18 habitable planetoids. It appeared that six of them had already fallen under lizard control and there was a fight still progressing over the remainder. The natives still had a naval fleet in play with a number of large defense platforms ringing the worlds they possessed, though one of them was right now under assault…or rather was when this scouting report had been made.

The Admiral looked through the recordings, seeing that the natives were using a form of mauler point defense system. It wasn’t the telltale blue that Star Force was used to, but the sensor readings confirmed it was a derivative and the long range beam weapons were a spot on match for sammies, which made sense given that they were somewhat linked to the maulers, physics wise. That meant this race had tech still superior to the lizards, for while their phasers were considerably more advanced than plasma they didn’t pack the punch of the weapons they were squaring off with, though it did appear that the native’s versions were less potent than what Star Force used.

Krimja pulled up the few recordings taken of the fighting, seeing the distinctive yellow/tan cruisers of the lizards en mass assaulting a native station that was black as obsidian save for the weaponsfire. It was a mess of curves, more artistically designed than functional, but it was putting up one hell of a fight and it looked like the natives had at least 300 of the stations in orbit around this planet to supplement their defense fleet. Those vessels were angled blades, each at what looked to be just over a 90 degree bend forming stemless arrows. Rather than obsidian those warships were the stark opposite, looking like pale white stone and showing up easily to the eye even without their weaponsfire.

As usual the lizards had numbers on the defenders but the natives were sticking it to them, and given the location of this system they had to have been doing so for centuries. If all they’d lost in that time were a handful of planets then they were holding out better against the lizards than anyone had save for Star Force. Then again, if they’d been holding out all this time and the phaser upgrades had tipped the balance of power this race may have been looking at a losing curve, but still they were so well fortified that it was going to take the lizards a great deal of time to conquer them.

Krimja looked over their numbers, seeing a considerable fleet but with no major chess pieces. Was that because this location wasn’t important enough to warrant them or because these natives had a way of getting to them? He would have loved to have a full history of this war to study, for to date no one else had fought them, conceivably, this long and survived. The H’kar were the closest, but they’d gotten their asses kicked and their empire conquered before running to eventual sanctuary with The Nexus. These natives were an entirely different matter, especially because this appeared to be a single system civilization.

Then again that could just be an assumption. The surrounding systems were all lizard or unoccupied according to the scouting reports, but not all empires kept to adjacent systems. This race may have dozens of systems scattered throughout lizard territory or just this one…and all this time they thought that the mass of lizard-occupied space was completely dominated by them. Krimja wondered if this was just an anomaly or if there were other holdouts out there that weren’t bowing to the lizard fleets, having been swallowed up by their empire as it expanded around them, but refusing to be conquered themselves.

This one was fighting hard, but as far as the ground war was concerned he didn’t have any data. The scout ships had stayed too far away to get anything useful, but there were position plots on the contested planets and the lizard occupied ones indicating weaponsfire. From the look of it the lizards hadn’t been able to fully pacify their conquests in the system, leaving them still in contention, or perhaps rebellion. It was impossible to know from these records, but there was fighting still going on in a big enough way for spacebound craft to recognize and from the yields being measured there was an enormous amount of carnage taking place in there.

As he continued to pour through the records he did find several instances of starfighters being used, something that Star Force strictly banned. Even the lizards didn’t use them, though not for the same reasons. Star Force didn’t risk personnel needlessly, and in space combat starfighters were easy targets. The lizards used their cruisers as their naval backbone, reserving their wisps for atmospheric combat where they would be effective, but this race was using the fighters in space combat and apparently doing well for it. There were losses noted in the records, but whatever type of craft they were using was showing to be effective against the lizard cruisers.

“Busy morning?” a voice asked from behind him.

Krimja half turned around on his bench, with virtually every appendage he had bending in response to the surprise presence behind him. “You are far too quiet when moving.”

“I only have 4 limbs to worry about,” Mike-448 said as he walked up beside the Admiral and noticed some of the battle recordings he had displayed. “What’s this?”

“A scout ship dropped this data packet off two hours ago, I was just reviewing the contents.”

“Where is this?”

Krimja poked and prodded several different control buttons designed for his fingerless physiology and brought up a starmap showing the system in question only 39 lightyears from their current position.

“Who’s winning?”

“The natives still hold the majority of the system, but if they’re fighting now then that probably means they’ve been winning for a long time.”

“Send it to my console,” the mage said as he walked over to his commander’s chair and sat down with a plethora of data being shunted over to him as the all Bsidd crew continued to go about their tasks with shipboard operations and the planetary assault. In fact, Mike was the only Human onboard the ship that had been designed specifically for Bsidd physiology, but there was enough redundancy to accommodate all the Star Force races if necessary and he had a set of quarters designed for Human use along with a few spares in case any others came onboard.

All together there were 51 Archons in this invasion fleet and two Calavari, the latter of which were squadron commanders in the aerial division. The rest of the 569,000 troops were Bsidd, as were all of the jumpships and drones in the fleet. Any operation of this size and importance called for the leadership of Archons, but unlike a lot of other joint operations this one was entirely on the back of the Bsidd.

That went for every piece of equipment in the fleet aside from the Archon’s and Calavari’s armor, which they naturally brought with them. Everything else had been Bsidd designed and produced, though the jumpships were all standard models with slightly modified interiors. The drones were not the standard blocks that Mainline used, nor the spear-like designs the Calavari fielded, but rather thick discs that stacked on top of one another in cylindrical tubes within the jumpship. They were built of the same tech as the other models, but the Bsidd preferred the curves versus the angular lines of the blocks.

The blocks were stackable for maximum volume consumption, whereas the discs would always leave space in between the tubes due to those curves, but support apparatus was required for all drone models and the Bsidd had incorporated that into the gaps, meaning their choice of design left little wasted space. Additionally, those supports were mobile and could be arranged to accommodate different sizes of discs and even the other models of drones. The same went for all Star Force warships so they’d never encounter a situation of having to pick up and put a square peg in a round docking apparatus.

The jumpships could share drones if needed, but most used those that were built for them and all the drones in this fleet were the Bsidd discs. They were still in cutter, corvette, frigate, destroyer, cruiser analogs, meaning approximately the same internal space, engines, weapons, etc. The differences came in aesthetics and angular attack patterns, for like the Calavari drones the Bsidd had a narrow cross section to point towards the enemy if they were able, whereas the Mainline blocks were more built for omni-directional combat. All the drones were, but the remote pilots of the Bsidd discs like to bring them edge in against their targets to present as little surface area as possible for the enemy to strike back against.

The battlecruisers that were continuing the planetary bombardment were more like plugs than discs, but they held the same circular shape as the rest of the Bsidd drones while also being the widest. The smallest of them were the cutters and looked like game tokens they were so small and flat, but dock them together and interlink shields and you had a very strong defensive tactic to utilize. More often than not that ended up being a row of 12 or more cutters docked together being flown into enemy lines and surviving due to their linked shields, then breaking up and engaging individual targets, for while docked only their ridge weapons were given firing lines and that limited their damage potential.

That was just one little wrinkle in Star Force’s combat philosophy, and there were others for the Bsidd, not to mention the Calavari, Scionate, and every other faction. They all used common and compatible equipment but allowed for some diversity of design. That gave Star Force a few extra options in joint campaigns, as well as allowing for distinction and pride, with the Bsidd being quite proud of the drones they produced and the few extra tactics that they created.

Nothing in Star Force existed for tradition’s sake, with functionality and effectiveness always being the top priority, and that instilled an even greater sense of pride in a faction when something that was unique to them proved valuable. Paying lip service was a concept that had virtually disappeared from Star Force save for some of the civilian sectors, and everything that was built had a purpose. No pandering, graft, or waste. The Bsidd civilization had been built from scratch under the Star Force model and as a result, no matter how alien they physically looked to Mike, he always felt at home with them and had no trouble living on a ship with an entirely Bsidd crew. He was Star Force, they were Star Force, and they worked together seamlessly.

Mike was a member of Clan Meteor, which was Larissa’s Clan and therefore had the most Archons working with the Bsidd since she’d been the one to design their civilization and escort it through those first fragile years. Ever since then they’d maintained close ties and a good number of Bsidd were now part of the Clan themselves, for ever since Randy had taken a bazillion Kiritas into Clan Star Fox and claimed the title of ‘largest Clan’ by far, other Clans had been experimenting with recruiting non-Humans in far greater numbers than before, with most of the Bsidd going to either Clan Meteor because of Larissa or to Clan Ninja Monkey because Morgan was offering them a chance to fight immediately rather than doing mostly training and building like the other Clans.

Mike knew Clan Meteor was engaged in some of the invasions like this along with the Bsidd, but the vast majority of its members were working hard in either exhaustive training sessions or in constructing new colonies and upgrading the ones they already had. There was literally a mad rush on amongst the Clans that he’d never seen before and he couldn’t quite explain it himself, but everyone was prepping as if the V’kit’no’sat were coming back tomorrow…and it was theoretically possible that they would…but that had been true since the inception of Star Force and he’d never seen this kind of fanatical drive amongst them.

He didn’t understand it, but he did appreciate it. Everyone was psyched up and working harder than they ever had before, from Archons down to techs, to increase the power and prestige of their Clan…and when it came to prestige within Star Force, that boiled down to just one thing.

Responsibility.

Those who could handle the fights, the resource collection, industrial production, recycling efforts, colony construction, etc were the ones that had the power. Not so they could order someone else to go do it, but so they could do it themselves. The Clans wanted missions and to take on the toughest opponents, but only those who were capable within Star Force got those missions and responsibilities.

Back in the day before Star Force existed the word ‘responsibility’ was seen as a negative. Something that you had to do whether you wanted to or not. Now that was just the opposite. It was a privilege to be the one that others depended on, and you only got to be in that position if you were a badass, whether it be a faction, a Clan, a planet, a city, a group, or an individual. You wanted to be the guy in the hot seat when the time of crisis came, not the one running away from it and shirking the duty to give to another.

Likewise Star Force was responsible for the security of the ADZ and all the non-Star Force races within it. Why? Not because they’d been told to. Not because they were being paid to. Not because it was a burden they bore and didn’t want and couldn’t transfer to someone else. No. Star Force did it because it needed to be done and they wanted to do it. Not for reward or compensation, but because that’s what badasses did. They saved people, took on the challenges, and came through in the clutch.

That’s what it meant to be superior. You didn’t tell someone else to go fight your battles for you, you tell them to back off and let you handle it because you’re more capable. That was the proper place of the superior, on the front lines, not hiding behind a wall of ‘lesser’ valued personnel and planets.

And that’s what the Clans wanted. They wanted to be superior despite their small size. They wanted to matter when the times of crisis came rather than being stuck in the stands watching the action go down when the big dogs stepped in. The Bsidd were now one of those big dogs, and despite the skill level in the Clans being higher, their civilization size was far too small for them to handle more than a few ‘small’ missions.

The Clans wanted more than that, as much as they could get in fact, which was why they were pressing so hard. If the V’kit’no’sat came back 50 years from now, each of the Clans wanted to be the ones to engage them while others evacuated and ran, and there’d be a long line of volunteers for that duty, but only those most capable would get it.

That was the Star Force way. There were no sacrificial pawns like in chess and the disgusting warfare practices of other empires, with the lizards taking the prize as the most gruesome to date. Sacrifice was abhorrent, no matter how effective it might be in some limited circumstances. A properly outfitted and trained military would kick the crap out of any that used such darkside tactics, and with every year that progressed that military would grow stronger due to the fact that they wouldn’t lose people to attrition. Self-sufficiency was about more than just staying alive, it was the means to take the ordinary soldier and make them extraordinary over the course of centuries through a slow progression of skills and experience.

The longer that military existed and survived, the stronger it would become. That was why Star Force was now able to beat the lizards in virtually every battle and why their swarm tactics were becoming less and less effective. Technology aside, Star Force’s troops were just plain better and growing in skill with each passing year…whereas the lizards’ were dying off and having replacements grown, maintaining their current strengths and not advancing.

That was one of the many illusions in life getting busted in epic fashion. Many people thought that darkside practices were the way to greater strength, and that sacrifice on the battlefield helped the civilization by winning a battle on a single day at any costs…but the truth was the cumulative effect of keeping your people alive and training indefinitely pooled into some truly remarkable feats that were only now becoming evident.

And many races within the ADZ still denied what they saw, partly because they couldn’t understand it. A single Star Force commando with a few centuries of training to their name was now literally a demi-god when going up against ‘normal’ people, and even though a lot of what happened in the war against the lizards didn’t make its way into the news, Star Force security used commandos to deal with internal matters and those soldiers did interact with the ADZ races.

Many people claimed they were given cybernetic enhancements or other cheats, unable to simply accept the fact that being the good guys, while seemingly having short term disadvantages, gave you mind boggling power in the long term so long as you were wise enough to maintain and cultivate it over the progression of years.

To quote an old Star Wars philosophical debate, the darkside may have been the quicker, easier path, but at the end of the day the lightside was and always would be the stronger.

And what did the lightside badasses do more than anything? Save people.

“Admiral, cease fire and start loading the drones back inside the warships,” Mike said after giving the data packet a thorough look.

“We’re leaving?” Krimja asked for clarification.

Mike nodded. “The damage we’ve done here won’t be quickly erased, and either we or another fleet can come back and finish the mission later. Right now we have a more important task before us.”

“A rescue mission?”

“If these guys have survived this long, then we’re going to make damn sure they don’t get wiped out a few years prior to the safe zone reaching them. We’re skipping ahead and coming to their aid.”

“We don’t have any linguistics on them.”

“I know. We’ll have to make do when we get there, but once we start shooting the lizards I think our intentions will be clear enough.”

Krimja tapped one of his appendages against a console, giving a familiar signal to his bridge crew to carry out the order they’d just overheard. On his display screens the battlecruisers immediately stopped firing and began a slow retreat up to higher orbit as the lizard planetary defense batteries continued to paint one of their shields with diffuse beams.

“Drones are withdrawing,” he confirmed, turning around fully as he stood up and looked down at where the Archon was sitting reading through more of the scouting report. “Are we going in alone or calling for support?”

“Both. Dispatch a courier ship with an update and get this data back on the grid. If they want to send backup they can, but we’re not waiting. We’re heading straight there and taking pressure off these guy as soon as possible. If we can save lives by getting there a month sooner, we’re getting there a month sooner. Drop a few monitoring probes on our way out. I want to see how they respond when we’re gone. Schedule and log data retrieval before we jump out.”

“Gladly,” Krimja said as he walked back to his station and sat down, opening up the orders panel to craft and file the necessary requests to be sent back onto the Star Force grid with the courier as Mike continued to study the scouting report with great interest. Though the circumstances would have changed somewhat since the time this report data was collected and would change more during their travel time there he wanted to get well acquainted with the party the lizards were throwing for the locals before he crashed it.

3

February 22, 2826

Aphat System (Unknown race)

Inner Zone

The Archer 7 pulled away from its deceleration point in low orbit around the giant white star follow the pair of warships that had preceded it as the sensor feeds began to get returns. There was a small lizard fleet also in orbit around the star but some 36 degrees around the perimeter. There were many jumpships among them and Mike instantly knew this was either a troop or supply fleet holding station to resupply the lizard forces assaulting the system, for they wouldn’t leave empty jumpships just sitting around for months or years on end. They’d have a flow of supplies coming in, meaning these were probably at least partially loaded.

“Admiral, deploy drones and have the Archer 13 come with us and do likewise. Primary target is that nearby fleet while the rest of ours covers the entry point. Bring us with the drones, we’re going to need the heavier weapons.”

“Navigator, plot and execute course correction,” Krimja said as the Archon let him handle the details while he studied the updating battlemap. “Drones stand by to detach after we gain momentum. Comm, signal the Archer 13 to do the same and link them in with our navigational control. I want a simultaneous jump and us riding even with them. No lagging. The more time we take the greater the chance of those ships running.”

As the Bsidd sat down at his command station the bridge crew got to work carrying out his orders. Two decks below them there was a huge chamber filled with individual stations that half of the drone controllers now sat in. The other chamber was located a deck below and both were safely inside the central mass of the ship and very difficult for weaponsfire to find. Every station in both chambers was filled with Bsidd of varying types, all of which were soon to be assigned to some task.

Who went where and got what assignment was the purview of the bridge crew who, as soon as the issue to deploy came, assigned a pilot to each drone while another began feeding them navigational coordinates so they could get underway. The ‘coin racks’ in the back half of the ship began releasing the disc-shaped drones one at a time from each stack with them dropping below the ship and easing away into widely spaced escort slots as the Archer 7 made a fast transition around the star by enhancing its gravitational pull in order to facilitate the tight curve as they accelerated laterally.

The drones had to do so as well as soon as they left the inertial dampening field, but the bridge crew knew better than to try to fly a curved course during release and risk collisions when they passed through the barrier of the IDF and physics took over, so when the time came to release the jumpship’s engines went dark and the warship coasted in a straight line until all were out, then as a group they’d resume the curved trajectory around the star and up to the position of the lizard fleet.

The Archer 7 had a total of 56 drones onboard, including two of the battlecruisers. Those fell to the back of the formation and got a wide spacing before the course alterations began that resulted in all the ships spreading out as their individual engines and navigation calculations put them back on course. Once they were all pivoting on the star’s gravity well they eased back together, pulling navigational information from the jumpship to coordinate a somewhat precise arrival while other bridge crewers were handing out remote piloting slots.

The pilots in the two bays below the bridge were all waiting at their stations until a prompt would come up requesting that they take a control slot. If the pilot accepted then a function on one of the drones would be routed to their station. Helm control had already been divvied up before they left the confines of the jumpship, but now the weapon batteries, shield control, and auxiliary tasks were being handed out with many gunners getting two or more weapons each. How many tasks went to an individual pilot was a factor of how many drones there were for the total number of pilots available and what each of their ratings were.

There was a complex ranking system involved that was run by computer and allowed the bridge crew to hand out assignment in batches or individually as they chose, not having to know the history of each pilot but by selecting ‘best available’ for certain tasks. How much a pilot could multitask was also figured in based off of training scores and combat experience, with those more skilled being given multiple jobs so the less skilled could focus on one or two things and become more effective at them. The less one had to do in battle the more likely that they wouldn’t get overwhelmed. Each of these pilots knew their task and their task alone, for not one of them was assigned tasks on different drones simultaneously.

Each pilot was mentally on one ship, either through a neural interface or the holographic pocket of displays available to them in their little control nooks. They only knew what was happening to their ship, and often not even the whole thing if their attention was on a particular firing line. It was better if they knew what was happening directly around them, but more often than not the gunners didn’t just fire randomly at nearby ships. The bridge crew was also able to assign targets, whether they be individual ships or specific locations on those ships with battlemap markers.

Those virtual orders could also come from the ship’s Captain, the Admiral, or an Archon in a nexus. The gunners often didn’t know who the order was from, they just saw a glowing marker beacon on their displays to tell them that this was a priority target, then they’d decide what to shoot and when, for most of the time they’d have a slew of targeting markers to choose from that were color coded. Pulsing red was the highest priority, with red being very important and orange and yellow below that.

If something was worth shooting, like a comm array or shield generator, it would be marked purple so the gunners knew where to look without having to search themselves. If a marker went yellow that meant it was preferred that they shoot that one over the others. Orange was greatly preferred while red was ‘shoot it now.’ Pulsing red meant to ignore everything else and blow the hell out of whatever was marked as fast as possible.

But there were also other markers, with blue meaning ignore and green meaning don’t shoot at all. Allied ships shown with a green halo, while if a certain section of an enemy ship had something valuable onboard it’d be tagged with green, like the cargo you were trying to steal. If a ship was fighting as a diversion the bridge crew would mark it blue so the gunners knew it was still an enemy, but a waste of shots even if it was flying right in front of your guns.

The color system was different for each race and the control stations were modular so that if, say, a Human needed to replace a Bsidd all they had to do was hit a few buttons and everything from the holograms to button layout to seat shape would alter to match the individual logging into the system. Right now there were only Bsidd, but different variants had different sized bodies, so while their holograms remained the same their seats and button layout did not, for the small Eppies couldn’t reach the farthest buttons on an Alpha’s control board, and an Alpha couldn’t tag the small buttons as easily as an Eppie could.

Star Force had taken all possibilities into consideration, even changing some of the holographic color schemes into wavelengths of light that Humans couldn’t see because they stood out better for other races, and vice versa. The Bsidd had produced this warship, but since it was Star Force any race could use it, and use it on a moment’s notice. All the remote pilot had to do was log in and his or her presets would automatically update, including customized button layout, or they could choose from several default standards.

As these Bsidd controllers got their assignments their screens lit up with localized sensor feeds from the ship they were virtually on as well as having a panel where written orders could be displayed. In addition to that each controller had sound cues to give them additional data and even that very rare vocal communication from someone on the bridge. Each little nook they had was sound dampened via an energy field that allowed them to hear outside their little bubble of reality, but with reducing those sounds to a loud whisper so as to not drown out the various pings and warnings of the ‘gaming system’ they were using.

Every little detail mattered to the battle, and the remote pilots knew better than to get sloppy. If they couldn’t handle all the tasks requested of them they’d only accept the ones that they could, and if they got overloaded they could remit one or two back to the bridge where they would find another pilot to take on that duty…though in battle when you were losing ships the greatest workload would come at the beginning, for so long as a jumpship wasn’t lost you weren’t going to lose remote pilots and they’d share more and more of the tasks with the pilots from destroyed drones as time progressed, increasing overall efficiency as the workload was spread out.

When the pair of warships finally ended their tug on the star and leveled out they began decelerating on approach as the lizard fleet picked them up and a few of the ships began to move. As soon as the jumpships were within range they both launched bloons at the same target, with the glowing capsules carrying IDF-laced goo that hit and spread over portions of the lizard jumpship. More bloons followed, blanketing several ships as the others began to run. Even before the drones could get to them more bloons fired off, tagging and disabling ships for a short period of time so long as the IDF field covered all the internal gravity drives. Even one remaining active was enough to allow a ship to move, with several lizard vessels limping off in just such a condition.

A few large Keema blasts shot out across the gap, nearly invisible coming from the battlecruisers, and punched through the shields of the jumpship they hit. The batteries meant for surface bombardment worked well enough against the huge jumpships, but the handful of cruisers with them were too small and mobile to adequately target until the drones closed range…but by that time most of the lizard jumpships had flashed out, making emergency jumps elsewhere in the system to avoid the slaughter that they knew was coming their way.

The two warships and their drones closed with the six jumpships that were left behind as the bloon launchers continued to bathe them in the disabling goo else it’d expire and they’d be free to move again. Even the cruisers knew what was coming and had ran, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to do any damage to the Star Force ships with such small numbers, leaving the caught jumpships to their fate.

However, these ships were tens of kilometers long and didn’t explode with the push of a button. The orders going out to the drones were to disable, not destroy, so the bloon launchers wouldn’t have to sustain continuous fire to keep them in place. That meant first breaching the shields, with the battlecruisers handled nicely in conjunction to the heavy medium-ranged Keema batteries on the warships, then coring into and destroying the gravity drives no matter how deeply buried inside the ship they were located.

Other targets were the weapons batteries, which a portion of the drones went after so they didn’t whittle down the Star Force shields and cause damage during the long process that killing a jumpship took. As usual, Mike sent out an offer of surrender to the jumpships that they obligingly didn’t take. Though he didn’t like killing other starship crews, he didn’t want to be burdened with prisoners on a mission like this. They needed to hit hard and fast, though poaching cargo ships was still a bit distasteful for such an operation.

Fortunately slowing down Star Force with prisoners wasn’t a tactic the lizards had used yet, so Mike’s pair of warships held in place and slowly tore apart the 6 lizard jumpships until they were fully disabled and no more than helpless space stations floating in orbit. They didn’t bother to stick around to pulverize them, rather meeting up with the rest of their fleet that had arrived and proceeding further into the system where the bulk of the enemy forces were.

Mike studied the updating battlemaps as a few drones were sent to every planet for intel purposes. There were no active naval battles at present, but a huge chunk of the natives’ defenses had been wiped out of orbit around one planet and had a very large lizard fleet sitting in the rubble while the planetary defenders were taking refuge alongside their existing battle stations.

Admiral, have a look, Mike said telepathically through the wall from the nexus and onto the bridge as he sent a location ping to Krimja’s station showing him the location of that particular lizard fleet, though there were thousands of ships elsewhere in the system working on other targets and covering the ground troops they had on the semi-conquered worlds.

The Bsidd activated the comm back to the nexus in lieu of the telepathy he didn’t possess, nor any of his race did. That was another reason why the Humans were so suited to being the core of Star Force. The powers of the Archons were beyond impressive.

“A lot to chew, but I think we can handle it without losing too many drones. If they reinforce it’ll tip the scales and we’ll be in a messy fight.”

“I agree,” Mike said, sending the official order out through the nexus. “If the natives jump in we’ll coordinate as much as possible, but let’s assume we’re going at it alone for now.”

“I’ve got a designated comm officer standing by in case they try to make contact. Hopefully we can establish some rudimentary shorthand if they do.”

“I wouldn’t count on that, but try anyway,” Mike said, knowing that language differences didn’t only exist in spoken words but in computer systems as well. “Lizard would be the best bet if they’ve been fighting them as long as we think they have. Work it from there, but I’m not expecting anything so soon.”

“I hope to surprise you.”

“Please do. In the meantime, let’s work on the Bsidd’s kill count. Lots of ships out there to deny the enemy the use of, and in doing so let’s hope we make some new friends.”

“And if not?”

“We killsteal and run. Enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend, but we can still help these guys out regardless. Just watch our back in case they don’t take kindly to us being here either.”

“I’ll put a man on monitoring them while you go to work. If they head our way I’ll ping you well before they get within weapons range.”

“Thank you. Let’s get busy,” Mike said, cutting the comm and focusing as he linked fully with the nexus and immersed himself in the fleet. Krimja knew he’d communicate with him through the system unless something warranted spoken words and the Bsidd knew to reciprocate, for the less distracting the battlemaster the better. While his crew of remote pilots were damn good, they always fought more effectively with an Archon guiding the flow of battle and he didn’t expect today to be any different.

Settling himself on his bench he began setting up his control boards so he could also issue selective commands with a touch of a button rather than verbally shouting to his crew. When a Star Force warship went into combat the bridge didn’t get noisy, leaving everyone without exterior distractions so they could focus on their small part of the overall battle.

The Admiral’s role was that similar to the Archon’s, and he’d be backing him up mostly while looking for adjustments to make when necessary. Some Archons preferred to let their Admirals fight the battle and make tweaks, but Mike did not. He wanted to be in the hot seat from the beginning, which meant Krimja would be carrying out his general orders and adding the detail necessary so the Archon wouldn’t have to.

To that end he received his first vector allotment, indicating that Mike wanted three prongs to the attack, and the Admiral went about assigning warships to each with theirs being added to the central group first off.

4

The left prong to the Star Force attack skirted well wide of the lizard formation as it broke from its holding orbit and rearranged itself into swarm mode, clumping the cruisers together so they could mass fire on the drones. If they didn’t they’d get picked apart too easily, plus it would make it harder for ramming countermeasures to come into play. When necessary the lizards were still attempting to go kamikaze against ships though they didn’t try so many times against the jumpships knowing they had dampening shields that could slow their momentum or stop it entirely before reaching the proper shields.

The drones were a bit different, being much smaller and not so equipped, but the shield matrixes they carried were variable and could be retasked to emit the dampening fields in front of a target. That would leave the drone without shields itself, but there was only so much room inside their disc-like volume to accommodate weapons, engines, power cells, etc. Choices had to be made, but if a ship looked to be the upcoming target of a kamikaze attack the drones could be deployed into defensive alignment and blanket the trajectory with the dampening shields…which would act as a momentum slower and structured in a similar manner to the Archon’s Lachka ‘crash bags.’ They didn’t structurally link back to the emitters, rather laying down a cloying energy field and sustaining it to achieve the desired slowing effect.

In the clutter of a heated battle the drones were essentially vulnerable to lizard ships ramming them, but when those impacts occurred they were not at very high speeds and most likely would only diminish or breach a drone’s shields in addition to knocking it out of place. That would open it up to hull attack by the others around it while pancaking the much less sturdy lizard cruiser and it was a technique that was used on occasion, but with so many drones in play it almost seemed pointless because the drone in question would almost certainly withdraw, recharge its shields, then cycle back into the battle.

Whether or not that happened today wasn’t known to the remote pilots flying this prong of the attack, but they knew that keeping the enemy off the jumpships was the priority and unlike in previous eras the jumpships were most definitely coming into the battle rather than staying far beyond it, earning their titles as ‘warships.’ They were not glorified carriers, and had on them some impressive weaponry in addition to the bloon launchers.

Some of that weaponry launched out prior to any of the three prongs getting to target. Some were compact bloons mean to cheat the range limitations and get some mauler blasts on target, which in this case was just firing into the moving swarm of cruisers because the large core of lizard capital ships were lagging behind and letting the cruisers get in position to take the brunt of the assault, knowing that Star Force could smoke the bigger ships right off if they led with them.

Along with those bloons came a series of missiles, some small, some large, and all shielded. A hail of anti-missile phaser fire filled the area ahead of the missiles but a few hits weren’t going to be able to take them out and the missiles were being fired in groups with the leading few acting as shield ships to protect the ones with the payloads. As a result most of them got through to the inside of the lizard formations then found ships to detonate against.

When they exploded they didn’t damage the lizard ships, rather mushrooming out in gigantic energy fields that interacted with the lizard shields and drained them, some to the point of breaching the matrixes for those closest to the detonation points, in preparation for the incoming drones that entered Keema range within the next handful of seconds.

With the battlecruisers already firing their heavy, long range versions the medium Keema batteries opened up across the fleet as they coasted to a stop, intent on just poaching the lizard ships while staying outside their phaser range. That didn’t stop the lizards from returning fire, but when their phaser beams reached the drones they were diffuse and disintegrating, for like the Keema they were unstable upon release and didn’t continue indefinitely like a laser.

Though like a laser they did fan out, spreading their damage over a wider area rather than a pinpoint strike that would have the best chance of momentarily breaching a shield. As the lizard ships surged ahead to cut the distance the beams from both sides got stronger, though the Star Force Keema quickly peeked out and had them tagging the enemy hulls with shots powerful enough to breach through their yellow/tan armor plating with a single hit.

Once the lizards got within their prime phaser range the Star Force drones accelerated again, jumping across the gap to bring their short range weapons into play. Those were comprised of a few maulers and sammies but most were now Ta’lin’yi, with years of technical advancements making those weapons smaller and more potent, enough that most drones carried at least two. Those drones targeted the shieldless lizard cruisers, with their shield columns touching hull and blasting it away with fireworks-like results when the white/gold sparkling energy surge hit. All it took were a handful of Ta’lin’yi hits to take down a cruiser, allowing even a single drone to chew through one in under 12 seconds if the shields were already down.

But there were a lot of targets to choose from, for there were thousands upon thousands of lizard ships just in this one tendril that they were sending against the leftmost prong. That was typical and nothing the remote pilots hadn’t seen before so they didn’t panic, knowing what they needed to do and listening to the prompts their controllers were giving them, whether they were a crewer on the bridge, a ship’s Captain, or even the Admiral or an Archon. When they told them to do something they did it immediately, then filled in the blanks themselves when left alone amongst the fray.

That included everything from deciding which target to fire at to maneuvering the ship around the enemy vessels to get better firing lines, for the ships didn’t just sit still and shoot at each other. That would have been a death sentence for the lizard cruisers who didn’t have the armor, shields, or firepower for that kind of a slugging match, so they acted more like a slow flock of birds swirling about to deliver a few good salvos before running off to live to recharge their own shields.

Trouble was starships weren’t all that fast and the Star Force drones were faster, so it wasn’t uncommon to see the drones breaking formation to briefly chase down a ship and make a kill then circle back around to the group they were in. If you could stay with the flow you’d dominate, but let the lizards create a current of ships passing by you and they’d pummel you with weaponsfire you could not stop, for even if you destroyed a ship its debris would fly on by and there would be intact cruisers coming at you the next second, every second, as the mass of lizard ships acted in unison to try and take down individual drones.

The naval power scale had tipped so much in the past few centuries that the lizards were considerably outclassed at this point and even a cutter could take on two lizard cruisers and reliably win. That kind of dominance was countered with massive numbers, but the Bsidd fleet wasn’t going to let them use that advantage to its fullest. One reason for the three pronged attack was to spread their fleet out, but when the left prong engaged it fanned out even more taking small clusters of drones out at different angles and trying to get to the edge of the lizard formation. If they could do that then they’d essentially have their rear angles clear of enemies and be able to shift shields towards the incoming firepower and make themselves that much harder to kill.

The lizards knew this and always tried to keep ships surrounding the drones…but that also drew them further and further apart. It was a numbers game and if Star Force could spread them out enough they’d win handily. If the lizards were able to stay clumped up enough and still surround the drones then they’d have the advantage of attrition with the Star Force ships having to retreat and recharge or stay and risk destruction in order to rack up a kill count.

As it was they didn’t always have that choice. The remote pilots were good at anticipating when to pull back, and their controllers would ping them if they thought they’d overstayed, but there were never any guarantees and the flow of battle could change instantly. That was another tactic the lizards used, with multiple ships attacking different targets in a seemingly predictable way then all changing to a single target in the hopes of getting through its shields before it had a chance to pull back and retreat.

So not only did the remote pilots have to worry about who to shoot and when, they also had to look at positioning and try to avoid giving the enemy too many proximity possibilities to counter them with. That responsibility lay with the pilot of each craft and the controllers orchestrating the overall battle, and the ones the Bsidd had sent with this invasion fleet were all experienced in lizard combat so most of the predictable tricks didn’t work on them.

But they were always trying new ones, and it was Mike’s job to smoke those out and see ahead to any possible traps or opportunities from his position in the command nexus. He knew his troops would take care of the minutia of battle, as well as being consumed by it and unable to notice what was happening elsewhere. As the Admiral handled a lot of the duties coordinating the central prong of their attack that was heading directly for the larger lizard capital ships, Mike kept making alterations here and there but wanted to keep a clear head for the overall battle. Dive in too deep to micromanaging one piece of it and he’d lose perspective…which was the primary task he had and that others were counting on him for.

It was that big picture approach that allowed him to see the multiple jump signatures of ships entering planetary orbit as soon as they manifested themselves into strings of lizard reinforcements coming in from other fleets. They couldn’t jump en mass, fortunately, and these were not coming by jumpship either so they had some time, but on the larger battlemap there were strings of the ships arriving and maneuvering around planetary orbit while the main battle was underway. The lizards knew they had to keep their numbers up or they might as well retreat and it looked like they planned to do just that rather than concede Star Force this planet’s orbital swath that they’d taken from the natives.

Mike also noticed deployments from the native fleets, not heading for the huge battle that he was currently sitting in the middle of but the wide V-shaped ships were making slow course corrections from their current positions and heading towards the jumppoints the lizards were using, ostensibly to attack those reinforcements. The natives were still a wildcard in this, but he was glad that they noticed the opportunity for what it was and were throwing in at exactly the points needed while keeping their ships away from his own given their lack of knowledge of each other.

Mike had a limited knowledge of their capability, based off the scouting reports and snippets of battle that he’d observed, but he had no way of knowing how many lizard ships were incoming and how the natives would fare against them. He thought they could handle a good number of them but hoped they weren’t desperate enough to engage in reckless engagements. Mike’s Bsidd fleet could kill all the lizards in the system given enough time, they just had to be smart and cagey about it and not rush in head on to their numbers, splitting them up and whittling them down by using Star Force’s strengths against them and denying them the swarm tactics that the lizards relied upon.

But there was no way for him to communicate that to the natives, so all he could do was hope they knew what they were doing and didn’t let their desperation to aid in this seemingly victorious unknown raid cause them to lose a chunk of their fleet that they’d kept intact this long. He wasn’t sure how it looked on the outside, maybe the natives thought his ships were losing, for after all these centuries of fighting the lizards Mike could look at an engagement and size up the tactics of it instantly, both because he was familiar with his own fleet and had so much combat experience against the lizards.

Regardless, the natives were coming to the aid of Star Force and going to try and ambush the reinforcement fleet as they came into planetary orbit piecemeal. It was definitely an opportunity to exploit, but it was going to take some time for them to get there and they weren’t moving as fast as Star Force’s ships were capable of. That said, this battle wasn’t going to be over anytime soon given how much tonnage was in play and how long weaponsfire took to tear through hulls, armored or otherwise.

But unlike in the movies, when a starship was destroyed it didn’t vanish in a cloud of vapor. Every molecule was still there, broken apart or maybe in altered forms, but the mass didn’t disappear. That meant that with every lizard ship killed there was junk now floating in the battlefield and the lizards weren’t retreating from that mess. Mike knew that was on purpose because they wanted the wreckage to offer them cover to pin down Star Force’s movement options more than to block incoming weaponsfire. They needed the drones to be in one spot in order to mass a swarm of ships against them, so the more pinned down Mike’s ships got the better it was for them.

The mage sent a mental order to the Admiral and suddenly the Archer 7 accelerated up into the lead of the central prong, widening its forward shields and altering them into a physical plow while a secondary shield blocked the phaser beams that passed harmlessly through it. That umbrella caught and forced aside the growing debris, whether it be chunks of ship or pulverized hull plating that was now the consistency of sand floating ahead of them. Behind them the drones pulled in, traveling down the clear road as the jumpship began taking more and more hits from the surrounding cruisers.

Those were added to by the larger capital ships that Mike was pulling the central prong towards. Against Star Force those ships were not very effective, for their increased weaponry and armor aside, they didn’t stand up well in a slugging match, ironically making the cruisers better suited for handling the drones. The larger ships weren’t produced in numbers to successfully swarm opponents, and their larger size only made them easier targets per equal amounts of mass than a fleet of cruisers.

But they weren’t here to fight Star Force, they were here to conquer the natives who had a radically different fleet structure…which was why the lizards weren’t putting those warships into their front lines and trying to preserve them for cleanup if the cruisers were able to inflict enough damage.

Mike wasn’t waiting though, so with the jumpship plowing the road of debris and a few cruisers that refused to budge out of the way, he brought the central prong directly to the larger lizard ships only to have them scatter and run…at which point Mike tagged drone clusters and had them race ahead, ignoring all the cruisers and putting damage into the larger capital ships.

Meanwhile the cruiser swarm fell in on them, encircling the entire central prong and leaving the six jumpships in it surrounded enough that sensors couldn’t see much outside the cloud. If it hadn’t been for comm redundancy they would have been almost blind as to what was happening elsewhere in orbit, but Mike’s nexus links kept him in contact with all their ships and their non-clouded sensors, sharing data and keeping him in the know as he reformed the warships into a cluster of their own and created a pocket of ‘safe’ space between them where the damage drones were now rotating into since the edge of the enemy fleet was no longer accessible to retreat to.

5

Mike guided the battle in all three prongs from the nexus as well as watching the intervention of the natives on the reinforcement threads pouring more ships into the main battle. Until they got to those jumppoints the lizards had been gaining an advantage in that the cycling rate of the drones was getting higher and higher. When that happened there was a point of no return where ships would have to be brought to the front lines with full shields to replace those that were retreating, except that they hadn’t fully recharged themselves. At that point it was a grinding game with the drones’ extensive armor taking the hits, and it wouldn’t replace itself going forward like shield energy would.

So far they’d only lost two drones, both cutters that had been ambushed in directed attacks without enough time to peel off. The lizard ships that had stuck around long enough to kill them were likewise taken out in an exchange of 40 or so for 2, but it was mostly a desperate attempt on their part to take out any of the Star Force drones. With them gone Mike had slightly less firepower to work with, but it wasn’t significant as the rotations continued and it being a shield war at the moment. The lizards would have to burn through a lot of ships to get the drones down into the kill zone, for Mike wasn’t going to let a few more get killed in order to set up takedowns on groups of others given the need for all his drones going forward throughout this mission.

The lizard reinforcements had made things a bit iffy, but once that flow of ships was cut off Mike had fixed numbers to work with and saw that he had a narrow advantage. Keeping the ships moving and alive and only burning shield energy worked in sustaining them, then saw a reduced amount of incoming firepower as more lizard ships were killed continuously. He could have destroyed them quicker by just turning all the drones loose on offense, but he would have probably lost a few in the effort and damaged many others. The mage knew he had to be patient and the natives were giving him the time necessary to safely whittle down the lizards.

Mike kept a keen lookout for more ambush moves, preempting some and reacting quickly to others by sending in relief ships to literally surround the targeted vessel with their hulls to soak up damage and escort it into a ‘safe’ zone. He was holding off on using his few support ships and just working through rotations in order to preserve his fleet’s longevity. With every minute that passed the numbers tipped Star Force’s way and eventually a critical point came when the battle was clearly not going the lizards way and it looked like they weren’t going to be able to kill another ship, for the jumpships were soaking up so much firepower in the battle that they were essentially giving the drones pseudo shields by keeping the enemy sights square on them as they actively hunted down cruiser packs and disrupted their movement patterns.

Then the moment came when the lizard fleet altered its swarm disposition and sent out streams of ships away from the drones, running elsewhere in the system to regroup with other fleets rather than stay put and waste their remaining vessels only to burn away Star Force shield energy that would be fully replaced within half an hour.

But Mike didn’t just let them run, instead sending out a flurry of orders and tagging enemy ships to pursue in the hopes of making a few more kills before they could get to a jumppoint. He also sent drones out to the ongoing confrontations between the natives and the ships they’d drew off at the reinforcement jumppoints, for they were still engaged in battles that were not entirely in their favor and there were still lizard ships coming in. Mike expected that to end as soon as the lizards’ comm delays caught up and they knew that the battle was lost, but until then they were still a threat.

To their credit, all of the fleeing ships did not head towards those jumppoints. He expected that was because they wanted to kill some more native ships and didn’t want to draw Star Force’s fleet over to them before they could do that. Already Mike had seen some of the native ships get destroyed in the fighting and he wanted to minimize that as much as he could, especially since he’d been the one to start this fight and the natives were throwing in to help them out.

It took him a few seconds to get all the ships in his fleet tasked even with the neural interface, then the clumps that were the three prongs began to splinter with small groups headed after the fleeing ships and chunks of the fleet centered around the jumpships moving out towards the ongoing orbital fights. If that wasn’t enough to tell the lizards that Star Force was claiming domain over this planet’s orbital tracks then the battle song that he had all the jumpships and drones in the fleet begin broadcasting over numerous frequencies, including those the lizards used so he knew they could hear it, made it clear that this fleet wasn’t sitting put and relishing the beatdown they’d just issued, but going on full offensive and hitting everything lizard around this planet that didn’t pull out and run immediately.

The standard offers for surrender ended and the classic song ‘We will rock you’ replaced it playing on infinite repeat, with the Star Force fleet groups leaping across orbit pulling navigational feats that neither of the other two races could hope to accomplish and arriving on site within minutes rather than the 20+ it would have taken for the lizards to make the same trek.

As the Archer 7 came out of its microjump Mike’s foot began tapping with the rhythm of the song as he assigned targeting priorities with a few quick thoughts and grabbed control of the jumpship’s own main Keema battery for himself, targeting a very tricky shot between two native ships to hit a lizard cruiser and cut a trench down half its length that gutted the ship and turned it into a mostly dead hulk that acted as a shield for the native ships in the short delay before a Star Force destroyer slid into that spot and extended its shields out in a disc to block weaponsfire hitting around it and sparring the native vessels that were already showing hull breaches while it also fired back and pounded the nearest lizard cruisers.

Mike released control of the battery back to the remote pilots and tweaked a few alignments going forward, but by then it was pretty much automatic. His people knew what to do so he just mainly watched and waited for an opportunity to make changes if needed, but the short trip over to this location and the others for the various splinter groups had allowed them to partially recharge their depleted shield matrixes, virtually insuring that none of the drones would be destroyed short of their deployments getting sloppy or the lizards pulling some brilliant play.

Preventing both of those was Mike’s primary role here but none was to come to pass. The lizards’ ships were destroyed as they ignored the Star Force drones and focused exclusively on the natives, for those were the weak targets that they wanted to take out. For every one that they destroyed they could bring in more reinforcements later to compensate for any losses, so the emphasis was on doing damage and not the cost to the lizards, which was catastrophic for this small fleet of enemy ships.

Mike’s forces managed to keep all but one of the native ships intact once they arrived. That one had already been damaged prior to the arrival of the drones and a kamikaze cruiser got through the blockade and rammed it, bumping two drones aside in the process just to get the kill. As soon as the last active ship was destroyed or disabled Mike sent orders for rescue crews to get to the native ships and recovery crews to the remains of their two dead drones. It was unlikely that someone could reverse engineer them given the tech level Star Force now had, but they didn’t want to get sloppy with their trash and end up making someone a lot more powerful through negligence.

As soon as he sent the order he knew there was going to be issues with the recovery. The natives were an unknown, as was their biological needs. He didn’t even know if they could breathe the same atmosphere but he wasn’t going to risk someone dying from delay while they tried to establish some form of communication with the natives.

“Admiral, you have command,” he said through the comm as he deactivated the nexus after sending one last order for the other Archons in the fleet to assemble for possible recovery operations. “If we’re going to have a first contact situation we need my telepathy, so I’m heading to the hangar bay.”

“Understood. Still no response from hails.”

“Keep trying and cycle through all languages we have in the database. Maybe we’ll get lucky and hit on one they’re familiar with.”

“That’ll take a lot of time.”

“We just bought them time.”

“True. What are your standing orders?”

“We own orbit. Keep the lizards out but ignore the rest of the system save for recon until I say otherwise. I’ll be on armor comm in a few minutes if you need to reach me.”

“If you find survivors, will you be bringing them back here?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll play it by ear. Prep various atmospheric containment pods in one of the hangars and get the medtechs ready to adapt. If we can buy a few minutes with some prep I want them.”

“At all locations I presume?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make it happen and have a dropship standing by when you reach the hangar.”

“Keep an eye on the lizards and feed me updates. The dropships are going to be soft targets.”

“We’ll keep them out of reach.”

“I’m off,” Mike said, fully deactivating the nexus and turning about and into a run as he reentered the bridge and crossed it heading for the interior of the ship where his quarters were. When he got there he found his dark blue armor, or rather one out of three sets that he had onboard ship, and stepped into it within a few seconds. His feet went into already intact boots and his arms went into already intact gauntlets held in a statue-like pose with the rest of the armor being peeled apart in segments that included the helmet.

A mental command saw it all close up around him and lock into place. He sent another mental command to retract the helmet, sensing a 3 second holding ‘aura’ with in his mind.

“Retract helmet,” he said, enabling the safety protocol to release. His helmet split apart and the segments slid back down around his neck and behind his head, leaving him breathing free air and able to twist his neck side to side and backwards without being hindered, but with the segments piled behind his neck and acting as a bit of protective collar triggered with the binary command so that a rogue thought wouldn’t see the helmet splitting apart when one was in, say, a toxic atmosphere or no atmosphere at all.

The same protocol was in effect for the rest of the armor, but the quick in-and-outs were worth that little speedbump, though he had to telekinetically smooth his pant legs down inside to get some wrinkles in his casual uniform out. Another mental command crunched the armor down around feet, shins, thighs, waist, and every other part of the armor that had been designed to give him some room for internal movement. When it contracted down to his predetermined body form he felt himself mentally slip into battle readiness with his feet gripping the ground and able to twitch in any direction necessary in a split second. He didn’t have Kex like Jason did, but he could launch himself into a full aerial flip with barely a split second of preparation in order to jump over something flinging at his ankles…which was hard to do with loose boots.

As soon as he got his armor locked into place he headed out through the ship and to the hangar bay, finding a dropship waiting for him with a small crew of Bsidd all in either combat armor or envirosuits, some which appeared to just be getting to the ship a few seconds ahead of him.

“Ready for departure, Archon,” one of the Gammas said, standing next to a pair of Alphas in combat armor and a few other of the slightly larger ‘workers.’ Mike knew the Admiral had sent them here because they were the strongest of the Bsidd…not taking training into consideration…and could lift or pry apart debris and carry modular equipment better than any of the rest of the ship’s crew. The Alphas were armed, lightly, and were both Bsidd commandos there for security to watch Mike’s back and those of the other Bsidd just in case something went awry…like a group of lizards showing up or the crew turning on the rescuers.

Mike took a quick glance, confirming that they both had one lethal and one stun weapon, keeping their options open to deal with the unknown.

“Let’s go,” he said, walking through the small Sparrow-class dropship and into the cockpit.

“Where to?” the Epsilon variant pilot asked.

“Any of the tagged ships that their own vessels aren’t at.”

“Do they have rescue parties deployed?” he asked as they lifted off the deck and drifted towards the energy field separating the bay from space as the heavy blast door over it slowly retracted with a bright splash of sunlight shooting inside the crack.

“Not as a few minutes ago, but I hope we’re not the only ones picking up people. Get me within 400 meters of the hulls and I should be able to sense if there are living crew inside.”

“Really?”

“Archon magic,” Mike said, referencing a term that a lot of others had come to use when they didn’t feel like explaining something. “No point wasting time searching empty debris.”

“Proceeding to the nearest target,” the Bsidd said, setting a course around the various debris chunks and getting a few pea-sized hits as soon as they left the jumpship.

Mike took a deep breath and centered himself before extending his Ikrid out in spherical mode well beyond 400 meters. Technically there wasn’t a fixed ranged, for the ability kind of acted like a rubber band in that you could stretch it out via cone mode and the tighter you restricted the cone the further it would reach. He wanted the dropship close enough that he wouldn’t have trouble searching the ship segments, as well as being able to pick up faint lifesigns that could be missed at the outer edge of his range, for unconscious minds didn’t register as well as conscious ones.

The first chunk of ship they passed Mike scanned thoroughly but there was nothing living aboard. He had the pilot tag that piece on the battlemap as having been searched and then they moved on to the next ‘needs to be searched’ tag. They passed by five of them before he picked up a group of closely packed minds in the right ‘wing’ of one vessel that had been chopped in half by weapons damage or an internal explosion.

“Stop here,” Mike said, focusing his Ikrid tighter so he could squeeze out a bit more detail. “There’s at least 20 holed up here. I think…I think they’re stable but it’s hard to tell.”

The Bsidd in the pilots chair glanced up at him in question.

“Never mind, just find us a way onboard,” Mike said as he turned around and went into the back of the ship with the six others. The pilot would be staying here, but the rest were coming with him.

“Pack up, we’re going over,” he said, keeping his own hands free as he took position by the rear hatch. The Bsidd picked up a lot of equipment and waited behind him, each of them towering at least a foot taller than the Human and wearing purple/black armor. Their battlecasts were more flexible than the Archon’s, in that their hard plates only covered select portions but the ‘soft’ pieces were still more resilient to weaponsfire than the original Archon armor had been. Add on considerable shield strength and the Bsidd were anything but weak, and the envirosuits themselves were lightly armored so as not to get pierced by debris or low level weaponsfire.

Mike wouldn’t have been bringing men wearing those over if there were any suspected lizard activity, but only the soldiers had combat armor sculpted to their forms and he needed the jumpship techs to handle the bulk of the recovery operations. He stood at the ramp until he got a confirmation from the pilot that they were in position, then hit the door controls and an energy shield snapped into place a moment before the ramp cracked open and lowered to reveal an internal deck of the derelict chunk of ship that was now open to space.

“Me first,” Mike said, jumping through the shimmering blue field and into zero g for the two meter coast that ended with him getting his adhesive fingertips on a severed structural beam, then he turned around in the void of space as his armor switched over to internal oxygen. “Safety line.”

One of the techs threw an object through the field and Mike pulled the toss to him telekinetically, attaching it a few meters in so they’d have a firm line to hold onto and wouldn’t risk careening off into space if something went wrong…and in the Bsidd’s case ‘holding on’ involved wrapping two appendages around the line like a hoop, insuring that they didn’t float off, for the artificial gravity was out in at least this piece of the ship.

“It’s fixed. Let’s go,” he said, moving on into the exposed corridor and pulling the line with him.

6

Mike attached another nub some thirty meters down where the corridor made a sweeping turn up and to the right. That provided a solid point for the line to feather to, letting it stay slightly loose in between as the mage continued to lay cord down as he bounced his way from one wall to the other and up the corkscrew tunnel. The minds that he was sensing were nearby and all clustered in one area, but since he didn’t have a schematic of the ship he was just guessing which way to go aside from a little Pefbar help.

There was no grid-like pattern to the corridors so he just strung line where he went and left it in place when he had to backtrack, starting a new line inches from the old and heading off in another direction until the chamber the minds were in came into Pefbar view. From there he was able to see the route necessary to get there…along with the emergency blast doors that had cut off the survivable section of the ship from the decompressed areas.

There was no power here so he and the Bsidd were having to work their way through using nightvision and some tiny lights being emitted from their envirosuits and armor. Mike didn’t need his, for he had his Pefbar, and when he came up to the blast door he saw that it was more than a foot and a half thick using his psionic sense.

He waited for his team to catch up, then grabbed a piece of equipment from one of the Bsidd and helped him stretch it across the width of the corridor. It was a flexible hoop that both of them went about extending and melding to the floor, walls, and ceiling with some reliable adhesive, both to keep the atmosphere contained and to keep the mount from moving with the pressure. They put it two feet back from the blast doors then activated the portable shield generator and a blue film covered the corridor.

“What the hell…” Mike mumbled.

“What’s wrong?” one of the Alphas asked, with a pair of mandibles dropping over its stun gun.

“These minds are familiar. I think this is a race we’ve encountered before.”

“Which one?”

“Give me a moment,” he said as he floated in place and lightly disconnected his mind from his surroundings as he reached out to one of natives ahead. He could pick up thoughts and voices, both of which were not in any language he recognized, but he was able to hack into one of their bodies and see through their eyes.

The room was dark, for apparently the entire ship had lost power save for some few emergency systems. Mike saw a few status lights in the dark, but what drew his attention immediately were the faces and hands of the crew…for they were glowing a mixture of red and green. That was the wrong color, but there was no mistaking the body structures, including the hard carapace covering their heads and running down the back of their necks and beneath their uniforms. It was the telltale partial exoskeleton that, combined with the glowing skin, told Mike who this race was.

The Archon activated his comm, but also opened a channel to let his team hear his conversation so he wouldn’t have to repeat himself. “Admiral?”

“Here.”

“We haven’t met face to face yet, but the survivors on the other side of the blast door are some variant of Protovic. Dig up all known variations of their language and see if one is compatible with the natives.”

“Protovic? How?”

“I don’t know, but these have red/green skin instead of purple/green. I think we’ve stumbled onto a mystery that a lot of people are going to want to know the answer to.”

“If you haven’t seen them how do you know what color they are?”

“I managed to pull a feed from within the room they’re currently in. They’re just about the only thing glowing, so I think it’s safe to assume most of this ship is dead. Send over a shipment of envirosuits compatible with Protovic physiology.”

“Human sizes?”

“Basically. If they don’t have any of their own we’re going to need to get them out through vacuum. Have the other rescue teams similarly equipped. If you get even a hint of a comm line to the natives I want to know immediately.”

“Understood. Anything else you need?”

“A lightsaber would be useful, but other than that, no.”

“Team 4 has arrived on site and is attempting to recover three survivors.”

“Get as many as you can. Have the Protovic ships moved to recovery positions?”

“They’re sniffing around, but haven’t made any real attempts yet.”

“Give them a wide berth, but if they get near one of our teams have an escort drone standing by in case we need to peel.”

“Already on it. We’ve got your back.”

“Copy that. Keep me updated,” Mike said, cutting the comm and returning to his team’s frequency. “You get all that?”

“What eyes did you have on the other side of the door?” an Alpha asked.

“Telepathy.”

“Can you use it to contact them?”

“I can do better than that. In the meantime get some atmosphere on the other side of the shield,” he said as he went meditative again. One of the Gammas pulled himself past him using the ceiling line and deposited a canister on the other side of the energy shield, hitting a button and holding it steady so it didn’t blow itself out of the contained space as it released its solidified gases. Per its design it consumed the fuel reserve it had up until the atmospheric pressure reached desired levels, then it stopped releasing nitrogen and oxygen and began swirling around what was there through an intake vent and heating it towards room temperature rather than the frigid cold that it now existed at.

Mike let the Bsidd watch his back as he connected with the crew again, finding one of the healthiest ones and taking over control of his body. The Protovic slipped into a state of sleep that made it very suggestive and allowed Mike to order him about without having to worry about controlling every single muscle contraction in its body. He heard questions from the others as the Protovic moved out of the room, then he thought better of it and took a moment to knock all of them unconscious before taking his puppet out through the corridors and over to the far side of the blast door.

The emergency system still had power, and through the knowledge that this one contained he was able to identify the override sequence necessary to open it. The Protovic did the button pressing while Mike did the coaching, then when the thick doors split and retracted into the walls there was a bit of atmospheric bump as the two sides mixed, but the energy shield held without incident.

Mike pushed his way past the Bsidd who was putting away the partially depleted canister and gently shot himself through the door and over to the glowing face and hands inside a white uniform that clashed with the dark green of the corridors…or it would have if they had been able to see them, but the Archon knew what the interior of the now dark ship was supposed to look like, for he was still in this one’s head.

He gently withdrew his presence, letting the Protovic wake up slowly while he pounded him with reassurance and impulse of ‘ally,’ ‘friend,’ and ‘rescue.’ That said, the Protovic jerked fully awake when he finally saw the similar silhouette of the Human and the totally bizarre silhouettes of the Bsidd.

Mike spoke to him telepathically, not knowing the right verbal words, and eventually was able to settle the male Protovic down. Instructing him as to what to do next was a long 15 minute process, but eventually he was able to establish a rudimentary language between the two of them and decided right then and there to keep this one with him to act as emissary to the others they were hopefully going to rescue after this group.

With a wordless understanding reached, Mike and his new best friend floated through the dark hallways with the Protovic functioning as a mobile flood lamp and spraying red and green light wherever he went. When they got to the single room with the others inside the Archon let the Protovic go in first as he gently woke the others, then let him explain what was going on.

That took less than 30 seconds before what was left of the crew came floating out eager for rescue and knowing that these people were the ones who had come to their aid in the space battle. Apparently that was enough to establish trust…along with the fact that the air was getting stale and without at least moderate repairs to the ship they’d all suffocate or freeze to death, though Mike did see what looked like portable equipment, possibly heaters, set up in the room they were exiting.

One of them was missing an arm and a good portion of the skin over the right side of his face. The tissue underneath did not glow, nor did the blood that looked dark where it had dripped over his illuminated skin. The others had burns and gashes from what looked like fragmented debris strikes, with only about a third of them that appeared undamaged, though their mental states were considerably distressed.

With the help of his emissary they got them all into Human-sized envirosuits and onto the hand lines with the Bsidd escorting them out to the exposed hull and across the short gap to the waiting dropship. Mike had already called for another, for there were 34 Protovic survivors and they weren’t going to all fit in the sparrow. Once it was loaded up and the tether line disconnected it flew off, with another dropship, an Eagle-class this time, coming in and taking up position to rescue the rest of the survivors.

A third dropship came to pick up Mike and his team and take them over to the next location where survivors had been spotted, for one of the other Archons had assigned himself to spotter duty and had been flying around mentally scanning all the debris to save the search teams time. He’d kept the one Protovic with him and used him as an intermediary with the few other survivors they found and got them off their ships, or what was left of them, without complaint. That said, there were a few groups that had been identified that lost people before the Archons and Bsidd could get to them.

One Protovic shuttle was seen moving about looking for survivors, but other than that there was no help coming from them. That bugged Mike a lot, but he knew that a lot of races didn’t care about rescuing survivors from debris. It was a difficult process if you didn’t have the right equipment and some people didn’t bother to try…while others did but at a leisurely pace that often saw people lost due to a lack of alacrity.

Regardless, by the end of it he and his teams spread across all the orbital battlefields recovered 389 Protovic, 32 of which were near death. Four of those didn’t survive the trip over to the jumpships, and even the crude regenerators that Star Force now fielded weren’t enough to revive them. Had they a V’kit’no’sat model onboard that probably would have been another story, but there were so few of them in existence that even a mage of Mike’s standing didn’t rate one being sent with this invasion force.

The Star Force version didn’t melt, but was shaped like a mechanical mushroom that unfolded into bands and plates that cradled the injured part of a person’s body and set to stoking the natural regenerative processes. It was appropriately colored green and referred to by many Archons as the ‘extra life,’ and thanks to the Protovic sharing a physiology that was already logged in the Star Force database the units this fleet carried were already capable of fully treating the wounded, including the regeneration of severed limbs. That would take days, if not weeks to fully accomplish, but those Protovic that they got back to the jumpships still alive would all make full recoveries going forward. Those that had missed their window of opportunity had been mere minutes shy of making an eventual full recovery.

That was why rescue operations couldn’t be delayed and why Mike had ordered them immediately. Fortunately the lizards didn’t try any shenanigans in planetary orbit while the operations were going on, but he learned they were doing quite a bit of relocating throughout the rest of the system now that they knew there was a Star Force fleet in play. They needed far more ship concentration than they’d had here to deal with his drones, and by pulling ships in from multiple other locations they were assembling a big enough armada that Mike’s troops might not be sufficient to deal with them.

That meant there was a lot of strategy needed going forward and the lizards weren’t going to make it easy on them and keep themselves spread out enough to get picked off in smaller engagements such as the one they’d just fought and won. Mike didn’t have the ships he needed to quickly cleanse this system of the invaders, but he could still do it if he took the patient approach. In lieu of reinforcements that he didn’t have coming that was how he was going to have to play it, but for the moment establishing communication with these Protovic was his top priority after ensuring they got all the survivors recovered.

By the time Mike got back to the Archer 7 there was still no reply from the Protovic in response to any of the languages they attempted, which was understandable given that these Protovic were obviously not the same as those they were allied with…unless the red coloration was some secret that Star Force had never been told about. If these Protovic had split off from the others a very long time ago then they might not share a similar language now, but it had been their best bet other than lizard, to which they had not responded either.

So Mike took his Protovic emissary with him to a room on the jumpship that had database access and pulled up the visual information about the other Protovic and tried to translate as much nonverbal information as he could to him. He could clearly sense his shock at seeing the photos, as well as the satisfied conclusion that if Star Force was allied with the other Protovic then that made them allies of theirs as well, which was why they’d come to their aid.

That wasn’t true, for he’d had no idea this system contained Protovic, but given the lack of translation he wasn’t going to bother trying to explain that bit of detail, especially when it seemed that this one was slipping into the role of ally almost automatically. That was a big step, especially if his kin would reciprocate, but without a reliable means to communicate with the natives any combat coordination was going to be limited going forward and Mike knew he couldn’t just let the lizards have oodles of time to reposition and prepare for the beatdown that was coming their way. If he made a misstep they’d make him pay for it, and their victory here was not a sure thing…though he knew if he handled it correctly the lizards wouldn’t be able to stop them.

How many Protovic they killed before then was another matter, for there were still ground campaigns ongoing. Mike didn’t like the idea of setting down troops without the ability to talk to the Protovic, for the chances of misunderstandings or paranoia were high and he wouldn’t stand for a single soldier of his to be killed because of it.

He also wasn’t going to let the lizards have time to kill Protovic while he twiddled his thumbs in space either, so he had to come up with something.

After several hours of tedious telepathic chats with his new friend whom he’d dubbed ‘Candy Cane’ he let the man return to the rest of his crew that were going to remain on the jumpships until they healed. He ordered the Admiral to give the man comm access so he could try and talk to his own people, that was, if they could receive and decipher the Star Force transmissions. If their computers talked in a totally alien language as well then that was going to be a no go, but they had to try regardless.

Meanwhile Mike caught a quick nap for a couple of hours then took a short run and headed back to the command nexus to begin working on his next move…and seeing what the lizards and Protovic were going to make theirs.

7

March 3, 2826

Aphat System

Jmry

Mike sat hunched over inside the cockpit of his skeet, his Archon armor sliding into grooves in the seat designed to match it perfectly and give him a relaxed pose even while leaning forward and essentially resting his chest on the angled padding. His hands and feet were leveraging manual controls while his mind was partially linked into the neural interface and giving him the sensor feeds directly rather than relying on the holograms surrounding him. His eyes were closed to slits with him barely seeing the images around him through his own visual senses, though he was very aware of his body as he feathered the controls and eased his aerial fighter down beneath the ridges outlining a valley where a Protovic outpost was under siege.

In the days that followed the first orbital battle there had been no progress on finding a common language, or even roots of one, but an agreement had been reached on landing troops to fight the lizards on one of the 4 held planets with advancing lizard incursions on them. It was more of a point and nod ‘yes’ exercise than an actual agreement, but the Protovic knew Star Force was coming down to aid them in the fighting and that was pretty much all they had to go on.

Leaving the Admiral in command of the fleet after considerably thinning the lizards’ system ship count, Mike had come down with the ground troops and helped rout an invasion of a city. Trouble was, Protovic cities weren’t self-contained. This one had buildings sprawling across a wide area in splotches without a defined perimeter. Some lizard troops had gotten into sections and dug in, but Mike and the Bsidd had kept most of their troops blocked from ever getting that far, then he had gone in and helped located and eliminate the interlopers less than an hour ago.

Once finished there he’d ordered his troops out to other locations and hopped in a skeet enroute to another front. This section of Jmry was falling apart under the lizard assault and he didn’t have time to waste transitioning from one to another. He was tired, but sitting in a cockpit wasn’t going to stress him much, prompting him to put off a sleep cycle until he’d helped his troops keep this military outpost from falling to the lizards.

Columns of infantry and mechs were making their way up the valley, already having cut off the lizards’ reinforcement lane here and attacking them from behind, but as was typical the enemy had multiple fronts and had encircled the Protovic in this very treacherous circuit of canyons with an uncertain amount of troops in play. Mike expected them to have been dug in by now, with him flying on ahead to scout the area.

His Pefbar did him no good at this altitude so he had to rely on the skeet’s sensors entirely to search with, but his gut told him there was trouble here and that he was flying into hazardous terrain. That proved true about a third of the way up to the Protovic bunker as a burst of anti-air fire came from a nook in the canyon. A few splinters of plasma hit his shields before he was able to roll out of it, then he went evasive and drew fire from at least half a dozen more hidden weapons batteries.

Which is what he had hoped would happen. Better for the enemy to shoot at him than his troops, with him drawing them out of cover so that crew in orbit watching could tag the locations of the weapons hidden amongst the rocks. The lizards still hadn’t created a good replacement for their anti-air plasma weapons that utilized ‘fire and forget’ packages, and Mike knew well how to handle the glowing green splinters flinging up at him from seemingly everywhere.

Rather than flying up he went down, cutting under the firing cones of some of the batteries and letting his superior shields take some hits while he kept moving and dodging based off of the targeting tendencies he’d learned over the years rather than seeing and reacting to the weaponsfire that was far faster than his craft. He kept his speed up and hugged the terrain, eventually sliding up the slope and peeking over the far side and down into another valley, this one wider and more heavily forested. The entire area was choppy with washed out ‘roads’ that the infantry and mechs were making use of. They were visible from the air but the source of the anti-air fire was coming from the clumps of trees.

Mike saw them but couldn’t study their placements, running the gauntlet as long as he dared before pulling up hard and shooting straight up into the sky, taking some lucky shots to his right wing stub that didn’t penetrate as he got outside of their weapons range. The mage rolled his fighter over once high enough above the terrain that he didn’t need to worry, which was when he noticed a blot on the horizon to the west.

A quick check of the battlemap showed him that the blot was a lizard cruiser coming overland.

“Where the hell did that come from?” he wondered, setting a direct course for it while seeing a drone corvette heading down from orbit on an intercept course. It was going to be late, though, with the cruiser going to get to his ground troops before it could get shot down…and with various Protovic settlements spotting the countryside he couldn’t risk calling on orbital batteries to try and take it out. Even then there wasn’t much time to get the ships into position. The lizards had slipped a warship past them and it was going to be here within a couple of minutes.

Mike mentally tagged all the fighters in the air nearby to rally to him as he set course to intercept the cruiser at least a short distance away from his troops on the ground. There were 3 squadrons within range, each of which contained 10 fighters. The pilots were a mix of Bsidd Thetas, Eppies, and Zetas, all medium to small sized variants, and flying Y-shaped skeets known as ‘Behatis’ that were about 30% larger than Mike’s craft. They also had three engines, each on the ends of the spurs, but had a larger midsection bulge than the skeets did, which allowed even the largest Bsidd variants to pilot them if necessary.

When a smaller Bsidd was known to be the pilot, the cockpit was sectioned off and the excess space given to modular upgrades, including cargo compartments, additional fuel cells, a secondary shield generator, comm equipment, or a variety of other tech to take advantage of the size of the craft. It was a design concept built specifically for the Bsidd and only a couple of decades old, but the behatis had already replaced all other aerial fighters in popularity and was now the only design being actively produced.

Where the Calavari had their Valerie the Bsidd now had their Behati, but Mike was sticking with his skeet like the rest of the Humans, though his was the only one in the sky at the moment. There were also a few gunships of Bsidd manufacture to deal with lizard wisp swarms if they were to come their way, but so far that hadn’t happened. The lizards had air assets on the planet, but since they were the invading army rather than the defending one those numbers didn’t tilt into the insane and most of what was here had been chewed apart previously by the Protovic and their flying ‘Javelins.’

Mike was in his skeet to help identify and take out surface targets, as were the other fighters nearby, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do what they were primarily designed for…which was taking down aerial targets, even if they were really big ones. His skeet had two mauler cannons and the behatis had one each, meaning that with enough hits they could disrupt the cruiser’s shields and get some hits into the hull. Problem was they needed to take this thing down quick before it had a chance to pound the infantry.

Mike had mechs in play on the ground that would add considerable anti-air fire, not just from typical anti-air batteries but from all their weapons, for you didn’t need any specialization to shoot up into the air at a slow moving target. To that end he accessed the battlemap and fed commands out to the mechs to fire every missile they had at a point he then specified, splashing a virtual marker on the quickly approaching cruiser.

A moment later little plumes of fire leapt up from the ground at multiple locations down in the one canyon and arced over to travel horizontal to the cruiser. There was a slight delay, then a billowing cloud of fire and smoke built up on the leading edge of the enemy ship that it kept trying to push its way through, eventually succeeding but coming out of it with weakened shields…albeit temporarily.

Mike shot his fighter ahead at the best speed he could manage, getting into mauler range before the behati squadrons and pulling the trigger after selecting a double linked blast from his customizable control board, sending two blue blips of shield-disrupting energy at the front edge of the cruiser.

Klakten was with a group of Betas down on the canyon floor when the overhead sun was eclipsed by the front of the lizard ship as it appeared in the sky above them, crawling out over the rocky ridgeline and firing a pink phaser beam down at a madcat. It hit the left missile box and nearly penetrated the mech’s shields, but the Bsidd walking machine did what it did best and leapt ahead into a running gait as it turned its weapons skyward and added to the other streaks and orbs of weaponsfire reaching back up towards the cruiser, making the next phaser burst miss by a couple of meters as the madcat pilot juked the mech around in a randomized pattern.

Apparently the lizard gunners weren’t that good, but all it would take was one shot to kill Klakten or any of the other infantry. Their armor and shields couldn’t stand up to that kind of firepower, and there were already waypoints leading to places in the canyon that would provide some cover in the terrain, though he knew the trees wouldn’t do much to protect them. He sprinted with the others nearby over to the edge of the canyon, putting as much angle as they could between them and the rest of the enemy warship as it continued to creep out overhead and expose more weapons batteries to the troops below.

More and more pink rain followed, but at least it seemed to be targeting the mechs rather than the scattering infantry. Klakten kept his rifles silent, knowing that shooting up at the big ship wouldn’t do a damn bit of good and could alert them to his position. When he got under the tree cover he weaved through the thin trunks and found a bit of rock to hide behind, but he could still see the yellow/tan hull above him through the breaks in the leaves.

Suddenly his battlemap lit up with proximity warnings in the direction of the distant Protovic outpost, indicating that there were enemy ground troops approaching.

Figured. Bring in the warship overhead and flood them with a wave of infantry for double trouble. Oh well, at least now he’d have something to shoot at.

The Bsidd soldier variant pulled out one of his rifles and took up a better sniping position as those around him were doing likewise just as the first little green bastards appeared running up the center of the canyon out in the open…by the hundreds. They flooded out around the feet of the furthest mech that was shooting at the cruiser, then the eight-armed ‘Docite’ wheeled around and punched two of them into the ground, mashing them to their deaths as point defense weapons on the other arms began chewing the lizards apart by the dozens.

Infantry weapons began to spew tiny blue plasma streaks and sammy sniper bursts from both sides of the canyon, taking down more of the lizard infantry that was only armored with a light protective vest that had never done well against Star Force weapons. It might block a shot, or half of one nowadays, reducing damage done but not preserving them as proper armor would, so they went down easily, with many more coming up from behind those falling to replace them.

With the locations of the Bsidd infantry noted, the flood of lizards fanned out towards the sidewalls and Klakten knew it was go time. He kept firing as he lit his six plasma rods covering the end of some of his appendages and launched himself out of cover along with a few of the others. He ran four steps, shooting one lizard in the head before poking another with one of his glowing limbs. The blue tip discharged, blowing a hole into its head before he swung the same rod to the side and discharged from another segment into the arm of a second lizard.

With six rods to work with he was hacking through the lizards with ease while still shooting some with his rifle, throwing down so much firepower that they didn’t have a chance and the other Bsidd were no different. Unless the lizards could get enough hits to get through both his shields and his armor they weren’t going to be able to stop them, though there was an ammo limit on his plasma rods and rifles, but they’d taken that into consideration before they’d mounted this assault and had plenty of backup ammunition for the latter.

Just then a huge pink blast landed to his left, vaporizing one of the Bsidd there and at least a dozen lizards along with it. The superheated air pushed out and knocked Klakten off balance while leveling the lighter lizards. With horror flooding through him he stood up and kept fighting, using the momentary opportunity to jab the lizards closest to him that were on the ground and starting to jump back up onto their feet after scrambling for dropped weapons.

Just then another huge mass appeared underneath the lizard cruiser, with the Bsidd drone disc sliding in over top of the mechs and into the gap, providing them cover while firing at point blank range into the now shieldless underside of the enemy ship. Several huge bangs sounds, though the infantry couldn’t see what was happening from their vantage point and the fact that they were too busy fighting to look, but those that could steal a glance like Klakten did saw the lizard cruiser drop from the sky and land on the drone…with the drone responding and pushing back and to the side to dump the now dead hulk over the ridgeline so it wouldn’t fall on the troops below.

As it did a flurry of behatis and even a skeet zipped in underneath it and began strafing the lizard infantry with Klakten breathing a sigh of relief as he and the other Beta returned to fighting without the worry of being killed in a single shot from above.

“Admiral, where did that cruiser come from?” Mike asked as he pulled up out of a strafing run, having killed dozens of the lizards on that single pass now that they’d exposed themselves to rush his ground troops.

“Battlemap replay indicates it originated in one of the canyons beneath a camouflage canopy. Probably a forward operating base put into play during the initial invasion, which was why we didn’t detect it with our orbital scans.”

“Damn it. If there are others out there find them.”

“Already working on it. At the moment the skies are clear near your position. Not even any wisps in play.”

“If they can hide a cruiser they can hide a hangar,” Mike said warily. “This is exactly why not being able to talk to your ally sucks. How many infantry did we lose?”

“18 transponders are gone and two mechs are down. Both mechwarriors are intact.”

Mike bit his lip. “Score one for the bad guys. Status of the outpost?”

“Holding, but barely. The other attack groups are swarming them while this one slows you down.”

“Distractions, distractions. What’s the status of that drone?”

“Mostly intact.”

“Send it to the outpost to distract them.”

“There are still anti-air batteries in play,” the Admiral warned him.

“I know. We’re going to lose it. Do a lot of damage and buy the Protovic some time with it…and make sure it crash lands on those bastards.”

“Should we target the batteries themselves?”

“No, go for the troops. We’ll get the batteries from the ground.”

“Dispatching now.”

Mike cut the comm and wheeled his skeet around, zipping over the treetops and reversing course as he spotted the glint of something lizard in the sidewalls and intended to slag it before heading over the ridgeline and sneaking his way forward as close as he could to the mobile anti-warship phaser batteries set up near the outpost perimeter, another new trick the lizards had come up with in recent years. They also had plenty of point defense anti-air that would take him down if he got within sight of them, but he needed to poach what troops he could and buy his ground troops some time to get up to the Protovic and save them before they were overrun.

8

April 12, 2826

Aphat System

Jmry

Mike sat on a Protovic rooftop, taking the first bit of rest he’d had in over 36 hours of fighting. The city he was currently in had been hit by the lizards with overwhelming force, enough to defeat the local defenses and pull in numerous Protovic army units from the surrounding area in a hasty defense. Even then they couldn’t hold until Mike had rushed a few Bsidd units over, along with himself, to give them an added boost while everyone else he’d brought down to the planet was tied up in assaults elsewhere.

Even with Mike and the 240 Bsidd they should have lost the city, but they hadn’t given up and fought round the clock as more Protovic reinforcements gradually arrived and, in most cases, were utterly destroyed by the lizards. Mike hadn’t had his troops try and hold a secure location, for that would have been to the lizards’ advantage. Instead he let the locals try that pointless approach while he and the Bsidd roamed in hunter teams not interested in protecting infrastructure but in killing the enemy.

And they’d had to kill a lot of them before the city was at peace again. He hadn’t looked at any of the official estimates that were routinely compiled by the crews in orbit monitoring everything happening on the planet, but personally he guessed there had been at least a quarter million lizards, and as usual they had fought to the last man rather than retreat, doing what damage they could before they died.

And they’d done a lot. The streets were full of lizard corpses, but along with them were the fading glows of the Protovic, both soldiers and civilians. Lots of civilians had been caught unawares here and been mowed down. He’d had to jump over lots of them when on foot, but fortunately he’d come in with a jump pack and had done most of his long range movement over the rooftops and away from the gore.

There had been no trouble from the locals when they’d arrived. In fact they’d seemed overwhelmingly supportive and grateful…too much so in a few cases where a hidden civilian would run out and tackle one of the lizards near the Bsidd in an effort to help them and more than likely get themselves killed in the effort. Mike had caught one and used his Ikrid to make him stay put while he jumped in and fought a group of 30+ lizards in what probably looked like an unwinnable battle, but to the heavily armored, psionically laden Archon it was a piece of cake and he didn’t need help, let alone from an unarmed, unarmored civilian.

It was morning again, a few hours in, and the glows from the dead Protovic had mostly dissipated by now. Their bioluminescence would linger a while after they were killed, eventually fading down to white skin that had a scaly texture to it. That made the corpses looked even more disturbing, but at least they were no longer glowing like beacons marking the site of an atrocity. Many had been buried beneath piles of lizard corpses with only small holes that left glowing indicators of where they’d initially fallen before the snowstorm of dead enemies had covered them.

The Protovic had hover tanks that could float over the streets and buildings so only the infantry had been forced to trample the dead and blood slicks that had been accumulating. The smell had been getting constantly worse, but Mike had seen a collection team start to remove the bodies and clean the streets before he’d parked himself here so he expected the city to start to right itself, though he kept his helmet on to diminish the scent of the dead.

His Bsidd were waiting nearby in a couple of locations for pickup, equally exhausted but all still alive. Keeping on the move and not letting the lizards know where they were to mass against them had been a defensive decision as well. Both he and the Bsidd were chewed up with multiple dings in their armor and a few breaches. Mike even had a spot on his right arm that had gotten burned. Right now he could see the inner gel layer that had hardened over the spot and he was taking the moment to use a bit of Sesspik to goose the healing along while they were waiting for the dropships to arrive from orbit.

There weren’t a lot available, given that he’d deployed all his troops in order to make as much of a dent in the planetary invasion as possible, but it was just a matter of time until they rotated into availability and were sent down to him. He could have expedited the process and called for priority over other assignments, but since there were no longer any lizards in play here, for they’d searched the city thoroughly along with the Protovic units, there was no reason to make someone else wait when all they had to do was sit here and rest a bit.

“Archon.”

“Yes,” Mike answered the comm call from one of the Bsidd in the group behind his back to the north about 2 kilometers off.

“There’s something wrong here.”

Mike’s head came up a bit. “Wrong how?”

“The Protovic are…doing something. I think they have lizard prisoners.”

“That’s a very bad idea,” Mike said as he stood up and turned around, looking in the direction of the ID marker on his battlemap. “Where are they?”

The Bsidd answered with a waypoint another kilometer to the northwest of their position.

“Stay put, I’ll handle this,” he said as he forced his tired legs to launch him into a run across the mostly flat roof. When he got to the edge he goosed his jump pack and leapt across to the next building, continuing his run over the canyons of corpses below as he made his way directly to the virtual marker and bypassed the Bsidd evac point.

When he got close he could see a wide plaza that he’d done a considerable amount of fighting in over the previous day but gone were the corpses, replaced by a growing crowd of civilians and soldiers alike along with five pedestals that stood at least 10 meters tall. On top of them were, as the Bsidd had indicated, lizard prisoners. It looked like three each per pedestal and they were bound to central poles on the outer four platforms. The fifth was in the center and empty, with a group of Protovic walking up a circular staircase around the perimeter.

Mike leapt across to the last building on the perimeter of the plaza when that group stripped down and tied a female Protovic to the pole, with his gut suddenly telling him something was very wrong here. He stopped on the edge of the building, giving him the best vantage point as he reached out with his mind and sampled some of the thoughts in the crowd.

Some of them noticed him on the rooftop, with their reactions being one of welcome and thanks as the five pedestals suddenly lit on fire and began to burn the lizards and Protovic woman alive.

Mike immediately jumped off the building and drifted down into a gap in the crowd, at which point he began running forward bumping people out of the way. When they got the idea that he wasn’t here to observe the ritual they began blocking his path and trying to grab hold of his arms and legs, to which the mage lividly let loose a Fornax field and dropped everyone around him to the ground as he sprinted over the crumpled and twitching bodies.

When he got close enough he reached out to the lizards on the nearest pyre and hacked into their minds, dulling their senses and blocking out their pain as their bodies were rapidly disintegrating. Enemies or not, no one deserved this. The more he ran the more minds he accessed, stretching his multitasking abilities to their max to get them all while maintaining the Fornax field while he ran towards the central pedestal, making one huge jump pack-aided leapt up to it just as he felt the Protovic’s mind disappear from his grasp.

Mike landed in the column of green fire that extended some 8 meters up into the air, turning the elevated pedestal into a candle visible to all the thousands of Protovic standing around watching. Inside he saw the quickly shrinking remains of the Protovic, now stripped of flesh and with the muscle and blood boiling off the skeleton rapidly. She was dead and there was no way he could save her, likewise the lizard minds quickly slipped from his grasp as they too were killed.

Mike stood in the flames as his shields were quickly dropping in power. Before they could breach he used his Pefbar to look down inside the Pedestal and found something to telekinetically grab. He twisted the metal tube, wadding it up and choking off the fuel to the flame. It disappeared and left mark standing next to the charred skeletal remains of the woman as the four other pyres continued to burn the lizard prisoners.

The crowd just stood and watched, with a handful of soldiers moving towards the base of the central pedestal to get to Mike. They were outraged, he could sense, at him having interrupted their ceremony. The others just watched. They watched as people were burnt to death and no one had bothered to stop them. They had all gathered here to watch this sickness, which made them part of it.

Mike had pulled his invasion fleet off mission to come here to save these people, but now he realized they weren’t the Protovic he knew, nor were they victims in need.

They were another enemy.

With an anger flooding through him greater than he’d ever known before, Mike stepped off the pedestal and dropped to the ground just as the guards were climbing the stairs to get to him. They backtracked and joined in with others as they swarmed him, but he didn’t care. His mind was focused on the handful of Protovic that had escorted the woman up and tied her to the pole. They were nearby, with an ornately dressed one backtracking into the crowd.

Mike took the down the guards around him with another Fornax field and dashed ahead, chasing the one Protovic into the crowd and picking him up from afar with his telekinesis and jerking him back through the air towards him. Mike jumped forward and hit him with one very hard punch in the chest, breaking bones and internal organs alike before he released him to drop to the ground in a crunch, then the Archon pulled out his plasma rifle and shot the Protovic in the head.

Seeing that the guards and the crowds were stunned for a moment, then a rage built in them and they all rushed him, armed or unarmed it didn’t matter, they all moved with a single impulse towards the defiler…which was just as well as far as Mike was concerned. He shot off in another direction, tracking down the other two of his primary targets and killing them quickly with his rifle before slinging it onto his back rack and letting go of his Fornax in favor of just using his armor and muscles to beat down any and every one that came after him.

The three he had killed had strapped that woman to the pole so she couldn’t escape, meaning they deserved to die. The crowd he couldn’t say the same for though he expected the same, so while he wasn’t going to start shooting everyone in sight as a part of his mind really wanted to, he wasn’t just going to run away from this. Anyone in the crowd attacking him was declaring themselves an enemy and that was good enough for Mike. He wasn’t going to shoot them, but if they died from the beatdown he was going to lay out so be it.

So the mage held his ground and punched, kicked, and bodily rammed down every Protovic that came at him. He could feel their bones snapping and could see the blood splatters with every hit, but he didn’t feel sorry for them. Attacking a fully armored opponent with nothing but clothes on was beyond stupid, with many of these Protovic running straight into their deaths, but Mike knew and could even sense on their surface thoughts a shared insanity. They didn’t care or think about anything other than getting to him and taking down the man responsible for saving their lives, for he had gone from exalted hero to the worst of the worst as far as the Protovic were concerned, and there was only one answer to that.

And that answer was blood.

But they weren’t going to get any of his, for he was far too powerful for even the armored guards that showed up after a few minutes. Those put up more of a fight but had no chance against the Archon. Still they didn’t stop, with him being one man amongst an ever-growing sea of people beginning to flood in around him in the hopes of choking him out with too many bodies to hit. Against other opponents that would have worked, but with Mike’s psionics he could make an escape hole whenever he wanted.

Right now though he had no intention to leave. What they had done could not be let to pass, and as long as the sick bastards wanted to fight him he was going to oblige…but he wasn’t going to put his troops at risk, so in between punches and kicks he activated the comm to his local units with a simultaneous connection to the Admiral in orbit.

“I need…an…emergency evac…now. This location…first,” he said, ducking under a flying body as one of the crowd was somehow launched up and over the others at him. “Don’t worry about…me…get my troops out. The Pro…the Protovic are hostiles…no time…to explain…pull out everyone…on the planet…back to orbit…I’m last man out…and busy…don’t come to me…turtle up and aw…await evac…I’ve got asses…to kick,” he finished, turning off the comm and continuing to beat down the swarm of glowing bodies around him, for a lot of the Protovic were barely wearing any clothing.

They were not going to chase him off, no matter how many of them wanted to sacrifice themselves to take him down. His tiredness was now forgotten with the memory of the mental contacts he’d made with the now burnt prisoners echoing in his mind. This injustice could not be tolerated, and he was going to destroy every bit of their darkside ceremony as he could.

After thinning the crowd and leaving a trail of dead or heavily wounded bodies behind him as he roamed the plaza with the beehive of Protovic following his every movement, Mike knocked them back with another Fornax field and took the pause in the bone breaking to jump up onto one of the outer pedestals that was still on fire. He flicked his shields back on and went into the flames, seeing that only a few small bone fragments were left of the lizards. Everything else had been incinerated and vaporized by now, with the flames being a testament to this horrific ceremony that he was now going to smother.

He telekinetically reached inside and cut off the fuel supply with another crunch of the pipes. When the green flames dropped around him he jumped down into the crowd, landing in a pile of twitching bodies thanks to a preemptive Fornax blast, then hopped off that spot and up into the flames on the next pedestal. One by one he snuffed them out, then he dove back down into the angry mob and met them with an anger that outscaled theirs.

Mike was literally glowing with righteous fury and continued to beat down everyone that threw a blow at him until he got a battlemap ping from his Bsidd units indicating that they were all aboard and ready to depart. They were wondering if he was coming with them but not going to interrupt him, with the ping letting him know there was a way out if he wanted it.

“Go,” he told them, just noticing the approach of a second dropship to the other evac site within the city. “I’ll call…when I’m…done here.”

He didn’t receive a reply, perhaps due to the sound of his voice, recognizing that he was still in heavy combat. The Bsidd knew better than to second guess his orders, for he was an Archon and far wiser and more powerful than them, so if he said to go they would go and not think much of it. Archons knew when to fall back and survive, and right now this sick rabble wasn’t a threat warranting that.

Mike stayed there and continued to fight until there was no one left to hit. When the last of them were gone from his immediate presence he pushed out his senses and looked around, seeing a field of bodies across the plaza, some of which were moving or limping off, but just as many that were unconscious or dead.

Those who survived would have a chance to realize they were Sith scum and change their ways, but that wasn’t why he had left some alive. He wasn’t going to go around and kill those who were still alive, but anything that attacked him was going down and he honestly didn’t care if they died or not. The idea that this ceremony was legit and he was just protesting it with his beatdown had to be squashed immediately. They were in the wrong and this was the rectification. He wasn’t delaying the ceremony, he was destroying it.

To that end, with no more infantry or crazed civilians to hit, he went back over to the nearest pedestal and leapt back up on top and proceeded to start demolishing it bit by bit, first with telekinesis, then with his muscle and powered armor. It took time, but he was able to shred the pedestal in visible defiance to anyone watching. They would not and could not stop him, which was what he was trying to intone with his actions above and beyond just being Hulk-esk mad.

The darkside could not be tolerated or ignored, and as such he took the time to shred all five pedestals before calling for a dropship to meet him outside the city to take him back up to orbit.

9

When Mike got to his dropship he boarded it in a field outside the city and found only the pilot inside, but as soon as it lifted off he got a comm from the Admiral.

“Archon?”

“Go ahead,” he said as he sat down on an empty bench in the compartment behind the cockpit.

“Evac is proceeding in all areas save for one. Our troops on the southern continent are engaged in heavy action at the moment and cannot withdraw immediately.”

Mike frowned and pulled up his planetary battlemap, zooming in on the area that he was well familiar with. He’d fought there a week ago, securing a trio of cities against a lizard advance that had then turned into an assault against one of the enemy’s landing zones. That’s where the troops were now, and by the number of enemy contacts on the map he could tell that something was very wrong.

“What happened?”

“Subsurface bunkers, we think. We’ve only had a few minutes to analyze it, but the lizards got a lot of reinforcements all of a sudden. Our troops have taken up defensive positions within the enemy base and are unable to withdraw at present. The enemy has also deployed considerable air assets to keep our aircraft away.”

“I can see that,” Mike said, blowing out a slow breath and starting to realize just how tired he was now that his anger was coming down from raging levels.

“With your permission, I’d like to divert a portion of the evacuating troops to help pull them out.”

“Do it. I’ll head there on the ground and we’ll be the last ones out.”

“What do you want me to do with our guests?”

“How many are still onboard?”

“Six in medbay and your liaison.”

“They’re coming with us.”

“As prisoners?”

“No, they’re just coming. Don’t let them leave the ship, but otherwise don’t confine them. I’ll deal with them personally once I’m onboard, but don’t let them have comm access until then. And move the wounded onto your ship. I want them all in one place.”

“What happened down there?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Some sort of sacrificial ritual where they burned a group of lizards prisoners and one of their own alive in the city square with a crowd watching,” he said as he got up and moved into the cockpit.

“I honestly don’t know what to say to that.”

“Coordinates,” Mike said, talking to the pilot as he relayed them to his console via his helmet battlemap. “Just get me close and I’ll take it from there.”

The Bsidd wordlessly agreed with a head twitch that was the equivalent of a nod and adjusted their course away from an orbital trajectory and into a globe spanning jaunt through the thin upper atmosphere.

“It’s an abomination that cannot be tolerated,” he finally answered the Admiral. “I’ve seen plenty in my life, but this is among the worst. I imagine it’s not something you learn about in the maturia.”

“No, but I thought I’d seen enough lizard combat for things like this not to surprise me.”

“The darkside comes in many forms, unfortunately.”

“But why? The lizards are dishonorable, but there’s always a tactical element involved.”

“That’s what our guests are going to tell us eventually. We’ll take them back to the ADZ for a proper language analysis and interrogation.”

“Are we taking the entire fleet back?”

Mike hesitated for a moment as he thought that through. “I’d like to get back to our original mission, but it’ll have to wait. I need to go back and I’m not sending you there without at least one mage.”

“We can resume orbital bombardment and hold on any ground action until you return.”

“I trust in your ability to get it done, but the lizards are devious enough I don’t want you going in without a mage in case they pull something. If there’s any rethinking to do on that point let’s save it until after we get everyone back up to orbit.”

“Agreed. Are you alright?”

“I’m not injured.”

“But are you alright?”

“No, I’m not,” Mike admitted. “There’s a system full of bad guys that we have been fighting to protect. I screwed this one up.”

“We fight the lizards wherever they are. The more of them dead, the better the galaxy is.”

“Except we pushed harder than normal in some cases to safeguard the Protovic and we lost people. That’s a sick feeling I don’t think I’m ever going to shake, nor should I. To answer your question, I’m more angry than unable. I’m tired, but I can handle another short fight to get our people out. I could use a few more senzu beans though. I’ve only got 1 left.”

“I’ll send a courier to track you down once you get there. How are you planning to get through their aerial blockade?”

“I’ll go ground. I don’t want to wait until our fighters clear the air.”

“Should I task a warship?”

“Not with their big guns still in play. How many do they have left?”

“We got 3 batteries, two more are left.”

“Have one standing by in low orbit just in case, but I’d rather not waste one if we don’t have to. Or are our troops there in desperate need?”

“They’re cut off, but holding ground.”

“We play it safe then. Actually, I’ll get those guns myself.”

“Do you want one of the other Archons with you as backup?”

“No, keep them with their present units. I’ll just take a quick nap enroute to recharge. Get that extra ambrosia there ASAP. I’m going to need it.”

“I’ll launch a dropship with it inside of ten minutes.”

“Good. Let’s get this done before anyone else dies,” he said, cutting the comm and walking back to one of the benches where he laid down and configured his battlemap to ping him when they got in proximity to a waypoint he added. With that last bit done he closed his eyes and forced himself to calm down and half fall asleep, keeping the remainder of his mental functions active so he could slip into a healing trance and make the most out of the travel minutes ahead.

9 hours later he and the last of the Star Force troops flew back onboard the jumpships, having successfully pulled out the besieged unit and destroyed most of the lizard base in the process. As the dropships came onboard and deposited him and a handful of others on the Archer 7’s deck the warships began recalling their drones with the massive discs sliding into the racks one by one as they made final preparations to leave with neither the lizard nor Protovic fleets getting in their way.

On Mike’s way out of the hangar deck Candy Cane found him and held up a hand for him to stop. The Archon clamped down on his renewed anger at seeing the red/green face and accessed his mind again, which allowed them to exchange some ‘words’ in a shorthand they’d learned over the past weeks.

Candy Cane wanted to know what was going on, for he’d been unable to communicate with his people and the few wounded Protovic had been gathered here from the other ships they had been still receiving treatment on before being sent back down to the planet or to a Protovic ship like the others who’d already been sufficiently healed to leave.

Mike considered what to tell him, but ultimately settled a hand on his shoulder and imbued the knowledge that he was going to be used as an emissary to the other Protovic in order to establish communication with them, as well as to teach them and Star Force about his people’s language and civilization.

He felt a brief surge of anxiety, for he was being told rather than asked, but that thought disappeared when he realized what an honor it would be. Candy Cane sent thoughts of agreement back to Mike and he decided to leave it at that, walking on and heading towards his quarters where he was going to crash while letting the Admiral handle getting them out of the system. Unless something monumental happened on their way out he was going off the grid for a long while, not only to rest and train, but to think this through and prepare a report for the trailblazers that would hit the grid in the first Star Force system they passed through.

Hopefully by the time he dropped off the fleet in the Bsidd Region and got his flagship back to the ADZ with their guests there’d be a response and course of action waiting for him.

Kip-022 was coming back into his quarters onboard his flagship after a very hard day of training while his combat fleet was in transit when he found the message from Jason at the top of his notifications list when he logged into his account. They’d been scheduled to pass through a system with a relay a number of hours ago, but this was the first chance he’d had to check for updates and he expected a lot of them given the amount of time his attack group had spent clearing out two planets in a lizard held system along the Calavari Region border.

Kip opened Jason’s message first, as he always did with messages from his fellow trailblazers.

I expect you’ll be getting this message on your way back from mission, and if my guestimates are correct there will still be time for you to arrive if you wish. There’s been a discovery of a splinter race of Protovic out beyond the Bsidd Region. Mike-448 was on a standard cleaning mission when a scout ship relayed the information of an indigenous race within lizard territory that was holding out against them.

Without knowing who or what they were he diverted his fleet to their aid seeing as how they were actively battling an invasion fleet. When he arrived he discovered that they were Protovic, red faced instead of purple for some reason, and commanding a very dense system of planetoids, most of which were still in their possession. He eliminated a good chunk of the lizards’ warships and put down ground troops to assist in the defense of several surface cities that were in danger of falling.

That was when something bad happened, and he filed a detailed report I suggest you read through carefully. It’ll turn your stomach. After successfully defending one city by a very narrow margin, the Protovic held a ceremony in a city plaza where they burned alive a group of lizard prisoners and one of their own people in some sick ritual. Mike tried to stop them but didn’t get there in time, then went Hulk on them and beat the crap out of the entire crowd who took offense at him interrupting their celebration and tried to stop him from stopping them.

He included his helmet cam data, and the natives literally went insane trying to stop him in a swarming, unarmed rush worthy of the lizards. I’m proud to say he beat the crap out of them rather than running away, then destroyed the sacrificial pillars and left the plaza full of dead and wounded barbarians. After that he immediately recalled his troops to orbit and left the Sith civilization to fight the lizards on their own, but he did bring back a handful of Protovic whom he’d had on his ship recovering from injuries. He’d pulled them out of wreckage from a naval battle and didn’t bother to return them when he left. We have them now and are learning their language and a lot of stuff about their sick culture.

And by sick I mean right up there with the Aztecs and Darth Sidious. We’ve got them on Mars and will be working through their interrogation for at least a few months, and by ‘us’ I mean myself, Greg, and Rafa. Given your history with the non-barbaric Protovic I thought you might want in on this. We’ve already agreed that there’s no way we can let this stand, and we’re not going to remove the lizards around these guys and let their sick civilization remain. Right now we don’t even know if this is their only system or not, nor do we know of their connection to our Protovic. There’s a lot of questions to be answered and not having a common language is a pain in the ass. The more psionic help we can get the better, so if you feel like stopping by Sol please do.

At the bottom of the message was a link to a copy of Mike’s mission report, which Kip read through next followed by reviewing the helmet cam images from him and some early shots from what looked like a group of Bsidd at further range as the Protovic tied up the lizards to elevated platforms. When he saw them tie up one of their own and then light the fires through Mike’s helmet his stomach sank into a pit of fury that was echoed in the images turning into a bloody beatdown of everyone in attendance.

Kip made himself watch despite the nauseating camera whips side to side as Mike had been fighting. It didn’t make for good watching, but he wanted every bit of information he could get and followed it through to conclusion, seeing the field of dead and wounded Protovic that the mage had left behind along with the wrecked incinerators.

When the recording ended he just sat at his terminal staring at the blank screen as his mind wheeled in thought. What they had done was…something that you didn’t do by accident. No one chose when and where they were born, but no matter the culture around you there was always your conscience, and Kip had learned that a conscience wasn’t just a Human thing, but something all races had. It was an innate understanding of right and wrong that didn’t result from learning, but rather a fundamental sense just like sight or hearing.

That sense could be clouded, distorted, even suppressed to the point where you became a living, apathetic zombie…all of which could be a byproduct of the civilization’s culture weighing on you, but your conscience would always  be there fighting back, perhaps losing, but there would always be internal conflict so long as you were a good person. Even if you were tricked into doing bad things, that internal resistance would always be there.

What Kip had just seen said that this civilization was so far gone that these savages not only participated in this sickness but reveling in it. There may be no real ‘Force’ like in Star Wars, but there was a lightside and a darkside, and this was chokingly dark. These people had given over to it willfully, and he knew that by their reaction to Mike. They didn’t stand by and do nothing, they went after him with a vengeance that defied reason or logic, whereas a conflicted person would freeze up and hesitate.

If these people had been good in the beginning, they were lost now. While theoretically no one was permanently lost to the darkside, coming back out of it required a person to want to…with those who were truly dark wanting to be that way and therefore irredeemable. As bad as the lizards were, this was worse. The lizards didn’t kill their own, save for imprisonment situations, and their sick sacrifices at least held a combat purpose. Sacrifices without function were reserved for the truly insane, and that’s what Kip saw here in the faces of the crowd that attacked Mike to their own demise.

This could not stand. Their civilization, little that he knew about it, was clearly an abomination that had to be removed. If you put a Jedi and a Sith into the same room only one would walk out alive, and the same was true in reality. The lightside and the darkside could not coexist, which Kip knew meant that Star Force was going back there at some point to deal with this, and the fact that three of the others were already working on the problem showed they understood how significant this was.

You didn’t leave the darkside alone to fester and grow, no matter whether it attacked you or not. It had to be destroyed, and in this case that meant this Protovic civilization had to be destroyed in some way, shape, or form, which is no doubt what Jason, Greg, and Rafa were already working on while they gathered information from the prisoners.

Kip keyed his terminal for a commlink to the bridge, given that he wasn’t wearing any armor.

“Captain, I want an immediate course correction. Inform the Admiral that he’ll proceed with the rest of the fleet as planned, but we’re heading directly for Sol…and goose the speed as much as you can. I need to get there as soon as possible.”

10

July 2, 2826

Solar System

Mars

“Thought you’d come,” Jason said as Kip walked down off the dropship in the reclusive spaceport that sat in the center of one of Star Force’s cities that was off the public grid. Most of the planet was civilian in some measure, but this was one of several that were reserved specifically for Star Force use and operated in a manner similar to the tier 3 cities save for the fact that there was no public access for visitors.

“How bad is it?”

“Very,” Jason said as he fell in step with his fellow 2 walking across the large internal hangar deck towards an elevator shaft in the far wall. “We’ve established enough of a base language to be able to ask questions and get answers, but the context is real screwy. Heavy use of metaphors we think, but we’ve been able to get a basic layout of the Protovic civilization.”

“How about a name?”

“Veliquesh. And they have more than one system. Five in total, though the one we visited was their largest.”

“Population?”

“Somewhere in the vicinity of 3 trillion, though losses to the lizards may have taken a chunk out of that number.”

“Are our guests cooperating?”

“That’s where it gets interesting. It seems our arrival was foretold in a prophesy, and that they’ve been fighting the lizards for more than 1000 years waiting for the day we’d come to save them.”

“Yet they went after Mike pretty hard,” Kip pointed out.

“There’s the thing, they may believe we were preordained to save them, but go up higher on the religious pecking order and they abandon the lower levels quite fast. Their burnt sacrifices are at the center of their culture and occur with every major event. A victory, a remembrance, a holiday. The Protovic that Mike saw burnt alive was one specifically raised to adulthood in a reclusive sanctuary designed to keep them pure of various imaginary stuff. They’re raised specifically to be sacrificed when the occasion merits it. That’s their place in the Veliquesh civilization, though there are other sacrifices made to gain favor, atone for an injustice, etc.”

“Peachy. Why were the lizards involved?”

“Part of their magic. They believe in a, and I hate to use the analogy, a living force that drives all life in the universe and that by conducting these sacrificial rituals they can alter their place in it. They believe that doing so all this time has allowed them to hold out against the lizards while everyone else they’ve known of in the region has fallen. They alone lasted, and continue to make sacrifices to preserve their ‘grace’ within the force. They call their force Nash’garmat’ecklima, so we’ve just shortened it to ‘Nash.’ And like all things fraudulent, it takes a high level of delusion to keep their beliefs in check. The six we have here are so disconnected from the concept of the truth it makes their minds a muddled mess I haven’t seen the likes of before.”

“Regimented?”

“That’s putting it mildly. This makes fascism look sane. If you even whisper anything contrary to their beliefs you’re executed, which then leaves no one but the crazies around. They figure they’ve got plenty of population, so they focus on the ‘purity’ of their race which involves some nasty Hunger Games-like stuff to weed out the younglings who are worthy and who are not. If you’re not drinking their kool aid you don’t get a chance to grow up. The ones we’ve got are a mix of loyalty, crazy, and skill. Normally a civilization like this would implode on itself, but it’s survived against the lizards due to this weird mix of comprehension and delusion they’ve got going for a cultural hive mind. They adapt to fight the lizards, reworking their tenets as needed to survive, but always drift back towards crazy when they have a chance.”

“You’re saying the lizards have actually driven a bit of sense into these barbarians?” Kip asked as they reached the elevator doors and Jason telekinetically hit the call button.

“Sad to say, but yes. These guys want to be darkside, but necessity has somewhat brought them to their senses. Like they’re sitting shallow in the ocean but never breaking the surface. They can see the light and orient off of it, but are never allowed to breathe the free air. There’s a twisted nobility in them that’s giving us unfettered access. They want to help us learn, thinking we’re their saviors from prophecy, and they’re also very keen to get to know our Protovic.”

“Have you brought any of them in on this?” Kip asked as the doors opened and they stepped inside, with Jason keying their destination within the city.

“Yes, and we had to almost restrain them at times from beating the crap out of our guests. They find their whole civilization repulsive, and their red coloration is getting under their skin…no pun intended.”

“Why?”

“They’ve never known of any red-skinned Protovic, and the mystery behind where these came from is something that is going to throw the purple-skins into a fit once they find out. Those we have here have agreed to keep things quiet while we get the information we need, but their government is already sending additional staff to help us with the interrogations. They want to know who these bastards are in a big way.”

“Have they been of any help yet?”

“Their presence gives us legitimacy, but without psionics we’re having to teach them the Veliquesh language as we learn it, so there hasn’t been much opportunity for them to do much questioning other than what they’ve fed through us. In that they’ve been helpful, and seem to know what psychological buttons to press and when.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“Outside of Star Force only the Protovic, and they’re limited to a few dozen individuals. The Protovic Chancellor is personally on his way here and should be arriving within a couple of weeks. He said he wanted to keep this quiet until they got a grasp on what was happening.”

“If these were Ter’nat I’d do the same,” Kip agreed. “What does Davis have to say about it?”

“Just that he wants information. He’s letting us take the lead on this.”

“Does he realize there’s only one solution to this?”

Jason nodded. “It’s the details that are in question…and right now there are a lot of unknowns. I’ve been taking 2 hours a day out of my training schedule to work with these guys. Adding another shift in will be a lot of help.”

“Why not call in a dozen mages?”

“Quality over quantity. Most of the mages haven’t been inside non-Human minds that much, and I don’t want to be dealing with their learning curve while we try and bridge the language gap. You’ve probably had more exposure to Protovic minds than anyone, I’d guess.”

“Haven’t dealt with them in a while, but probably.”

“Then you tell me how they feel before I bias you any further. Any objections to getting started now?”

“Nope. I’ll settle in later.”

Jason nodded and the pair rode the next few minutes in the elevator in silence before it opened up into a residential section of the city, which prompted an eyebrow raise from Kip.

“We’re treating them as guests rather than prisoners. We’ve emptied this complex save for them and they have the run of the place, but aren’t permitted to leave. We’re handling all interrogations here.”

“How many people did you have to boot out?” he asked as they began walking down a nearly empty corridor towards a checkpoint that had a pair of security officers standing guard in front of the main entrance to an upscale residential complex that contained quarters larger than the base units that all civilians were given coming straight out of the maturia. This region would have housed those individuals who had earned considerable upgrades that included multi-room quarters and a lot of other living space luxuries.

“About 200. There were enough nearby facilities that we were able to relocate them all into higher level complexes temporarily in exchange for the inconvenience. How long that will be is still in question, and I don’t think they mind if we take our time with giving them back their original quarters.”

“Archons,” one of the guards said respectfully as the pair walked by, with Kip and Jason nodding in return as they entered the promenade of the little city inside a city that was this residential block. It led into a bit of a park with potted trees and curving stairways that led up to the higher levels that included a cafeteria, some basic entertainment facilities, and a lot more quarters. Pretty much all standard stuff, with most of the denizens traveling a bit further into the city for specialized needs but allowing for midnight snacks and such within easy walking distance.

“And there we are,” Jason said softly as they approached an individual sitting on his knees in the park area. “They pray to synergize themselves with the Nash multiple times per day. They think it upgrades their karma.”

“Any truth in it? Psionic or other stuff.”

Jason shook his head. “Nope. Just pure, unadulterated bull shit.”

“Is he going to get ticked if I interrupt him?”

“Walk up in front of him, and if he feels like talking he’ll acknowledge you. If not he’ll just ignore your presence.”

“The damn red even makes them look like Sith,” Kip said, accelerating his pace until he passed between two low hanging trees and came up in front of the bench where the Veliquesh held his meditative pose murmuring something that sounded unintelligible. The trailblazer stood directly in front of his glowing red/green face, seeing that he wore Star Force clothing, ostensibly because he’d been taken off his destroyed ship without having a chance to pack.

The man didn’t move, nor open his eyes, leaving both trailblazers standing there looking down at his elevated sitting position as Kip reached out and began eavesdropping on his surface thoughts. Almost immediately he sensed a considerable deviation from what he knew to be a normal Protovic mind, which sent him on a hacking hunt as he poked around every facet of his mental structure without the man having any clue that he was inside his head.

You’re right. He is different.

How? Jason asked.

Culturally and structurally. It’s almost as if he’s more advanced, yet broken at the same time. Pieces of his mental structure are strong and efficient, yet there are just as many sections that are degenerate.

We think it’s the equivalent of crack babies. Their parents were so screwed up that a bit of their mental damage got codified into their genetics and passed onto their offspring. Factor in that only the ‘damaged’ ones would pass their sick upbringing and you get a snowball effect. That’s our current theory anyway.

We’ve seen bits of that in other races, Kip agreed, thinking specifically to the Lacvamat and how many generations it took to undo that excessive group mentality. It wasn’t gone now, just modified to be less burdensome, but the Archons knew well that genetic inheritance could be a blessing or a curse, yet always just a starting point. Though for those weak willed it stacked the odds against them righting themselves over the course of time. It was always easier to go with what was default and not think about what you were doing, but no sane person could live life without at least some curiosity prompting one to poke around a bit inside their own head.

If you had to fight your own programming things got bad, not so much because it was impossible, but rather because one didn’t know what to do and was learning everything as they went along. This Protovic was probably partly crazy when he was born, then willfully chose to feed into the instability rather than fight and counter it. No matter how messed up someone was there was always a path into the light through training, but someone like this who figuratively had been born with the crazy already in him would have to fight a long, hard battle just to get to ‘normal,’ and in Kip’s experience he knew that most people were not up to that kind of a fight, especially as younglings, and just acclimatized to their current situation…which in this case, given their cultural counterpart, was to willfully go darkside.

As disturbing as that is, it’s the more advanced parts that interest me. Why are these Protovic ahead of the others? Kip wondered.

We haven’t gotten into a lot of their lore yet, both due to time and the fact that we only have a limited vocabulary. They may know of a split that our Protovic don’t.

This one doesn’t know about what Mike did?

None of them do. They were in orbit at the time and we cut off comms before anyone could tell them.

Good move there. Don’t want them clamming up and making this harder than it already is. What kind of schedule do you have them on?

We keep them busy. Four hours in the morning, four in the evening. He’s on his midday break.

Do they train?

They have cleansing rituals that amount to some light cardio and flexibility work. Maintenance stuff, really. From what we’ve learned they have fairly short lifespans, sacrifices aside. They also have a forced reproduction edict, given the turnover of ‘failures’ in their younglings. They’re working off of default strengths more than anything. Our Protovic would kick their asses handily.

So how are they holding back the lizards?

That’s a question I’ve been asking since I got here. Their tech level has a lot to do with it. Beyond that we’re not sure yet.

Kip knelt down until he sat on his ankles and stared up into the glowing face, daring him to look back but he wouldn’t. He just sat there mumbling, either unaware of Kip being inches away or deliberately avoiding acknowledgement.

Well, as long as he’s sitting here I will too, Kip said as he stood up and walked to the opposite bench and had a seat. I’m going to have a thorough look around his head, then meet up with you guys for the next interrogation session. You up or someone else?

Mike is. His psionics aren’t that good, but he’s got a personal stake in this. We’ve also got a couple of Ikrid specialists to help out. I had my shift this morning. Greg will take the last of the day.

You heading for a workout?

I was going to get you up to speed first.

Go ahead. I’ll find my own way from here.

A bit of advice, Jason warned. Don’t do anything to tick them off, no matter what kind of memories you stumble across.

That bad?

Sick is the word. I don’t like digging through that crap, but we need intel. Don’t let them see you get angry. They still think we’re here to save them.

Understood.

Jason walked off and left the two of them alone, still with no reaction from the Protovic, as Kip began a memory search. The different mental structure took him a while to adjust to, but after that it was no different than the memory searches he’d made of ADZ Protovic in past years. That familiarity let him dig deeply right off the bat, though without a language translation a lot of the man’s thoughts were a mucky mess.

Some of the first memories he went to were of the sacrifices, wondering what this one thought about them. Kip saw him observing many from his place in a crowd, and the feelings that accompanied them turned the Archon’s stomach. He was actually convinced that the horrific pain and agony of their deaths was a good thing, upping the Veliquesh’s standing in the Nash, and that the more resistance an individual gave, the more intense their destruction, resulted in a greater reward.

This Protovic actually relished in the agony and betrayal of those he witnessed being sacrificed, all the time knowing that it could happen to him to at some point. Rather than see that as a problem this one ignored it. He was one of the people benefiting from their demise, and it was almost a joke to him. The people he was seeing sacrificed had thought it would never happen to them, and now it was, with that horrific response all the more savory. He actually relished their screams and the scent of their incinerated blood and flesh, for what was a person had now been taken and consumed like fuel…and that visceral trade that he knew by nature was not supposed to happen, that was fundamentally wrong, would be compensated by a blessing in the Nash.

A wrong had to be done in order to receive the counterbalance, and the more wrong they could heap on the sacrificial slaughter the sweeter the recompense.

Kip realized that the ones groomed from birth to be the purest of sacrifices were not told of their purpose, so that when it did come the outrage and defiance would be intact and they’d go to their deaths in the utmost betrayal in order to fuel their position in the Nash with the greatest compensation.

Jason was right in that Kip wanted to Vader choke this bastard right here and now, but the Archon steadied himself and forced his emotions within the barrier of his skin, not letting anything show on the outside as he continued to dig into the man’s memories until he could stomach no more and had to take a break.

When he stood up the Protovic finally opened his eyes and looked up at him, speaking to him in words that Kip could not understand.

Channeling his anger into irony Kip turned back and looked at him, smiling and speaking in the nicest of tones.

“Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You’ve killed far too many people, and now that we know where you and your Sith buddies live, prepare for your entire civilization to die.”

iTunes: "We Will Rock You"

Rescue

1

March 12, 2827

Solar System

Mars

“Play it again,” the Protovic Chancellor said, not fully comprehending what he’d just heard.

Kip reset the hologram back to the relevant beginning of this interrogation snippet from the Veliquesh called Nifron who was still supplying information freely, thinking that Star Force was an ally of his race rather than a newly minted enemy. Over the past few months a computer translation program had been constructed for the Veliquesh race, allowing anyone to talk to the 7 prisoners they’d brought back with them.

“Our origins are not clear, but we do know that there was a great cataclysm that fragmented our race. We won a war, but in doing so were all but destroyed ourselves. In order to survive we were split into seven fragments and scattered across the galaxy. We have never known what happened to the others until now, but we do know of them. Each faction of the old empire had different coloration. Ours was tasked with Purity. The others were Unity, Trepidation, Origination, Equity, Contention, and Understanding. The purple visage signifies your allies as Origination, those who were responsible for the beginnings of life.”

“They are the first of the factions that we have known to survive aside from ours. It was said that we could no longer function together, for our enemies were too vast, so that to survive we must disappear into remote corners of the galaxy. Where the others went we did not know so that we could not compromise them. We did not think Origination could be so close to ourselves, else we would have sought them out. The days of the empire were so long ago that our records do not stretch back to its occurrence, nor do we have any estimates.”

“What we know of concerns more recent history. We branched out from our point of refuge to encompass 9 star systems, never overreaching or invading to claim what we wanted. We sought out worlds that were totally uninhabited so as to not draw attention to ourselves. We knew that we had to grow our power or fall victim to those we originally fled, but we had to do so carefully. Ironically an enemy came to us that was new, and the Li’vorkrachnika did not even know we existed. They were conquering everything across a swath of the galaxy that was unfortunately inhabited. Our neighbors fell, but we did not.”

“Primitive as they were we could not defeat them. They were far too many, so we simply kept to our borders and defended them. Over the years the enemy grew in strength and began to test our limits. We lost ships and structures with each attack, then rebuilt. Over time the enemy’s attacks grew more powerful and we lost enough to jeopardize our defenses, so we decided to evacuate 4 systems so to reinforce the others while we waited. A prophecy of your arrival had been foretold, so we were content to wait and survive until, in recent years, the technological power of the enemy increased greatly.”

“They have been using that advantage to make gains within our systems. None have fallen, but we were losing until you arrived. We have done our duty and survived until your arrival, but much has been lost over time. The reunification of the empire can now begin with Origination having been found and your aid to us. Together we will grow strong again, enough to one day defeat the Li’vorkrachnika and begin to search out the fate of the others. With each one we find our civilization will grow stronger, for isolated we are weak. We are built to function as one, and once we are again the galaxy will submit to us as it once did.”

“What do you know of this great war?” Mike’s voice asked from off camera.

The Veliquesh frowned, its glowing facial markings reshaping as it did. “Very little. It was an indomitable enemy that we succeeded in neutralizing, but the effort was too costly. When the main threat was gone the lesser ones rose up to destroy us, hence our need to flee and rebuild in isolation.”

“Why the split?”

“If we were one we would not submit to others. We would fight and be destroyed. We had to become components that could be recombined later, when the time was right. We know that we are not whole, so it keeps us from being true to form. Our mission is to grow and reassemble…nothing more. Once complete again, that will change.”

“Change how?”

“We do not know for certain. There is a void in us that the others were meant to fill. When we are together again we will be whole and know how to proceed. Until then we cannot know for certain.”

“Do any relics from the old empire still exist? Or merely stories passed down through the years?”

“Unfortunately nothing remains,” Nifron admitted. “The Nash’garmat’ecklima favored us to survive, but little more. Our faction’s transition to isolation was a tumultuous one. We did not function correctly without the others and great sacrifice was made to preserve ourselves in this current form. Many died in the early years, and with them went the records of such. We only know of the loss without detail and the mission before us. What do your allies know of this? Have they spoken of it? Any knowledge of those days or before is invaluable to us, no matter how small. We have nothing left of them.”

“You will be able to speak with them in time,” Mike promised. “Right now we need to record as much information as we can. They will be viewing these holos, so any information you can provide them for comparison sake speak now even if you do not feel it relevant to us.”

“What is your standing with them? You have stated you are allies, but how this is possible I do not understand. We have no peers.”

“What did your prophecy say of us?”

“It was said that you would be as if a force of nature that would consume the enemy and free us of our imprisonment. It made no mention of the other factions or your bond with them.”

“The Protovic are our ally, a lesser peer in both numbers and technology, but a trusted friend.”

Nifron frowned again, not understanding. “You claim superiority?”

“You saw us fight. Why do you disagree?”

The Veliquesh considered that, with his thoughts so muddled it was as if he was forced to use his brain for the first time to conceive something beyond tradition.

“Perhaps we have lost more than we realize. In our true form we have no equals.”

“What of this enemy you neutralized. Were they not an equal?”

“They were defeated. We were the superior.”

“But you were forced to disband and flee. That was also a defeat, was it not?”

“It was a necessity. It will only be a defeat if we fail to recombine and resume our place as the galactic lords. Has Origination spoken nothing of this to you?”

“About being galactic lords? No, they haven’t. And your level of technology isn’t superior to a lot of races out there. Did you lose a lot of it in the fracturing of your empire?”

“We do not know what has been lost. Are there races with technology superior to yours?”

“Many, yes.”

Again, the Veliquesh frowned and thought. “We will not know until we are reunited with the others. Until then we must persist. We are but pieces of the whole, and cannot know our true intent as we are now.”

Kip paused the holo there, for Mike had pressed other subjects thereafter. “Anything?”

“You said they were insane. Correct?”

“Sometimes even insanity is built upon fragments of the truth. What did he say?”

The Chancellor bowed his head slightly. “We have no knowledge of these origins whatsoever, and though I still do not understand what he says about reunification it brings to mind an uncertain memory. I will have to confer with my geneticists, but I seem to remember some mention of dormant, incomplete code segments. The missing pieces were not present in our genome at all. A bit of a lingering mystery, if I recall correctly. I doubt it has any relevance, but it is the only connection I can make. Everything he says is completely foreign to me.”

“What’s the furthest back you have records?”

“Nothing that predates our homeworld, nor any mention of other factions. His red coloring is not something that is present in our genome, active or otherwise.”

“Now that is interesting,” Kip mewed. “We need to do a full analysis of their genetic code then. Maybe they do have some of your missing puzzle pieces.”

“To what end?”

Kip shrugged. “I don’t know. I was hoping some of this would make sense to you.”

“Unfortunately it does not, and I reviewed our records thoroughly before I came. Have they met with any of my people yet?”

“This one hasn’t. Three of the others have. We’ve been keeping them isolated from one another for the most part through scheduling. We’re not treating them as prisoners per se, but we don’t want them sharing what questions we’ve asked and syncing their answers. Most of their days have them going through various forms of training to become familiar with Star Force, then a session where they teach us about the Veliquesh. They see each other passing in the halls, but other than interrupting their sleep cycles they have no spare time to congregate…and when they do we monitor their conversations.”

“Have you picked up on any duplicity?”

“No, but if you noticed in this recording they are very unused to thinking. Present them with a scenario that requires them to come up with a solution rather than just repeat rhetoric and they are extremely uncomfortable. We’re breaking these of that habit slowly, but I think it’s symptomatic of their civilization. Everything is rigid with deviations resulting in executions.”

“What do you plan to do with these 7?”

“We’re not sending them back. What they’re learning from us could get them killed.”

“Do not send them to us.”

Kip raised an eyebrow. “I expected you’d want them.”

“What they are, according to your information, is abhorrent. They are not Protovic, they are barbarians.”

“Agreed.”

“They are a poison that I do not want to subject my civilization to.”

“But you still want to learn about them?”

“Of course we do. We just cannot tolerate them as they are.”

Kip nodded. “Ok. They can remain with us.”

“You disapprove?”

“No. Just because you are the same race doesn’t make you the same people. It’s no different than you not wanting the Calavari living with you.”

“The Calavari do not burn people alive.”

“True,” Kip admitted.

“What is your aim in this?”

“We cannot allow this type of civilization to exist…anywhere. It has to be ended.”

“Ended how? Allow the Cajdital to remain in that region until they destroy them?”

“We’re certainly not going to protect them again, but I don’t think they’re going to fall anytime soon. And we’re not holding back our push into lizard territory. We’re going to deal with the Veliquesh ourselves, which is what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“We won’t oppose you,” the Chancellor said firmly. “They’re not our people.”

“We offer the Cajdital the option to surrender in every engagement, an offer they never accept. Only then do we kill them, for when we’ve captured them they try to kill themselves in confinement anyway. Do not mistake our war with them as an inclination to wipe out our enemies. We don’t plan on killing the Veliquesh. We plan on annexing them.”

The Chancellor took an involuntary step backwards as he stared at Kip. “Bringing them into your empire would be a grave mistake. They are a poison that goes against everything you stand for.”

“Which is why their civilization has to be destroyed,” Kip explained. “That doesn’t mean the people have to die…or rather it doesn’t mean they have to be killed. This isn’t our first time doing something like this. Every race that we’ve taken into Star Force has had their culture eradicated, save for any valuable pieces we preserved.”

“You wish to save them? Is that what you’re saying?”

“More or less. Is that going to be a problem?”

“You’re welcome to try, but I don’t want them anywhere near our territory.”

“Relax. What they are now will be destroyed, I can guarantee you that. Those younglings being born in the years to come will know nothing of this abomination. They’ll become part of Star Force, at which point I hope you choose not to shun them.”

“So long as we are in agreement that they will be part of Star Force and not the Protovic.”

“This is on us,” Kip made clear. “I just needed to know what part you wanted to play in it, if any.”

“Unless you’re going to kill them, we’d prefer to stay out of the affair.”

“We have a number of Protovic in Axius already. Are you going to object to us using them?”

The Chancellor sighed. “We don’t like anything about this, but so long as you keep this outside of my territory you can do as you wish. We do not give our blessing, for we think they should be destroyed, but we will not try to stop you if you want to try and save them from themselves. Just do not let them persist as they are now, not even in the slightest way. Ideas have a way of infecting others, and their culture is a poison I would suggest you do not toy with.”

“Truth kills lies, Chancellor. This is something we learned a long time ago, which is why we do not suppress information. If there’s something dangerous we confront it head on rather than trying to bury it away where no one will see.”

“I do not think this is wise, but it’s your empire. Do as you wish.”

Kip looked at the ceiling. “I was hoping for a little more optimism than that,” he said sarcastically.

“If these were Humans, how would you react?”

“Honestly it doesn’t affect me anymore. I look at you and I see a person. I look at Humans and I see a person. The race doesn’t factor in unless it’s a new one that I haven’t learned the idiosyncrasies of.”

The Chancellor raised an eyebrow. “A side effect of your Axius?”

Kip smiled. “Perhaps.”

“Our civilization is still only one race, and no matter how close our ties are with Star Force you will always be an outsider. That is not a negative, and please do not take it as an insult, it is just a reality of life.”

“Those you keep company with are the familiar, others are the outsiders. The biology doesn’t really matter. If you’ve only lived with other Protovic I understand how you can’t see that. I will admit that there are some compatibility issues, but a lot of my friends are Protovic and I don’t see them as outsiders. And most of them are not part of Star Force.”

“I will grant you wisdom there, but where Star Force is clear about who and what you are others are not. They feign to assimilate and seek to assert their own culture over that which they live in. That is why we keep to ourselves. Our affiliation with Star Force is the only exception. I am told even that was deemed dangerous, though you have proved a reliable ally over the course of time. You stated, arrogantly so, that the Protovic had to adhere to a set of your rules. We were already in compliance with most of them, and the remainder had been proposed internally before you issued your mandate, but we were rightfully concerned that it wouldn’t end there and that additional demands would be made later on.”

“Unfortunately the galaxy is full of liars and cheats.”

“But not you. You held to the mandate and did not alter it one speck over all these years. You have left us alone so long as we adhere to it, and that has allowed the interconnectivity that has bonded our civilizations more than we ever thought possible. I fear that if you annex these barbarians that it will alter Star Force, and through you us. Yet like you said, you have successfully annexed other races before, though none on this scale?”

“Not in these numbers, no. But the Calavari were a much more prominent race before their near destruction.”

“They are stronger now than they ever were before, which is credit due to you. I do not see it happening with the barbarians.”

“Once part of Star Force they will be allowed to travel throughout our territory as all others do, but their populations will not be relocated to the ADZ. Our borders are continuously expanding, and the Veliquesh will remain in the approximate region they are now. They will not become part of the ADZ community in any meaningful way.”

“And if you fail they will remain isolated and able to be severed once again?”

“We won’t fail. It’s simply a matter of denying the younglings any connection to the old culture from birth. Unless Protovic have some genetic memory that I’m unaware of?”

“All races do, but if you’re referring to the more impressive ones then no, we do not. You should already know that given your Axius Protovic.”

“Do I detect some dissatisfaction there?”

“They chose you over us.”

“Team pride?”

“Something like that. I do not think it is any different for you.”

“Yeah, we don’t like quitters either. But we always leave the door open for them to come back.”

The Chancellor cracked a smile. “Always a competition with you.”

“Friendly competition. And once I get past the horror of the Veliquesh I see them as a challenge, not a poison. I ask that you abhor what they are now, but wait to pass judgement on what we will make of them later. If we succeed I don’t want you carrying a grudge against people because of who their ancestors were. And if you do, then you’ll have to start hating yourself because it looks like you have the same ancestors as them,” Kip pointed out.

“Am I free to hate the ones living now?” he asked sarcastically.

“Yes. Their actions and mindset are deserving of hate. Those yet to be born are not yet poisoned by it. Make sure you differentiate between the two.”

“I take your meaning, but if your goals are for their offspring then what will you do with the 3 trillion bad ones now?”

“Keep them contained and away from everyone else while providing a difficult, but not impossible, path for individuals to work their way out of that mess. In order to do that they’ll have to essentially kill their own culture, which I doubt very few will, but we’ll offer them the possibility regardless. As for the rest, they haven’t attained self-sufficiency. Unless they change and learn, time will erase them from the galaxy.”

“A far more pleasant demise for their civilization than they deserve.”

“Probably true, but this way we don’t accidentally kill someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

“I still have my doubts. Feel free to impress me.”

“Watch and learn, youngling.”

The Chancellor blinked his glowing purple eyes, covering them briefly with glowing green eyelids. “How old do I have to get before you stop calling me youngling?”

“Tell you what. When you hit 500 years I’ll stop.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Archon.”

2

May 5, 2827

Solar System

Earth

Paul swung his double-bladed stun sword through a left to right slash, hitting and deflecting a thud up over his head before dipping the left side of his sword down to get another heading for his legs. He reversed the slash and brought the right side around to pick up another near his face then continued in a back and forth motion picking the little balls out of the air as a couple of padawans did likewise beside him in the training chamber.

All three of them were weathering a storm of thuds being directed their way from omnidirectional points and using battlemeld to see if they could effectively cover each other in close quarters without letting any through or getting their blades crossed. The two padawans had single blades, with Leona-11932 carrying a pair. Those were the three sword options available in Star Force, aside from the shorter stun sticks, and gave all three Archons a different feel for the combat…which all of them could sense through the battlemeld.

As Paul worked his way through the thuds heading towards side his of the small circle he tried to get as many as he could to minimize what the other two had to deal with, including those coming down from above with him whipping his sword around and over their heads often to pick up a few. He had two edges to work with, as did Leona, but Jackson-12431 only had a single. That meant he had less picking up capability, but should have had better movement speed. This was the third day that Paul and the pair in the advanced training group had been working on this, and honestly it was still a bit clunky.

Paul was so much faster than them that he’d had to adjust his battlemeld pacing accordingly. Operating at his Sav-enhanced rhythm while monitoring their normal speeds caused him to either lose the feel for them or to start operating at their speed. Often with the battlemeld a sync was formed one way or another and part of this drill was for him to learn not to do that. Training with Jason or one of the other trailblazers was easy because they were on the same level, but these two padawans were not.

And the reverse was also true, in that Paul’s Sav-enhanced mental status would overwhelm the padawans and they’d lose some amount of connection with him. They were having to learn to filter out what he was transmitting to them because their minds literally couldn’t keep up with his. There was a way to do this, Paul knew, but it was going to take a lot of work to figure out…which was exactly why there was still a permanent advanced training group. They’d do the head scratching and experimenting, then figure out how to accomplish whatever was necessary and codify it in the Star Force database for other Archons to learn from down the road.

The trailblazers always kept a minimum of three here at all times, plus a group of between 30-500 other Archons working on various things. Vermaire was almost a permanent resident aside from his time spent training the Arc Knights, and he was even more of a monster now than ever before. If not for the advanced psionics the trailblazers had there was no way they could have taken him on hand to hand. He was setting the benchmark in that subcategory with Paul and the others trying to keep up, though the size differences involved did have a huge impact on their effectiveness.

Archons were smaller and usually faster, while Vermaire and the other Knights had the greater mass and usually lesser speed, except the Black Knight’s agility was so great now that his size wasn’t a liability. That’s what made it so hard to fight him, for no matter how strong Paul or the others got Vermaire always had a muscle advantage.

Paul appreciated that, glad that there was someone above him in that subcategory for him to watch and learn from…but he didn’t like getting beaten any more than the rest of the trailblazers, or Archons for that matter. With Sav Paul could still move faster than the Black Knight, barely, and that allowed him to stand his ground in sparring matches, but he couldn’t beat him often. Usually it involved a momentary opportunity that Paul took advantage of, then Vermaire would learn and close the door to that method of attack.

The more Paul and the others sparred with him the tougher he got. Morgan could take him easily using her Jumat, and Paul was very interested in seeing the day when they found that illusive trigger and gave Vermaire the concussive energy, for that was something he desperately wanted to see the effects of on the man’s combat potential.

But for now the trigger hunting was at a standstill. Most of the tier 2 triggers had been found with those still remaining being very buried…or perhaps they were just going about finding them the wrong way. They had no guides to work from, and the accidental discoveries were growing more and more rare as time went on. Rio gaining Ubven had been a major boost to their efforts, but so far that trigger still eluded them as well and the fact that a few tier 3s were being accessed before all of the tier 2s suggested that some of them had to be buried in different locations than they were probing.

And by probing he meant fumbling around in the dark. After all this time no amount of gravity training had given anyone else Jumat, so what it was that pushed Morgan to that trigger was an ongoing mystery. Paul and the others were no longer looking for triggers, but rather just trying to expand and learn their new potential while hoping to accidentally stumble across them. It had happened enough already not to be inconceivable, but the fact that they didn’t have a plan to reaching them other than pure luck annoyed Paul enough that he just had to let it go and look at them as bonuses rather than goals to attain.

There was a lot of information in the Zen’zat files regarding their fighting style but Archon combat was a bit different, and not only due to their sizes. Zen’zat fought with many exotic styles while Archon combat had been created by the trailblazers themselves through them just experimenting and seeing what worked. There wasn’t any flair in it, just efficient knockdown power. The Zen’zat had techniques that favored a certain angle and amped it up greatly, like their Namen’trist. That style of hand to hand combat saw the use of the arms and hands as secondary and used only to facilitate setting up body blows thrown from the torso.

Even their kicks were supplementary, with the idea being to get a hip or shoulder into the opponent and use your mass and momentum to deliver kinetic force to momentarily stun your opponent enough to get a loose grapple with a foot or leg enough to pull them back to you for another body hit. The technique was effective, but narrow minded. Archons wouldn’t stick to one technique, rather they saw all techniques as tools to be used when there was need, which had them basically fighting and making it up as they went along.

The Zen’zat did not fight that way, which was why the Archons couldn’t just use their playbook and had to write one of their own, with this battlemeld swords chapter having to be written by those developing it. When completed they’d be able to link up with others, regardless of their rank, and effectively fight together as one mind rather than two competing individuals crammed into a confined space.

That space was marked by a small circle on the floor for this drill, and any of them stepping outside of it would end the challenge in failure. Every hit on their bodies was 10 points to the negative while every successful deflection was +1. There were bonus point receptacles placed on the walls for them to aim their deflections at but today they didn’t have that luxury, for the thuds were coming at them in too great a number to try and pick up any of the bonuses. Paul had to work his ass off just to keep himself and his teammates from getting hit.

He saw everything they saw, not to mention with his own Pefbar active. That was one sensation that the others had to learn to block out, relying on Paul’s vision and their own Pefbar to see everything around them. His sight was necessary for the colors and context, but add in his own superior Pefbar on top of theirs and it’d provide even more data to their minds…which would be too much for those without Sav to handle. A three-way meld was more burdensome than a pairing as it was, so a significant part of this swords exercise was in learning to pick and choose which pieces of the battlemeld you wanted to utilize, which had to be done by the receiver.

Paul’s battlemeld ability was transmitting everything automatically and rather than trying to create a custom link the Archons were learning to just filter out parts of it. Paul was learning too, though he didn’t need it for this drill. He could handle everything the two were feeding him and then some, it was the constant thud blocks that required his body to be moving so fast that the physical processing was overloading his mind and making him veer into numbness as he tried to overcompensate to take pressure off the other two.

As with most training drills in the advanced training group, this one was not meant to be beaten, but rather to have your limits pressed and surpassed, showing you where you were weak and giving your subconscious mind a taste of failure to adapt to. Paul never accepted that, but with so many thuds coming in at a slowly increasing rate there came a point where they were losing more points than gaining them. The challenge continued until their score eventually dropped to 0, then the thuds suddenly shut off as Paul blocked one last one into a bonus receptacle on the wall to his left, but it was too late to count.

All three of them stood there dripping with sweat as Leona released her part of the battlemeld, with Paul doing likewise a moment later. That had been a solid session regardless of what the stats eventually said. He didn’t know how long they’d been at it, but they’d gained enough experience points out of this to trigger a good adaptational training surge. Their bodies would adjust to the demands, as would their minds, and the next time they came back to this they’d be a little bit better at it…and from that they’d press even further.

“My arms are so dead,” Leona complained, having had to wield each sword with only one arm while Jackson had two-handed his single blade the entire time.

“Do you need the extra length?” Paul asked. “Switching to stun sticks would reduce the weight.”

“I don’t know, most of the thuds I’m getting on the bottom two thirds, but I’d be missing some if I made the switch. Not sure if it’d be a good tradeoff.”

“Has anyone build any novelty weapons?” Jackson asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Like blades attached to a gauntlet or throwing knives or such?”

“Fixed blades are a disadvantage save for leverage. They wouldn’t help,” Paul explained. “I’ve looked into variations, but the three we’re using as the best we’ve found.”

“Why don’t more Archons use the swords in combat?” Leona asked.

“They’re more of a badass weapons. You have to get melee close, and most stunning missions make use of ranged stuns or psionics. As far as kill power goes, the plasma swords have a very limited use. It’s more of a utility item than a main.”

“And why don’t they cut?” Jackson asked. “I mean, instead of delivering a point blast.”

“Because they’re not a lightsaber. Jason and I have been working on some prototype blades with some new tech, but not for combat. We’d like to have something to cut through doors or armor plating with, but to set up a blade like that it almost has to be flat. Combat needs the blades to be rounded, hence the explosive touch rather than a fine cut.”

“What about throwing knives?”

“What’s the purpose?” the titan countered.

“To look…cool? I don’t really know.”

“Our weapons are designed not to leave shrapnel behind, so sticking a blade into a body isn’t one of our goals. We can deliver remote grenades, like the Kiritas variety, but there’s no point in making them pointy.”

“So that’s why you switched from hard casings to gel?” Leona asked. “No more shrapnel.”

“Just a concussive energy pop,” Paul agreed.

“I guess I was just thinking that with psionics we could retrieve the blades so there wouldn’t be an ammo issue,” Jackson explained. “Throw and pull.”

“Tell you what, hit the showers and meet me topside in half an hour. I’ll grab some snacks and we’ll go on a little field trip.”

Leona raised an eyebrow. “Field trip?”

“You’re starting to think a like a trailblazer now, so why not show you some of the stuff we’ve made that hasn’t been very good. We keep it in a place called the Vault. It used to be stored in multiple places but we moved it to one facility here on Earth. There are a few combat items you might like to see.”

“How much training time are we going to lose?” Jackson asked.

Paul raised an eyebrow at him, but didn’t say a word.

“If he’s suggesting we go, the answer is none,” Leona said.

“Smart girl. We’ll take a break then extend the afternoon session to compensate.”

“What exactly do you have in there?” Leona asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“No reason you should have. It’s just kind of like our storage locker. I think it’ll answer your blade questions better than I can,” Paul said, retracting his doublebladed sword down into the extra-wide hilt before throwing it towards a wall rack and sliding it in telekinetically. “Half an hour,” he said, heading for the door, then he turned the corner and was gone.

“What was that about?” Jackson asked as Leona retracted her pair of swords and put them back into the wall storage rack before he did the same and shut it.

“I’m not sure, but it sounds interesting. Something the other Archons have probably never seen.”

“So why does he want to show it to us?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’re just padawans, and we’re not even in Clan Saber.”

“We’re working out here, so that makes us kind of special. Who knows, he offered and we’re going. Save your stupid questions until we get there.”

“Fine,” Jackson scoffed. “You’re not sharing a shower with me today.”

“Never do,” Leona mocked as she headed out a step ahead of him.

It took them sixteen minutes to get to the nearby equipment room, shower, and change into a fresh set of clothes, then another seven to move through Atlantis’s internal transit systems and up to the top deck of the city. Paul hadn’t said where to meet him, but there was a pad reserved for Archon craft and that was where they found him a few minutes later carrying a satchel and chewing on a sugar stick as he headed for one of the smallest mantises.

“Let’s go,” he said with his mouth half full as the padawans were just standing there, then he boarded the small aerial transport and headed for the cockpit as they followed him in. He sat down at the controls and powered the craft up as the two Archons parked themselves on the bench behind him.

“How far away is it?” Leona asked.

“About 20 minutes.”

“What city is it in?”

“It’s a standalone facility,” Paul said as they lifted off and coasted on anti-grav out into the sunlight from the concealed hangar and gained altitude. He extended the 4 wings from the craft’s upper housing and shot them off across the Pacific Ocean at low altitude while quickly gaining speed. Leona and Jackson held off further questions until they arrived, seeing nothing until Paul brought them to a standstill over an empty bit of ocean and just held them there, doing nothing.

“Is there a problem?” Leona asked.

“This is kind of a secret. So this stays between us, alright?”

“Ok,” Jackson said, with Leona nodding her agreement.

“Pinky swear,” Paul said deadpan as he held out his right hand.

Leona laughed. “Are you serious?”

“Totally. You don’t mess with the pinky. You in or not?”

Leona didn’t know if he was joking or not, but held out her hand and looped her pinky finger around his, which he then latched onto in a firm grip.

“I swear never to reveal the most awesome place in the universe.”

Leona couldn’t help but smile. “I swear never to reveal the most awesome place in the universe,” she repeated.

Paul let go of her hand and spun back around to his controls.

Jackson frowned. “What about me?”

“You’re a guy, why would I want to hold hands with you?” Paul asked, tipping the mantis’s nose over and sending them straight down into the water.

3

“Where is this exactly?” Jackson asked. “There aren’t any cities here that I know of.”

“It’s below the seafloor,” Paul said as they slowly trolled through the water with the sunlight disappearing with the depths. “And it’s not on most maps. Just a little hideaway we made.”

“You have a lot of those?” Leona asked.

Paul smirked. “Depends on your definition of ‘a lot.’”

“Worried about a security breach?”

“Privacy has its advantages. Someone doesn’t know to look for something if they don’t know it exists. Nor can they complain about not getting access to it.”

“It’s that cool, huh?”

“You wouldn’t believe how many times people have asked me to see the X-wing after Mark blabbed that we’d built one.”

Jackson’s eyes widened. “An X-wing? Like, from Star Wars? That X-wing?”

“Case in point,” Paul said as a blip came up on his sensor board indicating a short range beacon. “There we are. Gotta get close to pick it up…and have the access code.”

Leona saw him type a series of numbers into a keypad, but other than that nothing happened as far as she could see, though they were still a ways off the seafloor. “Is anyone down there?”

“I doubt it. Just a big storage locker we stuff stuff in.”

Leona and Jackson remained silent for the rest of the short trip, watching on the display screen as they approached a small crack in the seafloor roughly four times the size of their mantis in width. The depth was deceiving, for when they entered it they realized just how big it was…and saw the hangar built into the sidewall. Paul flew them inside the open doors and through the energy shield holding back the water, finding a nautilus also sitting on the otherwise empty deck.

“That’s a spare,” Paul said before they could ask about the hybrid aquatic/aerial craft. Like the mantis it could travel through both but was suited more for the water than the air. “We’re the only ones here. And I must remind you that all visitors are required to keep their hands to themselves and off the exhibits, we wouldn’t want to get nasty fingerprints on the cool toys.”

With that Paul got up and headed out of the mantis, leaving the pair of padawans a bit perplexed at his attitude. They weren’t sure if he was messing with them or what, so they just followed him out and across the empty bay to the only door into the facility. When it opened they were hit with an ambient white light that shown from the smooth walls, making the hallway look telltale Star Force but something out of the future…or maybe distant fictional past.

“Follow me,” Paul said as he walked down the long hallway, bypassing many side doors until he came to the unmarked one he wanted. With the press of a button it retracted into the wall and allowed them to enter a gallery of display cases that held a variety of exotic weapons.

“No way,” Jackson said when he saw a series of Covenant firearms. “You built Halo weapons?”

“As you can see we built a lot of stuff. It all works but most of it is inefficient crap, otherwise we’d be using it in the field.”

“Gunblade?” Leona asked.

“Only has 6 rounds, which is pretty useless,” Paul said as she looked at the sword that doubled as a rifle. “This is one of the more recent ones,” he said, picking up a short stick and holding it in his hand laterally. With a press of a button a neon white blade materialized over his knuckles, giving him a Covenant energy blade.

“I thought you said you didn’t have any narrow cutters yet?”

“No reliable ones,” he said, swinging it through the air a few times just to get the feel. “This is plasma contained within an energy shield, same as the stun swords, but the more you swipe it across a target the more damage is done. It’s more like a tactile bomb than a cutter, and the recharge rate, while very fast to make it effective, drains the battery so quick you get maybe a minute of decent damage. And you can’t parry, because the blade is just energy. It’s more like a plasma paintbrush. Plus this handle hold is crap when you actually try to work with it. Hence it gets thrown into the cool relics storage you see here.”

Paul deactivated the sword and tossed it to Jackson. “Don’t blast yourself,” he said as he walked down the row until he hit a cutout and crossed over six more, coming to a specific display case. “As far as throwing knives go, I think this is about as close as we’ve gotten.”

Leona looked where he pointed, seeing a deck of cards. “I don’t understand.”

“Jackson, you get it?”

The padawan stopped swiping the energy sword through the air and glanced over, looking at the thick deck. “Afraid not.”

Paul smiled and picked up the deck, holding them in his left hand while sliding a control ring over his left ear. “Mentally activated,” he said, whipping his arm around and releasing a single card through the air toward the nearest wall some 30 meters away. It flew straight with a neon red glow then impaled the wall and stuck there.

“What the hell?” Leona asked.

“It takes a lot of practice, but you can chuck these pretty fast,” he said, spinning around in a tornado twirl and releasing a card with each rotation. They impacted forming a pretty damn level line on the wall, all still glowing red while the deck in his hand were not luminous. “With a thought I can make them discharge, but I don’t want to blow up the wall,” he said, recalling the cards to him from across the room. They flew at him one at a time and returned to his left hand, settling into the deck.

“How?” Jackson asked.

“They’re not rigid. The material bends into a clinging goo on impact,” Paul said, chucking a glowing red rectangle at the padawan and having it seemingly impale his chest, but the material had simply mushed around the impact point instead. A second later Paul recalled it, then held it up for him to see that the rectangle had reformed itself.

“They’re grenades?” Leona asked.

“Can be. We’ve also been able to load them with stun charges, chemicals, even surveillance equipment. Their flight is kept level through a little telekinetic control, as is the recall. My arm strength gives them most of their speed and they need a decent hit to trigger the melting and sticking process.”

“Where did you get the idea for these?” Leona asked.

“Same place we got the ideas for most of this stuff. Movies, TV shows, video games, books. We tried a lot of stuff, just to see if we could, and some of it panned out. We use it now as standard equipment, the rest is stored here for nostalgia sake or just in case we find a use for it…or think of a way to tweak the design and make it viable.”

“So give me that,” Paul said, motioning for Jackson to return him the energy sword, “and have a look around. We’ve built just about everything we could think of. If you still have any ideas for melee weapons afterwards please feel free to share. As you can see, we don’t have a problem stealing ideas.”

“And then can we see the X-wing?” Jackson asked.

“I’m not taking you through every room, but we’ll hit the aircraft hangar on the way out.”

“Cool,” Leona said, walking down the closest row of display cases. The room was huge and there were literally hundreds of handheld weapons here, some of which she recognized from lore, but most were unfamiliar to her. After about a minute of searching she stopped when she saw an actual knife, or rather more like a dagger. “I thought you said you didn’t build any knives?”

Paul walked over to her position and saw the green/gold/black/silver dagger and smiled. “That’s one of Morgan’s and is still a work in progress.”

“What are the buttons on it for?”

“One is to activate the plasma sheath, because it works like a plasma sword, but its main function is a…car key. The buttons are what you would call an input code.”

“Card key for what?” she asked while Jackson was half a football field away looking through other items.

“I said ‘car’ key. Before you were born there were physical keys that had to be inserted for a vehicle to operate. This one doesn’t have to be inserted, it’s just a metaphor,” he said, passing his hand through the static field meant to keep dust off the displays and picking it up. Paul raised it to his lips and blew into a slit on it while pressing a series of buttons that resulted in a music tone.

“Audial recognition?” Leona asked, not understanding.

“No, just a bit of theatrical awesomeness. When you hit the right tone a signal is sent out activating your…car, which is what we’re still working on.”

“What kind of car?”

“When we get back to Atlantis do a search for ‘Power Rangers’ and ‘Dragonzord.’”

“Ok,” she said, walking on while Paul wiped a bit of spit off the Dragon Dagger and put it back in its ornamental resting place.

After Paul got back to Atlantis and finished his day’s training he returned to his quarters and logged onto his comm terminal to check his messages, finding one from Jason and a rare one from Cal-com. He opened the Voku’s first, for he hadn’t heard from him much since he’d redeployed himself to the middle of lizard territory and outside the relay grid. Any messages coming to Paul had to be carried via courier ship, meaning there wasn’t a lot of communication between the two nowadays. They’d handled their planning phase in the past, with events going forward holding course and not requiring any major overhauls or meetings.

Normally messages from Cal-com were short or contained attached files, but as soon as Paul opened this one he saw that it was incredibly long in addition to having attached files. The trailblazer read through it quickly, seeing that his Voku counterpart was setting up the foundation of a defense pact on the far side of lizard territory. The difference between this pact and a formal alliance was that there was going to be no interconnectivity other than shared intelligence on the lizards, making it a shared mission rather than any bonds of unity.

Star Force’s relationship with the Voku was a great deal more than that but Cal-com wasn’t interested in gaining friends, only organizing the locals to better defend against the lizards. A lot of what he was proposing was intelligence based, with the lesser races pulling scouting missions rather than combat so they could detect where the lizards were so that they could be contained. A few of the races he mentioned were capable of fighting the lizards and winning battles, but there was one in particular that he went into great detail on.

They were called the Preema, and were arguably stronger than the Voku. That piqued Paul’s curiosity immediately, then went even further when he detailed their placement and numbers. They had a huge empire spinward of Star Force and lizard territory in the same galactic arm, with attached files of what little Cal-com had learned as of yet. Most important thing was they recognized the long term threat of the lizards and wanted to aid in their preemptive defeat…but they didn’t want to be responsible for claiming territory beyond their own.

That was a bit odd, but understandable given the additional information Paul ran through. Cal-com’s intelligence indicated that the Preema were solitary and that their empire was extremely dense, preventing others from having any clue what was going on inside it. They operated with fixed borders and rightly understood that defeating the lizards meant denying them the ability to colonize new worlds or to recolonize those they had been kicked off. You couldn’t do that from afar, so it seemed that they were going to offer their services in the ass kicking department while relying on the Voku and others to hold and deny the lizards territory that they cleansed them from.

That was a huge task, as Paul and Star Force well knew, for they were already monitoring a lot of empty systems that they had no immediate wish to colonize. Putting relays in each system was necessary, but that was a slow process because they had to be properly defended. Lesser systems were being used to link the conquered territory and provide some surveillance, but patrols had to be routinely sent out to every system to check on them and the local monitoring drones.

The best way to deny the lizards territory was to inhabit it after they kicked them off, but there were so many lizard systems that that wasn’t going to be feasible, and just handing out planets to anyone who came looking for them was problematic for a number of reasons. It seemed that Cal-com was organizing the locals on the far side into holding their own territory and being responsible for patrolling the immediate region around it, constructing a puzzle piece border zone to stop the spread of the lizards, or at least to detect their incursions so they could be targeted and destroyed by the Voku or Preema once they eventually arrived.

It seemed they were setting up a semi-permanent staging base in the new Voku territory and would be spamming their navy out of there. He said that given their strength they’d be able to kill the lizards with reliable certainty, it was the aftermath that was the challenge. He intended to secure his new border region first, then press across the middle of lizard territory up to the border he’d negotiated with Paul, leaving Star Force the task of conquering the remaining lizard systems up to that.

But the most important part of Cal-com’s message was the fact that the Preema were telepathic and had raided his mind briefly before he got outside of range. During that moment they had found the memory of Humans and reacted to it with keen interest. They wanted to meet with Star Force and Paul had a sinking feeling in his gut that quickly manifested itself into an epiphany that had him pulling up the Star Force copy of the pyramid database and going through the V’kit’no’sat race list.

The location of the Preema empire was beyond the old borders but not by much, and some races that the V’kit’no’sat knew of or had contact with had been plotted in an auxiliary file due to the fact that they were rumored rather than confirmed locations. Paul’s mind told him he’d come across the Preema before, but it took him more than three hours of searching before he finally was able to find a link.

The V’kit’no’sat had another name for them, but the biological files were a match. The Hamach were a race that had made diplomatic contact and had not been deemed worthy of eradicating. They were fairly advanced and not interested in more than greeting their neighbors. The V’kit’no’sat exchanged information with them then wanted no further communication, which the Hamach had obliged. The location of the Hamach was within the current borders of the Preema according to Cal-com’s map, which is why Paul thought he’d remembered them. He’d done a search through the database before looking for races in this galactic arm with a certain technological level and had come across them before, only the name had changed since they’d made contact…which was well before the fall of Earth.

So it was likely that they knew what the Zen’zat were, and from Cal-com’s memories had identified Star Force as being Zen’zat…but Zen’zat that were not part of the V’kit’no’sat. If they knew anything about of them they’d know that that was not tolerated. The question was, did the Preema still have contact with the shrunken empire and could they tip the V’kit’no’sat off to their existence?

Paul had to find out one way or another, so he skipped going to bed and instead headed over to find Davis to fill him in, then he transferred to a warship in orbit and left Sol heading outside the ADZ to cross lizard space and find Cal-com so he could arrange that meeting the Preema wanted.

After that Paul didn’t know. He’d have to play this by ear and hope their luck held out.

4

June 28, 2827

Shaleth System (Voku territory)

Inova

Cal-com walked up to the guards outside his private oracle only to have them tense up when they saw the Human behind him. He put a dissatisfied look on his face and shook his head. “Relax. If this one wanted to kill me he would have done so long ago.”

The guards shrank bit as Cal-com passed them a step and opened the door, with Paul looking up at the much bigger Voku with a stern expression on his face. “Don’t relax too much. I could still try to kill one of you.”

That resulted in a stare down for a moment until Cal-com walked inside and Paul followed, then the door sealed and the two warlords had a secure location to themselves. “What’s so urgent to bring you out here in person?”

“The Preema,” Paul said as he casually walked around and took in the layout. It wasn’t much different than what Cal-com and him had worked in before, save for the displays were concerning a different section of the galaxy with unfamiliar starmaps. “I think they know who we are.”

“What do you mean?” Cal-com said, leaning against a wall as Paul stopped near a table sticking out of the bulkhead that had numerous holographic icons representing ship placements suspended above it…and the remains of one of the Voku’s snack bars. Nasty stuff. Tasted like coffee.

“The enemy in the core that I never told you about. They’re called the V’kit’no’sat. My race is part of them. We’re called Ter’nat, or rather the low breeding stock are. They recruit elites out of the Ter’nat and transform them into Zen’zat. Warriors who serve the overall conglomeration of an empire whom your elders created and were subsequently kicked out of.”

When Paul saw Cal-com stiffen he waved a hand through the air dismissively. “Yes, I probably should be keeping this secret but at this point I don’t care. My home system was one of the most distant colonies of the V’kit’no’sat that was lost during a rebellion by one of the member races. The empire shrank thereafter and it was abandoned along with a lot of other worlds in this galactic arm. All were presumed dead in the fighting that took place, I assume, but apparently a few Zen’zat were left behind. My race are the descendants of those Zen’zat, and if the V’kit’no’sat ever learn of our existence they will stop at nothing to annihilate us. No one can leave the empire. When your elders did they fought a war that all but killed them off.”

“And you know this how?”

“We have a very important piece of V’kit’no’sat tech on Earth that contains their database as of the time of the planet’s abandonment. History, tech, training, almost everything they had save for their closest secrets. Your elders, who are called Zak’de’ron, or we just call them ‘dragons’ because that’s what they are, helped us unlock the restricted files a while back as a favor for waking them up. Seemed there was only one left alive, in stasis, watching over a bunch of eggs. We found them during a battle, revived him without knowing what he was, and got the story thereafter. The Zak’de’ron were defeated by the V’kit’no’sat, with this being a backup plan in case that happened. That’s why your elders went missing for such a long time. They were all dead save for one.”

“I hope that will impress on you the gravity of the situation,” Paul emphasized. “Your elders founded the V’kit’no’sat with a handful of other races to battle an enemy at the heart of the galaxy, to keep them in check because they cannot be defeated through conventional means. They are called the Hadarak and live within gravity wells where the V’kit’no’sat cannot go. Without them keeping the menace in place, it would spread throughout the galaxy doing lots of unknowable damage, yadda, yadda, yadda. The V’kit’no’sat developed a bit of an ego, necessitating the equal submission of every member race to the collective, which your elders did not hold to. That rift eventually lead to a war that destroyed them. Backstabbed by their own creation. The V’kit’no’sat tolerate no deviation. Anyone who does is dead, which is why it is imperative that they do not find out that we’re alive or they’ll come for us en mass and with far greater technology than we now wield,” Paul said, finally finishing and crossing his arms over his chest.

“That explains a great many things,” Cal-com said slowly, soaking it all in. “And your current relationship with the Elders is what, exactly?”

“We did each other a favor once, but that’s it, officially. They did send you to watch our backs though.”

“You do not serve them then, as you did within this empire?”

“No we don’t. We’re an anomaly that wasn’t supposed to exist. Zen’zat are forbidden from breeding, due in no small part to the psionic abilities that we have been given. So many generations have passed that those latent abilities grew dormant and we have to wake them up in our own people, which is why not every Human can do what the Archons can.”

“And the further you extend your empire the greater the risk of drawing their attention?”

“That is the conundrum I have been living under for the past 800 years.”

“An enemy greater than the Elders…now I fully understand your coreward boundary restriction.”

“Not quite. It seems the Zak’de’ron did not fully share their technology and knowledge with the V’kit’no’sat. They held some back, which irritated the other races. They were still dominant, just vastly outnumbered.”

Cal-com nodded, feeling as if the galaxy had just righted itself slightly. “And the Preema?”

“They had contact with the V’kit’no’sat under a different name long ago. I think they recognized us from your memories. I have to come to terms with them one way or another. The shrinking of the V’kit’no’sat empire may have severed all communications between them, but I need to find out what they know and whose side they are on.”

“What help do you need?”

“I need to meet with them, face to face so I can use my psionics to pick their brains. I have a block that will prevent them from reading mine, which is another reason the V’kit’no’sat won’t leave us alive. We were designed to be very useful tools, but gone rogue we could pose a small threat…and they don’t tolerate any threats.”

“Who are these other races you speak of? The ones that the Elders allied with.”

“Have a look,” Paul said, sending a slew of images into his friend’s mind. He went slow enough so he could process it all, but a few minutes later the Voku finally came to grips with just how elite of a crowd he was playing with.

“Thank you, Paul. I knew you were favored by the Elders, but I did not understand why until now. You are their lesser kin.”

“Ahhh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“But you are. You no longer follow their leadership, but you are one of the great races, even if in exile. And if you have possession of a database of knowledge, then you are recovering what was lost and resuming your place in the galaxy.”

“Our place is going to get squashed flat if the Preema or anyone else rat us out, which is why only a few Humans know of this. Tell no one of it, ever. If your elders want to know they can just read your mind.”

“I apologize for betraying your secret, however inadvertently.”

“We’re not exactly hiding as it is.”

“Are the Skarrons aware?”

“They are aware of the V’kit’no’sat and keep clear of their territory, but I do not think they know our ancestry.”

“Now the shape of their territory makes sense. I never understood why they expanded laterally rather than push into the core.”

“The starmaps we have are out of date, so we don’t know who is out there beyond where we scout ourselves. We didn’t know the Preema existed, and there’s no telling how many more powers are out there and who has links to the V’kit’no’sat, so we’re working through all this as we go.”

“How long ago was your homeworld abandoned?”

“About 100 millennia, give or take.”

“And there is no way of knowing how much further they have advanced in that time?”

“Nope,” Paul confirmed succinctly.

“Not an envious position to be in, I’ll grant you, but one with great potential if you are left undiscovered.”

“Right now, that’s up to the Preema. Set up a meet and greet, then show me what you’ve got going on out here. You can ask V’kit’no’sat questions along the way.”

Cal-com smiled, not knowing if his friend had read his mind or just knew him well enough to anticipate his curiosity. As long as Paul was in a divulging mood he wanted to know as much about this threat as possible, and their connection to the Elders.

Paul’s warship was escorted by Cal-com’s conglomerate as the Voku leader went with him to the system where the Preema were establishing their staging base. He wasn’t going to be present for the exchange, but Paul was going to let him listen in just the same via a pair of Voku guards that were going down to the planet’s surface with Paul. The Preema now owned one of the moons in orbit of Adolet in the Yishmur System, but given the bad atmosphere there the meeting was going to take place on the planet below.

On the way in Paul saw the hundreds of thousands of Preema ships already present as a beehive of activity was taking place on the surface of the moon, hidden beneath a dark cloud that was the atmosphere, but still visible to sensors. They were constructing huge cities that likewise bore down deep into the planet, for the canyons they were carving out were not natural, nor were the igloos that they were constructing over top of them. That was the best metaphor Paul could make, for the structures were not blocks nor spires, but half bubbles arranged in almost irregular patterns. Some larger, some small, and others bigger than the mountains that were being torn apart to make a place for them.

Each bubble had at least two connections at their base, such as an igloo would have a low entrance. Their ships in orbit were another matter, essentially built like a pair of forward swept wings with a hollow section in the center between them. The U-shaped ships were registering of an unknown hull material, but a quick sensor modification told Paul that the ships were actually scrambling sensors without having shields raised. A little trick that he knew how to accomplish, thanks to the V’kit’no’sat database, but one that Star Force hadn’t quite learned yet. Their sensors couldn’t identify the hull material or scan the interior of their ships, but the smallest models were Battleship-class, suggesting that the Preema were into heavies rather than swarm tactics.

They did have jumpships present, though, and Paul saw several of the extremely long, thin ships built with spine-like niches where the U-shaped warships would slide over a central rail and dock. The jumpships looked like fragile wisps, but each was more than 2 miles thick and over 120 long with lots of support craft flying to and from them even now, ostensibly hauling cargo down to the moon.

Paul took his time coming into the system before departing for the surface. The Voku had established a colony on the planet, but he would be meeting the Preema at a neutral location in a barren desert. A Voku detachment was already waiting there when Paul’s dropship set down, then on Cal-com’s orders they escorted the Human the short distance over to the platform the Preema had constructed for the purpose of this summit that held their native atmosphere on one half. Unlike when Cal-com had met them the Preema were already here and waiting, with Paul able to see four of them outside their armor and shining like flood lights through the dark and seemingly foul air around them.

Paul wore his golden titan armor as he walked between the dark skinned Voku, standing out against their equally black, skintight clothing augmented by defense shields that were invisible. He was the runt amongst them, but the contingent knew some of his combat capability and well as the fact that his armor was formidable in and of itself on top of his psionics and physical skill. They walked with pride and caution, knowing that even though he was the superior warrior his safety was their assigned mission.

When Paul got to the edge of the raised platform he skipped the low step and hopped straight up on top, then walked to the center were one of the Preema was waiting on the other side of a clear energy field.

“Gar cu ratch bey?” Paul asked when he looked into the lightly glowing quadruped’s six green eyes.

The Preema blinked three of them and tilted its head inquisitively. “I apologize. There seems to be a problem with the translational software. We will try an alternative language.”

“No need,” Paul said quickly. “I assume you can understand me now?”

“Yes we can. What language were you speaking previously?”

“One that I wanted to see if you knew. By now you must realize you can’t read my mind.”

“No we cannot, though may I assume that you can read ours?”

“You are resistant, but I can make contact.”

“You have us at a disadvantage then, but this is not entirely unexpected, nor troublesome. We are used to being the superior, it would be improper of us not to humbly accept the reverse when it occurs.”

“You wanted to speak with me. I am here,” Paul said, going through a carefully choreographed probing method that was linked to his words as he tried to provoke various reactions as he made Ikrid contact with this Preema and those standing behind it while the Voku looked on oblivious from outside the platform.

“May we see your face?”

“I am assuming that you have seen my kind before,” Paul said a moment before retracting his helmet into a small bundle of equipment behind his neck and revealing the pale skin, neon blue hair that he’d donned recently after losing a bet with Jason and decided he liked and was going to keep, and the odd twinkling grey eyes that denoted his ascension to tier 3 psionics.

“A very long time ago. You are said to be a member race of an empire near the core that once stretched near to our territory, but has receded since. May I ask why you have come back this far out?”

“What was the name of this empire?”

“They call themselves the V’kit’no’sat.”

Paul’s face didn’t betray his emotional state, but there was definitely an internal flinch. So it was true, they did know, and now Star Force’s fate was in this alien race’s hands…er, paws.

“Do you have a current means of communication with them?”

“They never deemed to set up one, preferring that we remain outside their territorial zones and not interfere with internal matters of any race, whether they had a link to the V’kit’no’sat or not. We obliged and kept tabs on them as we do all our neighbors, but when their empire shrank we knew only what we heard from travelers. We have not had official nor unofficial contact with them since that time. Does that allay your concerns?”

“Concerns?”

“We mean no offense if we are wrong, but given the current state of your technology and inability to destroy the lizards on a grand scale, we have surmised that you are a splinter race of the V’kit’no’sat, or perhaps a disconnected colony?”

“If you’re asking whether or not we can give you a line of communication back to the core, the answer is no.”

“That is not what we are seeking. Our concerns are with our own territory and our neighbors. The V’kit’no’sat are beyond our sphere now, save for you. We hold you no ill will, and only seek an acquaintance. Beyond that we believe an alliance against the Li’vorkrachnika is manageable.”

“To answer your question bluntly, we are not V’kit’no’sat. Nor do we wish them to be made aware of our existence.”

“As I said, we have no contact with them, and if it is your wish we will let any meeting occur without our involvement. We will not tell anyone that you are Ter’nat, for we know the death penalty that would bring.”

Paul’s eyes narrowed. “What else do you know of the V’kit’no’sat?”

“We watched and learned. They gave us very little information beyond that which was necessary to identify themselves and make clear that they were not to be trifled with. Some of their targets fled to us for sanctuary. We did not officially help them, but a few that had already eluded their pursuit vanished permanently when they crossed our borders. I trust that is a secret you will keep as well, given that we now both have knowledge of the other that the V’kit’no’sat would not be pleased to hear.”

Paul smirked. “Perhaps, but with us it’s an internal matter that they would never overlook. For reasons that I will not go into detail with you about. You might not rate high enough for them to concern themselves with.”

“Our historical records suggest otherwise. They do not tolerate opposition in any form.”

“I’m just saying that we’d be the higher priority.”

“I do not contend that, but they would come for us in time. It is said their memory of adversaries never grows old.”

“They are a bit grumpy,” Paul admitted, losing some of his formality as his mental searches continued to come up clean. This Preema wasn’t trying to hide anything from him. “And here’s to hoping they stay in the core and leave us both alone. Right now though we have another matter to worry about, and I get the feeling you have some questions regarding the Li’vorkrachnika.”

5

“You have shown an ability to defeat them handily, based on the information the Voku supplied us. You have a tech advantage, but you are doing better than that should allow. We believe this is strategic and would like to know exactly what it is you are doing before we bring our fleets into contention with them. We do not doubt that we will be victorious, but efficiency is key given the size of the enemy territory.”

“They adapt,” Paul said bluntly. “We adapt as well, so there is no set strategy. We preserve our troops while they sacrifice theirs. Take away their ability to do that in order to achieve objectives and you thwart most of their attacks.”

“How have you done this?”

“Armor, shielding, extensive training. We don’t give them any soft targets to hit, and most of their territorial expansion is through taking over soft targets.”

“Do you use your telepathy in battle?”

“Yes we do.”

“What level of casualties do you accept?”

“None. We don’t launch an attack unless we expect everyone to survive. During defensive engagements we do what we can, but the enemy is the one who chooses the battlefield and the timing.”

The Preema tilted its head back. “You don’t lose troops in battle?”

“Rarely.”

“And when you do?”

“We learn from the mistake and move on.”

“How can one fight an enemy without putting themselves into jeopardy?”

“A lot of good equipment that takes the hits for you. The lizards send infantry into battle with only a thin protective vest. All of our troops are in full armor that also carries shielding. Combine that with tactics that rotate damaged units out on a regular basis and we have a self-sustaining combat philosophy that works so long as we don’t get too overloaded with numbers.”

“Lizards?”

“Sorry, habit. That’s what we refer to the Li’vorkrachnika as.”

“The Voku do not have a long term plan for victory against the…lizards. They accept that they must be fought now or the threat will grow worse with time. Do you have a plan?”

“A partial one. There is a line towards the core that we will not cross. The lizards have already spread beyond it so destroying them entirely is beyond our reach. Our goals lie with their colonies rimward of this line, and we do intend to destroy all of them we can find.”

“And the purpose of this line is?”

“We cannot approach the V’kit’no’sat. To do so would risk our discovery.”

“We are in a similar position in that we will not expand beyond our borders. We may fight beyond them, but we will not grow our empire externally. This limitation also seems to negate any chance of destroying the lizard civilization entirely, and from the information we have gathered it seems they can regrow from a single colony.”

“That is our understanding as well, though they suffer from supply limitations like everyone else.”

“Their population growth is predetermined and selective?”

“They grow who they need when they need them, yes.”

“High turnover rate?”

“Very high when they fight us.”

“Then their talent pool is shallow.”

“We believe so, though their leadership is kept safely away from the combat. We know little about them or their longevity.”

“Have they any allies?”

“On occasion they have used other races as tools, but we believe they intended to betray those who would help them eventually. For them there can be no cohabitation of the galaxy. At least that’s our read on them, and we haven’t seen anything to contradict it yet.”

“Point of origin?”

“A world in what we refer to as their core systems. At present they are too well defended to assault, but our ultimate goal is to get there and destroy them. In every engagement we offer them a chance to surrender and in every instance they have refused to do so. We believe annihilation is the only solution, though feel free to point out anything you think we have missed.”

“Some enemies are intractable and must be destroyed. Regrettable as this is, it is the way of the galaxy. The Voku have also offered similar conclusions. If they are to be destroyed, the Skarrons would be the logical ally to combat them coreward of your line. I know you are aware of them. Have you made any overtures in that regard?”

Paul’s eyes narrowed. “The Skarrons are as much an enemy of Star Force as the lizards are. If they want to fight them so be it, but we will not aid them.”

“And if we chose to do so, what would your reaction be?”

“To warn you that they cannot be trusted.”

“That we suspect given what we have heard of them, but to allow the lizards to expand in a safe haven is foolishness. I mean no disrespect, but the logistics are determinate. They must be countered everywhere in order for this pact to be effective.”

“We will have nothing to do with the Skarrons other than to shoot them out of orbit,” Paul said firmly. “What relations you have with them are your business, but do not bring them near us and expect us to stay our hand due to your presence.”

“I am merely making an inquiry. We have not contacted them.”

“And what of your short war with The Nexus?”

“Long past. We have no contact with them since, nor do we wish to pursue the matter beyond our borders. They were repelled and have not tried a second invasion.”

“One of our allies against the lizards is a member race of The Nexus. Will that be an issue?”

“So long as they do not attack us again, there is no issue. You said a member race, but not The Nexus as a whole as an ally?”

“The H’kar were defeated by the lizards and fled rimward. They encountered The Nexus and were granted membership. That membership saved them by giving them the technology to fight back and establish a new home territory within The Nexus. They want their old home back, and are helping us fight the lizards in order to one day accomplish that.”

“They aided them but did not fight the lizards? From what we know The Nexus is extremely insistent that an attack against one is an attack against all and they respond appropriately.”

“The Nexus feels the lizards are a minor threat and are busy fighting much larger ones. What those are I do not know, but they have not made a major push against them.”

“Anyone who considers a race that spreads as quickly as the lizards not to be worth stopping early does not have an understanding of tactics. Technological primitivism is not permanent. If they expand to great numbers, those numbers can be upgraded rapidly at some point in the future with technology influx or breakthroughs.”

“Agreed.”

“Have the lizards been assimilating captured technology?”

“Not in great amounts, but yes, there have been some instances. They operate with a standard tech package in every star system. Changes to it are rare, but sweeping when they occur. There was a race known as the Kvash that the lizards defeated. We know they incorporated one of their weapon designs into their ships prior to their most recent upgrade, the origins of which we do not know.”

“The transition from plasma to an energy beam?”

“Yes. The lizards call them Vichsam. We refer to them as ‘Phasers.’ That upgrade alone has increased their military power considerably.”

“Yet you possess far more powerful weapons. Have they not tried to duplicate them from recovered debris?”

“We try not to let them have any debris, but as we’ve learned over the years it isn’t easy to copy something more advanced. There’s a considerable learning curve involved in reverse engineering even the simplest of objects.”

“You speak of your own technological efforts? Am I to assume you will continue to advance rapidly going forward as you recover the V’kit’no’sat tech you possess?”

“We are advancing…but not sharing.”

“We are not asking. But if your powerbase will continue to grow over the course of the coming war, it is a data point that we need to factor in to our planning. When we purge the lizards off their current worlds, someone must step in to claim them…and it will not be us.”

“We will not be claiming the bulk of those worlds, but we will monitor them. If you can provide the firepower to remove the lizards, I can take the burden of their future owners off your conscience. The Voku and I are already making plans in that regard.”

“May I ask your strategy?”

“Keep most of them barren and monitored through probes and interstellar relays with regional bases to strike down any incursions by the lizards or anyone else we deem inappropriate.”

“And are you capable of doing so now?”

“With the worlds we have already cleansed, yes. We are not pushing faster than we can sustain.”

“And if we start clearing worlds, how many of those can your monitoring sustain?”

“A lot near our borders. Further out will take time.”

“We will need to be in sync on that timetable before we begin launching assaults.”

“How soon will you be capable of doing that? I noticed your construction efforts when I flew in.”

“Those facilities are to service our fleet with repair and resupply. We are capable of launching assaults now even without them in operation. We are waiting to gather more ships and until the moment is right. We must coordinate properly in order for that moment to culminate.”

“Our forces won’t be traveling this far out to fight. The Voku will oversee this region of the conflict. I do caution you, though. The lizard burrow underground well. How is your race suited for infantry and close quarters combat?”

“We know the lizards are smaller than us and may have tunnels where we cannot pass, but those tunnels can be destroyed or expanded upon. Though we fly, we are not disinclined to ground combat.”

“But are you good at it? The lizards are devious enough that even we have to careful when we assault one of their worlds.”

“We will not be needing your assistance, though your caution is noted. We come fully prepared to fight on all warfronts.”

“Including aquatics?”

The Preema shifted. “They inhabit the waters as well?”

“They have a variant designed for them. They are a minority, but any world with significant bodies of water may have colonies there that will need to be removed. Are you capable of doing that?”

“It is difficult for us, but we are able.”

“It is not so difficult for us. We have several member races that are aquatic. Once a reliable connection is made across lizard territory we will be in a position to assist with those combat assignments and we would prefer you leave them to us rather than risk your own people fighting out of their element. Also, if the lizards realize you have this weakness you can expect them to funnel more resources into developing aquatic colonies.”

“Our warships are capable of aquatic travel. Any facilities they have we can destroy.”

“And infantry?”

“There we will not go, but we can deploy machines to compensate. Unless there is more resistance than we expect, we will be able to handle our own invasion zones and would prefer that we do not mix forces unless necessary. We do not want your people, or any others in this pact, to come to harm due to compatibility issues.”

“We are well aware of those issues, but I would still urge you to defer to us in aquatic matters when applicable.”

“We will take that under advisement, but for the most part we wish to deal with this threat alone in engagement theaters.”

“What is your reason for fighting them?”

“We do not wish to take chances with the future.”

“So long as you do not fight dishonorably, you will not find our forces to be a burden. The rest of this pact that the Voku are building I cannot speak for.”

“Do not mistake me, we will fight alongside you when the time is right, but when deciding what worlds to hit next we can handle targets on our own without a combined force.”

“I imagine most missions are going to be like that for us all. At least until we can establish a corridor through lizard territory that we can reliably ship through. The lizards aren’t great at naval ambushes, but they’re adaptive and if you get sloppy they won’t hesitate to try and pick off a ship or two. Though their ships are slow compared to ours…and I assume yours. I am told your technology is on a similar level to that of the Voku?”

“I cannot speak to that, for we know little about them or their combat capability, but we are far beyond the lizards. We are also superior to The Nexus, if that allows you to draw a comparison.”

“Are there any others that you know of in that peer group in proximity to the lizards?”

“Unfortunately no. There are others, but at greater distance and disinterest. The Skarrons are the largest power after us, though their tech level is considerably lower.”

“Who ranks after that?”

“There is a disagreeable race known as the Brechmak on the upper edge of the galactic plane, similar in size to your territory. The lizards have not yet reached them, but if they do I would expect them to encounter a pushback. They are not someone whom we can negotiate with, and are therefore inadvisable as members of the Voku pact.”

“Is that what we’re calling it? The Voku pact.”

“If there is an official name I have not been informed of it.”

“Good enough for me. The Voku pact it is.”

“I can tell you that there are several technologically advanced races of small size near or currently within the boundaries of the lizard empire. A few more advanced than ourselves. They may or may not be inclined to fight, and I would wager the latter. Still, we are working with the Voku to inform as many potential targets as possible to rally as many races as are willing to the fight. Some will not want to engage until they themselves are attacked. We are fortunate that you do not hold to that lack of foresight. You have accomplished much in a short span of time, including the safe harbor to outsiders fleeing to you from the lizard advance. Such actions denote a wise race, and there are regrettably few within this galaxy.”

“That we know of,” Paul said, acknowledging the compliment with a nod. “Most of the galaxy is unknown.”

“I suspect you know more of it than us. Would you be interested in a map swap? Even if yours is dated, I would guess it to cover far more systems than ours.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “The V’kit’no’sat maps are coreward. How far rimward do yours go?”

“Into the next galactic arm, with a few outliers we have made contact with. We do not scout, so they are not thorough. Merely a conglomeration of data acquired from others.”

“How about I show you ours, you show me yours, and then we can decide how much we want to trade data on?”

“An overview?”

“Visual, yes.”

“This is agreeable. Even if you do not give us the maps I am curious to see the extent of the V’kit’no’sat before their collapse.”

“And I am curious,” Paul said, eyeing their armor suits that were splayed out on the other side of the energy field separating the two atmospheres, “as to whether or not those suits are orbit capable?”

“They are. We do not require transports to move to and from a planetary surface.”

“How about from the moon?”

“We could if necessary, but do not typically travel far so exposed. Our wings are built for atmosphere, and flying where there is none is disconcerting. Is your armor capable of reaching orbit?”

“Unfortunately no, it doesn’t fly…yet. We’re working on that, but so far the tech is too bulky to put on a frame that has to remain agile for combat purposes.”

“And the lizards have never employed such armor?”

“Not to my knowledge. They have body suits for cold climates, but no hardened armor.”

“I am surprised that is not one adaptation they have attempted to counter you.”

“It would not work. They know their weaknesses and their advantages. Trying to fight like we do will not suit them. A portable shield generator backpack would be more in line with their style, but they have not fielded any such device yet.”

“All your troops are so equipped?”

“There are minor variations, but yes.”

“And the rest of your population?”

“No, they do not wear armor.”

The Preema lifted a paw towards the right where his suit sat erect like a peeled back statue of a gargoyle. “These suits are combat rated, but all Preema wear similar versions as a matter of course. We can fly without them, but our range and speed are greatly reduced and we have no navigational capability. Such is necessary for our larger worlds to operate on, else there’d be chaos in the skies. When you use such armor on a daily basis you find ways of miniaturizing its functions and making other gradual upgrades. I imagine yours will be more rapid, for rumors of V’kit’no’sat armor were scaling, if I remember correctly?”

“The Voku use scaling tech as well, thought the V’kit’no’sat versions are much more complex. We, however, are not building to recreate what they have made, but to fashion our own. We’re keeping the hard plates even as we gain scaling tech.”

“Is there an advantage in this?”

“There will be. In any case we can’t fly in it, though we do have an avian race within Star Force.”

“Though we share a similar nature, we have no wish to meet them. As we understand it, Humans are the core to your empire, and it is only with you we wish to make ourselves known as friend and neighbor. Others can wait until they are sufficiently advanced.”

“As you wish. I take it that if the lizard threat were to disappear, you would withdraw back into your own territory and not involve yourselves in outside events?”

“We would monitor, but not partake. We have come to accept there are some things we cannot change. The lizards are one thing that we must change, else the future will grow increasingly problematic.”

6

August 24, 2827

Solar System

Earth

“So how much trouble are we in?” Davis asked as Paul walked into his office late in the day as the sun was beginning to set over the Atlantis city spires to the west.

Paul waved a hand toward one of the three desk chairs and telekinetically pulled it to him, spinning it around and sitting down with his arms on the backrest. “I think we might be ok, but I really don’t like a stranger knowing our secret. The Voku I can trust because the dragons hate the V’kit’no’sat more than we do, but the Preema are still pretty much an unknown despite the mental scans I pulled. Their ambassadorial team seemed to be on the level, but we’ve got no choice but to trust them to keep our secret for the simple fact that we can’t stop them from spilling it if they want.”

“How much do they know?”

“They identified us as Ter’nat, which says they know enough. Anyone with casual knowledge of the V’kit’no’sat would know us as Zen’zat. The Ter’nat are recluses by order and don’t interact with outsiders. If the Preema really did receive a ‘get to know us’ packet from the V’kit’no’sat then they know plenty, though they seem clueless as to the cause of their territorial shrinkage. I would guess they truly do not have communication capability with the V’kit’no’sat given the distances involved.”

“How long would it take a courier ship to reach them?”

“Their drives are faster than ours at the moment, so that’s a possibility, but as long as we don’t cross them I don’t yet see a motive for them to betray us. They also implied that they had helped fugitives escape the V’kit’no’sat in the past.”

Davis raised an eyebrow. “Now that’s interesting. Anyone we know?”

“Didn’t get into it. Most of our time was spent prepping for the lizards, but I did pull a decent amount of information from their minds as we did so. They knew I could do it, so they didn’t actively resist my intrusions as they probably could have. Their telekinetic skills are formidable, akin to maybe an acolyte level 70. As always other races never have a full Ikrid package so it’s hard to say for sure, but they could have thrown up defensive blocks if they’d wanted to, and I know they knew how.”

“So they were choosing to be open?”

“A diplomatic tactic. They shared whatever information I requested, but I think they just saw that as being polite while letting me search their minds was more efficient.”

“Did you get a population number?”

“Give or take 8 quadrillion.”

Davis closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me they’re friendly?”

“When their self-interest is involved, yes, they’re friendlies. They want to kill the lizards before they spread and surround them. They’re not overly concerned about them being a threat to the Preema, but let them run wild for a few hundred thousand years and that could change. They want to nip it in the bud, but can’t, or won’t lock down the territory on their own. They’re adamant about keeping their current borders, so they need us to keep the lizards from moving back in after they’re evicted. For that purpose, they’re being nice.”

“And if it wasn’t for that purpose?”

“Apathy. They’d let the galaxy burn if it didn’t affect them, and they don’t appear to be vindictive. They fought a brief war with The Nexus a while back, but they’re going to make diplomatic contact and request their assistance along the H’kar front. Don’t know if it’ll do any good, but I think it shows that as long as their homeworlds are secure they don’t give a damn about anything else.”

“I’m aware of that invasion, and while you were gone I was able to acquire additional information regarding it from the H’kar. No official documentation was available, but there’s enough lore circulating that it wasn’t hard to find. Seems The Nexus was planning a great crusade that was met with unexpected force and turned back. Word is they haven’t given up, just put it on the back burner for some day down the road.”

“Do they have something The Nexus wants? Their intelligence couldn’t have been that bad to miss the size of their empire. It hasn’t changed much, for they keep a strictly level population along with their fixed borders. They own every damn system within their territory, so there isn’t anyone in their backyard. That big of a hole galaxy is hard to miss.”

“It is curious, but even if we obtained official documents I doubt they would tell us the truth. This was a huge debacle for them that they still haven’t lived down internally. What kind of tech do the Preema have?”

“Different from the Voku, but in the same league. Rigid but collapsible armor, ships are fixed design as is all other large structures. Favor hull armor to shields, though they possess both. Chess piece mentality, battleship their smallest warship. Utilize jumpships that will connect their territory with their staging system at surprising speeds. These guys aren’t messing around and they’re more than fit to fight the lizards. I think the Voku could take them with even numbers, but it’s hard to say without seeing them fight. I don’t suppose there were any visuals of the combat between them and The Nexus?”

“And publicize their defeat? No, there were none to be found and no rumor of there ever having been any in the first place.”

“Well then, this is just speculation from what I was able to glean from their minds, but I think they’re the responsible hammer that won’t pick off more than it can smash. I don’t get the feeling that they are very adaptable, but with them taking a turtle mentality they haven’t exactly needed to hone that ability. The Voku are much more complex, no doubt due to the dragons’ influence. The lizards can’t fool the Voku twice, but if they find a weakness in the Preema, which I doubt will happen, I could see it tripping them up a while. They’re rooted in their winning ways, whereas the Voku are constantly changing and have woven that into their technology and battle strategies. If we had to pick a fight with one of them, I’d rather fight the Preema.”

“Let’s hope that we don’t. Short of the Zak’de’ron ordering them to do so, I don’t feel that the Voku would betray us, but you know them better than I do?”

“Agreed, though I wouldn’t want to see Cal-com put into that position. He trusts the dragons due to their wisdom above all else. Let’s hope they stay that way and don’t try to backstab us. He might balk, but the rest of the Voku wouldn’t.”

“What arrangements have you made with the Preema?”

“We shared some intel, maps mostly, and I got you an extension out towards the rim,” Paul said, pulling out a datachip and tossing it to him. “Didn’t get that decoded until a week ago. Their computer systems are ‘wacky,’ and I’m quoting one of our techs on that. We’ll have a conversion package set up within a year, but right now that bit of info is all we’ve been able to translate out of the data nodule they gave me as a going away present.”

Davis inserted the Star Force datachip into his clear desktop and produced a galactic hologram between the two men that was scaled down to their galactic arm and the rim beyond it. With a few keystrokes Davis had the computer add it to a copy of the master database that he reserved for himself and a few others, seeing thousands of star systems fill in with spotty data. There were lots of gaps in between systems but hundreds of new empires were cataloged, including two very large ones beyond the edge of The Nexus’s territory.

“It seems the mega empires are a galactic fad nowadays,” Paul commented as Davis took a moment to soak in the obvious revelations, then the trailblazer stuck a finger in the map and directed his attention to lizard territory and the scattering of dots there that indicated races within the vast expanse that remained independent.

“Interesting. So there are more out there.”

“Some extremely advanced as well just sitting out the storm,” Paul said with some disgust. “Not sure if I want to congratulate them on surviving or punch them in the face for not stomping on the lizards when they were tiny.”

“The Preema seem to know a lot of what goes on far beyond their borders.”

“Motivated self-interest,” Paul reiterated. “They claim to not scout, rather let the information flow in to them. They were particularly keen to get a piece of the V’kit’no’sat map we have.”

Davis raised an eyebrow. “What did you give them?”

“The chunk surrounding their territory. It seemed about an even trade for what they were offering us, but their ambassador did get his eyes on all of it while we were negotiating. He was rather shocked, so I’m guessing the V’kit’no’sat didn’t boast about how big their empire was to the neighbors.”

“And now they know where to look if they want to reestablish contact?”

“They wanted the map for the other races it detailed, and they were aware that it was badly out of date. As they said, they don’t scout, and in all this time they have never gone looking for the V’kit’no’sat after they were told to basically mind their own business. Again, that’s from the mind of those I met, and there’s a possibility they’re dupes fed misinformation.”

“No, you’re right. The V’kit’no’sat are so large that finding them isn’t going to be a problem if you just head coreward. And this update will help us considerably. Already I’m beginning to glimpse a few insights into The Nexus from these placements. They are not nearly so secure as they would like people to think.”

“Which means the likelihood of them helping us against the lizards is nil, save for the H’kar.”

“About that,” Davis added, his eyes still on the map and all its glorious new data. “There’s some major feelings getting rubbed the wrong way internally. Apparently the H’kar are spending too much time with us and some of the other Nexus members don’t like it. Nothing has happened, but I’ve learned that it’s an underlying thread in their relationship, especially since The Nexus is starting to be viewed badly within the H’kar for refusing to help them retake their old territory. There’s even a few rumors of them leaving to join Star Force?”

That brought Paul’s head up, but Davis waved him off. “There’s no truth in it, at least not as far as they’ve brought to me. There hasn’t even been the slightest discussion, though what the H’kar are thinking internally is anyone’s guess. Their people see us taking system after system while the H’kar’s territorial zone in The Nexus continues to be pilfered. They haven’t lost one of their own systems, but the lizards are making gains nearby and the other races think the H’kar are not fulfilling their duty.”

“Technically they aren’t,” Paul pointed out.

“They don’t have the resources to, or rather the resources and the knowhow.  Every time they engage the lizards without us they lose a lot of ships, as you well know, and their people and those in other Nexus races are noticing as well. Star Force is getting some jealous attention, it seems.”

“Where did you learn all this from?”

“I have established some inroads with the H’kar that led back into The Nexus. I’d like to get a relay link to them, but that’s probably a century off at least. For now we’re utilizing courier ships to cover the gap, but the H’kar are obliging and running routes to keep us in the loop along with their own civilization. Through them I have contact with The Nexus and a few of their more reasonable races, as well as some living within their borders but not part of their organization.”

“Sneaky, sneaky,” Paul commented approvingly.

“Something I learned from you guys when you colonized the outer zone of this system without my knowing about it.”

“Yeah,” Paul said proudly, “we did that.”

“So where are you off to after this?”

“Back to the advanced training group indefinitely. Still got a lot of work to do there. Always have a lot of work to do there.”

“Are you going to help out with the Veliquesh?”

“No. We’ve already got 5 trailblazers lined up for the invasion when it goes down and they don’t need help from me in the prep. I’m sending a chunk of Clan Saber, but I’m going to be remaining here and available to troubleshoot in their absence. We’re looking at a multiple decade mission and I have to stay free to co-op with the Voku and now the Preema going forward.”

“This is going to be the biggest annexation we’ve tried to date. Make sure you guys don’t go too thin on the staffing. We have to get this right from the outset.”

“I know…we know.”

“There’s more to it than you know,” Davis said, finally looking up from the map. “Despite their efforts, the Protovic have sprung a leak.”

Paul rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, that too. Apparently the news of far off kin was too juicy for someone to keep their mouth shut. It’s spread like wildfire throughout their civilization and back into the ADZ. A few details regarding their savagery and our intent to take them out have also surfaced, then got shredded by the rumor mill. Sadly most of the ADZ denizens that are outside Star Force are newborns. They don’t remember us giving their ancestors safe harbor or pulling them off worlds under lizard attack. They’ve grown up here knowing nothing more than what they see on the news or hear from rumors. One that keeps popping up on both is our ‘master plan’ to conquer and enslave all those that we are protecting, either over the course of time or, in more recent versions, once the lizard threat has ended.”

Paul whistled. “That’s definitely eating the crazy cake before it’s baked.”

“These people have no clue what’s going on unless we tell them, and many outside our worlds don’t get or aren’t allowed to view our news broadcasts. There’s a building movement towards a united front against us, much akin to the Rebel Alliance versus the ever dominating Empire in Star Wars.”

Paul sat up straight in his chair, glaring at Davis. “Oh no you just didn’t…”

The slightly older man held up his hand for Paul to stay with him. “They’re romanticizing it, almost like a game because they know they have no leverage on us. They also know that we’ll protect them regardless of how stupid they get. In that situation people tend to allow themselves to get stupider and eventually drown out the ones that are somewhat reasonable, generating more hype as they go until they’re believing their own nonsense. The news of the Veliquesh has amped up that tenfold and is seeming to give truth to the predictions. As a result, everyone is going to be watching very closely to what we do, and I intend to give them plenty of news updates and raw data to analyze.”

“Um…”

“Within reason. They won’t be sending any ships to take a look for themselves. If they do send them packing and I’ll deal with them accordingly. Most of the news agencies know better than to cross me, given our history of fairness. They also know that the more responsible they behave the more leeway I give them with regards to our databases. Most will respect the edict to stay away, and in exchange I’ll supply them with battle footage where acceptable, though most of their analysis is going to be in the civilian centers afterwards.”

“That is going to be a huge mess.”

“Exactly. And I want them to see who it is that we’re conquering and how messed up they are.”

Paul lowered his head and sighed. “Can’t you just let me conquer them too and end this nonsense once and for all?” he said only half sarcastically.

“Their current population is far greater than that of the Veliquesh,” Davis reminded him. “We couldn’t absorb them without it destroying us from within. As it is, the Veliquesh are going to have to be self-contained for decades else they’ll do the same.”

“How big of a threat is this, really? I thought we were long past this nonsense mattering.”

Davis chewed on his lip as he considered how to answer. “We’re dealing with younglings, Paul. Most people in the ADZ outside of Star Force haven’t attained self-sufficiency and are less than 100 years old. They don’t know we’re the good guys, and we have to show them that, again, because of their population turnover. It’s like mowing the grass, you never truly finish. I’m not worried about these other races being a threat to Star Force. Even the proposed economic sanctions they’re tossing about with each other won’t do more than tickle the economy I’ve set up. It’s not about us, it’s about them. We get a steady flow of immigrants from those races because they see a better way to live with us, and it’s the people still there that haven’t understood, or maybe haven’t been born yet that need to know.”

“I still say it’d just be easier to conquer them all, one at a time if necessary, that way we wouldn’t have to deal with them being ignorant in the first place.”

“I know, and agree. But we made agreements that we are not going to break, so long as they hold up their end. They start prohibiting emigration or eating meat and I’ll give you the go ahead to revoke their sovereignty. But so long as they hold to terms, they’re free to be as ignorant as they like. I want to take over the entire galaxy, but know we can’t, V’kit’no’sat and others aside. If we grow too big too soon we’ll collapse internally. How big we can grow without risking that is an ever present question mark in my mind, and I honestly can’t even give you a prediction.”

“So long as we don’t lose our core people, there’s no limit to how large we can grow, theoretically,” Paul pointed out.

“But there’s only so much you and I can keep our eyes on, and you know as well as I do that good people are a minority in the galaxy. We need more of them the larger we grow to keep Star Force free of corruption. A lot of the people we have, that are good and trusted soldiers and techs, are that way because they’re followers. So long as we shine the light and keep it shining they’ll mimic us and follow. If they can’t see the light all manner of problems will arise. How many torch bearers we have is the critical number to our growth, logistical and military challenges aside.”

“And with the mess that the Veliquesh are, you want us to make sure we shine the light as brightly as possible?”

“I don’t need to warn you to do what’s right. I’m warning you to not cut it so close. I know you’re going to have to pull more Archons into this mission than ever before assembled because of the need of our psionics, but you’re also going to have to delay missions against the lizards to do it and I know you hate that. Don’t take what you think you’ll need. Take that and then some and forget the lizards for now. We’re the Jedi, the Veliquesh are the Sith, and this invasion is about showing which side of the Force is stronger. And the ADZ and beyond will be watching to see the outcome. We can’t just succeed in this, we have to kick ass so boldly and smoothly to send a message that everyone needs to hear.”

“That the darkside isn’t stronger?”

“That the darkside isn’t supposed to even exist. It’s a disturbance, an anomaly rather than a peer. The Veliquesh civilization has to be annihilated, and it has to be annihilated by the light of Star Force rather than by the creep of the lizards.”

“So you want us to show off?”

“I need you to show off. The galaxy is mostly followers. Give them something worth following.”

“Alright. I still can’t go, but I’ll make sure the others make this mission lopsided.”

“And it has to be just us. No outside help that could make mistakes.”

“The Protovic don’t want in anyway, I hear. We’ll do this in house, but it’ll take a lot of troops and techs to go big on this one.”

“Go big, Paul. The bigger the better. Get this done and get it done quickly, then you can get back to the lizards. Kill the Sith first, then worry about the stormtroopers.”

“That’s not fair to the lizards. They can actually hit what they’re aiming at.”

7

July 2, 2831

Ghav System (Veliquesh territory)

Umbralsht

“Here we go,” Greg whispered to himself as the four holos of his fellow trailblazers assigned to this crusade winked out above the nexus control boards and he mentally linked with the equipment. His fleet appeared in his mind as well as in holo and he gave the final jump order with his command ship and 56 warships under his command winking out of stellar orbit and taking a few minutes to cross the Ghav System to the far out planet of Umbralsht.

It was the only one that the Veliquesh had colonized in this system as opposed to the cluttered Aphat System where Mike had originally found them. It’d been decided to start with the smallest of the 5 systems they owned after a thorough scouting expedition had been sent to them all. Each had lizards present knocking on their door, so it was likely that Star Force was going to have to fight a 3 way campaign to claim this planet but so be it. They had enough firepower with them to get the job done and then some, with four other command ships and their constituent fleets making the jump into planetary orbit shortly after Greg’s.

Jason, Rafa, Kip, and Oni were here as well to ensure that this mission did not have so much as a hiccup, and they were prepared to stay for the duration of this system’s engagement. If needed they could swap out before they went after the other 4 Veliquesh systems, but Greg knew that the others wouldn’t. They were going to own this, even if it took them the next 20 years to play out. The Veliquesh were not a small empire, and were made all the larger in the scope that their population was the goal of this invasion. They were to be captured, not killed, so orbital bombardment was out of the question. They were going to have to get tricky in order to make this work, which was exactly why Greg and the other trailblazers were here.

When his command ship came out of its jump he saw the planet with a lizard fleet higher up than the Veliquesh defenders and right where the reconnaissance drone had put them less than an hour ago. Neither side was fighting, maintaining what looked like a standoff for the moment, but the lizards immediately began to redeploy as soon as they saw his giant donut of a ship wink into existence after a very hard deceleration. It was followed by the elongated shapes of the warships who maneuvered off the jumppoint to clear it for those yet to come before they began releasing their drones.

Greg began issuing deployment orders to them as soon as they were free, getting his screens set up to cover the larger ships while sending a group off to deal with the lizards. He expected them to run, but if they wanted to stick around and get killed then so much the better. Every ship Star Force took down here was one they couldn’t use again elsewhere and that would matter to someone somewhere who didn’t have to fight these ships at a later date.

The jumpships stayed in formation as the drones shot off towards the lizard fleet and Greg let them go, mentally keeping aware of what was happening but letting the striker in command of that group handle the chase. Meanwhile the Veliquesh fleet was stirring, seeing more and more of the huge Star Force warships jumping into orbit. Did they know of what had happened in the other Veliquesh System? He would have thought so after 5 years, but there was no way to know for sure other than to ask.

Greg activated the comm and accessed the language translation system and linked it to the Veliquesh package that would ensure that their computer systems could understand the transmission. They’d spent the past half-decade preparing for this invasion and finally had all the pieces in place. Now it was time to put it to use and the opening move was Greg’s to make.

“Attention Veliquesh. I am Greg-073 in command of this Star Force warfleet. The lizard threat to you is now over. We are here to secure this system permanently, but I need you to stand down your forces and surrender to us. We are here not only to save you from the lizards but to save you from yourselves. Your civilization has gone to the darkside and it must be cleansed. There is no need for anyone to die if you’re willing to cooperate, and even if you do not we still won’t kill you. We will be taking you prisoner whether you like it or not, and we’ve brought enough firepower to break through whatever defenses you have.”

“We know you have a prophesy that has told of our arrival. We come from a region of space known as the ADZ and have 7 of your people there teaching us of your ways. We also have your purple-skinned kin there, which you will be reunited with once you are fit to do so. The barbarism of the Veliquesh must end, and it will end here and now, one way or another. I do not expect you to surrender, but I am offering it none the less. You have one hour to respond, after which time we’ll begin taking your planet from you the hard way. If after that point you change your minds you will always have the option of surrender, all you need to do is say so. We’re here to save you, after all, but seeing as how you’re currently a bunch of crazy ass holes I don’t expect much sanity from you.”

“So, you have 1 hour. Reply on this frequency if you want to chat. Meanwhile we’ll be destroying or chasing off the lizards. If you’re very confused right now that’s ok. You’ll learn. We’re the good guys and this is how we roll. Your purple-skinned kin understand and respect this, and are valued allies. You will be too, one day. That day can be today if you choose. If not…get ready for a beatdown. We haven’t come all this way to bluff, and there are a lot of lizards closer to home for us to kill. This system now belongs to Star Force. You have 1 hour to come to grips with that. You may respond earlier than that if you wish.”

Greg cut the transmission then keyed in a recorded message from the Protovic Chancellor. Kip had asked him to make it in the hopes that they would identify Star Force with their kin and maybe some of them wouldn’t fight back. Greg didn’t know if the odds on that were very good or not, but even if one person chose to surrender it was worth the minor effort. The message would run about 7 minutes and give them some history and context on the Protovic, as well as outlining the reasons why the Veliquesh civilization could not be reunited with them in its current state.

Greg had heard it before so he didn’t bother to listen to it, rather sending out deployment orders and scattering his jumpships to multiple orbital coordinates to set up for the coming assaults on the Veliquesh battle stations. The Archons weren’t going to assault them one or two at a time, but rather hitting all of them simultaneously. That would cause chaos with their defense fleet as to which position to reinforce as well as making it abundantly clear that the Veliquesh were outmatched.

As Greg’s ships dispersed so did Rafa’s fleet, with the other three still coming in through the jumppoint and making it even more intimidating to those on the planet before them. There was a chance that they’d see the force involved and come to take it as a fulfilment of their prophecy given the fact that they were going to kick the lizards out of the system. To that end Greg keyed in a relay that would send some of their battlemap data to the Veliquesh so they could see the engagements with the lizards as they progressed. This whole affair needed to be as open and truthful as possible, but deep down Greg knew that these people literally were insane. There might have been a few reasonable ones that were able to slip through their purging cracks, but the restoration of their race was going to come from the next generation. These, after they captured them, were pretty much going to be babysat and contained unless they could bring themselves to reject everything they’d lived by up until now.

The odds of that weren’t good, but with a total population of around 3 trillion there might be some in that mix…and if they’d made it this far without going fully to the darkside then they deserved a chance to climb into the light.

Which was why the assaults on the battle stations were not going to be destructive affairs. They were going to have to disable them and then board the technological monstrosities. They were built more out of raw material than anything, forcing the lizard plasma weapons to peel away layer after layer of armor and superstructure to take them out, and even with their new phaser weapons they would still take quite a pounding before they went down…which no doubt was why they’d survived so long in this never ending war.

His bridge crew would be monitoring all frequencies just in case the Veliquesh responded, so Greg didn’t worry about it and focused on arranging his fleet for the coming assault as he noticed a few lizard cruiser kills reported back from elsewhere in the system where his ships were hunting them down. They were doing so remotely, and even with the signal lag they had still been able to ambush a few after they’d made their emergency jump away from the planet and had not yet aligned for their next jump.

Star Force ships were faster, so the lizards had to run and keep running to have any chance to get away. If they delayed for any reason they were dead, and his troops were too good at this to let the opportunity slip away, so when he received a request for one of the jumpships to peel off and follow the drones to reduce the signal lag he gave permission for it to break ranks and head out to a different location where they expected some of the lizards to run to next prior to trying to get back to the star. Without a jumpship they wouldn’t be able to leave the system aside from a very slow jump to a nearby star system, and their jumpships hadn’t been able to load up prior to the Star Force fleet spooking them when they arrived.

They were probably trying to play ping pong with the system’s gravity wells to find a rendezvous point to collect the cruisers and then try to make a run for the star, meaning the warship that he’d just let go after them was going to have a challenge on its hands. Greg didn’t expect they’d get them all, space was just too big for that, but Star Force had gotten good at running down and disabling ships, though in this case they’d have to be destroyed rather than captured.

He hoped the same thing wouldn’t be necessary with the Veliquesh fleet. While they could board the battle station and take them over from within, a starship was another matter entirely. There were too many to snag first off, and those they couldn’t get an IDF gel packet on could run or, in a probable scenario given their sacrificial society, go lizard and ram the drones. If that happened they wouldn’t be able to capture all of the Veliquesh as was their goal, but there were only so many opportunities they could give these bastards to live. If they were truly determined to die fighting, some would probably find a way to do so.

Yanaris stood in his battle armor alongside four other security guards onboard one of the Veliquesh’s orbital battle stations. One of the Li’vorkrachnika’s best tactics in taking them down was to blast a hole in the hull then send suicide squads into the interior and try to disable them from within. Yanaris and the others were here to prevent that from happening, but it was not the Li’vorkrachnika that were attacking. Another unknown adversary had arrived and was overrunning the orbital defenses, but beyond that Yanaris did not have any knowledge of what was going on, nor did the others with him.

They knew they had a duty, but the breach point had already been lost. Right now he was standing with the others behind a closed door heavy enough to stand up against considerable firepower. It was blocking the most critical section of the station from the attackers and Yanaris was here to insure that they did not make it through. Any cuts would have to be made into the material of the door itself, for it would not open no matter how much trickery you allowed. It was a big, fat wall and would have to be dealt with as such, and any holes cut into it would allow his team to shoot back before the attackers could come through, making it very costly to them and perhaps enough to stop them entirely.

Yanaris’s armor didn’t cover his entire body. It exposed his hands and face, but had an otherwise full ornamental helmet that came up to the underside of his chin and was designed to be flexible yet resilient. He could turn his head as much as he liked and it wouldn’t interfere, giving him the situational awareness necessary in battle that a full helmet would have hindered. Around his left arm was coiled his weapon, a Shas’tik cannon that he would use to shoot through the cutting holes if they manifested, though he knew that if they got to his position the rest of the battle station was essentially lost. He and the four with him were the last defenders protecting the critical systems and operational crew and they would do their duty no matter what the outcome.

Even if they died there was a chance that others would come to the aid of the station, so he planned to do everything he could to stop or slow the attackers, even though he had no idea what they were capable of. During the time of waiting he cycled through a light, standing prayer pose mentally uttering a venatra when a bright blue light poked through the door. It shook him enough that he jerked his arm up and took aim automatically, as did the others, but the brilliant dot didn’t expand. It barely moved at all, tracing upwards ever so slightly.

Yanaris held his aim, but as the minutes ticked by the snake-like weapon began to bob and his head began twitchy. The waiting was unbearable as a tiny line was made forming a half circle, giving him nothing to shook back against. There were no explosives going off, no plasma holes being chewed out, just thin, tiny, precise dot of light ever so slowly cutting a path around a section of the door.

When the Veliquesh beside him fired his weapon Yanaris did likewise in reflex, with a dozen or more yellow energy beams sizzling against the inside of the door and barely scratching the surface. Yanaris glared at the other trooper, angry at himself for the breach in protocol, but there was no time for recriminations. He held his aim again, steady as he could manage with the others doing likewise as they waited, and waited.

When that bright blue dot finally finished its circle it went out, then the attackers began to pull the circular plug towards them, at which point Yanaris and the others stepped backward and took up positions alongside either wall in the short hallway that led to a not so reinforced door behind which were the personnel responsible for maintaining the critical systems.

Yanaris took a knee in front of one of the others, letting him have a clear firing line over his head while using his own body to block the lower half of his while keeping the center of the hallway clear for hopefully some of the attackers’ weaponsfire to miss through…but when the plug of the now useless door was rolled clear there was no one to see on the other side.

The Veliquesh held their ground and waited for a few seconds, then Yanaris realized he had frozen up from panic, unable to do anything more than stand still and breath. He cursed himself but was unable to do anything about it, even his eyes wouldn’t turn, but they were still open and blinking though he couldn’t move a single muscle of his own accord. Somehow his fear had turned him into a living statue.

Then a figure appeared in front of that hole and ducked down to step through, with Yanaris trying to pull the trigger on his weapon but unable to. He expected the others to fire but when the black-armored attacker walked through casually and sustained no hits Yanaris didn’t understand why the others didn’t shoot him. He couldn’t turn his head to see what they were doing, but he could see the attacker draw a weapon from behind his back and fire a pink burst of energy to Yanaris’s left, followed by two more shots as the rage and confusion swelled inside of him a moment before the attacker took aim at him and the Veliquesh was hit and fuzz filled his head a split second before he blacked out.

The striker shot all five Veliquesh with his stun pistol, then free of the effort to freeze their minds he extended his psionics beyond the next door and felt a group of personnel taking refuge there, maybe 20 or so within his range. He used his Pefbar to examine the door, finding it was a simple latch, then he telepathically told two of the commandos outside to come in behind him.

As soon as their dirty white armor stepped through the hole he ran forward and kicked the door open, throwing a Fornax blast ahead of him that took all of the Veliquesh down to the ground for a moment, but that was all he needed to come through and begin firing stun blasts on their fallen bodies, with the commandos fanning out to either side in the room and doing likewise.

The striker ran forward, scanning more of the room and the surrounding hallway connections and finding a single individual behind a locked door. He stopped and focused hard on that one, hacking into his mind and rendering him unconscious directly. Tagging that door on the battlemap with a retrieve icon he moved on further into the station’s interior as an army of armored Kiritas followed them up and began collecting the prisoners, binding them up and administering patches to their exposed heads that would keep them unconscious until they wanted them otherwise.

Once their prizes were wrapped appropriately in a tiny anti-grav harness they were floated a half meter off the ground and dragged back out through the cut doors in the massive station one or two at a time as the Kiritas took them to the captured hangar and handed them over to the dropships. Once full they’d make a trip over to the cargo jumpships waiting nearby in orbit, unload, then come back again to pick up more in a cycle that would continue round the clock for most days in the years to come.

8

December 11, 2831

Ghav System (Veliquesh territory)

Umbralsht

Jason ran hard to keep pace with the mech star as it approached the Veliquesh army guarding a reclusive facility on the third southern continent’s expansive barren plains. There wasn’t so much as a blade of grass amongst the dirt and gravel his golden boots were racing across, but at the same time there wasn’t a lick of elevation change either, making for a very flat battlefield that had a pair of orbital defense clusters that were likewise keeping aircraft at bay. The facility covered less than 2 square miles but it had several hundred thousand Veliquesh troops guarding it, including what looked to be at least 200 tanks based on what had come outside and into view of orbital scan thus far.

Jason had several options for dealing with the facility but had elected for a brute force, simplistic approach. Rather than send a group of highly skilled infantry to take the Veliquesh on in a widespread brawl he had tagged 5 mechs to accompany him in and subdue the defenders for a cleanup team to collect and remove. That put a lot of emphasis on those five mechs, but the Veliquesh tanks didn’t have enough firepower to seriously threaten them unless they could focus their firepower on a single target and pound it for a few minutes.

That wasn’t going to happen, for this star of mechwarriors had fought together enough times to be able to feel where each other were and come to their aid even without use of the battlemap. All were Archons and were using a watered down imitation of battlemeld in that they kept an Ikrid link between each other to coordinate their combat. That meant they couldn’t get too much spacing in between them, but spread them over a kilometer or so and they acted like a single mind, with one able to communicate with another with no comm delay.

The Veliquesh would never be able to isolate one of them, leaving Jason the ‘weak’ link here. He could have come in a mech himself, but they needed an infantry component and no one aside from the other 4 trailblazers could keep up with him. They were busy with other campaigns across the planet so he was handling this one solo…or rather in tandem with the mechs with him being their tiny little brother in his golden titan armor.

He was using the powered enhancements to augment his running in order to keep pace when the Veliquesh fired the first shots. Their tanks used the same yellow energy beams that their infantry weapons did, with thirteen hitting the first of 3 neos and being absorbed by the mech’s shields. Each beam persisted for nearly a full second, making the mech look like it was the central hub in a brilliant spider’s web of energy that began to oscillate as the Veliquesh tanks continuously repositioned, floating over the ground and moving out to engage the mechs as their infantry followed behind, intent on fighting them with their tiny personal weapons.

That kind of stupidity had been seen throughout the invasion, for the Veliquesh had no qualms about wasting personnel. It was strange, for against the lizards they used considerable caution to preserve most of their forces, but against the drastically superior Star Force troops they were fighting almost in kamikaze fashion, as if they would rather die opposing the ‘heretics’ than run away to live and fight another day.

Jason had used that to his advantage many times to draw the Veliquesh troops out into easy takedowns. These savages had some skill, but it was so mixed in with craziness that they were easy to manipulate even when he wasn’t inside their heads. A proper soldier went into battle without internal struggles to fight, so that the only opponents they had were exterior. These Veliquesh, like their brothers across the planet, felt they had something to prove in combat, namely that their sick religion was legit and their prophecies would fulfill themselves over the course of events no matter how differing the facts appeared at present.

This left them fighting a ghost war, trying to make reality bend into their expectations. This greatly restricted their adaptational ability, whereas Jason had no such hindrances. If he came up against Veliquesh that were fighting better than he was he’d pull back, regroup, and find a different way to beat them. When you fought a ghost war you had a battle plan that you believed would work, and you tried to make it work even when it was obvious that it wasn’t. You had to delude yourself rather than rationally evaluate what was going on, for your subconscious mind would start telling you something other than your beliefs held, and irrational people would never accept that.

So it wasn’t surprising that these Veliquesh somehow convinced themselves than infantry weapons were going to give them a way to defeat the five mechs before them. Jason didn’t mind, for it just made these troops all the easier to capture, but there was the small problem of them getting in around the mechs’ feet. They wouldn’t slow them down…if they were willing to step on them, which was not the case. Had they been lizards the Archons would have taken care not to if possible, but ultimately would run them over if they had to. Here the objective was to capture the enemy troops, so mashing them into pulp wasn’t an option.

Jason was going to make sure that didn’t happen, acting as minesweeper should any of them get bogged down with suicidal crazies swarming them like groupies. The neos had some options to deal with them, but the two sabers were a bit more ungainly. They were a special mech variant that Paul had developed independent of Cora’s genius and were only used by four Clans, Sangheili being one of them. They were a deviation from standard Star Force mech design in that they were quadruped and shaped like horses…with a spike coming out the top of their heads.

That spike wouldn’t be used today, but fit in with the melee theme and was technically a form of sword more in line with some of the biological ones that the V’kit’no’sat had. The mechs were fast as straight line speed, but their maneuvering capabilities in engagements were subpar. That said, they were a solid mech that was geared more towards the future with many upgrades assumed to be forthcoming. Why the two mechwarriors piloting them had chosen them was a personal matter, for Jason hadn’t picked equipment for this mission. He preferred they piloted what they felt most comfortable with, so the two ‘unicorns’ were accompanying the three humanoid neos with Jason running between them in the middle right slot in the six-man line.

While Jason hadn’t chosen what mechs they used, all the mechs in this invasion had been reconfigured with disabling weapons. They each still carried one lethal one, just in case it was needed, but when Jason finally gave the star the go ahead to engage, the neos fired huge orbs of pink stun energy into the tanks where normally they would have been firing maulers out of their wrist cannons. There was a risk in that, for if that amount of stun energy hit one of the infantry it might kill them. Humans were more resistant to stun energy than other races because they were descended from Zen’zat, not Ter’nat, and it had been part of the upgrades given to them.

But in order to take down the crews inside the tanks they had to hit them with enough stun energy to soak through the armor and into the cockpit. That yield had been tuned during the first weeks of ground combat so now they knew how much they had to hit them with in order to take them down. Rather than load it all up into one shot they watered down the energy orbs with a binding agent that would amp up the persistency of the stun energy in the material it hit. That meant when the first orb hit a tank it would render its surface with the stun energy that would cling to it like static electricity. Subsequent hits would increase the saturation until it would penetrate into the cockpit and create a field through the tank that would knock out anyone inside.

That left infantry hits less dangerous, but still potentially deadly…plus the misses from the mechs that hit the ground would leave a circle of invisible stun residue potent enough that for about 20 seconds would function as a stun mine for any infantry walking over top of it. That was a sweet side effect that hadn’t been planned, for his mechwarriors rarely missed their targets.

Having to hit each tank with multiple hits wasn’t a problem, so as more and more yellow beams stretched across the sky marking the mechs and trying to burn through their shields one or two pink orbs would follow them back per second and hit a tank, with Jason knowing it was down only when it stopped firing, for it was mechanically undamaged from the attacks.

Some of them kept moving, but thanks to the pancake flat terrain it wasn’t like they were going to run off a cliff or something. Jason had one pass him by, motoring on anti-grav and heading on a random heading past the mechs with its crew asleep at the wheel. Something about that seemed funny, but if one of those tank beams hit him he’d be in trouble. His shields were far less powerful than the mechs but he could still take one or two hits, in theory. He wasn’t interested in testing that, so as the mechs engaged the tanks and the ranges closed, they physically met up with each other and the trailblazer ran past one of the tanks and psionically knocked out its crew as he headed for the ranks of infantry behind them.

They were approaching in columns and jogging in formation…which made them all the easier to target with area of effect weapons. They should have approached scattered, but it seemed like holding to formation was one part of their delusional plan to achieve victory.

In reality it made it all the easier for Jason, for he was an area of effect weapon, and launched himself into a sprint and dove into the nearest column as they saw and fired at his armor. Most of their shots missed, with the few that hit being inconsequential. He knocked aside the first of the red and green-faced Protovic and pushed into their lines with the impacts with their armor draining his shields further. He let that persist as he emitted a Fornax field around him and knocked them down like a giant paintbrush from the sky had touched the front row and made a swath all the way to the back of their formation.

They didn’t stay down long, for as soon as his disabling aura passed them they regained their bodily control and got to their feet, but Jason had delayed them from getting to the mechs. When he got to the back and saw clean air ahead of him all the way up to the facility a few kilometers off he wheeled around and pulled out a rack of stun grenades, cradling it in his left hand as he ran back into the now chaotic mess of troops and started chucking them at the densest clusters of enemy troops.

Each of the little grenades glowed when activated and had a light adhesion surface, so that when he hit one of their armored suits it would stick like a weak magnet and detonate per its programming based off point of contact. Jason had set these to one second, so as he ran through the troops doing a fair impression of the Master Chief from Halo he stuck grenades to troops with just enough time for him to run out of range, then they’d physically blow apart releasing the stun energy within in what looked like water balloon pops.

When he finished his crate he chucked the container aside and pulled out a pair of stun pistols from his back rack and got to work with individual shots up until the other infantry columns got near the mechs, then he diverted to start clearing the idiots away from the walking machines while they methodically took down the tanks.

On another part of the planet Kip was invading one of their cities with a few hundred Archons operating in battlemeld pairings that were making good use of their Lew abilities and mowing down dozens, even hundreds, of civilians in a single pass. The area of effect stun ‘lines’ were far more useful than infantry weapons and were allowing the Archons to knock out the Veliquesh faster than the retrieval teams could pick them up.

Originally those capable of the Lew and Jini abilities had been spread out across multiple missions, but after seeing how ridiculously effective it was at knocking out the civilians and even the stupid soldiers who chose to fight them hand to hand in the streets rather than taking advantage of the urban terrain, he’d reorganized most of them into one team that was tearing across this city in front of cleanup crews of commandos and a few other Archons that were hunting down and stunning those that were missed.

At present Kip’s troops were assaulting 6 different cities simultaneously and cleaning up 4 others, but by pooling this group together it was making this assault so much easier and he planned to continue with the tactic against the largest cities. Had Humans not had the Ikrid blocks in place he’d have been horrified to think what the V’kit’no’sat could have done to them in a similar manner. This wasn’t even a fight, merely a dance off with the enemy dropping to the ground unconscious after a few choreographed tandem moves.

Kip was there on the ground, but rather than helping with the sweeps he was perched atop one of the Veliquesh buildings and watching everything happening via battlemap. This was going so smoothly he expected something bad was going to happen to compensate for their good fortune and he was going to be in position to respond to it personally. Not only did he have a jump pack layered onto his armor he also had an eagle flight exoskeleton standing beside him so he could cross kilometers of city when needed. It wasn’t something he could fight in, merely a little aerial motorcycle that he could strap on for travel here and there, but it was more efficient for this type of mission than using a skeet.

After half the city was clear his guess proved correct, though not in the way he suspected. He got a report from aerial reconnaissance of an assembly of Veliquesh in one of the unsecured sections of the city prepping another sacrificial ceremony, but this one had hundreds of pedestals being assembled.

“Oh no you don’t,” the trailblazer said, jumping up from his seated position and crossing to his eagle in a few steps. He strapped in and flew off the building and kept low to the rooftops to avoid the few anti-air batteries that were still in play. His skeets were finding and taking them out, but since this ceremony was going down in an area still controlled by the enemy he wasn’t going to risk getting hit by playing aerial fighter. Instead he even ducked down in between some of the taller buildings and navigated the artificial terrain, drawing several rifle shots from below but they missed as he zipped across the cityscape at considerable speed.

It took him 3 minutes to get to the plaza where there were already 2 green pyres lit and people being strapped onto others six at a time. It seemed they were trying to up the number of sacrifices in order to gain a blessing from their fictitious Nash, probably to stem the ‘magical’ methods his Archons were using to take control of the city, but Kip was going to have none of it.

He flew out over top of the assembly of what looked to be at least 10,000 people and set his eagle to fly to a predetermined rooftop nearby before dropping out of it and falling into the savage horde. Feathering his jump pack he angled his fall and landed near one of the lit pyres. With a telekinetic jerk he severed the internal components and extinguished the flame…revealing the half destroyed bodies of those who had been alive less than a minute ago.

Kip sent out a huge Fornax field and held the effort, blanketing some 18 of the pyres as he killed the other active one then worked his way around to three more. After that he had to release the effort to allow his mental tissues to recharge, during which time he made good use of his other psionics and stun weapons. The Veliquesh still tried to stop him, not by attacking him, which many did, but by delaying him long enough for them to burn at least a few more people before he could stop them.

But the trailblazer could sense their thoughts, for they were literally all screaming with rage in the same insane mental voice. The ceremony had to be completed, no matter what they had to do to stop the ‘demon.’

It wasn’t the exact word, but it was close enough that Kip took the slander as a compliment as he made use of several Ikrid inquiries as he moved about, fighting as little as necessary, to head off the attempts to activate other pyres, including some that were still being hauled in via transport. Those they set up in the streets nearby and dragged their unwilling prisoners out there to try and avoid him, but he knew what was happening before most of the crowd did and successfully killed every pyre before they could be lit…aside from the two that had been active when he arrived.

Then in an equally horrific act, the bunches of bound prisoners were turned on and began to be hacked apart and sometimes decapitated with knives and other bladed weapons. It seemed that if they couldn’t complete the ritual through fire they’d do it through lesser means. Unfortunately Kip couldn’t get to all of them in time, but those he did he stopped cold with so many psionic abilities it looked from the air like some kind of bomb hit the crowd and mowed down hundreds of people within a matter of seconds.

That invisible bomb kept popping up at location after location until the crowds finally decided to scatter when there was no longer any prisoners to execute. Some were dead, the rest were unconscious and now out of reach across a sea of equally silent bodies.

Kip stayed there and chased off or knocked out the rest of the bastards, then patrolled his prisoners both visually and with Ikrid to ensure there were none active hiding amongst the rest. He spotted two and headed to them directly, finding that they were both prisoners that hadn’t been entirely killed.

“Damn,” he whispered, dropping to a knee next to one and mentally linking with the other across a short distance. Their bodies were slashed so badly that there was no way he could save them and he knew it, which was why he didn’t call for an emergency dropship flight. They were both awake but still bound by the hands and feet, so Kip numbed the pain and telekinetically snapped the corded cuffs as the one 20 meters off slipped from his mental grip.

The one just in front of him persisted and looked up at him, shivering from the horror that had just been silenced as much as from the blood loss. Both were female and looked to be from the prime cattle they raised in seclusion and ignorance for these sick occasions. This one didn’t understand what was going on, but as she looked at his gold armor she mouthed a word that Kip didn’t recognize vocally, but mentally he interpreted the sentiment as ‘thank you.’

A moment later her eyelids closed and her head collapsed to the ground, resting in the pool of her own blood…but her life didn’t fade as fast as the other one, persistently hanging on despite her gruesome injuries.

“Shit,” Kip said, taking one quick look around him with Ikrid before pulling the gauntlet off his right hand and pressing his flesh against her forehead…one of the few places where she wasn’t cut. If she was going to fight to hang on then he’d do what he could, even if it was futile. He called for a dropship with a medic, knowing it would take at least half an hour to get here and that she didn’t have that kind of time, but if he didn’t then there was really no hope for her.

An urge in him built as he connected to her through physical contact to enhance his control over her body as he manually tried to lock down the damage, using a combination of Ikrid hacking and telekinetic patches to reduce her bleeding and put her body into a semblance of recovery mode. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but by taking away some of the randomness of her panic mode he could maybe help her body heal a bit quicker. It was just a crazy idea but he felt like doing something rather than just waiting for her to die.

His hatred for what they’d done boiled over in him and he didn’t recognize the instability surging beneath it until it nearly overwhelmed him…at which point the ascension forced itself to prominence. He resisted it at first, not wanting to let go of his hold on the woman, but finding a way to do both he let it creep its way into what would have been four red flashing lights had he been wearing a biomonitor, but he knew the feeling regardless.

When the tissue growth activated it was full body…but far less intense than what he’d gone through to get bioshield. Still he had to fight to keep his hold on the woman and the rest of her blood from spilling out onto the plaza’s ornamental paving stones. When the ascension finished his hold on her morphed into a new sense, in which he could ‘see’ her body from a new perspective. Working on instinct or genetic memory or whatever it was, he pushed several new avenues available to him and her cellular regeneration spiked…not enough to even compare to a regenerator, but it was enough for her wounds to start patching and the internal organ damage to start closing off and engaging emergency healing options equivalent to closing blast doors on a starship with a hull breach.

Kip didn’t know what he was doing but he just went with it, every now and then taking a peek around the area with Pefbar but fighting the internal battle nonstop to the point where he had to manually force her respiratory systems to keep functioning when they tried to shut down. As he goosed her healing along he essentially acted like a second brain giving her body orders and keeping her alive while unconscious and unaware of what was going on.

Somehow he managed to keep her clinging to life until the dropship with skeet escort flew directly over him and hovered above the unconscious crowd, for there were no good spots to land nearby. A team of commandos dropped out, followed by a pair of armored medics who came over to him.

“I can’t release her. I’m all that’s keeping her alive. I’ll move her inside then work with me enroute to the command ship. We’re going straight to the regenerator on Greg’s flagship,” he said as he telekinetically lifted her body while he maintained his touch on her forehead. One of the medics told the pilot to fly lower and he brought it down with only a meter of clearance over the unconscious bodies. Kip set a collection ping on the battlemap, knowing that others would follow it up and take these people prisoner before they could wake or be killed by others in the city. He added a hazardous tag to it then let it be, focusing all of his energy on the woman as he walked her into the dropship with the medics while the commandos stayed behind to begin the collection effort and temporarily secure the site.

9

“Archon, we have it,” the medic said holding a V’kit’no’sat regenerator in his hand. “Let go of her.”

Kip let go of her head as she lay on the medical bed, still somehow clinging to life as the medic pulled the tattered remains of her shirt off her partially armored chest and laid the gleaming silver piece of technology directly onto the exoskeletal strip that ran down the middle of her flat torso. The hardened, black scaly plates didn’t cause the tiny tendrils of the regenerator any trouble for they sank into her body as if the hard patches weren’t even there.

The device continued to branch out across her like a mess of tree roots, dipping down under her pants and spreading out across most of her body. Immediately the sensors built into the bed began to show her vitals improving as the regenerator started to rapidly repair the damage done to her.

Kip sighed, knowing that she’d live past this point. The regenerator could revive those who were not functioning, so he had no doubt about its ability to heal her injuries. It’d even replace her lost blood, though it’d be limited to the physical matter within her body, meaning she’d have to eat a lot to give it the necessary mass to replace something like a missing arm…fortunately all of hers were still mostly intact, making the recovery process that much more simple.

The trailblazer took a step back and stumbled, suddenly feeling the consequences of his ascension as the adrenaline induced numbness began to wear off.

“Are you alright?” one of the medics said, with three of them hovering around the patient and a score of others scattered around the medbay.

“Yes and no. I need you to run a full scan and send the results back to Earth. Tag it ‘new psionic data.’”

“New?” the head medic asked. “Your disorientation is ascension residue?”

“Yeah, I got fried and didn’t have time to deal with it properly. And damn it all, I didn’t have a biomonitor on. Get me scanned quickly and maybe there will be something salvageable.”

“Over here,” one of the other medics said, motioning him to an empty table. He began extruding the necessary equipment from the concealed wall niches as Kip deactivated and stepped out of his armor, leaving the Christmas tree of apparatus standing in place as he rolled onto the table.

“What do you want done with her after she’s healed?”

“Keep her unconscious and send her over to the prisoner ship with the others, standard protocol,” he said, closing his eyes and laying his head back. “Wake me when you’re done scanning. I need to slip into Sesspik before my head explodes.”

The female Protovic woke up in a groggy state not knowing where she was or what had happened to her, but as soon as her memories caught up she reacted violently, jumping up off the narrow bed and hitting her head on the low ceiling above it. She bounced down and onto the floor, then scrambled to her feet looking around in a panic as she clawed at her own body searching for her injuries amidst the memory of pain.

But there were no wounds, which she could clearly see given that she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Her thin physique was much like that of a Human, save for that fact that she had no hair or breasts. Female Protovic still bore the younglings during reproduction, but they were born into a fleshy egg sack that then gestated externally to produce offspring that could eat solid food so there were no mammary glands in their genome.

To her that was normal, for she’d never known of another race. She’d spent most of her life in seclusion along with her sisters in the Renval where they trained their bodies and minds for clarity and purity while they awaited their graduation to the second phase of their progression towards becoming Advarchs. Naisha had recently been moved into that second phase of her life, only to end up bound as a prisoner and taken out into a plaza for some horrific purpose. She didn’t know what had happened, but the numerous stabbings that she’d suffered would not leave her memory and she kept flopping around on the floor in nervous twitchings for a long time before the lingering panic finally bled off.

That left her looking around and wondering where she was, and if she was in any more danger. All she could see was the confines of a tiny room that had two doors. One was closed and the other was open. She stood up and poked her head inside it, finding but an unusual chamber that resembled a lavatory. Inside it was a stack of folded clothing, also foreign.

Naisha didn’t know what was going on, so she went to the other door and tried to find a way to open it but there was no handle or keypad. It was shut and no amount of prying with her fingers could get her to move it. Normally she would have accepted her situation and gone along with the flow, assuming she was where she was supposed to be, but the room did not look Veliquesh and after what had just happened her trust levels were running low.

After a few minutes of walking around the small room and looking at every facet of it a hologram appeared in front of a flat screen on the wall with the image of an alien, yet it spoke their language.

“Hello. You are probably wondering where you are and what is happening, and this recorded message has been designed to answer the largest questions. I will be your guide through the transition process, which will be an entirely solitary affair. You are currently in transit from your former home to a new one that we have built for you. Who are we, you may be asking? We are Star Force. If you haven’t heard of us already let me make this as simple as possible…we’re the ones invading your home and taking you prisoner, not because we’re the enemy but because we’re your friends.”

“You’ll notice that you’re not dead. That’s because we didn’t come here to kill you, but to save you from a corrupt and horrific existence. The Veliquesh civilization that you were born into is an abomination. We are killing that abomination but giving you another chance at life. You are onboard one of our jumpships at the moment and will remain in this chamber until we arrive at your new home. There you will be kept in isolation until you have earned your freedom. If you choose not to cooperate, so be it. You will not be harmed, but you will also not be allowed any contact with the outside world. If you choose to live that way we will accommodate you. If you want something more then you’ll have to be willing to learn new things and unlearn old lies that have blinded you.”

“This will be hard for you, we know, which is why we’re keeping you by yourself. No one else can tell you what to do, or punish you for not doing something. It’s just you and the automated information database. Explore, learn, make mistakes and question everything. There will be no reprisals of any kind. This is your time, your chance at a fresh start. Make use of it or not. The choice is yours.”

“For now just stay where you are, food will be brought to you through the panel to the left of your bed. There is a set of clothes for you to wear, if you wish, in the other chamber. You can stay nude if you like, no one will be monitoring you, but everything from here on out will be Star Force equipment, including the clothing. It is safe, do not worry, for we have many of your race as allies and are well familiar with your biology and needs.”

The alien moved to the side and an image of a Veliquesh appeared beside it, except that it wasn’t right. It had purple markings instead of red.

“What the Human says is true. I am part of Star Force, as you will have a chance to become if you prove yourselves worthy. If not they will take care of your for the remainder of your life, asking nothing in return. Why would they do that? Because they are the protectors of all life, no matter where you come from or what race you are. That’s why you weren’t killed during the invasion, and that’s why my race is allied with them. I was born into Axius, which is something you will learn about later, so I have been Star Force my entire life. They are not the enemy, and I ask that you take the time to question everything. That is not what you have been told to do since birth, but it is what you will need to find a way to do now.”

“This room,” the alien continued, “has a learning module. Touch the crystal below the screen to access it and you will have instructions to follow from there. The trip to your new home won’t take long, and if you feel like doing nothing that is alright. The learning will take place at a speed of your choosing, or not at all. We’re flexible like that. This is your journey and your future. Proceed as you wish, but know that we are not your enemy, and while it seems like we’re the bad guys, in truth we just rescued you from the bad guys. It make take a long time for you to understand that, but so be it. We’ve got time, and so do you, for we don’t make sacrifices of any kind, and you have no need to fear for your life.”

“Use the terminal,” the Veliquesh added. “Listen and learn. I wish you luck, my long lost brothers and sisters. Be brave and think. The truth doesn’t mind verification. Only lies want you blind to other possibilities.”

The hologram shut down, but a button underneath the screen on the wall lit up with a blinking light that wouldn’t stop.

Naisha didn’t press it. She didn’t do anything but stand still wrapping her arms around herself and rubbing the exoskeleton strips on her elbows.

Sacrifice? Is that what they were doing to her and the other captives? She’d never been taught anything about that growing up, other than what the word meant. In fact she didn’t know much about her own people, aside from that they were fighting a war and that she was one of a few selected from birth to perform an important role in the survival of their race.

But they’d just tried to kill her?

Or maybe she was already dead? The memories of the stabbings were pounding in her head but nothing else was there. She didn’t know how she’d gotten to this room or even where she was. If what the alien said was true she was on a starship, but there was no way to tell. Gravity felt normal, but that didn’t mean anything.

Her own people had just killed her, or tried to…then the memory of the golden armor appeared and she realized that person had somehow saved her. Was it an alien? Or was it the purple skin that was talking?

Naisha didn’t know anything, and after a few minutes of thinking with no answers she just sat down on the soft floor and wrapped her arms around her knees and cried for a long time.

She woke up again, this time without the violent reaction, finding herself lying on the floor where she’d been sitting. Her head was still a mess, and despite the ghost images of pain her body was fully healed…though how that had happened she didn’t know. Maybe this was the next life…but no, the alien had said she’d been taken.

Naisha didn’t know what to think, but the button underneath the screen was still flashing rhythmically, the only thing in the room to be even remotely active. Hesitantly she crawled over to it and pressed her thin finger against it. It stopped flashing and the screen came alive with Veliquesh script that had an inventory menu. She read through it, finding the scrolling buttons were almost identical to what she had used growing up, which somehow felt reassuring.

With that being the only bit of home here she gravitated to it, reading the headings and picking a few to click on by using her fingers on the screen. There was a lot of data, far too much to read at once, but as she scrolled down she saw an information topic labeled ‘sacrifices.’ Cringing with a cocktail of ugly emotions swirling inside her, Naisha pulled it up and read what her people had been doing and how the aliens denounced it as being horrifically wrong.

Naisha didn’t want to believe it, and wouldn’t have if she hadn’t experienced it herself. Then it came to the part about the Renval and how those raised in it were not told of their true purpose. That they were supposed to be sacrificed with no knowledge as to why in order to cause a larger blessing to emerge from the Nash’garmat’ecklima than other types of sacrifices would. They had to be betrayed in order for their civilization to prosper, and she was one of their sacrificial dupes.

She recoiled from the screen, sitting back down on the floor and crying again. She knew it was true but her mind wouldn’t accept it. She’d been taught to adhere to the principles of the Veliquesh without question, concern, or trepidation…and then they’d stabbed her. She didn’t deserve that. She was pure and hadn’t faltered one iota in her convictions. She prayed every day, practiced the cleansing rituals without fail, done everything she’d been told to do.

But that was the point. The betrayal had to be visceral and total, according to this information, for her sacrifice to be worth the effort of her secluded upbringing. Her life was a currency the Veliquesh had tried to spend to counter the invasion…and invasion by a race that had bothered to save her life and heal her, somehow, and whom was allied with purple Veliquesh?

Summoning up a touch of courage she went back to the terminal and found an entry explaining who they were. The ‘Protovic’ history was weird, most of which she couldn’t understand given the indoctrinated mess that her mind was, but a part of her needed to believe that they were the true Veliquesh that she had been loyal to since birth. With that thought being about all that was sustaining her from a total mental breakdown she continued reading, more and more until a beep from the wall signaled that her food had arrived, as an entry in the reading had described.

Hesitantly she went over and opened the panel, with her hunger taking over as soon as she smelled the contents of the tray. Whatever they were it wasn’t Veliquesh food, but she ate the oddly shaped pieces none the less, finding the tastes weird but her appetite wasn’t allowing for complaint. She put the tray back inside as instructed and hit a button to conceal it again. It’d be recycled for the next delivery later on.

Naisha went back to her reading, then when biological necessity asserted itself went into the connected chamber. When she came back out it was in the Star Force clothing. The regimented part of her mind recoiled from it, telling her that she was wearing poison and now unpure, but another part said this was what the Protovic would wear and therefore was pure. The Renval had been perverted, and if she was going to rectify herself she had to trust in the Protovic’s wisdom and go along with these aliens, whom they revered as being not just allies but very wise.

Naisha stayed up and read through entries until her eyes could take no more. She finally went to the bed and fell asleep the moment she laid down, waking who knew how long later to find another tray of food having arrived and was waiting for her at the repetitive tone that had somehow failed to wake her.

She ate the cold food without concern and went back to studying, with that being the one constant that she was trying to sustain herself on and ignoring everything in the past. It was too traumatic to analyze, so she blocked it out as much as she could even as she was reading about it. With that mental duplicity gaining in complexity she became two people. One being the emotional victim and the other the scholar, with her disconnecting the two when she was reading in order to give her mind the freedom to wander that she had never been allowed before.

Sometime later the hologram reappeared, startling her as it manifested itself right where she was standing. Naisha jerked back, then heard the alien say that she was about to be transferred to her new home, but that it would have to happen when she was unconscious. It told her to lie down on her bed but she was reluctant to do so, fearing another betrayal. Eventually it didn’t matter, for there was a bright pink light and suddenly she lost consciousness.

She woke up sometime later finding herself laying on the bed as instructed…but the room had changed color. It was the same size and dimensions, but the white/grey motif had been replaced with white/gold. She swung her legs off the bed and looked around, triggering the motion sensors that immediately activated another holographic message.

“Welcome to your new home,” the alien said. “It looks a lot like your room on the starship, but I can assure you that you are planetside now. You’ve been moved 29 lightyears away to a star system known as Broj,” it said as a holographic map materialized with all 5 Veliquesh systems marked along with a pulsing blue one that indicated her present location.

She was a bit coreward of them, but not far off in what had previously been categorized as the Shrva’en System and held by the lizards, formerly owned by a race called the Nephen. That’s what she’d learned in her studies as a child, but apparently things had changed…or had that just been another lie she’d been told?

“There are other Veliquesh here, but you will not see them. They are in chambers similar to yours, but they must also earn their freedom through learning and training, which you are now available to make use of. Now that you’ve read the training file intro, you can take your orientation session now if you wish. Just step over to the door and put your hand on the circle.”

Naisha looked at the door and saw a glowing gold spot appear. Forcing herself to trust in the Protovic, she stood up and walked over to it, putting her five fingers against it and pressing her palm firmly. After a moment there was a tone and she let go as the door slid into the wall revealing a hallway outside with indicator lights that the reading had told her would be here. She followed them through a series of turns until she came to the first chamber, with the hologram returning, this time in much larger form and standing as tall as she was.

“This is the track, which is for the purpose of running. The shoes you have now are adequate, but you may earn upgrades with successful workouts. If you wish to begin enter. If not return to your quarters by following the indicated lines.”

Naisha walked towards the closed door and it opened before she could make contact, revealing a wide hallway that had a slightly spongy surface to it. On the floor was a series of lines with markings on them, but they were of a script she didn’t understand.

“Standard evaluation run. Stay with the marker as long as you can. Four circuits is the maximum. Begin in five, four, three, two, one…”

The glowing purple ball floating near the wall started to move…but Naisha didn’t, for a moment, then scrambled to catch up. It wasn’t moving very fast but she did have to run to keep pace. Following instructions came naturally to her, so she did as told and stayed with it for four full circuits, at which time it disappeared and was replaced by a static blue symbol that was accompanied by some type of brief music.

The hologram reappeared, clapping its hands together slowly. “Well done. You’ve taken your first step into a much larger world. Now it is time to rest and eat. Return to your quarters and the information terminal will show you how to schedule future workouts. You have done well.”

It disappeared and the guiding lights returned. Naisha followed them out of the track and back to her quarters where she was locked in again. Her mind and emotions were still a jumble, but suppressed enough for her to function. It felt better to have something to do, as well as an acknowledgement that she was doing it correctly.

That said she still had a long journey ahead of her, and far more than she could expected. But day by day, little by little, she’d work through the horrors and lies in her mind, slowly freeing herself through knowledge and training, though it would be a painful transition. The lies did not want to die, and clung to her through all the indoctrinational tricks that had essentially glued them to her subconscious. But she wanted to know the truth, deep down inside, and that little light of inspiration was enough to ever so gradually trim away the lies now that they didn’t have any exterior support. She was alone, and while that was scary in and of itself, it gave her mind the freedom to figure things out on her own, making mistakes along the way and not being punished for them.

Had she been amongst other Veliquesh she would not have made the transition, for compliance had been burned into her mind from birth, but without anyone else to calibrate to she had to learn to set her own course. She had to unlearn what she had learned, and eventually the new knowledge and skills replaced the old, permanently freeing her from the past and killing the Veliquesh in her.

She was Protovic know, so the hologram decreed, and gave her the final list of tasks she’d have to complete before being allowed out of her seclusion and into the next stage of her transitional journey.

10

May 19, 2838

Broj System (Bsidd Region)

Onyx

Naisha was nervous and excited as she sat on the bed in her small quarters. There was a countdown on her display screen indicating when she’d be able to leave, not for another workout session but from this place entirely. What was in store for her she didn’t know, but she was ready to move on. As much as she’d come to think of her little cubby hole here as home, she wanted to get out in the galaxy and see some of the things she’d been learning about.

The countdown only had a few minutes left, and was displayed in Star Force numbers rather than Veliquesh. In fact all of her lessons over the past 2 years had been in their language. She spoke English now, somewhat, and could read their letters and numbers with effort. Part of her mind was still thinking in Veliquesh terms, but every now and then she’d have a dream in English. Her lessons told her that it would take time, but eventually she would be able to fully convert over to the Star Force language and she looked forward to the opportunity to actually converse with someone other than the computer.

She’d been here for almost 7 years now, with no contact whatsoever to the other Veliquesh, or anyone from Star Force. There were no messages, no passersby in the hallway. She hadn’t glimpsed a living creature since she’d been rescued into this facility, but she’d learned and seen many in her lessons. She knew what the ADZ was, how big the lizard empire had grown, who the Humans were and the other races that made up Star Force…and why they had decided to invade the Veliquesh. Naisha had no mixed feelings there, for if they hadn’t she’d have been sacrificed along with the other dupes.

‘Dupe’ was a word she’d clung to, for it fit her situation completely. They had used her since birth, tricking her into becoming the supposedly pure sacrifice they wanted. There was nothing pure about her or the others in the Renval. Purity, holiness, sanctity, etc were just fictitious nonsense that she’d been told about so many times she’d just took them to be true without thinking. They’d always discouraged thinking, insisting on acceptance. She’d done what she thought she was supposed to do, bought into what they told her and had been loyal…which was why she was a dupe. She’d fallen for it completely.

But then again that was partially a good thing, for it had kept her alive to the day when Star Force arrived. Had she had questions or concerns during her early years she would have been quietly taken away and killed. Several of her Renval brothers and sisters had been transferred to other locations, and only now did she realize what had really happened to them. Dissent had not been tolerated, which meant she and the others had been born into a trap that they had no chance of escaping from.

But she was still a dupe for having believed it all, though not now. Star Force taught, but they did not force. It was odd, for ‘force’ was in their name, but that ‘force’ was a protective one. Keeping people like her from harm while they thought freely and figured things out on their own. For as much information was available to her in her lessons, she always had to do the hard work herself. Nothing was given to her, she had to achieve every rank attributed to her…and if she hadn’t she’d simply be left alone in her quarters to do whatever she wanted, not that there was much to do in such a small room aside from watch the vids and sleep.

No, Naisha owed Star Force for her life and then some, but she had been the one to earn her departure. A small part of her mind wondered if she wasn’t being a dupe for a second time, but rather than pushing the thought aside she considered it. Her gut said no, that this was legit, but there was only one way to find out. As she watched the final seconds tick off the clock she knew this was the moment of truth and found her insides twisting up in knots of anxiety.

When the countdown reached zero the door merely slid open, with Naisha seeing guide lights outside like every other day she’d been led to various training rooms. With no belongs to her name she simply walked out and went where directed, passing down familiar hallways until reaching a door that she’d never been through. When it opened there were more corridors like the ones she’d just walked through, but now she was in new territory and her mind seemed to come alive at that. This was fresh exposure rather than the repetition she’d lived by ever since being brought here.

When she walked through the archway the door closed behind her but the lights kept guiding her on through a very long course that eventually brought her to a cupola that had the first living person she’d seen inside the glass casing. The purple-skinned Protovic smiled and opened the clear door for her, allowing her to tentatively come inside the booth that had two short benches in it along either wall.

“Hello, Naisha. My name is Gharris. I’ll be your attendant through this transition period.”

“H…Hi,” she stammered, finding her voice catching in her throat.

“It’s alright. I assume you haven’t spoken to anyone in a long time…or are my words difficult to understand?”

“You sound different than the hologram.”

“That’s because he isn’t me. I am the first Protovic you’ve met with this color of skin, right?”

Naisha nodded.

“And I look the same as the hologram?”

“No. Not the same. I thought you would speak the same.”

“We all have our little quirks. Please, have a seat,” Gharris said, motioning for her to sit down on the opposite bench as he touched a control panel on the side of his.

“What is this room?”

“It’s not a room, as you’ll see in a moment. It’s our ride,” he finished as there was a mechanical shimmy as the pod car detached and began traveling down a dark tunnel. The lights of the hallway soon shrank to a dim speck, but both Protovic were providing enough of their own light to see by, which was why the pod had no interior illumination. Gharris looked at her casually as the pod was filled with a mix of red, purple, and green light from their faces and hands.

“You are being transferred into a city where you will live. It’s not the final destination on your journey, but it will be a big shock compared to what you’ve been living in.”

“A city?”

“Yes. A Star Force city,” he said as a crack of white light appeared on the opposite side of the bubble car and quickly enlarged as they approached, testifying to the speed that they were traveling. A moment later the darkness vanished as they shot out into the sunlight traveling on an elevated monorail through snow-covered mountains.

Naisha sucked in a quick breath and Gharris smiled. “Nice little reveal we have there, isn’t it? Look back and you’ll see where you’ve been living all this time.”

She turned her head to the left and saw a flat mountain covered in snow…only it wasn’t a mountain, but rather the side of a huge artificial building larger than anything she’d ever laid eyes on before, but certainly in proportion to some of the infrastructure that she’d learned about in the ADZ.

“The rest of the Veliquesh are there, in isolation like you were. Or, rather, the ones that have been captured. The fighting is still ongoing and we’re receiving shipments of prisoners in the same manner that brought you here. They’re just starting the journey that you’ve been on, if they want to pursue it. If not they’ll live out their lives in that building or others like it that have been built across the planet. Even now more are being constructed to house all the prisoners, and it’s a race to construct facilities quick enough to hold everyone being brought in. The Archons are quite good at what they do, so we receive regular transports of prisoners coming in.”

“You, however, are no longer a prisoner. You’ve proven yourself to be wise enough that we’re willing to trust you not to repeat the mistakes of the past, and by past I mean the Veliquesh civilization. It dies in that building,” Gharris said, pointing to the quickly shrinking artificial mountain range as natural ones were popping up between it and them as they passed further out across the terrain. “You are Protovic, like me. The coloration of your skin and your past don’t change that. We were born at different times and different places, but we are the same race, now reunited.”

“Thank you,” she said meekly, yet totally in awe at the landscapes around her.

“But,” he added, “this planet will be your home unless you earn your way off it. I’m here because I choose to be, as are a lot of other Axius Protovic, along with a scattering of other races. We all live in the same city, and those of you that earn your way out of that building will be living with us and learning what it truly means to be part of Star Force. You can kick back and relax, enjoying yourselves and making a life here, or you can push your training further and earn the option to leave and go elsewhere as a full Star Force citizen. I think a lot of you will be staying here,” he said, pointing ahead as the first towers of the city became visible over the mountain peaks, “but ultimately it will be up to you what you do with your life.”

The distance was deceiving, looking as if the city was just over the next line of mountains, but it took them nearly 20 more minutes before those spires became huge structures dwarfing the nearest mountains. Naisha’s jaw literally dropped, which Gharris took notice of.

“Big, isn’t it?”

“What will I do there?”

“Whatever you want or nothing at all. There will be opportunities to work for credits or other perks, as well as training for a variety of things. If you want to pursue full citizenship there will be a gauntlet of tasks set before you, but no timetable of when they have to be accomplished. You can do multiple things at once if you choose, and you may reproduce if you wish. There will be other Protovic there.”

She turned her head away from the clear walls and looked at him oddly.

He squinted back at her. “You were Renval, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ve never mated?”

She shook her head ‘no.’

“Something else for you to experiment with if you wish. However I will tell you, any offspring you produce will go to a maturia and you will not see them again. They will be raised as full citizens from birth, and therefore will not be in this city. They won’t be on this planet, actually.”

“Why?”

“So that we can make sure the Veliquesh culture dies here. Those who never leave prisoner status will, unfortunately, never achieve self-sufficiency. They’ll grow weak and degenerate and die there. I’ve heard that some have actually found ways to kill themselves,” Gharris said with visible dissatisfaction on his face. “We can’t save everyone, and in truth we can’t save anyone if they don’t want to be saved. This planet is our way of destroying the Veliquesh but saving those people within it that want something better. Those who questioned were killed by the Veliquesh, meaning that virtually everyone that’s been captured is some form of crazy. We’re not assuming they can’t be redeemed, but so far not one of the Protovic to come out of that facility has been an adult outside of the Renval.”

“How many of us are there?”

“That have earned their way out? Somewhere around 350, I think.”

“That’s all?”

“Sadly yes, but there may be more working through the system more slowly than you. I don’t know their status, we never see any of that. I was just told you were ready and to pick you up. You’re one of us now, not one of them.”

“What happened to the younglings?”

“They’re treated as prisoners as well, but have a different process to earn their way out. No one that was born into the Veliquesh culture, no matter how young they were, is allowed into this city without earning their way here. The infants are being raised and trained as a group and I expect most of them will be here eventually. All new births here will be sent offworld, so the infant facilities will only have a short lifespan once the invasion is completed.”

“How long will that take?”

“Hard to say. Population wise about 22% of you are here.”

“How many have died?”

“None at our hands, and we’ve kept the lizards away ever since the invasion began. A small number have killed themselves prior to being taken prisoner, plus however many have done so in isolation. We know it is hard to live alone after being with so many people for so long, but it has to be done this way. Each person has to walk their own path, and if we put you together into groups, even of two, one would influence the other.”

“I understand. You can’t let us be forced into anything by our peers.”

“And you won’t be here. It is impossible to describe, but the community you are entering is far different than what you grew up in. I’ll help you get situated and be available for a number of days afterward, but there isn’t much to actually do other than to go around exploring. There are no dangers here, just people to meet and things to do.”

“Do I get my own quarters?”

“Yes, and they’ll be identical to the ones you’ve had…except no locked doors. Well, you can lock it from the inside, but you’re free to move about the city as often as you like, whenever you like. You just can’t leave. As you can see the planet is covered in snow and very cold, not somewhere we can survive without equipment. The spaceport is also restricted, but you’ll hit checkpoints that will prevent you from access without the proper ID so you can’t go somewhere you’re not supposed to be on accident. If you bump into them you’ll be politely redirected, so feel free to walk anywhere and everywhere you can.”

“It’s so big,” Naisha said as the last of the mountains passed alongside them as they shot through a valley and the whole of the city opened up before them. There was a boundary wall separating the icy wastelands, with the monorail track passing over top of it and intersecting a number of other lines. They hit one that continued into the city, with so many buildings interconnected by short tubes and rail lines that it literally blew her mind to see it all…and then there were the massive spires in the center and dotted around the perimeter that she had to look up through the ceiling to see the tops of.

“We are well protected from the lizards and others. There are weapons batteries at the top of some of those spires, not to mention a shield that protects the entire city when activated. You’ll never have to worry about them getting to you here.”

“How many of us can this city hold?”

“A lot, and we’ll expand it or build others as necessary going forward. We don’t know how many people will make it out of prisoner status, but we’re going to make sure each and every one of them has the chance to do so. After that it’s totally in their hands.”

“If I’m not a prisoner, and I’m not a citizen, then what am I?”

“Think of yourself as a guest that has a lot to learn about what it is to be part of Star Force, with people like me living here to act as friends and mentors. You can watch and learn from us, but don’t think you’re separate. You’re like our little brothers and sisters from now on, regardless of what your age actually is.”

“Have you attained self-sufficiency?”

“I have.”

“How old are you?”

“Only 72.”

“Wow. Most Veliquesh only lived to be 40 or 50.”

“You’re not Veliquesh anymore. You’re Protovic and Star Force, and you can live as long as you want if you’re willing to work at it.”

“I am.”

“I know. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t,” Gharris said as the pod slid into the side of one of the many buildings and the cityscape disappeared. They traveled through a tunnel, slowing in speed until they popped out into an internal air pocket that looked more like another world than a single room.

“We’re here,” he said a moment before the pod switched tracks and moved down from the elevated lines to park in a receptacle along with numerous other empty pods. He opened the door and stepped out, waiting for her to do so as well.

Naisha walked out cautiously, hearing so many sounds that it seemed to overwhelm her for a moment. Gharris closed the door and took her by the arm.

“Walk with me. It’ll take some time to get your bearings and I know a good place to start.”

She let him guide her, clinging to his arm as a safety line as they passed several other people walking through the mostly empty paths until they came to a set of wide stairs. They climbed up them, too numerous for her to try and count, and arrived at a wide promenade with clumps of people here and there at tables or kiosks. Almost all of them were not Protovic, and those that were didn’t have any red patches on their faces.

“Over here,” he said, walking her to a railing that let them look down over the top of the park and see far more people below doing all manner of things.

Naisha grabbed the railing and held on tight, for fear of falling even though there was no way she was going to unless she climbed over, for it came all the way up to her chest. The vertigo aside the sight of so many people had her shivering with nerves for a reason she couldn’t peg, but her whole body was shaking uncontrollably.

“You’ve been by yourself for a long time. It’s understandable that there will be some shakes while you adjust.”

“Thank you, but I do not like this. I should have more control over myself.”

“You’re not the first to go through this,” he reassured her, “and won’t be the last.”

“I suppose not,” she said, still clinging to the rail and trying to steady her shaking arms.

“Just let it pass, don’t force it,” Gharris suggested. “We can wait here till it does. I don’t have anywhere else to be today. You’re my only assignment.”

“What do you normally do?”

“I work as a comm tech, servicing and building communications gear. Everything from personal equipment up to the planetary transmitters. I volunteered to be a transitional attendant, mostly because I wanted to see if you guys were really our peers.”

She looked over at him. “Are we?”

Gharris nodded. “Very much so. You’re home now, sister,” he said, putting his arm across her shoulders and giving her a soft hug on her exoskeletal plates. “And we’re very glad to have you here.”

“I really don’t feel like I deserve this.”

“Nonsense. Everyone deserves this. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

“What about all those in the prison?”

Gharris sighed. “We’d bring them here if we could, but we can’t bring the Veliquesh with them. It has to die there, so the only way you were able to get here was to separate yourself from it. If we don’t kill it that poison could spread and linger on. You’re free to do what you want here, and if you wanted to live the Veliquesh way you could, up to a point. That sickness could continue in you and others, but we know it won’t. Not after everything you’ve learned. If you bought into that nonsense you never would have been able to pass the requirements to get here.”

“I know.”

“So us keeping the others in isolation until or unless they earn their way out isn’t us punishing them, it’s one last act of corruption by the Veliquesh culture. It’s making them prisoners, and unless they can break themselves free of it…and we’re offering them all the help we can…then they’ll still be victims of it. But it will end with them. We’ll still offer them a way out, we’ll never give up on them until they day they die, but if they can’t bring themselves to think rather than believe, there’s nothing more we can do for them. Bringing them here and letting them see each other would only destroy what little chance they have of freeing their minds. Isolation is their best hope of that.”

“It works,” Naisha said.

“And hopefully in time the others there now will find their way through it. If not, there will be many more coming in fresh to the system. And with 3 trillion of you to process, I expect there will be many more red faces showing up in this city over the coming years, even if that number is only a fraction of the total rescued.”

“I’m not ungrateful, at all, but something about that still makes me sad…and excited, because I made it through. Is that wrong?”

“No. No it’s not. What’s happened to your people is sad, but you survived it and have a bright future ahead of you. Don’t waste it. Embrace it. Let the others make their way here on their own terms, or not at all. They aren’t your concern now. What you do going forward is.”

“Ok. Other than standing here with the shakes, what am I supposed to do today?”

Ghariss laughed. “Whatever we want. We’re exploring, remember? I’ll get you to your quarters eventually, but for now let’s be brave and head out, shakes or not. Pick a direction and we’ll start walking.”

“What?”

“Just point in some direction and I’ll take it from there.”

“Um…alright,” she said pointing to her left for no reason.

He offered her his arm again. “You can let go when the shakes leave you.”

“Do I have to?” she asked, looping both of hers around his and holding on tightly.

“You won’t get lost. I promise. But you can hold on to me if you wish until you feel comfortable. I don’t mind the close proximity to such a pretty face,” he said with a wink, which she didn’t interpret, for that was one Star Force facial expression that she’d have to learn along with a lot of others in the days to come.

“Come on,” he said, nudging her to start moving. “One foot in front of the other and let’s start walking you into your future.”

Headstrong

1

August 29, 2840

Mastodon System (Ninja Monkey territory)

Kido

Morgan stood on the edge of a small, churning pool of water looking up at the waterfall that stretched above it more than 100 meters as Ur’va’sel walked up beside her in his red/black Ninja Monkey combat armor. The Scionate stood as high as her shoulder with his head raised upwards to look at her with a scorch mark across where the left eye would be, save for the fact that the helmet, like Morgan’s, had no faceplate or eye slits. It was solid armor with an interior display screen fed by multiple microscopic cameras on the exterior, so the quadruped didn’t see the damage he’d taken earlier in the day, only the jungle around them.

“What is it?” he asked her.

“Just taking a moment to ponder the change in lizard tactics,” she said, still looking up at the waterfall that was throwing a fine spray of mist over her golden armor, though the helmet cam wouldn’t pick that up on contact and cloud her vision, “and to wonder why these battles seem more personal. I’ve helped take 93 worlds from the lizards, but these last few seem different.”

“Because you can keep them?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s because I’m responsible for them hereafter, whereas in the past I’d just move on to the next target. Still, I’m feeling a bit of sentimentality I hadn’t expected.”

“Do you think the lizards feel likewise?”

“No. I think they’re testing us again. We haven’t been using large forces to take these planets and they either sense a weakness or just don’t want to let us get away with victories that we didn’t earn.”

“They are not going to take this world back,” the Scionate said firmly.

“I think their aim is to deny it to us, or at least stall our advance. Whatever their motivation is, they keep sending more troops down.”

“In that they are at least making us earn our keep.”

“They’re wasting troops, Ur’va’sel. They may not care about losses, but they always lose them for a reason. I don’t see their angle here, but they’re up to something. I know it.”

“What can they hope to gain? Even if we should be defeated the rest of Star Force will not let them keep this world.”

“Technically it’s all on us, but they don’t know that…or do they? Damn, I’ve been blind. That is why they’re here.”

“Explain please.”

Morgan shuffled her feet, thinking things through in a flash.

“There’s been a lingering question concerning their intelligence capabilities and whether or not they monitor ADZ activities. Do they even know our language? I know they’re too smart not to take advantage of opportunities, but we haven’t seen any evidence of it. We make so much public knowledge they can’t have missed it, and Ninja Monkey’s mandate isn’t a secret anymore. It’s hit the news networks, and I’ll be damned if they aren’t monitoring them somehow.”

“So they know we are limited in number?”

Morgan nodded. “I think they’re testing us in that regard. They want to see whether or not we really are on our own, and if we are…holy crap.”

“What is it?”

She turned to look at her top ranking Scionate within Clan Ninja Monkey. “I think the lizards are picking a fight with us, and intend to take back these worlds if they can. These troop insertions are probably just scouts, testing our reactions.”

“What of the past years? We never saw this response in the other systems.”

“It probably took time for them to notice, now they’re calling our bluff. We either fight them Clan to lizard, or break our mandate and get help.”

“Why would they care?”

“They know about our no-go line. I bet this is a taunt.”

“How could they know that?”

“Well, we haven’t publically said we’re not pushing any further coreward, but it’s pretty damn obvious which directions we’re expanding. This border is staying essentially the same while the Calavari and Bsidd Regions are mushrooming out. Either they came to that deduction based on the map or they deduced it through word of our mandate. If they know, or even suspect that we won’t push coreward, then I bet this is just the first stage of them getting bold…and that’s something we cannot have.”

“Bold, as in major push?”

“Possibly. Either way I think they’re going to contend this world and every other one we take going forward,” she said as a ping on the battlemap got her attention.

“Another drop pod,” Ur’va’sel said, seeing the marker for a new lizard craft that was entering the atmosphere at roughly the same speed as a meteor and would deliver 100-200 troops instantaneously to whatever location they wanted, and with most of this planet not covered by Ninja Monkey anti-air defenses they were landing troops everywhere in small groups that were accomplishing a number of missions.

Morgan had already busted up several firebases they were establishing in the jungle or digging underground. Nothing large, just ground work while other teams were hitting soft targets and even assaulting the two colonies she’d started to build on Kido. The 18 lizard colonies that had been located here were now toast, but the lizards had not let a day go by without them having boots on the ground in some location. They owned two more worlds in this system, with Morgan now owning three if you counted Kido. As was normal for her Clan, she was renaming every system and world she took, even though this world was not fully under her control yet.

The other two insystem had been taken some 4 years ago, but she hadn’t been able to launch this attack until she’d built them up sufficiently to defend themselves. Her available troop numbers were low, for the Ninja Monkeys now possessed 9 different systems on the border and had to have troops in all of them for defensive placements. Even as she was getting in more and more recruits from a variety of races she was having to hold back her invasions until she pooled enough to make the next step forward. That more than anything probably confirmed to the lizards that she was operating alone here, and now it looked like they had decided to fight her directly rather than playing for time and letting Star Force have whatever systems it wanted without lizard reinforcements to contend with.

The enemy’s local defenses in this region were heavy, given the fact that Star Force had not pushed into this region and the lizards had been able to build freely since they’d claimed them. They were definitely challenges to take, but Morgan’s gut instinct confirmed what her mind told her.

This was an entirely new game, and without Star Force’s backing the lizards weren’t going to be playing shy anymore. Their claws were starting to come out now that they sensed an opportunity for victory, either in outright reclaiming some worlds or in at least making Star Force go back on its stated mandate for her Clan. That would be a symbolic victory rather than a material one, but if they were monitoring ADZ news broadcasts then they were probably aware of Star Force’s ‘no nonsense’ reputation and their credibility when it came to pronouncements and following them through.

If they forced Star Force to backtrack on this one it’d be a black mark, suggesting that they’d underestimated the threat. It’d been so long since the lizards had had a victory against them that maybe that was enough of a reason for them to pursue, or maybe this was just for the sake of testing how Star Force would react. Either way, more of those drop pods were coming down from orbit as lizard cruisers dove into the upper atmosphere to release them before they could be intercepted. Morgan’s small fleet could hold its own, but blockade an entire planet it could not.

“Crap, they’re coming down further away than we thought,” Morgan said, turning on her left leg and jumping into a run following the course of the small river. “We’ve got some running to do.”

“We will keep pace,” Ur’va’sel said as he followed on her heels while sending out a comm to the other Scionate nearby to join them. Within a couple of minutes a group of 17 others had caught up and fell into a long, agile line following the trailblazer and having to work hard to keep up with her despite their quadruped speed advantage. The jungle was tricky to navigate, which forced them to redirect with about every third step, but Morgan blazed the trail and the Scionate followed her marks as they crossed country as fast as they could to get to the location of the recent drop pods.

It took them almost half an hour to get further to the south, then Morgan began picking up mental signatures and guessed they were moving off from the pods so not to betray their locations. The jungle canopy was thick enough to hide them from all but the closest of scans and the lizards were making good use of it, with this group of six moving rapidly to who knew where.

“Iv’ra’nom, Gha’stiv’kex…they’re yours,” she said, diverting to the left to chase a larger group ahead.

“We will be back shortly,” Iv’ra’nom said as he and another Scionate towards the end of the line broke off from their trail and made their way towards the waypoint Morgan set down slightly ahead of where the lizards were moving. The Scionate didn’t have psionics to track them, but get them close and they’d be able to do the rest.

Morgan kept their pace hard, forcing their way through bits of dense jungle and over hillsides rather than trying to circle around. She had no trouble jumping over the bits of terrain and fortunately the Scionate didn’t either, for they possessed a vertical jump higher than her own…though they did have four legs to accomplish it with.

When the trailblazer cut over a short ravine she hopped up to the cliff edge and grabbed a branch, pulling herself the rest of the way up and onto her feet at the top while the Scionate just lunged the full height, clawing at the ground for traction and letting their momentum take them up and over the rim. Morgan got back into the lead after a moment, then led them the last kilometer up to a group of at least 100 lizards that were not moving, or rather not across terrain. They were active, but it looked like they were setting up another firebase in a fixed location, probably what the group of six were planning to work out of and extending their perimeter.

The lizards had been using comm probes to set up short range sequences that could stretch across kilometers without being noticeable from range. Star Force couldn’t hack the signals because they were so low powered that they couldn’t get a receiver on them, plus it seemed they were mostly directional and broadcasting horizontally, meaning even the most sensitive equipment couldn’t pick them up from orbit.

Those six might have been going to deploy those, but she’d have to wait for the report from the two she sent after them. One armored Scionate was enough to kill six lizards, but she didn’t want to get sloppy. And while she could easily have tracked down these groups solo, she’d been using the Scionate more and more as escorts simply due to the fact that they could keep up with her while running…not to mention that the lizards were now scattering rather than standing their ground and fighting, and having more people with her helped greatly in running them all down.

If the lizards had an advantage they’d fight, or had nowhere to run to, but if they had a choice they’d flee and regroup with others. It was something new in this campaign, but then again everything here seemed new, like the lizards were working on another page in their playbook. Morgan wasn’t sure exactly what they were up to, but the more of them she took out of the picture the better, as always.

And her team wasn’t the only one out roaming the jungle. She had hundreds of teams scattered across the planet doing the same, though she saved herself for the hottest spots, and this region had seen the most recent lizard drops, hence this was where she’d deployed herself and her Scionate team.

When they were nearly on top of them Morgan telepathically gave the Scionate the order to fan out, with her slowing her speed but still remaining point. Just as she was about to use her psionics to subdue the outlying lizards she ran straight into an invisible wall and bounced off it. Three of the Scionate did as well before the others checked up and stopped short of the shield wall the lizards had deployed.

An armored paw poked at Morgan’s helmet as her Pefbar returned quicker than her vision.

“Archon, are you alright?”

“What…what the hell?” she asked, sitting up and feeling a bit dizzy as she looked ahead and saw the tiny fluctuations in her Pefbar as to where the energy shield was. Just past it she could see the lizards squirming about, for they’d been alerted to their presence and were hastily going somewhere further away from the shield wall…which she expected was around the entire perimeter, but there was no way to know for sure.

“An energy shield,” the Scionate said, looking down at her helmet as she sat on the ground for a moment before she attempted to stand. Not seeing that coming had knocked the wind out of her, but she was getting her balance again quickly.

“How quaint,” she said, looking around for an emitter nearby but seeing nothing in her Pefbar to telekinetically wrench. Instead she summoned up a wave of goosebumps and pooled her concussive energy around her body. “Follow the perimeter and see if you can find a gap. I’m going after them.”

The Scionate immediately left her and scattered in both directions while she walked forward and stepped into the shield with her Jumat disrupting it enough to let her pass through. Unfortunately she couldn’t transmit the energy around the Scionate or she would have brought them with her, and trying to knock the shield down for a heartbeat to let one of them jump through would have taken too much time. As soon as she was on the other side she ran ahead, tracking the nearest lizard minds through the thick foliage to try and find out where they were going.

She had her answer some forty seconds later when the lizards suddenly went vertical, dropping down into what had to be underground unless there was a deep ravine that she wasn’t seeing. When she got to their approximate descent point she found a sealed hatch that was buried in the dirt and covered with overhanging leaves, almost impossible to find. Apparently the lizards had been here for some time, long enough anyways to have dug out subsurface bunkers by hand.

“You guys find a way in yet?”

“Negative. The arc is vast and we are still searching the perimeter.”

“The twerps have infrastructure in place, subsurface. Keep looking for a way in, but if you find none break up into teams of 2 and patrol the perimeter. Hunt down any lizards that make their way out. I’m going down and cleaning out whatever mess they’ve made. I’ll contact you when I’m done or find a way to shut the shield down.”

With that Morgan telekinetically latched onto the flimsy hatch and pulled it off its hinges, then hopped into the opening and fell straight down into the crude lizard labyrinth.

7 hours later Morgan stepped off a dropship onto the hangar deck of her command ship in orbit. It was the only one in the Ninja Monkey fleet and was her mobile base of operations wherever she went while most of her troops were stationed in the pair of surface colonies and a few firebases that had been set up nearer to the lizard drop regions. She could have slept there, but she needed to squeeze in at least a short workout before heading back out again and the colonies didn’t have a full sanctum, in that there was no elite section to it.

Her command ship did, but first thing she did when she got back was shower and eat, then on her way to bed for what would be a six hour stint she sat down at her terminal and ran through the system status reports. They detailed everything that was happening in Mastodon and included some lizard ship movements elsewhere, but none had come in to reinforce this planet, for she owned orbit and none could stay long enough to stake out a foothold. They’d run troops down into drop position, or maybe send some cargo down, but that was all they could do…and they’d been spamming that tactic ever since they’d figured out they could get away with it.

Had Morgan more drones that wouldn’t be possible, but she could only build so fast. Her other captured worlds were doing well to start snowballing their industry, but it would take a lot of time to build up the necessary material and, while they were certainly winning here, the losses of equipment that they were suffering in Mastodon were eating into whatever reinforcements she was getting.

Fully conquering this system was going to take several more years at least, and the other ones she was eyeing going forward were getting more heavily fortified as time went by. The lizards knew she was coming for them eventually, and since they seemed to think it would only be the Ninja Monkeys attacking they were putting more resources into beefing them up than other systems…which was going to make this a very long, arduous campaign.

Part of Morgan didn’t like that, seeing that the lizards had found a way to use their coreward border against them, but another part of her appreciated the challenge. It was her Clan against the lizards and they weren’t going to play defense against her. They might be getting their asses kicked elsewhere and trying to minimize the losses while they gained more and more systems on other fronts, but here they were making a play at it and calling Star Force out.

Morgan would meet them head on and fight this, with her Clan essentially engaged in an even fight while Star Force rolled over systems towards the rim and the lizards were expanding quickly coreward. It was an odd little microcosm in the war, but it seemed fitting none the less. She wanted her Clan to be on the front lines getting battle experience, and it seemed the lizards were going to oblige and give her all the fight she could handle…and maybe more if these drops and new tactics were just the scouting probe for a larger, more typical swarm rush to come.

Only time would tell, but this was her fight and her border to lock down…and with every day that went by she secured her holdings tighter as well. No matter what happened, both sides were amping up their defenses and setting up their strategy for the long term, with this looking like a major brawl in its infancy.

If Clan Ninja Monkey was going to survive this they’d have to do it by becoming far stronger than they were now, and Morgan relished that make or break necessity. As much as she liked training, she felt she belonged on the battlefield where the outcome mattered to more than your stats. Winning and losing here affected people’s lives and the balance of power in this swath of space, and Morgan intended to stake out her little piece of the border so those systems on the other side could develop in peace and contribute to other fronts while Clan Ninja Monkey took the heat here.

So far the rest of the coreward border was quiet, with Morgan having succeeded in drawing the lizards’ attention to her little piece, for that’s where the extra resources and troops were going. In that way she was protecting a far larger border than just her handful of systems could cover. It was a taunt that was getting more of a response than she’d imagined, as well as having the bonus effect of being able to fight the lizards when they were trying to win. She feared everyone else was getting soft in their expectations on the fronts they were winning on, for the lizards didn’t truly expect to hold those.

Here it seemed they thought they could and were actually trying, and potentially succeeding if Morgan couldn’t beat them. That meant this combat would give her troops far more experience than any other front, and that fit right into her plans. She just hoped the lizards didn’t come so hard at her so fast that she’d have to retreat and pull back to a couple of systems. If they were playing the probing game then she had time, and that was what she expected to get. A few systems here or there didn’t mean a damn to the lizards. They were focusing here for other reasons, and she expected them to give her just enough resistance to see how much her Clan could and couldn’t do.

Keeping her hand concealed so they couldn’t push her past that limit was the trick, and the longer that time went on the harder it would be to do that.

Morgan went through all the recent reports then shut down her terminal and slid into bed. This wasn’t a game, and it certainly wasn’t a walk in the park. She knew she was going to have more difficulty here than on any other front…which meant this was exactly where she was supposed to be.

Twelve hours from now she’d be back down on the planet hunting more lizards being dropped from orbit, but for right now she let herself disconnect from everything and just rest. This was going to be a long war, with her ability to sustain herself and her Clan being the key to victory. Get wore down, even a little, and it would snowball into defeat.

Rest was a weapon, and one Morgan had learned to make full use of a long time ago.

After seven minutes of pillow time she slipped into sleep, her mind quiet and her body numbing to the regenerative process. When she woke the next morning she’d snap back into action, with that polarity being a skill that most Archons never fully mastered.

2

February 2, 2848

Anivia System (Delta Region)

Frostbite

Busy? Taryn’s mental voice asked.

Come in, Ginsi answered a moment before the trailblazer walked through her quarters’ door, though she remained at her comm terminal reading.

“What are you working on?”

“Nothing,” the newly minted padawan said as Taryn walked up behind her chair and scoped out the flatscreen display. “Just reading a message from Mina.”

“You two still keep in contact?”

Ginsi nodded. “She’s a friend and I’m feeding her workouts. You’d be surprised what kind of nonsense is floating around out there despite people having grown up in a maturia.”

“You have no idea,” Taryn said patiently while Ginsi finished up. Her apprentice typed back a short reply and sent it off, then spun around and looked up at her.

“What’s up?”

“Something big.”

“I like big.”

“The reason we came here for training wasn’t for the view,” Taryn said, referencing the frozen wasteland that was Frostbite. “We’ve been given a long term assignment, and I’m going to want as much input from you as possible. You’re not just here to tag along.”

“What is it?” Ginsi said with a frown. The ‘long term’ part threw her.

“We’re going to uplift a ward.”

The padawan’s eyebrows raised. “A ward?”

“The Hepcha, actually. They’ve been climbing in status for a long while and we felt it was time to bring them fully into the fold.”

“Do we need to? I mean with the Protovic we’ve already got a huge upgrade to our lineup underway.”

“We can multitask. The Hepcha have earned this, and it’s up to us to incorporate them as best we can.”

“What’s there to do? They already have a Star Force society.”

“We have to make them independent and combat capable.”

“They’re avian, right?”

“Yes.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Right now there are only 1.2 billion, but we’ve been keeping their population low by choice. They’re egg layers so it’s not an issue, save for now we’ll be boosting those numbers considerably.”

“Aren’t there other races better suited to ground combat that we could incorporate? The Lacvamat haven’t exactly been all that helpful.”

Taryn tapped Ginsi on the forehead with her finger. “You’ve got your head stuck in hand to hand combat. Avian is different, and while there are a lot of weaknesses they do have advantages. We’ve got to tailor the Hepcha to make them effective.”

Ginsi shrugged. “If you say so.”

“Not overly thrilled, are you?”

“You know I prefer combat.”

“But you’re my apprentice, and I’m taking this assignment…therefore you are as well. There’s more to being an Archon than just fighting, though if that’s your aim there will be plenty of opportunity for that to come. Look at this as a peak into an area that you’ll probably never otherwise see. And if it helps your mental outlook, consider what we’re going to be doing as crafting living weapons. The Calavari weren’t that good on the ground before we got through training them. Don’t count the Hepcha out just yet.”

“If you say so. They’re one of the wards in this system, aren’t they?”

“Yep.”

“So we’ll be living with them?”

“No, they’ll be living with us. There’s a generic colony that’s been built on Preen for our purposes. We’ll expand and reconfigure it as necessary, but it’ll be built for both Human and Hepcha by the time we’re done with it.”

“What’s it built for now?”

“Axius design so we could be flexible from the get go.”

“An extra they had or specifically for us?”

“Axius built it…for us.”

“Ok then, where do we start?”

“After morning workouts we’re transferring over there along with a team I’ve been assembling. Work like this has no roadmap, despite others having done similar things with other races. Each one is unique and we have to troubleshoot our way through it.”

“Don’t you mean trailblaze?”

“Or that.”

“Who oversaw the Lacvamat elevation?”

“Connor. I’ve read through all his notes and I’d suggest you do so as well, I’ve already given you access, but don’t make the mistake of assuming all avians are the same. Hepcha have four wings and feathers. The Lacvamat have two and are flesh. That right there is going to make their movement capability different.”

Ginsi held up her hands. “Alright, alright. I hear you. What exactly do you want me to do?”

“Think outside the box and find a way for these guys to kick ass.”

Ginsi’s frown turned into a smirk. “You do know how to press my buttons, don’t you?”

“Perception isn’t about lies, but rather the best way to approach a situation. You see them as they are, I see them as for what they will become.”

“Honestly I don’t know crap about them other than what I read through in the maturia a long time ago.”

“No rush. This is going to take a long time. First things first, though. Our training doesn’t end, we just cram it into a long morning session and extend our days out to 36 hours. That’ll give us plenty of sleep and the necessary hours to tinker with the Hepcha civilization.”

“That’s still a cutback.”

“If you’re measuring by volume, yes. But it’s a far less cutback than we’d see if we were out fighting the lizards.”

“You have a point there.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll still have a chance to soar up through the ranks.”

“Only if you teach me the psionics I need. Without them I’m capped.”

“Academically. No one is physically capped.”

“You know what I mean, and…”

“No, I’m not giving you all of them first year. One at time, youngling.”

Ginsi growled. “Yes, master.”

Taryn pointed a warning finger down at her. “Don’t call me ‘master’ or I’ll go Vader on you. Get dressed and meet me in the sanctum. We’ve got a lot of work to do here and I’m going to make you pay for that comment.”

“I like more workouts,” Ginsi countered as she stood up and walked over to her quarter’s closet and began taking off her casual uniform to replace it with more appropriate workout attire.

“I didn’t say more workouts, I’m just not going to hold back as much as normal. Be prepared for a few bruises,” Taryn said as she walked out.

“You’re all heart, mast…” Ginsi whispered until her throat suddenly tightened up from a telekinetic chokehold.

Not funny, she told Taryn who was still walking away in the hallway outside her quarters. The titan held her until she got out of range, then the invisible grip disappeared and she could breathe normally again.

“Prick,” she said as she pulled out a jog bra and put it on. And to think she’d been thrilled when a trailblazer had taken her on as an apprentice. Right now that didn’t seem like a good idea, for there were days when she really wanted to kick Taryn’s ass…but she was far too strong for her to do that, and the titan didn’t mind flaunting that fact from time to time.

“One day,” she said, pulling on her running shoes and snugging them up before heading out and down to the sanctum in the Axius colony where they were staying…and soon to be leaving.

Ginsi sat down in the command center they’d just claimed and put her feet up on a station as Taryn took center stage amidst several dozen support personnel that she’d chosen to head the Hepcha ‘uplift’ process. The padawan had ultimately decided just to play the support banana on this one and learn what she could in the process, because it really wasn’t something she was interested in. Her focus was on her skills and her skills alone for that day in the hopefully distant future when Star Force went up against the V’kit’no’sat…and she intended to be the one fighting them, not an army of Hepcha.

“The work that has been done with the Hepcha thus far,” Taryn began as she pulled up a hologram of the race that floated larger than life midair above her head, “has been commendable, but it’s been based around the fact that Star Force would provide them everything they needed rather than them providing for themselves. This is necessary in wards, as well as a way to help them detox from whatever life they lived previously…which is usually a pretty bad one if we’re taking them on as wards.”

“There’s word floating around that there are a few other wards that are teetering on reaching elevation status, but none have accomplished as much as the Hepcha have. They are eager to join our ranks and that is why we’re here. We’re not forcing this, so let’s just guide the flow and let them find out how far they can climb. Biggest drawback we have is their lightweight frame,” Taryn said, pointing above her.

“Good for flying, but little else. The feathers are also problematic. Lacvamat just use conical capture to achieve flight, but the Hepcha filter it through their wings on the upbeat. Armor won’t allow for that. We can armor their midsection and put extra strong shielding over their wings, but it looks like an anti-grav component will need to be added instead. That won’t leave much armor volume, so we’ve got a challenge to solve there.”

“They’re smaller than the Lacvamat and barely bigger than a cat, but experiments with growth enhancements derived from the drugs that the Knights use have enlarged a segment of them to about 2/3rds Lacvamat size. I intend to keep this binary divide in their society and make use of both advantages. The smaller Hepcha will have combat uses, we just have to figure out what those are. They will probably be support oriented, but you never know. Axius has some very clever ways to make the smaller races combat viable, and it’s our job to copy, steal, or invent our own for these guys.”

“Neural interface is going to be key, because they have very little button pressing capability, which essentially comes down to their talons…which they have to stand on…and their beak. We’re going to look to Scionate designs for inspiration there, given that they also use a lot of backup mouth controls. We need manual backups, of course, but we also need manual interfaces for civilian applications. Save the neural links for combat. Some work in this has already been done under the ward system, but I’ve looked through what they’re living with and it’s too damn inefficient. Way better than what they used to have, but not good enough for me.”

“One thing that we are creating new is glide corridors, and I’ve already got the techs working in a section of the city on prototypes. Due to their small size we should be able to carve out tunnels above the Human walkways for them to move through. Since they need to be small, we’re going to have repulsor buffers in them so they can just dive in and coast. They won’t hit the walls or have to flap their wings, just ride it through like a one-way waterslide.”

Ginsi raised a hand to get Taryn’s attention. “Is there such a thing as a 2-way waterslide?”

Rather than getting mad the trailblazer considered that. “I don’t think so, but now that you’ve mentioned it I think we have to build one…but not here. Water is a no go around these guys. Wet their feathers and their flight capability gets chopped. They can manage it, but it’s like putting a heavy backpack on before you go running. That said, aquatics is still a go because they won’t ever be swimming without gear. Some of the preliminary tests that Lens ran indicate they have good aptitude for maneuvering in currents and at high speeds, which is probably pathetically slow to what they’re used to doing in the atmosphere. We are developing an aquatics division for the Hepcha, and there are currently zero people in it right now, so we’ll have to build it from scratch.”

“What they do have is a significant aerial division, piloting skeets, Valeries, and a few other craft. Nothing original to them, so that’s going to have to change. They also have a handful of individuals fighting with Axius on the ground, and we want to look through those combat records very carefully. They have no naval or mech divisions, and the first thing we want to look into is getting them a cargo fleet. I’m going to bring in some Kiritak to help with that and run what we set up so they can get some experience without the entire operation being a newbfest.”

“But first priority is this colony and the infrastructure. We’ll tolerate it as is, but we need to come up with firm designs before we start building elsewhere. That means theorizing, creating prototypes here, and testing them with the population we start to pull over from the wards. We are doing nothing on theory, and everything from practical experience. Clear?” she asked, getting a few confirmation nods.

“These guys are looking to us for guidance and we’re going to give it to them. Don’t make guesses, and bring anything unclear to me. I’d rather not give them something than give them something faulty that we then have to replace. Every step they take is one forward, we’re not having them go backwards. Trust is a commodity that you can’t replace, so don’t squander it. Route everything through me except where I say otherwise. I’m the face of this transformation so feed into that. You’re just my little minions working behind the scenes…save for the big minion over there that is my mini-me.”

“Mini?” Ginsi asked, for she was almost exactly the same height and weight as Taryn.

“You and I will be on the same page, so you’ll be able to speak for me to the Hepcha. We’re a team, but the rest of you will be disconnected from them as far as image holds. You’ll be integrated with them on projects and living side by side, but you’re the hired help. I’m the one that has to get this done. Don’t take that as an insult, because it’s not. You guys can come and go as needed. You can be reassigned to another system or leave the project entirely. I cannot. I’m in this for the long haul. So we’re going to structure their social understanding of the conversion down to me and my padawan. We’re the figureheads…and actual ones…leading this. The rest of you have your work, but you’ll be nameless and interchangeable. Focus on your tasks and I’ll take the hero worship. I’m told that it happens with all the races that we uplift and I don’t want you getting involved in it.”

“What I said may not make sense now, but just remember it and in time you’ll understand. Don’t let it become personal. I’ll give you tasks and you’ll complete them. You are not becoming part of the Hepcha community like an Axius colony. You’re separate. You may cross paths with them but don’t let yourselves become standard bearers. Don’t let them get to know you or else they’ll pattern off of you. Let them focus on me and Ginsi while you analyze them. Keep your distance or your perception might slip. We have to make changes to them in order to get them up to speed and I don’t want you empathizing with them because they’re, as some people have already stated, cute.”

“Cute or not they want this and we’re going to give it to them. That means a lot of work and training on their part. If they see you making excuses for them they’ll think that’s acceptable. It is not unless I say it is, so let them get their cues from me. You just remain pleasantly neutral.”

“Are they really that impressionable?” Ginsi asked.

“Very. And insulated. As a ward they haven’t had the commerce traffic coming to and from them. It’s restricted to keep them safely anonymous for the most part. That’s going to be a shock, and I want me to be the intermediary that brings them through the transition. Not 50 different ones that might be telling them opposing things, even if it’s just with your body language during off hours. You can let your hair down in private, but do not take any Hepcha as close friends. You need to keep a professional distance while you are working here. After the fact is your prerogative. The first step for them has to be at my sole direction.”

“We’ll keep our distance,” one of the techs assured her.

Taryn nodded. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, ambrosia is going to be tricky to develop for these guys given that they’ve already got a hyperactive metabolism that requires near ambrosia levels of sustenance in their food anyway. For their ambrosia we’re doing the opposite and making it an endurance boost, and how we’re going to do that I’m not quite sure. Just one of many things we’re going to have to figure out going forward.”

3

March 1, 2848

Aphat System (Veliquesh territory)

Dmak

Kip zipped his skeet past a Veliquesh building and delivered a pointblank mauler burst into the last of the anti-air defenses the city had, melting through the light armor casing and junking the interior. There was a small spurt of debris that flew out the other side, but the turret’s death wasn’t dramatic. He circled back around to confirm that he’d hit it, and the lack of fire when he raised up above the rooftops told him everything he needed to know even before he got eyes on the damaged turret.

A quick check of the battlemap confirmed that the city had now been fully plucked of defenses.

“All fighters pull back. Admiral, send in the presents once we’re clear,” he commed as he accelerated towards the perimeter of the Veliquesh city. It’d been 17 years since this invasion began and to date they hadn’t lost a single man. Some of the Veliquesh had managed to get themselves killed, but none of Kip’s troops or any of the other Star Force armies had suffered more than bodily injuries, and those were far and few between…largely due to a change in tactics they’d made after the first few years.

The Veliquesh cities were huge and widespread, not making use of their volume and relying mostly on low level buildings, as far as Star Force standards went anyways. It took Kip and the other pilots some time to get into the clear, and when they did he set and traveled out to a waypoint where the others would eventually gather with him. Once they were all out a virtual marker appeared covering the entire city and out past the edges like a golden blanket indicating the no-fly zone that was now in effect. The Admiral had set that in place, not Kip, and soon the first of the bombs became visible on the upper edge of the battlemap as they fell from orbit.

Or rather flew, for they were actually missiles rather than rail gun slugs or just chunks of matter. They came down in a spread, one wave after another and each bomb targeting different locations within the city where it would pop just prior to reaching the buildings or the surface. When they detonated they created a huge plume of green that washed across and through the buildings, then turned pink when it expanded out far enough. The clinging stun energy saturated the area and would hold its charge for several minutes while more bombs fell nearby and onto the same locations, blanketing the cityscape and rendering anyone caught out in the open unconscious on contact.

Originally Kip and the others hadn’t been able to use area of effect weapons for fear of overloading their targets and killing them, but subsequent research into Veliquesh physiology and some sneaky techs had found a way to lace the energy with a regulator that would actually repel additional stun energy past a certain concentration. As a bonus it wouldn’t only resist that energy, but push it away until it hit something that wasn’t already saturated. For that reason one bomb could cover a lot of city if the buildings were small, while others required multiple hits to soak through and saturate the large ones. Everything from person to bulkheads got a bath with the residue rippling across already hit areas and traveling, in some cases, kilometers before it found a fresh area to soak into.

The energy was configured to be matter hungry and lightly susceptible to gravity, meaning that the bombs were effectively water balloons that would spread out across the city rather than blowing back into the air. It’d taken years of tweaks to get them to where they were now, but they were more than worth the effort for they could neutralize a city far faster with the bombs than going in on foot and shooting them one person at a time. It also meant there was little risk to the ground teams, though on occasion there would be a handful that the bombs would miss.

To Kip it felt fitting, for while they were almost forced to use such weapons against the lizards they were using them now to take down an equally bad enemy but without having to resort to the bloodshed that the Veliquesh lived and breathed. That was a snub to them in and of itself, for they weren’t just defeating them militarily, but culturally as well.

And there was nothing the Veliquesh could do about it. Star Force’s weapons and tactics were far superior to the lizards, whom had finally been winning out against the Veliquesh when Kip and the others had arrived. They’d driven them off then set about the methodical destruction of the sick culture without killing the people in it. It was a crusade that he and the others here were fully behind with no mixed feelings. Had they been sending down lethal bombs that would have been another story, for you never knew who was down there and if they deserved killing or not.

By taking away that question mark Star Force could be as aggressive as it liked, and the number of bombs coming down certainly testified to an appetite for destruction. None of the buildings were so much as scratched, but with every detonation swaths of the sick race were taken out of the equation and would wake up later as prisoners in an isolation that would only end if they effectively switched sides. So Kip knew that every bomb detonation was taking down the number of Veliquesh permanently, for if any of these did see their freedom again it would be as Protovic, with the Veliquesh in them dying here with every beautiful green explosion.

But as always, this was just one piece of a very large puzzle. The other four systems the Veliquesh had owned were now barren and under watch by Star Force, but not inhabited. Their cities were slowly being dismantled by an advance team, but most of the techs assigned to this mission were busy building new prison habitats to keep up with the demand. When they eventually worked through those they’d be redeployed to reclamation duty that would wipe the Veliquesh stench off those four systems and add them to the unoccupied territory list that Star Force was accumulating from its conquests throughout lizard territory.

The Aphat System was different. It was too valuable to pass up with 18 habitable planetoids, whereas other systems were lucky to even have 1. That meant it also had the bulk of the Veliquesh population in it, with this world being the second major one they’d hit. They’d started with the ones that the lizards had invaded and worked their way through the Veliquesh survivors there while a group of them also tracked down and destroyed the lizards on the ground. As usual they refused to surrender, but after all this time Kip only felt a tiny pang of regret. He knew they had genetic ‘brain boxes’ on them that would resist the isolation technique they were using on the Veliquesh prisoners, but he still hated having to kill them all…a little bit.

By now that it was clear that it was either their race in dominance or their deaths trying to accomplish it. If there was another way to deal with them he and the others would find it in time, but for now it was offer them surrender and when they didn’t accept it, blow the hell out of them.

Kip was glad they weren’t doing that to the Veliquesh, even if some of them deserved it. Star Force wasn’t interested in punishment, only neutralizing threats, and once these bastards were taken prisoner they wouldn’t be sacrificing anyone else again…not to mention what other horrors they might have wrought had the lizards not boxed them in. According to their interrogations of the ‘diplomatic envoy’ that Mike had brought back with him, they seemed to have galactic domination as one of their long term goals, and if they had no qualms about killing their own younglings for not maintaining 100% compliance he doubted they’d be any more merciful to other races.

Kip waited with the other skeets on the perimeter until the bombardment ceased and the no-fly zone restriction disappeared. When it did he and the others headed back in as a flock of dropships came down from orbit carrying cleanup teams that would begin collecting the captives and transporting them back up to the holding ships. Several combat teams were coming down as well, for the bombs didn’t always penetrate deep enough to catch all the subsurface structures. Kip was going to be flying patrols in case there were any hotspots that needed hit and organizing the teams from the air while staying on guard for any more of the suicidal Veliquesh fighter squadrons that seemed to be interested in doing damage to the transports carrying their own people rather than to Kip’s troops.

For whatever their reasons they were targeting them with ambushes wherever they could, so Kip was staying in pilot mode for these operations just in case he needed to intercept some more of their fighters springing up from concealed hideaways. The Veliquesh might be crazy, but they weren’t totally stupid, and Kip could see now how they’d held the lizards off for so long. They were innovative within their strict strategies, which were focused around causing damage regardless of the strength of their opponent. The lizards happened to be weaker than them, technologically speaking, so it had paid off, but Star Force was not and the Veliquesh were essentially throwing themselves at them trying to do what damage they could.

They’d changed targets now, but the methodology was the same. The switch to hidden hangars spread across the planet had been an effective move for the fact that Star Force hadn’t been able to locate and eliminate them all initially, but the Veliquesh pilots still fought in the same manner. Again, as he’d noted on numerous occasions, these bastards showed some potential along with the crazy in them. How the two could coexist Kip wasn’t sure, but they did. And that meant he always had to stay on his toes just in case they showed another spark of adaptability and tried something new.

Today wasn’t going to be one of those days, and the now predictable fighter squadrons appearing from outside the city and rushing the filled transports as they headed back to orbit with prisoners were intercepted and destroyed. Those pilots that survived the crashes would be recovered, but there was no way the skeets could go easy on them when there were troops on the ground and ships in the air that were vulnerable. The Veliquesh weapons were better than what the lizards used, and had they got to one of the transports they could have brought it down with sustained weaponsfire from 6 or 8 of them.

They sent over 300 towards the city this time, meaning Kip and the others had to take them down quickly. Some of the pilots would die, but so be it. These were actively attacking their ships, which was considerably different than some Veliquesh sitting in a building minding his own business.

So after the fighters were destroyed and he sent recovery teams out to the crash sites Kip continued his aerial patrol for several hours until his bladder called it quits and he cycled back up to orbit while replacement patrols took over for him. They came from firebases on the surface but he headed back up to his command ship that was sitting next to Greg’s in a low parking orbit. The other three were spread out around the same planet with their fleets in blockade formation to keep any remaining surface ships from escaping and to prevent any ships from the other Veliquesh planets in the system from interrupting this planetary assault.

For the most part they didn’t try anymore, given the number of ships present, but when the transports finished filling a jumpship with prisoners and that ship would leave the system they would try and intercept it if they had an opportunity. Usually they didn’t, given the speed of the Star Force vessels, so the naval front was pretty much mundane up until they got around to finishing with this planet and would assault another.

Right now Kip was in the bad guy farming business, harvesting the citizenry from planet after plant and shipping them off to a nearby Star Force system where others would deal with the aftermath. As long as this crusade was taking, he wouldn’t be involved in the non-combat assignments, nor would the other four trailblazers. When the last prisoner had been collected their work would be finished and they’d return to other duties, leaving what happened to the Veliquesh in others’ hands.

And that was for the best, because after so many years of dealing with these guys Kip thoroughly hated them. Even now they were conducting sacrifice rituals on the other planets in order to try and stay Star Force’s inevitable march against them. He couldn’t stop them all and had to just turn a blind eye to it and focus on one planet at a time…but he never could, not completely. And even on a planet like this that was crawling with Star Force units there were still Veliquesh killing each other, whether it be a public ceremony or younglings that didn’t measure up.

Sometimes they’d find bodies of individuals in the buildings after a stun bombardment that had been eviscerated through a number of sick means with no clue as to why or how it’d happened. The depth of this civilization’s corruption was something Kip didn’t care to figure out, given that he was here to destroy it. To that end he did his job and ‘harvested’ as many living Veliquesh as he could get his hands on, but the trail of bodies left behind from their internal affairs made it clear why Veliquesh didn’t typically live past half a century.

That was another reason why Kip preferred organizing assaults from the air, so he didn’t have to see what they’d been up to in person. Every time he did it made him angry, and after a while that anger drained you of energy. The same was true of his troops, so he made sure to rotate them in and out of duties that had them on the front lines to give them a chance to recharge physically and emotionally.

For Kip, he didn’t give himself time off. When his skeet slid into one of the many bays on his command ship he first headed to the bathroom, then over to the sanctum to get in some training and work off that anger in a beneficial way. After that he’d get some sleep then head back down to the planet again to oversee another city assault while this one and four others were still being cleaned up.

Once a city was ‘harvested’ they had to put down surveillance gear around the perimeter to make sure no Veliquesh snuck back in, with some inevitably trying. It was a good tactic, for it would give them an impregnable base of operations for the simple reason that Star Force thought it was empty, but Kip and the others were too shrewd for that. They had teams assigned to patrol and hunt down any reclaimers that made their way inside, and with psionics they weren't that hard to locate.

Day in and day out this would continue, as it had for some 17 years now. Kip had seen so many cities that he could literally replicate the Veliquesh architecture from memory, but that wasn’t an issue for him or his troops. They fought the same way they trained…with an eye on the current trends and maintaining themselves indefinitely. The 3 trillion population of the Veliquesh wasn’t going to be an impediment against them, for they’d simply take it one mission at a time, slipping in training blocks here and there so they didn’t grow weak, and work through the entire number of the sick bastards over the course of time.

It was work that needed to be done and Kip didn’t feel like being anywhere else, but when the day came and it was completed he was going to be glad to see the galaxy rid of the Veliquesh and say goodbye to this region of space…at least until the cities were deconstructed and something worthwhile was put in their place.

Most of his troops felt the same way, with all manner of public countdowns being recorded from the jumpships to the firebases. They were doing good work here, but they’d all be glad when it was eventually finished.

4

April 9, 2853

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Jmry

Rafa climbed up a ladder and out of one of the Veliquesh buildings, coming onto the rooftop and leaving the collection team below to pick up the stunned prisoners. When he got to the top he scanned his battlemap looking for more targets but every building around him had been tagged with a ‘green’ marker indicating that it had already been checked and cleared.

Numerous units were dotting the map, but all of them were Star Force and most were collection teams. The others were combat units that, like Rafa, were looking for stragglers that had escaped capture. The building below him had held a group of holdouts, but the trailblazer had made quick work of them using his Ikrid, putting them all to sleep without a shot even needing to be fired.

Four high priority dots were also spread across this Veliquesh city, with those being Kip, Oni, Greg, and Jason. This was the last city on the last planet that hadn’t yet fallen. A few others had actually gone ahead and surrendered, seeing that they stood no chance as they witnessed the fall of every other city across Jmry, but this one and a few others had remained defiant to the end…and now it looked like it was finally over.

Rafa double-checked the battlemap to make sure it was really done, then he allowed himself to sit down and rest for a bit as he looked out over the Veliquesh city. The plaza where this had all began with Mike was about a kilometer to the northeast, and they’d specifically left this location for last. It’d taken 22 years for the five of them to conquer the three trillion Veliquesh, and slow as it was stunning and taking them prisoner, Rafa knew it had been the right call. Kill the culture but spare the people, for as bad as these psychopaths were none of them had chosen to be born into this sick place. Had they been born into an Axius colony he doubted they would have ended up the way they were, and that was why the Veliquesh civilization had to be destroyed…so that the next generation would be spared this horror and have a chance at a real life.

That next generation was going to be in the hands of someone else, for as soon as they tidied up here they were leaving. This system was remaining in Star Force hands, but it was going to be under the direction of a mage while the trailblazers cycled back to the ADZ. Rafa was going to spend some badly needed time with the advanced training group and he wasn’t sure about the others. They hadn’t talked about what they were doing next, rather focusing on the task at hand and maintaining their training throughout.

It had been a long war, but in some ways it didn’t seem like it. Once you got past a certain span of time everything blurred together and you just went with the grind. Rafa’s sense of time was linked to planets taken, not days on the calendar, and this one finished the set. Five systems conquered, zero casualties, and a prisoner count exceeding 3.07 trillion. What they picked up here would be added to that, but the bulk of that number had already been shipped to the Broj System, leaving Rafa and the others with a small pool of waiting cargo ships to carry these last few off. When they went, so would Rafa, and he could wash his hands of this place.

The building he now sat on and all the ones in his vision would be gone if and when he ever came back. Every last bit of infrastructure was going to be torn down and replaced, erasing the Veliquesh from existence. After this it was back to fighting the lizards and that even longer war, which made Rafa laugh. When were they not at war? First it was with other Humans on Earth, then the lizards, followed by the Skarrons and a lot of little confrontations that didn’t even make the news. Archons were always fighting someone, somewhere…he was just glad the battles were taking place on the enemy’s turf rather than the ADZ being invaded. At least now they could pick their battles, more or less.

“All done?” Jason’s voice asked inside his helmet.

“Looks like, but there could always be a few stragglers.”

“The sweeper teams can finish those. I’m heading back to orbit. Want a lift?”

“Sure,” Rafa said as he stood up, with Jason sending him a waypoint across the city. “Be there in 20.”

When Rafa finally ran up to the position where Jason had given him the waypoint he saw a Falcon-class dropship squeezed onto a road between two fat buildings and a trio of golden-clad Archons standing at the foot of the open boarding ramp. The trailblazers slowed to a jog as he came up on them, then stopped just a foot short of Oni’s armored shoulder.

“Greg’s on his way,” Jason told him. “We were discussing where we were headed after this.”

“Now or when we get back to the ADZ?”

“Right now,” Oni clarified, “I’m heading to a sanctum for a nice long run, after that is the question. Do you want to head back to the ADZ on the same ship or are you going somewhere we’re not?”

“I’m headed to Earth,” Rafa said. “What about you?”

“Mordor. I’ve got Clan stuff to take care of.”

“I’m going to pay Morgan a visit,” Kip added. “Her reports are indicating some heavy lizard activity in her region and I want to see what they’re up to personally.”

“Well, I’ve got some rounds to make in Beta Region,” Jason finished, “but I can transit through Sol, so I’m up for a group trip if you are.”

“I’m in no rush,” Kip mentioned as Greg came floating down to them from one of the nearby rooftops. “So I’m game.”

“Game for what?” he asked as he walked the last few steps to them after deactivating his jump pack.

“Heading back to Sol on the same ship so we can get some workouts in together before we head our separate ways,” Oni said.

“I’d like to, but my I’m going to meet up with a task force heading deeper into lizard space not far from here. I’m not heading back home for a while.”

“Sucks,” Kip commented.

Greg’s golden armor shrugged. “Lots of lizard systems to take and this little detour put us behind schedule as it is.”

“We have a schedule?” Rafa asked.

“I’d like to be knocking on their homeworld’s door in a couple hundred years, if that’s alright with you?”

“Fine with me, but don’t you want a break from combat to get in some decent training?”

“Nope. I’m good as is.”

“Can you stick around a few days?” Jason asked.

“We need to babysit the tail end of this operation anyway, so sure. I’m up for a few days of kicking your asses in challenges.”

“Your ship or mine?” Oni asked.

“Mine,” Jason said, thumbing towards the dropship. “That’s where this bird is going.”

“Settles that,” Rafa said as he brushed past Jason. “Let’s get to it.”

Brad-050 arrived in Aphat 4 months after his fellow trailblazers left, bringing with him an army of techs and a few combat ships to replace the majority that had cycled out to lizard hunting duty. He still had a decent defense fleet under his command to protect the system, but coming with him were a flotilla of Sentinel pieces that would combine into two of the newest versions full of Keema batteries and the most advanced defense shields to date. With those in place it was going to be damn hard for the lizards to displace them, and nowadays they didn’t seem to be in a rush to try.

Since the initial invasion the lizards hadn’t been back to Aphat or the other four systems that Star Force had taken from the Veliquesh. Those were being patrolled with their own guardian fleets while techs disassembled what was left of their infrastructure, then those fleets would eventually transition to Aphat, leaving nothing but monitoring equipment behind to make sure the lizards didn’t move in and claim them.

Aphat was an entirely different situation, for the reclamation effort here was going to take far longer. Brad had picked the planet of Nym to begin his work on and had redirected all techs to cleansing a section of its surface and subsequently building a small Star Force colony in its place. As the techs progressed further across the planet the Star Force infrastructure would follow, at a much slower pace, but as time went on the Veliquesh stain would be erased and a new piece of Star Force would grow in its place.

The facilities on Broj where the Veliquesh prisoners were being held also had the maturias for the children recovered. Those children were then sent into the transitional colony where they could prove themselves worthy or not of being full citizens. Already some had moved into the ADZ, but the ones coming out to Brad were another group entirely.

When prisoners had been taken a fair number of the Veliquesh females had been pregnant. When they gave birth to the fleshy egg sacks in isolation, those as of yet unhatched younglings were taken offworld to a separate maturia located deeper in Bsidd space. Brad had been working with them for a while, but most of the maturia regimen was a copy of the Axius Protovic program so he didn’t have much to do there. His work was going to begin in earnest now that those maturia were starting to produce graduates.

They weren’t in vast numbers, for the Veliquesh prisoners weren’t mating in isolation and the handful that were in the transitional colony weren’t adding all that many. That meant Brad had a limited window of opportunity to get a Star Force Protovic civilization set up and functioning before they ran out of younglings to grow it from. He had specifically said that none of the transitional Protovic would be allowed to join in the early stages, for he wanted to form it out of those who had known nothing but Star Force maturia, but intended to open it up to them a few decades down the road once the tone of the civilization had been set.

That meant he had a lot of green personnel to work with, so he’d recruited a variety of individuals from across Star Force to assist him in forming the core of the new civilization. Few of them were Protovic, but rather a mix of Calavari, Kiritak, Human, Bsidd, and Elarioni, for this world did have a large ocean on it and Brad wanted to get the aquatics division started right away. There were around 1200 of them in total, meaning that aside from the construction crews building the colony everything was going to have to be staffed by the maturia graduates and overseen by the ‘elders.’

That wasn’t the most preferred situation, but given that Brad didn’t have a native population to babysit and he was able to start from scratch he felt it was a good place to start. Wisdom took time to build, and the more hands-on activity these younglings could get, the faster they would learn…though he was having a transitional support team in place to actually run the startup colony during the integration of the younglings. Things like food prep and maintenance weren’t something you wanted to hand them right off their first day, but the support team would cycle out gradually and within a year or two be fully replaced by locals.

When Brad’s jumpship arrived he took a dropship down to the half-built colony with his elite staff and got to work right away setting up the necessary programs needed for when the younglings started to arrive a month later. A lot of that planning had already been done, but it wasn’t until they actually got on site that they were able to get a feel for the place and set up shop. There was a full sanctum in place for Brad’s use, so he intended to stay planetside for the foreseeable future rather than living out of a jumpship.

When he got to the surface he essentially staked his claim and started micromanaging everything in order to make sure things were in order for when the first batch of 5,000 younglings arrived. He’s specified that number and would have exactly that amount coming in every month for the first year while the balance would be moved into other locations within Star Force to await their turn. Nearly all of them wanted to come to Brad’s new addition to the empire, for they’d been hearing of it throughout their maturia training, but the trailblazer knew he couldn’t overload the limited infrastructure and staff with too much new blood, hence a staggered approach was used.

He spent a lot of personal time with that first 5,000. So much so that he eventually knew them all by name. He pushed them hard in training, got them acquainted with limited but essential duties, then relied on them to carry them out when the next batch came in and he saw to their indoctrination into the new order…save it wasn’t all that new for them, for all they’d ever known was Star Force. The few wrinkles that Brad put into the Protovic civilization took some getting used to and developed over time, but after that first year the trailblazer felt he had a sufficient core of personnel to open up the immigration doors and allow an additional 10,000 per week.

The Star Force engineers gave him plenty of infrastructure to use and kept right on building as he incorporated more and more Protovic younglings into his new civilization. Some of them even began working with the construction crews to learn hands-on and begin creating their own branch. They weren’t given anything critical to do, just some basic work to gain experience on with the prime crews as they expanded the single colony out into a network of cities across the northern continent.

As the colony’s population surged a small trickle of new infants came with it, which were put into a maturia on site staffed by the same people who had been working the others and were now transitioning here as those were being shut down stage by stage as they exhausted their supply of infants. Brad couldn’t trust younglings to run the maturias so they had to be staffed by professionals, but as soon as the local maturia had its first class assembled the Protovic civilization was officially born and sustainable.

It would take another 20 years before any of those infants cycled into the general population, but the sequence was underway and Brad was careful to monitor all aspects of the new Protovic as they developed, making adjustments where necessary and improvements where he was able to fashion them. He kept his core staff around permanently, knowing that it would be a long time before the Protovic were able to fly solo, but with each year that passed they became more and more capable.

Brad didn’t open the door to the older Protovic transfers until the 24th year, and even then he limited the number to only 10 the first month. He increased that tiny amount to 15 the next, then 25 and so on to make sure that the individuals assimilated into the masses rather than having a social division form between the old and the new. He wanted them all to identify simply as ‘Protovic’ and made the transition gradual for that reason.

Over time he upped the number, but by then there were so many maturia younglings coming in that it didn’t truly matter and the transitional ones were blended in with the new civilization as they all worked to build and strengthen the newest part of Star Force. It would be a long time into the future before they’d start fielding warships and armies of their own to fight the lizards, but Brad worked patiently and diligently towards that end, slowly crafting a new twist on classic Star Force protocol to make the Protovic an effective and unique addition to the overall empire…and one that would surpass the independent Protovic civilization in comparison, tech advantage aside.

5

December 26, 2879

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Naisha set her bag down on the bed of her new three room quarters. The design was slightly different than what she had been living in on Onyx but basically the same third level allotment that she’d earned in the transitional colony that was now in the process of becoming part of Axius. More and more non-Protovic were coming to the world as a slow trickle of people were coming out of the prisons. She didn’t know the exact number, but it had only been a few years ago when the ‘survivor’ count had passed 500,000.

500,000 out of what had been 3 trillion people taken prisoner. Naisha had been insulated from the rest of the Veliquesh civilization, but she hadn’t expected it to be as thoroughly corrupt as that number indicated. On the other hand, given some of the stories she’d heard from other survivors it was amazing that anyone had come out of that mess of a life sane. But all those she’d talked to were, for like her they’d come through the transition process and earned their freedom. Naisha still didn’t know exactly how that worked from a psychological or scientific standpoint…but it obviously did.

Most of the Protovic on Onyx were from the pools of younglings that the invasion had rescued before they could be evaluated as ‘unfit’ and killed, making her and the other survivors a small minority, then add in all the immigrants from other races and the planet had become a vibrant mix of faces and cultures that washed away the last bits of Veliquesh from her system…though she’d always retain the memories of how they’d tried to kill her and nearly succeeded.

She never know who it was that had saved her, but what she’d learned of Star Force told her that it had been an Archon, based on the armor. She couldn’t for the life of her remember what color it had been, and though she wanted to know she figured that was probably going to be one mystery she carried with her for the rest of her life…which now that she’d attained self-sufficiency could end up being a very long time.

Rather than spending her days in the colony lingering about as she had at first and many others did permanently, Naisha had trained as a generic worker, though for Star Force that was a lot more complicated that it sounded. It was the lowest paid position within the organization but one that still required extensive training. She spent over 8 months going through drills and procedures that expanded upon what she’d learned during her days in the prison…which she eventually found out doubled for what others went through in a maturia.

The extra training ran her through all kinds of variables and how to deal with them, giving her basic training in the food supply division that was far more than she’d expected. Half of all Star Force foodstuffs were prepackaged, with the rest requiring combination and prep before being made available in the cafeterias. She began as a level 1 assistant having had lessons in various allergies and the components that went into every bit of food that Star Force provided free of charge.

Other food items were available for sale by private venders, but Naisha hadn’t been allowed to work in a cafeteria until she knew every single item Star Force served and how to assemble each of those that were not prepackaged. That included the foodstuffs for Protovic, Humans, Calavari, and every other race within Star Force. The foodstuffs weren’t labeled as such, for some were palatable by several races, but they weren’t going to let her do so much as lay out the packages onto the display cases until she was able to spot potential problems, such as the wrong items going in the vending lines.

All the foodstuffs looked different, even if it was as simple a thing as coloration, so people would know which ones were meant for them and which were not, and it was the responsibility of every single person on the staff to insure there were no mistakes made so the people coming in to eat didn’t have to think about what they were grabbing off the racks.

It was important, as were all Star Force positions, and that was made clear from day 1 of training. When she began her work the tasks were simple, with her taking certain items from place to place and other menial tasks that could easily have been accomplished without any training required, but the difference was she wasn’t just following orders. She understood everything that she was doing and saw each item as a puzzle piece in a larger system that was recognizable to her.

Working in that position was her way of paying back Star Force for saving her, though they in turn paid her a credit stipend for doing so. She received an automatic 2.2 credits per day when she began and that had risen to 2.9 by the time she’d petitioned and received permission to transfer to the Protovic colony on Nym. After a month of working in the cafeteria she had been given a quarters’ upgrade as default, but she went ahead and purchased the next level up. That had cost her .7 credits per day and was deducted from her stipend automatically, which still allowed her to accumulate a surplus to use on whatever she wanted.

There were further quarters upgrades available, but the next one up cost 3.5 credits per day and was therefore out of her pay range unless she wanted to save up and pay a year’s advance. That hadn’t appealed to her and the three room quarters were much more luxurious than the basic ‘pods’ that she’d lived in. The bedroom was larger and had several modular pullouts that she could configure as she liked. The cleansing chamber was also slightly larger and included clothing storage, but it was the auxiliary living space in the third room that made the quarters a true luxury.

It had no specific purpose, but was more than three times the size of the bedroom and contained a large vid screen across one wall. The standard furniture was here, but Naisha could purchase additional pieces as needed…or actually the correct term was ‘rent,’ for when she’d transferred to Nym her old furniture hadn’t come with her. Right now there was a long couch and a stool stationed next to a table built into the wall. Anything beyond that she’d have to acquire with credits.

Her credit account did transfer between factions, and all of Star Force used the same currency system so she wasn’t going to have to start from scratch, nor was she going to have to look for a new position. That had already been arranged prior to her transit. There had been a long waiting line for the survivors to transfer to the Protovic and priority had gone to those most qualified. Had she not been working a job she’d still be waiting on Onyx, so even though she was on the lowest working tier of the empire she still got preferential treatment over those who simply lived without contributing.

Star Force had made it clear that that was perfectly acceptable behavior, but Naisha thought it was unacceptably rude on the part of the survivors to do so. They were alive and well because Star Force had rescued them, then went to the effort to train them. Naisha wasn’t skilled in any major way, but she was helping out where she could and didn’t care to socialize with any of the others that did not…and she’d gotten into more than one argument over that fact back on Onyx.

When her bag hit the bed she came down beside it a moment later and just laid out. Travel between star systems wasn’t difficult, but it did take her out of her routine and she found that to be exhausting. Naisha closed her eyes and took a crash nap right then and there, waking up some time later and beginning to unpack the few personal items she’d brought with her. All the necessities could be acquired locally, so what was in her pack was an assortment of novelties that she’d accumulated, including a small collection of decorative statues.

Naisha arranged them on one of the pullout shelves built into the living room wall and hit the activation buttons on those that were so equipped, with the Dvapp-built ‘snowman’ beginning to oscillate through his dance pattern as the crystalline material bent and flowed in a cyclical pattern.

She’d paid 172 credits for it, but it was worth every one and her favorite of them all. A few special items of clothing went into the closet and a custom set of casual shoes dropped next to the bed, which was the end of her unpacking. She stowed away her travel duffle and left her quarters after reprogramming the security code to something new, headed to the nearest equipment store.

There were several types in a Star Force city, but it was the clothing one that she headed to first. Nothing there cost credits, though there were temporal limitations to how much you could acquire at a time so no hoarding could occur. The amount was actually rather high so Naisha was able to fill out her wardrobe with standard uniforms and casual clothes on that single trip, then would be able to replace worn out clothing at a recycle station there and exchange them for tokens that could be used for more items.

The standard was 300 tokens for clothing, which included shoes, but since she was working that stipend upped to 350. Likewise there was a utility stipend of 75 tokens that allowed her to get a toothbrush and toothpaste at another equipment store along with shedding kit and a few other personal maintenance items, all of which could be recycled for a refund of the tokens if they became broken or empty.

Naisha went to a third store and picked up some training gear pulling from a third pool of tokens. Here she got a pair of running shoes and some stretch bands so she could do some resistance training in her quarters first thing when she woke up. She still had some tokens left in all three pools but didn’t feel the need to burn them all, but she did head to the civilian stores and bought a few things with credits, including a bag of candy that was sold as being tailored specifically to Protovic physiology.

It was by far the best candy she’d ever had back on Onyx and she wanted to keep a supply of it in her quarters at all times. It cost her 1.4 credits per bag, but it was worth it when she came back from a workout with a sugar low and didn’t feel like heading over to the cafeteria to eat. Some people took prepackaged foodstuffs back to their quarters to store up a small stockpile, but all of the warm foods were meant to be eaten on site. Private companies made meals that could be prepared in your quarters using modular cooking equipment, but Naisha didn’t care for those. A regular candy snack was enough to get her by until she found enough energy to get herself back over to the cafeteria to eat rather than work.

She wasn’t sure what would be different here, but assumed that most of the procedures would be the same. The grace window she had after transit was three days, but she went ahead and reported for work as soon as she got herself settled that first day. She spent a 4 hour shift then headed off for a workout in one of the local gymnasiums before allowing herself the luxury to explore her new home…or some of it, for the city was massive.

She and the rest of the citizens pretty much had access to everything, with only a few restricted sections for those with clearance beyond hers. One of those was the shipyards, for the city had a surface facility that was working in the open air beneath a shield dome to keep the weather out. Naisha eventually found her way to an observation deck on a tower that overlooked the shipyard and sat down on one of the bar stools sipping a confection drink along with others that were there to enjoy the view of the city or the broadcasts on the vid screens that were showing everything from news to sports.

All the faces she had seen since arriving here were Protovic and her red variety. Supposedly there were a handful of purple here that had come from Axius and even the other Protovic civilization that was an ally of Star Force, but they must have been so few in number to disappear amongst the masses.

It was odd, for everyone was the same. She’d gotten used to there being different races everywhere, but aside from the occasional Human this colony was all Protovic. That brought up a few memories of the Veliquesh, but things here were so different, so open, that the comparison fizzed immediately.

Looking out the windows she could see the drone warships she’d heard about. Rather than adopt the standard Star Force block style or use one of the other factions’ blueprints the Protovic had designed and begun to build their own version. It wasn’t much of a deviation, but they were using triangular wedges that would come together in fours that would then form a solid square, making for no wasted volume during transport onboard a jumpship.

Right now there were three of the drones under construction within sight, along with several starships that took on a more unique design and incorporated the typical Protovic hammerhead motif into a blocky back segment rather than the X-design. These starships, Naisha knew, were for local transit within the system. Many more were promised to come, but the Protovic fleet was only in its infancy. There were two other shipyards on the planet and four more in orbit working to build that military and civilian fleet, but it was going to take a long time to increase their numbers, for they were getting no outside help in doing so.

Everything here was being built locally, which was part of the draw for Naisha and the other immigrants. This was a Protovic civilization, and while they were part of Star Force she found it appealing to have a corner of it that was their own. That wasn’t to say she wanted to be isolationist, not at all, but she did like the idea of them being able to pull their own weight and eventually give back to the rest of Star Force later on when they had the strength to really make a difference in the war against the lizards.

That was beyond her prevue though, so she was determined to do what she could in support of those that would be going out to fight. Already there was a small number of advanced Protovic teams fighting alongside Axius, but the bulk of their limited military was still involved in permanent training to get them ready and establish a core group that others generations could build upon. Everything here had been built from scratch, and while they did have all the wisdom and experience of Star Force and the leadership of a trailblazer, some things still had to be earned with time and the Protovic were no exception.

But they were earning their keep and learning, which was why Naisha was so excited to be here and be a part of it, finally, after getting passed up so many times for transfer. She loved the community on Onyx, but now that she was here she realized this was truly where she belonged.

Another added bonus was that the Veliquesh that had tried to kill her and the others were now stuck in a prison facility in another system entirely, rather than being right next door. They couldn’t get out unless they earned their way out, but the fact that a lot of them were still alive and unrepentant was a disturbing thought. She knew that wouldn’t last forever, and even if Star Force isolation kept them alive longer than they would have been in their former decrepit society, they wouldn’t last forever unless they attained self-sufficiency, which Naisha knew required a lot of training and the willingness to analyze and rework a person’s interior.

Veliquesh didn’t do that. They prayed to the Nash to aid them rather than trying to do it themselves. She’d already heard that some of the prison facilities were being torn down and the materials recycled as they were no longer needed, for the prisoner count was diminishing with each year. A few would earn their way out, but the rest were simply dying off from what had mistakenly been considered old age in the past. Now she realized it was really physical and mental degradation.

In short, the Veliquesh that didn’t learn from Star Force and become Protovic were going to have their sick culture kill them through an alternative means…stagnation. The tools were there for them to use and learn from, but if they didn’t they’d eventually die off. All of them would, and that thought comforted Naisha. Not because of their failure to change, but because the nightmare of the Veliquesh would, some day in the future, be completely erased from the galaxy, and the ongoing deconstruction efforts of the prison facilities meant that day wasn’t too far away.

Here though she didn’t have to worry about that, or see it. These were all Protovic, as she was, and they had a bright future ahead of them if they were willing to work at it, and she was, for while she was going to be working in the cafeteria she was also taking additional maturia courses at a slow pace attempting to create new skills. Right now that was just a basic, all around training program, but if she showed aptitude in anything she was going to pursue it, for while she was helping Star Force in a tiny way she wanted to do more.

And even if it took her 100 years of training to get to the point where she was able to do that, she was ok with it. For now that she was self-sufficient she had all the time in the galaxy, and no matter what meager achievements she was able to make going forward she would always strive for more. Because that was the Star Force way and, above all else, she wanted to repay them as much as she could, knowing that debt could never fully be repaid. They had saved her from darkness and given her a place in the light…and she was going to defend and support that light in any way, shape, or form she could, in perpetuity.

6

January 3, 2880

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Jenran took a deep breath and set himself, eyeing the target at the end of the run-up. When the tone sounded he took off running, not at full sprint, as he’d learned previously, because while he needed speed he also needed control and accuracy. He had 55 meters to work with and got up to decent speed in half that, then transitioned into a ‘floating’ stride as he set himself into a forward lean, finishing with his last few strides sending him into a partial lunge forward.

He hit the target head first with his body at about a 40 degree angle to the ground then bounced off it and landed haphazardly to the left. The Protovic flipped around into a tri-point stance and shook off the momentary disorientation with a twitch of his head, then ran off to the side to touch a finish pedestal. This challenge was two part, with the level of impact being measured as well as the recovery time, and as soon as he hit the pedestal with his glowing red/green hand his score was displayed above it in holo.

Jenran frowned. His combined score had gone up 16 points, but his kinetic impact had decreased 7. It seemed that no matter what he tried he always lost ground in some way.

He hit the reset button on the side of the finish pedestal and walked back to the start point, set himself again, then took off running. He hit the wall in a similar manner, impacting it with the exoskeleton cap on his head where a Human would have had hair, but if one of them had tried this they’d knock themselves unconscious or snap their neck. Jenran didn’t have to worry about either because when he impacted his exoskeleton ran down the back of his head and connected to his torso, so as long as he held his form there wasn’t going to be any bending involved.

The bounce coming off the wall was uncontrollable and somewhat random, but others had learned how to at least predict it so they could stay on their feet and get to the pedestal almost instantaneously. His current bounce sent him neither left nor right, but rather returned him directly opposite his momentum path…which was a rarity. It bounced him back half a meter and he fell flat on his face.

Jenran climbed to his feet and jogged the few steps over to the finish pedestal on the right, for there were two to accommodate which way you bounced off the wall. He’d been screwed by the reverse direction immediately, and as a result his score ended up being junk…yet his kinetic impact had gone up 21 points from the previous run.

“Having trouble?” a voice asked from nearby.

Jenran turned around and saw Kleeva watching him. “I can’t get a handle on this.”

“Your head is more rounded, so it’s going to be harder to apply a predictable hit,” she said, walking over to him and hitting the reset button on the pedestal. “All males are.”

“They don’t have the same difficulty that I do,” he complained.

“Watch me,” she said, running back to the start and reversing direction with a single foot plant that turned into a light sprint. When she hit the wall head first her flatter cranial dome rolled her to the right. Her shoulder hit the wall, then her body rolled across it and she landed on her feet already moving towards the finish pedestal. She slapped the button and got a transition time less than half of what Jenran had been scoring on his best runs.

Kleeva tilted her neck to the left, with a soft pop sounding as her exoskeleton readjusted. “See what I did?”

“You stayed on your feet.”

“No…well yes, but that’s not what I meant. I turned my head a fraction prior to impact so I knew which way I’d be bouncing.”

Jenran frowned. “Doesn’t that reduce your impact score?”

“Not when you only do it a fraction. I can measure it out better because of my flat head, but I’ve seen some males do it better than me so I know you can.”

Jenran looked down at his shorter friend who was also going through commando training. All females were smaller than the males by about 12% mass, but aside from a slightly flatter head and a few other small cosmetic differences they were every bit as effective as the males, though in the case of this training drill they were better because of that cranium difference.

“I’ll keep trying, but my scores aren’t even at the minimum yet.”

“I’m only just over it,” she argued.

“You’re lower mass, so that’s to be expected.”

“I have to hit the same scores as you, regardless.”

“I’m just saying your technique is better, and I don’t know how to train myself a better one other than throwing myself at this stupid wall a bazillion times and hoping to accidentally improve.”

“You know, when we get into actual combat we’re going to have helmets and targets that aren’t flat walls.”

“Exactly my point. We have to adapt and I can’t figure out how to do it here on the easy, predictable, non-moving challenge course.”

“It’s all in the angle of impact.”

“I can’t feel it enough to control it.”

“Then slow down.”

“My score tanks from the lack of impact if I do that.”

“But you might need to in order to learn the control necessary. You can gradually up it until you find the break point, then fiddle with it there.”

“I have to learn this at speed.”

“And you will…after you learn it at slow speed,” she insisted, pulling him by the arm. “Come on. I’ll pace you.”

“We’ll run into each other on the bounce.”

“Afraid of a few bumps?” she said, citing the now well-known endurance that the race had compared to the others in Star Force. With their exoskeletal patches and almost Gumby-like flesh elsewhere, the Protovic could take a lot more pounding than others could without getting injured, so much so that it was rumored that their trailblazer patron had designed this and other collision tactics specifically for their combat use…things the other races couldn’t do without hurting themselves.

“Fine,” he relented, walking with her back to the start and taking up a position alongside the shorter Protovic.

“Mimic me,” she said, walking forward at first then transitioning into a slow jog that she added to at the very end with a lunge forward into the wall. Jenran made for a sloppy shadow and hit a fraction of a second after her, with both of them rolling to the outside and away from each other.

“Try to match me closer. I’ll increase slowly,” Kleeva said, walking back to the start.

“I feel like a youngling,” he complained, glancing around at the other identical courses being used nearby. Those Protovic weren’t going anywhere near this slow, and most of them were hitting scores that he hadn’t even come close to.

“You are one,” she said pithily before giving him a countdown with her left hand, dropping it as she took off. This time he held to her pace better and they both impacted the wall at nearly the same time, then they reset and began to repeat the binary attack on multiple run-throughs, increasing their speed gradually as they progressed and per Kleeva’s choice…which was a much slower rate than Jenran preferred.

They were up to their 21st repetition when he hit and bounced the wrong way, slamming into her left elbow as she rolled across the wall. He dropped to the ground and didn’t get up while she did, recovering and transitioning over to the pedestal. When Kleeva tapped it and turned around she saw him still lying on the ground clutching his crotch.

“What’s wrong?”

“What do you think?” he groaned.

Kleeva’s hand rose to cover her mouth as she laughed. “You weren’t closed up?”

“Apparently not,” he said, embarrassed.

“Why the hell not? You know I didn’t do that on purpose.”

“Doesn’t really matter at this point,” he said, getting to a knee but rising no further.

“But why weren’t you closed up?” she asked, referencing the pelvic plates on the males that covered their genitalia when not in use. Females had internal organs and merely an aperture that was not protected, but very hard to hit. If a male got caught with his plates spread and hit there with even the slightest bump it was said to be extremely painful.

“You.”

“Me?”

“I wasn’t concentrating when I hit the wall and I guess I…spread on accident.”

“Because of me?”

“You are one of the hottest girls here,” he said in mild defense.

“Oh…really? You never mentioned you had a thing for me before…”

“I didn’t plan to,” he said, wincing as he got up, then trying to stand still and let the unbearable pain bleed off. “I’m here to fight…not mate.”

“You can’t do either right now,” she said, still smirking. “Wow. Never realized I had that effect on guys.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he asked, still in considerable pain that didn’t want to go away.

“I’m sorry…but yeah. A bit.”

“This is why you don’t do tandem runs.”

“No, this is why you keep yourself closed up,” she argued, still not quite believing that he’d been caught off guard because of her.

“I’ll remember that,” he said stiffly.

“It really hurts, doesn’t it?”

“You have no idea.”

“How long before you start feeling…normal?”

“Depends how hard you’re hit, and you stuck me good with your elbow.”

“Actually, it was you that rolled into me, remember? At least we found your speed limit. Now you can work on gradually increasing it without losing control.”

“I really hate you right now.”

“What happened?” another commando trainee asked, coming over to where Jenran was standing with an awkward lean forward.

“Don’t ask.”

“He got caught open,” Kleeva told him.

The other male tried to suppress a smirk, then looked at him with genuine concern. “How bad?”

“Elbow.”

“Ouch,” he said empathetically. “Been there before. Nothing you can do but wait it out.”

“I know.”

“My condolences,” the other male said, heading back to his own training drills.

“I’m sorry,” Kleeva said after he’d left.

“Not your fault…but I still hate you.”

“At least that’s one thing girls don’t have to worry about in combat.”

“Lucky you.”

“Do you want me to find you a medic?”

“No.”

“How about a stun gun?”

Jenran didn’t answer vocally, but gave her a look that said ‘maybe.’

“Tell you what. You rest and I’ll get back to my own training. Later on today, or whenever you fully recover, I’ll make it up to you,” she said, leaning in close to his head and whispering. “Pain now, pleasure later, all even?”

“No need,” he said, mentally kicking himself for turning her down but he was in so much residual pain that his subconscious didn’t argue much. “Just an accident, and my fault. Forget about it.”

“And what if I insist?” she said, gently licking his forehead.

“Not really in the flirting mood right now,” he said honestly.

“Oh…right. Sorry. I owe you, though. Guess we’ll continue this later then,” she said, stepping away and hesitating. “If you don’t find me, I’ll find you. I want to even up.”

“Fine…later,” he said, sitting back down on the ground.

Kleeva cringed and walked away.

Jenran looked down at his crotch, then up at the wall where the misfortune had occurred. “Can’t get any worse,” he told himself, standing up and walking to the start position. If he was going to be in pain he might as well be getting something out of these minutes than just sitting and wallowing in discomfort…that and he didn’t want to attract any more attention.

Making sure he was tightly closed up he jogged forward and very lightly hit the wall head on, rolling to the left and over to the pedestal. He didn’t even look at the score, resetting it and going back to try again. With each repetition the pain got less and less to the point where he was able to start processing what Kleeva had been saying pre-flirt.

Right now he had to go slow, and that restriction made him realize she was right. He was worrying too much about his appearance and needed to work this from the slow end up. Now that he literally had no pride left there was no shame in taking these runs slow and trying to work on his impact deflection angles.

Turning his brain off to everything else he just repeated the drill more times than he knew until he accidentally set a new personal best combined score…and at a lower speed than he had been attempting before. Frowning, he reset the drill and did it again, getting almost the exact same score, only 1 point lower. Jenran did it four more times the exact same way, ruling out the possibility that it was just an accident, then he hit the reset again and took his start position, the pain of his collision now almost entirely gone.

He took off at full speed and tried to apply the same technique he’d been using to this attempt, not expecting to succeed but hoping to see that something had changed. When he hit the wall he bounced off randomly again, but he flopped onto the ground and got to his feet well enough and tagged the pedestal, seeing that the kinetic impact was decent, but more importantly he’d been able to feel his error on contact. There was no way he could have controlled it, but he wasn’t numbing up for that moment of impact like he had been before.

Now that he could ‘see’ what was occurring he knew he could learn to do it like the others. In retrospect he realized he’d just been trying for too much and hadn’t allowed his senses to calibrate to the hard impacts. He’d been mentally flinching with each but now, having let his mind gradually adjust to harder and harder impacts, he could go through it ‘eyes open,’ which he tested with several more runs before slowing down again and picking up from where he’d left off on his gradual improvement, now confident that he’d be able to get this within the next few days.

When he eventually quit he realized he’d spend the past 4 hours in the gym. He’d expected to be there half an hour and had to rush several other training elements before reporting for mandatory scripted sessions. He didn’t like having screwed up his morning’s workouts, but realized that the tradeoff was more than worth it. He’d made a huge rookie mistake and now was wise to it, with the ironic part being that he probably wouldn’t have gained that insight if Kleeva hadn’t embarrassed him with that accidental collision.

He’d heard stories of accidental training insights from others, and now it seemed he had one of his own to tell. He liked that, but more so he liked the increased capability it would give him, for he could apply the same insight to other areas even after he mastered the head ram. It was one of the unique combat tactics to the Protovic and he’d been feeling inadequate for not being able to do it up to requirements. His scores weren’t high enough to meet them yet, but it was just a matter of time now that he knew his mistake had been countered.

Regardless of any sexual liaison with Kleeva that would result from this, his crotch knock had been worth it. He knew he’d never say that in the moment of pain, but it was now past and he still had his training insight going forward. It had sucked, and he wouldn’t be living down that stigma anytime soon, but on the battlefield things like that didn’t matter. Skill and ability did, and he’d just increased his slightly, however accidental it might have been.

7

July 5, 2888

Ventrol System (lizard territory)

Treymit

Nephit took cover behind a boulder, tucking his appendages in behind as much of it as he could as his fellow Bsidd did likewise in four other spots. The lizards they were facing were being more stubborn than normal and weren’t walking out to their deaths like normal. They had numbers on the Star Force troops but not enough to really press the issue. Instead the lizards were operating in hit teams that were carrying one of their newest toys…a rocket launcher that did more concussive damage than shrapnel. Even a direct hit wouldn’t take down Nephit or his fellow Betas if their shields and armor were full, but that’s not what the lizards were going for.

The stupid explosives would physically move the Bsidd they hit, knocking them over or even flinging them through the air when the lizards shot at their feet. If they got a good bounce the lizards would rush them when they were out of position, and the little bastards were getting good with combos, making it necessary for the Bsidd to not group up too much and keep to cover whenever possible. His team had two snipers in the back that were working through the enemy ranks, so right now they just needed to buy time.

They had two Archons with their unit of some 500 Bsidd, and they’d ordered them into a defensive position, telling them to turtle up and hold ground. Ahead of them was a lizard stronghold they were trying to knock out, one that still had anti-air cover to keep the aerial division back, so they were going to take it down the hard way. It hadn’t occurred to Nephit unit a few minutes ago that the lizards had flanked them with reinforcements and now surrounded them on all sides…hence the turtle maneuver.

He’d fought in a few of these situations before, knowing they were dangerous if they screwed up, but more often than not the lizards would overcommit and turn their advantage into defeat. That wasn’t happening here, for the little green vermin were fighting smart and chucking rockets into them whenever they could. His armor had taken a gash on two of his appendages, but his shields had reformed over it before it could get worse. Others had also taken some armor damage, but everyone was still combat capable so he wasn’t worried too much. If they were in trouble the Archons would tell them what to do, and right now they were just holding ground as they’d done so many times in the past.

A phaser shot skipped across the boulder’s surface, blowing up a spray of molten dust as it passed and partially hit him in the helmet. His shield caught it but he ducked down a bit further, having thought he was too low to be shot already. He got a ‘hand’ signal from another Bsidd across a gap and hiding behind a dead tree on the otherwise rocky terrain, prompting him to curl up his appendages and roll like a ball out into the open. When he took fire, as expected, he just kept rolling like a tumbleweed as four others stepped out and returned fire. He didn’t see how many of the lizards were hit, but when he got to the other side and took cover behind a rock near the tree those there gave him a nod of respect, meaning that the maneuver had been worth it.

Nephit checked his shield gage, noting it had dropped under 25%. He needed to stay down and recharge, but the lizards weren’t going to cooperate. A rocket zipped by his head and hit a boulder behind him, blasting it apart and turning the pieces into light shrapnel that bounced off the twenty some Bsidd in the area. Those that were now denied cover ran multiple ways as two more rocket shots came in and physically moved three of them out of position with hits to the ground nearby.

Nephit got slammed up against his cover rock by the concussion wave, then a sea of green rushed into view to his right as the lizards came forward and tried to take advantage of the situation, firing dozens of phaser shots into the downed and disoriented Bsidd that were out in the open. He and the others rushed out and engaged them hand to hand, with a few getting there first and interposing themselves between the attackers and their targets. Nephit came out into the flank of the group and took a shot to the helmet as two of them turned on him just as he saw a sammy sniper shot come down and hit a lizard to his right in the head.

It fell to the ground dead, with Nephit seeing the det pack on its back. He cursed and kept fighting, realizing how he and the others had stupidly been baited into a trap…one that their sniper had just saved them from.

Thirty seconds later half the lizards there were dead and the others fell back to the horde that was waiting further up the plain. They’d just been poked, not fully engaged, but he and others had taken a lot of shield depletion and some bad armor hits. He was ok for the moment, ducking back into cover as long range phaser blasts peppered the area, breaking up the short-lived melee.

After a few seconds of cover and him seeing his shield strength bar begin to creep back up his comm broke open with some type of music he wasn’t familiar with. It was loud and obviously a battle song, but he didn’t know what it was for until he zoomed out his battlemap and saw a host of new icons approaching.

“Yes,” one of the Bsidd next to him said with eagerness as orders from the Archons began to come through in the form of waypoints and target beacons. The unfamiliar song kept repeating the phrase ‘back off, I’ll take you on” and Nephit liked it immediately, especially because the orders were indicating that they were abandoning their turtle formation and pressing the attack. He and the others waited as instructed until their standard bearers came up in the form of an Archon striker that was not assigned to them, but was probably one belonging to the Protovic that were reinforcing them.

The battle song kept playing for several minutes as they approach, with that lead Archon running out into the open where Nephit and the others had just fought that brief scrap and setting his feet into the dry dirt and holding position as the lizards peppered him with pink phaser strikes. The next thing the Bsidd saw was a blur of red/grey armor flying through the air past the Archon on what was probably a telekinetic grip, for the Human’s arm went in the same direction as if he was flinging the mass forward.

Immediately Nephit got the order to push and he jumped out of cover as the Archon beat them to the front by two steps, following the Protovic he’d just threw into the group of lizards ahead that had been bowled down from the physical impact. A red energy shield burst out from that Protovic into a flat wall blocking most of the firing coming in at him. Those lizards nearest him on the ‘friendly’ side turned and shot him multiple times but he just held still, carrying a large shield emitter backpack as the Archon telekinetically ripped two of them off him and the Bsidd shot the others dead.

Behind Nephit more Bsidd followed along with a column of Protovic. They looked like Humans and wore almost identical armor to their commandos, with the coloration being the only major difference. A specialized icon flashed directly over top the Bsidd on the battlemap, with it materializing on his HUD as an area of blue sparkles surrounding him. He knew that meant to make gaps to let the Protovic through, with the smaller allies sprinting up between them and running directly towards the lizards as the shield carrier either lost his charge or deliberately dropped the energy matrix.

Half a dozen of the Protovic ran by or jumped over him, then weathered a storm of phaser hits before diving and ramming the lizard groups head first and knocking several over per hit. Nephit and the Bsidd weren’t far behind and used the disruption to shoot down some at range then jump in on top of the others and fight them hand to hand using their plasma rods. What looked like a sea of blue lightsaber blades lit up, six per Bsidd, and began lashing the lizards with pointblank plasma hits.

As was expected, the lizards didn’t back down like the song suggested. Those hidden nearby emerged and swarmed the Star Force troops in what looked to be an even battle for the moment Nephit had to glance around, then he was too occupied with the lizards on top of him to pay attention to anything else. He fought them as he normally did, but there were rockets flying everything disrupting their formations…though they had the Protovic doing the same to the lizards with their own bodies. He’d never seen a Human fight like that before, but these troops were and taking a hell of a physical beating doing it. More than once he saw an Archon pick one up and throw them like a rock at the lizards, and not all of them had shield packs.

Some of those ramming tactics paid off for Nephit, because they set up kills for him. The Kamikaze-like behavior was something the lizards hadn’t seen Star Force use before and it seemed to shake them up even as they were chucking rockets and pouncing on anyone they caught out. More Protovic were grouped up into fireteams and were assisting hunting the lizards like typical Human commandos.

With me, an Archon said telepathically as it passed Nephit and tapped him on one of his appendages.

A bit shocked by the voice appearing in his head rather than his helmet, Nephit did as instructed and followed the Archon through the melee and up to the front with two Protovic flanking him. They didn’t stay there long, having to divert to knock down groups of lizards coming towards him but the Archon didn’t stop moving and neither did Nephit until they ran up on a crevice that ran between two monoliths of rock that stood 6 meters high.

Kill them as they come out, the Archon said as he turned around and protected the Bsidd’s flank.

Nephit trusted in his judgement and faced directly into the crevice that was barely wide enough for two Betas to stand side by side, but he had just enough room to stretch out his appendages and swing freely as he bullied his way into the line of lizards coming up out of a small hole in the rock wall on the left. He cut down two with plasma rods and shot the rest as he moved his way up to the hole as another quickly climbed out and tried to roll away from him. The Bsidd reached out and jabbed it in the chest with a plasma rod as another climbed out and tried to get away, firing a shot into his chest section as it scurried to clear the hole.

Nephit understood what he had to do and backed up a step so they couldn’t shoot out the lateral tunnel at him, then he used one of his two rifles to shoot the lizards that had come out while he jabbed the next one crawling out of the tunnel. He remained there, fighting furiously to knock them all down and not let any through while the Archon covered the entrance to the crevice…though he couldn’t see him. The lizards were climbing out so fast he couldn’t pay attention to anything else, trusting that the Archon would know what he was doing and Nephit understanding that he had to be the mauler taking down this line of reinforcements as they were vulnerable coming out single file.

It was a sweet spot for an ambush and required him to rack up an insanely high kill count, which is exactly what he did up until he ran out of ammo, but by then there were other Bsidd standing behind him ready to take his place, for they’d already advanced this far and secured their foothold…with the lizards below ground apparently unaware and still sending a string of reinforcements out to a quick death as the crevice filled up with bodies.

Jenran dove into a group of four lizards, hitting one in the chest with his helmeted head. Rather than rolling to either side he just let his momentum carry him into and over the lizard as it went down. He rolled through a rough somersault and kicked out his armored left leg to catch a third lizard, for a second had been bowled down by the first as it was knocked backwards.

The Protovic didn’t even bother to try and fire his rifle, clinging to it with one hand as he kicked and rolled, knocking down as many lizards as he could until blue plasma streaks filled the air directly over him and the surrounding lizards went down from the hits. Red/grey suits of armor ran up to and past him as Jenran got to his feet and fell into line behind them.

They didn’t have far to go to get to the next group of lizards, with someone else pulling the same maneuver he just had. Using his rifle, Jenran moved forward and shot one of the lizards that had been knocked down while the others engaged a group of 50 or so situated in a circular enclosure within the rocks. It was an ambush position but the Protovic didn’t care, they just pushed their way in, knocking down the leading edge of the lizards and ramming a shield carrier into the worst of it. That bit of tech was one of Brad’s unique additions to the Protovic, which essentially put a heavy cradle over top of the commando armor that made the carrier extremely unagile and incapable of most hand to hand combat…but the tradeoff was worth it when paired with a fighting unit.

He’d said the Protovic were ‘headstrong,’ hence the signature battle song he’d given them, and had crafted their ground combat tactics accordingly. They carried more armor than Human commandos, making their suits slightly more stiff while needing less internal padding given their exoskeletal segments. And while they were trained to be agile, their ability to simply ram their opponents and not get disoriented by the collision gave them an advantage that Brad had told them to use often in group combat while still training them to be conventional commandos with a full range of evasive combat techniques.

This was the first invasion that the Protovic army was involved in and Jenran’s fifth battle. He and the others knew they were being evaluated, as well as the fact that this fight was live and people were in jeopardy if they screwed it up…but so far everyone had been doing their job and they’d been mowing down the lizards they’d been assigned to go against, though he suspected they were being given the easy assignments since they were newbs to this sort of fighting, while the Bsidd armies were taking on the heaviest areas of resistance.

Didn’t matter to him. There were lizards here to be fought and the bulk of the currently small Protovic army was finally getting a chance to contribute…and he was realizing just how small and weak the lizards were. These were standard varieties they were coming up against, no maulers, and every time he collided with one it did little to stop his higher mass. They were easy takedowns if they could get to them, especially considering that they were wearing no armor aside from some pathetic vests. Those might stop a shot, or half of one, but otherwise they were useless against Star Force’s weapons.

Jenran fought from the back of his unit while his shields recharged, only taking a few additional hits while the others soaked up most of the incoming fire. When he was nearly full and ready to take on the next diving assignment he got a battlemap prompt and immediately ran over to the nearby waypoint, finding the Archon that had summoned him and feeling his telepathy in his head.

He’d done this before and returned a ‘ready’ thought while getting the approximate direction the Archon wanted to throw him. He ran on that trajectory then felt himself tip forward and be lifted off the ground, accelerated by an invisible force as he was shot through the air like a slow missile past the Archon and the other Protovic, then hit headfirst into a wall of lizards. He kept his arms tucked around his rifle until he felt the telekinetic hold let go and gravity returned to normal.

As he crashed into the lizards he let his legs and one arm fly wide to catch as many of them as he could, acting like a snowplow that mowed down a line of them, leaving him the prime target now as multiple phaser blasts hit him, though a few missed and actually hit other lizards as he scrambled around on the ground, knowing that standing up immediately was a bad idea. He needed to buy a few seconds and then…

Two more Protovic came running up and head-butted lizards aside as a wave of blue plasma fire followed them along with the padawan that had thrown him. A group of lizards just dropped to the ground in front of him and Jenran shot them as quickly as he could while the Archon jumped over their bodies and punched another so hard he flew back as another projectile and knocked four more down.

Soon Jenran was surrounded by other Protovic and out of danger, finding his shields had gone down and he had a slightly melted gash across his right leg but no other damage. He held back and shot a few downed lizards that he wasn’t sure were totally dead as his shield bar reformed at minimal strength.

Tucking in behind others with more shield than him, he followed the group forward as they continued their cyclical push that, by design, was never supposed to end and give the lizards a chance to regroup. Once a Protovic formation started the charge forward they would continue until the enemy gave them too much resistance and they had to fall back, or until they’d won the battle.

8

July 18, 2888

Chepmet System (lizard territory)

Inner Zone

The Excalibur came out of its deceleration jump into view of the white star that stood at the center of the lizard-occupied system head of the line. It’d pulled extra heavy on the gravity drives to position them further out than normal, for they expected immediate resistance. Chepmet was a key system on the primary shipping route connecting the lizard core worlds and their expansion zone into Skarron territory. They used multiple paths to link the two, but the bulk of their ship and cargo transfer was occurring on one line…one very heavily defended line as they attempted to reduce the amount of raids that Star Force and the Voku were exacting on them.

The Preema invasion corridor had already eaten out a chunk of lizard territory on the Voku side of the midline and Star Force continued to creep their border in from the opposite side. That meant the vast expanse of territory in the ‘middle’ of lizard space was shrinking. Not so much that they were in jeopardy of getting cut off anytime soon, but the lizards could see the writing on the wall and had been reinforcing this particular line of systems, both in terms of planetary defenses and ship count.

So it didn’t surprise Paul when his command ship’s sensors began to pick up warship contacts in orbit around the star by the thousands. They were there to make sure any lizard ships coming through were protected as they made the transition from one jumppoint to another, for intercepting a ship mid jump was virtually unheard of. The weak points in the traffic flow were around the stars, so that’s where the lizards were pooling their ships and adding more to them as the months passed by.

There were too many for Paul to take out with his small Clan Saber fleet, which exited behind the Excalibur six in count. Four were standard warships and began deploying drones immediately upon arrival, but the other two were the main reason they were here. They were jumpship-sized drones that had no internal living space whatsoever, not even for maintenance access. Normally Star Force wouldn’t build anything that big in that manner, but these were prototypes that Clan Saber had developed and Paul had brought them here for a field test…as well as to diminish the number of ships the lizards had in the system.

Both mammoth warships were Ravager-class and had the distinction of carrying the first ‘holy’ weapon Star Force had managed to produce, which was the V’kit’no’sat’s Dre’mo’don. It was crude as hell right now and too large to fit on any normal sized drone, but each ravager had 12 Dre’mo’dons on them, a lot of armor and shields, and some backup Ta’lin’yi and mauler cannons with a sprinkling of Sammy anti-air turrets.

They were beasts with more kill power than the rest of the fleet combined, most of which was due to the Dre’mo’dons. They were the same type of weapon that Kara had in her armor, which compressed down into a tiny jewel set into her wrist. The one’s Star Force had built were monstrosities, and not due to their destructive power. What the V’kit’no’sat could condense down into a square meter, Star Force’s techs were only accomplishing the same with a battery the size of a dropship.

That meant they were hugely inefficient, but the end result was same when the condensed energy packet was launched. It wasn’t a beam, nor could reach even close to beam speeds, making it a medium/short range weapon, but it tore apart shields and armor alike in a way that made all the rest of Star Force’s weapons look like mere toys…which was why Paul and Roger had been pressing the techs to rush the design even if it took something huge to carry them.

The weapon schematics had been a Star Force project, but it was Clan Saber that had gone ahead and incorporated them into the ravager design while others factions were waiting for them to be tinkered with and reduced in size first. Paul wasn’t waiting, for this weapon put them ahead of the Voku, the Preema, and the Nexus in terms of raw firepower. He was here to take the pair of ravagers against an overwhelming lizard fleet, with the rest of his ships there to protect the prototypes. He knew he’d have to withdraw at some point, but intended to get a lot of data and ship kills before that and did not want to risk losing one of the very expensive ships.

Credits weren’t the issue, but the number of arc elements and solari required to construct the Dre’mo’don were insane compared to everything else they were using. Paul had only been able to afford it because Clan Saber had built a small Star Forge-class mining station of their own now that the main facilities were out of prototype stage and they had a limited, but firm handle on the technology. Mainline had 3 of the massive stations up and running with another two under construction, while Paul had spent a significant amount of his Clan’s resources to build his own baby version that he’d named the Pocket Knife.

Between it and the two ravagers, he’d devoted an enormous amount of his Clan’s resources into a very small amount of equipment, but both ventures were going to put the Sabers far ahead of the curve. The Dre’mo’don wasn’t the V’kit’no’sat’s most advanced weapon by far, but it was a staple of their smaller ships and the batteries on the ravagers were equivalent in yield to what the Rit’ko’sor had on their Frigate analogs. Small by V’kit’no’sat standards, but still naval yield and far more powerful than anything Kara could produce.

To put it in simpler terms, the weapons should be able to 1-hit lizard cruisers, though to date that theory hadn’t been tested, which was one of the reasons why Paul was here.

The trailblazer linked into the nexus and took personal command of both ravagers while leaving the drone fleet under the control of the remote pilots. They knew their job and he probably wouldn’t have to give any additional orders, leaving him free to focus on the new tech and using it to maximum advantage while simultaneously safeguarding it.

As the lizard sensors finally caught the echoes from the incoming ships their fleets began to reposition to come after the invaders, and those were just the ones already in orbit around the star. Paul knew there were at least 2 inhabited planets in the system, but how many more ships they had around them was a question mark. They’d only been able to get a brief scouting report that was some 60 years old from the Voku, plus updates from ships passing through that could not stay around long enough to take a fresh look.

As Paul’s fleet began to move towards the star and approach the swarm of lizard ships, three of his own drones broke off and made microjumps that would take them through a very fast scouting run of the other planets. That wasn’t their purpose here, but he might as well have a look while they were in the neighborhood. Those drones were operating on limited remote control and Paul had told his Admiral previously that he wanted them out and back quickly, for he didn’t know how long they’d be able to stand up against the lizard fleet and he didn’t want them left behind for the lizards to potentially disable and study.

As the four jumpships spread out into compass points around the Excalibur and the drones filled in the gaps while pushing the formation out even further, Paul kept the two ravagers in close to the command ship before sending them on out ahead when the fat donut started shooting bloons at the enemy. He wanted to keep well clear of their firing radius and let them fight the enemy, with the rest of the fleet holding position nearby to react as necessary. They were all going to shoot any and all lizard ships that came within firing range, but he wanted the ravagers to go in first and have their choice of targets.

Paul watched with considerable interest as the first 100+ ship tendril of cruisers came in towards the port ravager firing their phaser beams at a slightly greater range than the Dre’mo’dons could handle. Their energy packet was only momentarily cohesive, and once that cloyingness ran its course they’d pop like fireworks and dissipate their energy. Anything near the ‘pop’ would take damage, but it would be minimal compared to what the bolt would have accomplished on a proper hit.

When Paul felt the first of the cruisers come within the reliable range he fired the first Dre’mo’don, which while on V’kit’no’sat weapons was green, a color alteration hadn’t been a big technological issue so Paul had these built standard Star Force blue. What looked like a tiny pinprick of light glowed so brightly it might as well have been a piece of a star. It shot out almost too fast for the eye to track and impacted one of the fresh lizard cruisers that had full armor and shields, while a handful of the others had already been hit by bloons and weakened.

The Dre’mo’don hit the lizard shields and punched right through, overloading their matrix on impact then partially melting through the armor plates as the energy packet destabilized, turning from a tiny mote into a miniature nova. The hole in the armor expanded on the inside into a destructive cone that blew out the opposite side of the ship and nearly severed the entire thing in half. Sensor tags of weapons batteries winked out across the hull leaving only two still operational, but the rest of the cruiser was either junk or unpowered.

Pretty damn close to a 1-hit kill.

Paul didn’t waste a second shot on it and targeted a different cruiser with his second battery while the first went on an 18-second recharge. He hated that it was that ponderously slow but he had 12 batteries to work with, so as the lizard fleets swarmed around the ravagers with even more ships only minutes away, he was able to fire a shot every 1.5 seconds and use the secondary weaponry to clean up his kills and take them completely out of the fight.

And Paul had two ships to work with, so there was a constant repetition of the tiny blue sparks flying out and knocking down cruisers as the rest of the Star Force fleet became heavily engaged and positioned to  keep themselves bracketing the ravagers so the enemy couldn’t fully surround them and fire from all angles simultaneously. Paul had brought two shield ship drones per ravager and had them waiting nearby to swoop in and aid them if necessary, but the confusion of the lizards prevented any serious threat to the deadly ships.

The titan knew it would take time for the enemy to calculate the destructive potential and adjust their attack patterns accordingly. Until that happened he was more than happy to just sit there racking up easy kills, all the while monitoring the long range sensors and the growing number of ships heading their way.

It took 12 minutes before Paul realized the lizards were not adapting to the new threat. Almost giddy with the opportunity he expanded his mind out to the rest of the fleet and grabbed some remote pilots to man the secondary weapons on the ravagers while he assumed full fleet control and took them on the offensive. He split up the ravagers and sent them into different areas while the Excalibur did the same. The lizards weren’t running, but they weren’t adjusting to the firepower the ravagers were throwing down…perhaps because it was so extreme they didn’t know what to do about it.

Regardless of their thinking, or lack thereof, Paul knew the opportunity he had and pressed the engagement to the point of risking the loss of a significant portion of his drones. The spacing between his ships spread out, taking on a much more aggressive posture and figuratively taunting the lizards to come at them now that they weren’t turtled up into a defensive alignment. When the enemy continued to press the attack Paul new it was game on and that he had a chance of destroying the entire fleet now on sensors…though discounting whatever else they had in the system.

That was a wild card right now and he’d keep an eye on it, but so long as the lizards were going to take the bait he was going to make them pay for their lack of vision. He frowned as the term ‘lack of vision’ stuck in his mind and he realized it was something the Emperor had said.

Whatever…the point was valid. The lizards would learn what the ravagers could do going forward and adapt to it as they always did, but in the next few minutes at least he had caught them by surprise and was going to milk it for all he could.

15 days later…

Paul’s seven ship fleet flew into planetary orbit at one of their frontline system naval outposts, which was comprised of a repair yard and supply depot sitting near a Sentinel defense platform. The planet was uninhabited as of now, with the facilities having been built specifically to aid in the warfront expansion by giving Star Force a stepping stone forward without having to put down another significant colonization effort.

Another warfleet, one much larger than Paul’s, was already on station and he recognized Taryn’s flagship a couple of seconds before her hologram appeared beside his command chair on the bridge.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked, seeing the armor damage across all of his ships and the onboard drone count being at 43% capacity.

“Picked a fight and won,” Paul said pithily as he motioned to the Admiral to go ahead and get the repair work ordered, which is what he’d been on the bridge to do rather than being down in his sanctum trying fruitlessly to find the trigger to the Ubven ability that Rio had been continuously flaunting in their sparring sessions, preventing Paul or anyone else from beating him even once in hand to hand when he could essentially freeze his opponent for a few seconds whenever he wanted.

“Kind of looks like you lost,” Taryn commented.

“Took more damage than I planned, but I had a limited opportunity to do some significant damage and I took it. The lizards didn’t know what to do with the ravagers.”

“Define significant damage?” she asked curiously.

Paul smiled. “Kill count…232,721 cruisers.”

Taryn’s eyes went wide. “What the hell?!”

“I told you the Dre’mo’dons would be worth the effort.”

“No way,” she said disbelievingly. “I’ve seen the numbers. They shouldn’t be that effective. What else did you do?”

“I admit, we’re not going to get that kind of a landslide going forward, but they didn’t know how many ships were necessary to mass against the ravagers for longer than I expected. In their moment of uncertainty they didn’t retreat and I made them pay for it.”

“How many ships did you leave them with?”

Paul cringed. “They had well over a million insystem. We got a decent scouting survey, but never got a complete ship count.”

“Damn, they are serious about holding that trade route. Mostly cruisers?”

“All cruisers. I think they know using bigger ships is just making it easier for us. And now that we can pretty much kill one with a single hit I doubt we’ll see any larger varieties used, save for chess pieces if and when they think there’s a need.”

“Don’t you think they’ll keep those far away now?”

“It’s possible, but they now have data on the defenses the ravagers had and they can see they’re nothing special. If I was stupid enough to hold position, they could run an invoker up on one and take it down before the Dre’mo’dons could do enough damage to disable it. That much mass has its advantages. The capital ship tonnage is their liability, with us anyway. Skarrons are a different story.”

“Yeah, they just keep hemorrhaging territory,” Taryn said, referencing an intelligence report passed on by the Preema, who were now officially allies with the Skarrons and assisting them in a few engagements past the Star Force coreward no-go line in an attempt to slow or stop the lizard advance in some key sectors. They knew they needed the Skarrons on the offensive, not the defensive, but so far the lizards were owning them…though the Skarrons had so much territory that their empire hadn’t been seriously weakened thus far, though it did have an ever expanding chunk bitten out of it on the map.

“Where are you headed?” Paul asked.

“Yechmo then Deerma. Should be able to clear out both fairly easy. The lizards never put down serious roots, and I’m curious as to why.”

“How’s the new padawan working out?”

“He’s no Ginsi, but we gel well. No arguments or bristling like with Supergirl, and he’s actually interested in more than just level upgrades.”

“Couldn’t talk Ginsi into becoming a builder?”

“Nope. She’s choosing to go straight-up weapon. Useful in her niche, but she’s no trailblazer. Take away our training notes and her progression will tank, I’ll guarantee it. Might happen anyway now that I’m not around to hold her hand. She’s very quick when something is explained to her, but her adaptational skills aside from hand to hand suck. Well, that’s not fair. She’s slightly below average for Archons. Compared to us, she sucks.”

“And the new guy?”

“He’s a grinder, but intelligent. He’ll make a solid mage when I get finished with him. Are you out of the padawan business?”

“For now. The stronger I get the more of a hindrance they become.”

“I felt the same way too until I started looking on them as a tool rather than a ward. I give them more space than I did before and I’ve found a useful balance.”

“How soon you leaving?”

“Got another task force I’m waiting on. Probably a week at the earliest.”

“Then get your butt over here and we’ll discuss padawans during a long run, and I promise I won’t slow you down.”

“Heading over,” she said with a smirk. “And have the holos of your battle handy. I want to see how your new toys earned those beauty marks.”

9

October 2, 2888

Unnamed System (Backwater Region)

Unnamed planet

Jack-809506 stopped walking suddenly, pausing in the forest underneath the partial canopy as rays of sunlight came down onto the ground like strobe lights.

“What’s wrong?” Ikra asked as she sat perched on the Archon’s back rack. The Hepcha had been riding there for several hours as the scouting pair had been quietly pushing their way north over hilly terrain in search of the bandits that had been ambushing convoys coming though the region. The planet’s population was primitive in that they hadn’t mastered anti-grav tech yet, but they were part of a small alliance that had and their trading partners had set up a number of spaceports on the planet to facilitate the economic interlinking.

One of those spaceports was 230 miles to the south and had been getting its cargo shipments hijacked, both those coming into the spaceport over ground and those flowing out from it. The local Venats hadn’t been able to find those responsible, but a handful of investigators from the Uframon Alliance suspected Groms and they’d asked Star Force to confirm it if possible.

Jack was out in the middle of nowhere as far as Star Force was concerned. He was in the Backwater Region, which was a loose term referring to all the territory beyond Epsilon, Gamma, and Delta Regions that the lizards had not gotten into yet. Most of where Star Force had outposts was between the ADZ and the original Voku territory, but even at that those were single systems out of thousands of others…and Jack was far beyond those bastions of civilization.

Per Director Davis’s wishes Star Force had been making diplomatic contact with as many races as it could and establishing some level of relations with them. The Uframon Alliance was on the very fringe of Star Force’s reach and was on good terms with them, with a single enclave having been positioned on their capitol. It was the most heavily defended world Uframon had, but it was weak by ADZ standards. The idea of having Star Force put a tiny foothold down there was centered around trying to prop up Uframon and give them both legitimacy and military threat, for if someone invaded the planet they’d also have to attack Star Force as well…and word of their almost magical technology had gotten around the region despite the lack of interstellar communications.

That Star Force outpost was where Jack and a few hundred other personnel were stationed. The ranger was one of 7 Archons there and split most of his time between solitary training and going out on simple missions to aid Uframon. Some of them involved helping to teach their military new tricks, evaluating weaknesses in their security, or often tackling the unknown that they couldn’t. This current mission fell into the latter category, and as a courtesy he had volunteered to check it out.

The planet he was on was so primitive that it didn’t even have an official name yet, nor did the system as far as Star Force was concerned. The native’s had a name for it, but their language was so bizarre that it couldn’t be used. Assigning one to it and others in the region was still on the to-do list, as were many other systems that were being scouted out, but for now it simply had the identification number of TX-7839, with the planet having the same designation with a ‘-04’ being added. It had been a small member of the Uframon for the past 43 years and had benefited enormously from the economic activity, but it was still legitimately backwater as far as Jack was concerned.

Apparently someone else thought so as well, for they’d been launching convoy ambushes and getting away with it. Enough supplies and personnel had been lost that Uframon command had taken notice and sent their investigators…who could find nothing. A lull in the raids occurred during their arrival then they began again after they left. A second trip had found, again, nothing, so Uframon had asked Star Force if they could discover who was conducting these raids and Jack had been sent with his scouting partner here to find out.

He’d come via an Explorer-class starship/jumpship hybrid. It was small, but given Star Force’s engine tech it could travel faster than most other races’ jumpships and was sufficient to hop around the local star systems. It was approximately the size of a heavy cruiser but could be operated by a crew of 1 if needed. Jack had brought two more crewers, one for the starship and one for the dropship that had brought them down to the planet and was parked a good ways back, leaving him and Ikra on their own as they hiked through the forest headed nowhere in particular.

“Something’s wrong. I can’t sense anyone, but the wildlife is behaving different over there,” the Archon said, raising his left arm and pointing to the northwest. “Check it out.”

“On it,” the Hepcha said, spreading its four wings out across the ranger’s back and lifting off her travel perch with a flurry of alternating wing beats that gave her race a snakelike appearance in the air as her head and hind quarters bobbed up and down alternate of each other. The cat-sized avian flew up through a gap in the treetops and hovered in place, letting Jack pull camera feeds from her armor so he could see what she saw.

The Hepcha saw the rolling terrain covered in trees but nothing out of the ordinary, then when she started to angle in the direction Jack had indicated and gain some altitude, a line in the greenery became visible. Ikra flew lower as she approached it, searching for any anti-air turrets or ships in the sky that could spot her. When she found nothing she eased into a hummingbird-like hover that had her feathered wings stoking the air unbound while the rest of her body was covered in very thin, but still strong light blue armor that looked like scales. Those scales scraped over top of one another, preserving her flexibility while still protecting her body from all angles.

“See it?” she asked through the comm in her tiny helmet that covered her round head and long beak.

“Yeah,” Jack replied, watching via his helmet’s HUD. “Sneaky bastards. They cut into the trees to make a landing pad underneath the canopy. The hillside to your right will block view of it from the ground save for the nearest half mile, and all the orbital scans will show is untouched forest.”

“Ships should still be visible from the sky?”

“Not when there’s cloud cover, and most of the raids have occurred in bad weather.”

“This isn’t that well hidden,” the Hepcha argued as she flew around in casual circles, keeping her distance but giving the Archon multiple angles to work with. There wasn’t any infrastructure visible, just a flat piece of ground with a few trunks missing and an intact canopy above stretching from the nearby trees.

“You have to remember we’re playing in a very low league here. They don’t think about hiding things the way we do. The locals have very bad sensors, so I can imagine these guys operating out of this location with ease. Hold position, I’m coming to you.”

“No sign of activity yet.”

“Lay low just in case.”

“How low?”

“Stretch your wings if you like, but don’t get any altitude.”

“Buzzing as ordered,” she said as the Archon began to run, visible on her battlemap as a speedy dot moving through the forest. He was fast for a ground pounder, but couldn’t match her flight speed even on his best day and her worst. They’d been working as a scouting pair for the past 3 years, and even though she’d wanted to be posted to the front lines where the heavy action was, Ikra had come to realize that out here in the ‘safe’ territories there were still all kinds of dangers, but most of them were well within Star Force’s ability to dominate, leaving her and Jack as a very powerful pairing that she’d come to relish. Had they been fighting against the lizards that would have been another story altogether.

“Contact,” Ikra warned, seeing movement near the pad.

“I know, I can feel them now,” Jack said, heading in that direction on the battlemap. “They’re definitely Groms.”

“What do you want to do?”

“The locals can’t handle them, so we are.”

“How?”

Jack hesitated, knowing what Ikra meant even without her having to say it. This wasn’t a defensive mission, it was offense. Different standards applied and even if these guys were going to have to be killed he couldn’t get too over the top. When an enemy attacked you it was obvious how to respond, but when you were attacking them there were a lot of unknowns as to who you were shooting at and whether or not they deserved it. When they shot at you that was clear enough.

“They aren’t conducting these raids on foot, so we’re depriving them of their toys. If they make a big fuss over it we take them down as well, but their deaths aren’t the mission.”

“Gotcha,” the Hepcha said as she swooped down low to the treetops as Jack was nearing the clearing, making a big looping turn as she activated her shields and triggered her armor to extend out over her wings, taking away her main lifting capability but replacing it with light anti-grav. Ikra flew across the treetops, a blue scaled four-winged bird floating on her technology as she timed her arrival to coincide with Jack’s as he put up four waypoints on the map for her, marking the location of the hostiles.

When she flew over the last of the treetops she came up on an incline that put the clearing partially above the rest of the forest, allowing lateral access while still being covered by the branches. This left a bit of cover for her to emerge from, but as the Groms finally noticed Jack she coasted into the clear and underneath the higher set trees and dove down a couple of meters onto the nearest of them.

The bulky biped was wearing a bandoleer of ammunition and boots, but little else. Its grey hide was thick and it had a pair of short horns protruding from the top of its head that she centered on. With her right talon she trigged a charge just before she landed on its head for a split second, delivering the stun energy on contact for she didn’t have the weight luxury of carrying ranged weapons.

Ikra bounced off its head as it fell to the ground and got a couple of meters of altitude back as Jack shot the other three with ease, leaving the pair momentarily alone.

“Where now?” she asked, coasting on an anti-grav cushion but keeping moving. She wasn’t heavily armored enough to soak up a lot of damage and staying put was a good way to become an easy target. Jack, however, held still and silent for a moment, with Ikra knowing that meant he was focusing on his slowly growing psionic abilities.

“These are sentries. There’s a group of minds down that trail,” he said, pointing to a lightly mashed bit of brush. “They’re not moving yet.”

“No vehicles?”

Jack chewed on his lip. “No,” he said, taking his right gauntlet off and walking over to one of the unconscious Groms.

“Got your back,” Ikra said, beginning to fly a small circle around him to keep an eye on the area while he did his mind to mind thing. This wasn’t the first time they’d dealt with Groms, and she knew it’d take several minutes at least if he was able to get anything from them. They were aggressive and pack minded, but apparently their mental structure was very different from what Jack was used to, plus he didn’t know their language. There were so many different ones out here there was no way they could hope to learn them all, so he was going to have to wing it and hope to pick up on something.

Even the locals they were here to protect couldn’t be communicated with. They had to use an intermediary from the Uframon that could speak the language, and then communicate with him through a translation program only a few years old. It was a mess, so when the pair had come here they hadn’t bothered to inform anyone about it. They didn’t expect to coordinate with anyone, and even if they did the raiders might get tipped off and disappear.

So as usual they’d just dropped in where they wanted, for no one could stop them anyway and it was better to keep away from the locals altogether.

“They’re waiting on something,” Jack finally said, standing up and taking a step away from the Grom that massed twice what he did…in armor. “I think we’re going to stick around and see what shows up.”

“How long?”

“Soon.”

“Stay here or go after the others down the trail?”

“Trail…after I get them out of sight,” Jack said, walking over to and grabbing one of the Groms to drag off the crude dirt landing pad. “I get the feeling we’ve stumbled onto a network, and the more links we can smoke out the better.”

“So not a one day mission?” Ikra asked, still circling above him on the invisible cushion beneath her wings. She cocked her head, twisting her helmeted beak to the side and pausing her flight.

“I hear it too,” Jack said, noting the telltale whine of inefficient anti-grav approaching from a distance. “Go take a look.”

Ikra flexed her wings, mentally triggering them to increase propulsion in combination with a talon button press. She flew up out of the partial gap and into the open air, immediately dipping back down again and surfing the low gaps between the uneven treetops to keep out of sight. She flew wide of the direction the sound was coming from and spied one of the taller trees in the area. Ikra approached it from the opposite side and grabbed hold of the upper branches, pushing herself inside the leaves and then climbing through it far enough to look out but still conceal her. A few blue patches in the sea of green would most likely go unnoticed.

“Convoy. Not Grom transports, but definitely built for overland travel. Nothing the locals could build.”

“How many?”

“I count 3. I don’t think more than one will fit on the landing pad at a time.”

“Damn…our timing super sucks on this one. Looks like we start taking it all down and sort through the pieces afterwards.”

“I don’t think the transports are shielded.”

“Show me.”

Ikra sent the visual link as they came within a half mile of her position.

“Take the last, wait for the first to land.”

“Gladly,” she said, waiting impatiently until the three box-like hovering transports passed her by. When the first one dipped into the gap underneath the trees where Jack was waiting she pushed hard out of her perch and flew across the distance like a slow missile, coming up on the back transport and landing on top of it. It only took a moment to find the hatch, which she grasped with her talons and pulled up. It flipped open on a hinge, then she released and let it bang down on the top of the metallic box as she dove inside and went to work on the crew.

These might not be lizards, but this was still combat and she was working one on one with an Archon taking down targets far larger than her small frame. That was due to the armor, weapons, and training that Star Force had given her race in addition to sanctuary when their homeworld had been destroyed. She’d gone from being a helpless victim to a hunter, a moral hunter, and Ikra appreciated the irony in that as she got battered around inside the transport by the Groms as they flailed panickly to no avail.

After a long 40 seconds all 13 of them were unconscious and she was still unharmed, though her shields had gone down from the physical blows. With a satisfied beak pucker she drifted back over to the hatch when the transport hit something and came to a sudden stop. Ikra bounced off the wall then righted herself, flying up through the topside entrance and having to pull her way through tree branches that the pilotless transport had rammed into.

With them sliding harmlessly over her armor she pushed through and into clean air again, just in time to see the second transport turning away to run.

“Oh no you don’t,” she said with grim determination and took off after it.

10

November 19, 2888

Palma System (Preema Invasion Corridor)

Hefisti

Riona-111 looked out through the command nexus interface at the graveyard of lizard ships in orbit around the oversized planet that they’d recently been defending. It was a monster of a world with three times the surface area of Earth but only a 1.2 gravity rating. That made it a very valuable piece of property, but one that neither the Preema, Voku, nor Star Force would be laying claim to. This was going to be yet another world/system added to the list of purges and monitored to keep the lizards or others from coming back.

The purging process was already underway on the planet, with a fleet of 6 Preema Beta-class warships and 10 Alpha-class sitting in tranquil position just inside the orbit of the debris field that they’d been responsible for before Riona’s fleet had arrived. She had 12 Warship-class jumpships, one of which she was onboard, escorting a fleet of some 42 cargo/transport jumpships carrying Star Force aquatics troops. Hefisti housed a single body of water, but one that was bigger than all the oceans on Earth combined. The lizards had colonized it as well as the land, and digging them out of it was going to be a pain in the ass.

Which was why the Preema had asked for Star Force’s help on this one. Riona could see that they were already doing heavy damage on the land as they were given access to the Preema’s own version of a battlemap that displayed the location of all their units, but nothing was in the water as of yet. She didn’t know if that meant they were going to let her handle all of the aquatic warfare or they’d be joining in later, but either way the cleansing of the ocean was her responsibility.

According to intelligence reports from the Voku, this world had been a major lizard stronghold and it looked like they’d fought hard to hold onto it based on the space debris, which could easily have accounted for over 100,000 cruisers. Riona didn’t know how many there had been, nor how many ships the Preema had used to destroy them, but she got the feeling that those left in orbit were just here to guard the planet while their ground troops went into action. If these 16 alone had done this much damage then she was considerably underestimating their firepower.

The Alphas were their smallest ship, battleship size, and they scaled up from there. Star Force had tagged them all Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons, and jumpships. The Epsilons were so large that two of them squeezed together around a jumpship and took up all the available space on it, for they each easily outmassed the spindly frame. Riona knew of only five that the Preema had brought with them out of their home territory to the staging outpost and had never seen one in person, but knew they were the most powerful warships Star Force had ever come across given their sheer size and technology.

The Preema warships also doubled as troop carriers, for there were no ‘civilian’ ships within the system. Riona also assumed that there had been a much larger fleet here previously because the amount of troops showing on the planet was far greater than what the handful of ships in orbit could carry. They’d landed and set up a huge ground offensive, with their obvious intent being to destroy the lizard colonies as quickly as possible so they could check off this system and move on to the next.

But they couldn’t do that until the ocean was clear as well, and Riona knew there was a bit of a time competition in play. How much infrastructure the lizards had down there was unknown, but she intended to destroy it before the Preema got finished with the land-based colonies if at all possible.

One of her bridge officers got a line to the Preema commander and patched it through to the nexus with the winged quadruped appearing in holo, resplendent in its armor that they seemed to wear just about everywhere, though this one’s helmet had been retracted, which she knew was a measure of respect they were granting the Humans during communication.

“I am Riona-111 and have an army of aquatics troops ready to deploy into combat, with your permission,” she said, with the computer translating her words into the Preema’s native language. She and the other Archons had gotten out of the habit of learning new ones, relying instead on translators unless there was a significant reason to do otherwise. She’d learned lizard, obviously, as well as the old Alliance trade language, then more recently added Voku given their ever growing relationship, but unless something similar was going to happen with the Preema she wasn’t going to bother to add theirs to her personal list.

“Thank you for responding to our request,” the Preema said, his tone artificial due to the program being responsible for his words and therefore stripping them of all subtext. “There is a large lizard presence within the ocean. We have not probed it beyond light reconnaissance. We will transfer the appropriate files to you, but we suspect that there is much more down there that we do not know about. It will be a long, hard fight.”

“We came prepared for a hard fight.”

“Permission granted, and a request.”

“Yes?”

“Will you give us access to your communications protocols so we may monitor your efforts in realtime. We’d like to learn how the enemy fights for a time when we are required to fight them under the water as well, whether it be on this planet or another.”

“I can set up a relayed feed without linking you into our grid. It will provide you with a viewable datastream, but one that you won’t be able to interact with. We keep our comm systems’ intricacies a closely guarded secret.”

“I did not mean to pry. We only wish to watch and learn. Please do so in whatever manner you can that is not intrusive.”

“I’ll have it set up before we make planetfall.”

“Thank you, and good hunting.”

“Likewise,” Riona said as the brief conversation came to an end. She’d heard they weren’t overly theatrical, and this one seemed to be entirely down to business…which is something she could respect.

Using the mental control interface she sent the order to the bridge crew to set up the data transfer as well as picking their first landing spot and ordering the ships to begin heading down to low orbit and start unloading. The jumpships were not going to try to go in-atmosphere, even though it was technically possible, but rather get right on the border and drop the anti-grav equipped aquatics craft off there.

While she had some time to spare she zoomed in their surveillance equipment on the ground battles and took a look at what the Preema were up against. The land was full of lizard colonies, all of which had been stripped of their anti-orbital batteries from above. They had large craters where they had been, but the rest of the cityscape had been untouched and Riona knew why. The Preema ships had a variety of weapons at their disposal, but the largest one was a plasma orb the size of a football field that was generated within their U-shaped hulls.

That plasma was highly energized matter, the same way Star Force rifles were, and required physical material to generate the plasma in addition to the energy from a reactor or capacitor. That meant ammo limitations whenever you had something that big in play, though the plasma weapons were a lot more economical than rail guns. Preema plasma was extremely advanced and dense, but it was still just ionized gas. They were putting it to good use though, and looked to have probably dropped their warships down into the atmosphere and pummeled the batteries up close from a few miles above.

Staying put and vaporizing the city bit by bit would undoubtedly bleed them dry, and she didn’t think they wanted to do that and probably didn’t have enough supplies enroute to feed that kind of a campaign. If the lizards saw you systemically tearing a city apart they’d probably run and hide and you’d have to come down on foot and kill them up close anyway, so why waste the ammo?

Though by ‘foot’ she meant wing, for the Preema were avian and she could see swarms of them over a few sites. The resolution wasn’t great from their altitude and angle, plus some cloud cover obscuring straight visuals, but they were operating not in tight formation, but a widespread grouping that suggested non-lizard swarm tactics…more of a strong-man formation. They had armor that could take a pounding, she’d heard, so she was as interested in seeing them fight as they were to see the Star Force aquatics in action…though this wasn’t the first joint mission to date, but it was the largest.

It was also Riona’s first in conjunction with the Preema and on this side of the boundary line between the Voku and Star Force claimed ‘harvest’ zones, for the mage often thought of all the lizard systems like a forest on the map that they had to clearcut. Every other mission she’d gone on had been on the Star Force side, with this campaign having brought her clear across lizard territory to the far edge where the pushback was occurring. The Preema had jumped ahead a bit to get to this planet, given its significance, but there was definitely a huge sea of lizard systems between her and friendly territory, meaning her resupply options were nil.

Riona had to make do with what she had, and she’d brought along a lot of equipment and troops for that reason. When the jumpships hit the lowest comfortable orbit they could, they began releasing the aquatics battleships, destroyers, and frigates to coast down on their own to the water, or in the battleships’ case fly around the planet at will, for they were actually designed for the air as opposed to the water craft that could limp around on their anti-gravs that gave them propulsion underwater.

The smaller Star Force vessels were carried down in bunches inside larger transports that disengaged from the jumpships and ferried them, aquatics mechs and troops, and prefab modules that would be used to construct Star Force firebases, supply depots, and even a repair yard once they got them situated. This was going to be a multi-year campaign unless the lizards had really scrimped on their aquatics footprint, and Riona knew she was going to have to take her time and put down some temporary roots in order to hunt these bastards down properly.

In the meantime she was going to stay in orbit and observe both the underwater and ground battles, learning how the Preema fought and seeing how many surprises the lizards had in store for both of them. They were definitely going to lose this planet and system, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t take a few of the invaders with them and knowing the lizards as Star Force did, Riona knew to be constantly on guard for an innovative attempt at doing so.

She hoped the Preema wouldn’t get overconfident and be caught off guard just as her ship orbited around far enough to get sensors on the back side of the planet…where the crashed remains of one of their Alpha-class warships was visible at the base of a still present smoke plume.

“Damn,” she whispered, guessing it was from the efforts to take out the anti-orbital guns. “So much for our invincible ally.”

Riona took another look at her drone placements, which had disconnected from the warships to cover the cargo ships during offloading and once back up into holding orbit. They were where they were supposed to be, and she made a mental note not to trust the Preema for their security at any time, merely to count them as a luxury backup. She didn’t know the circumstances of the loss of that Alpha, but the lizards had managed to take one down in the face of what should have been an overwhelming assault fleet.

Paul has said the Preema might be newbs as far as their isolation saw them doing more watching beyond their borders than fighting, and she had a gut feeling he was right. But newbs or not, they were getting the job done and now with her here she might be able to spot a few ambushes before they went down. If not she’d keep her own people protected and see what happened to the Preema, for it was still unclear just how ‘close’ this alliance was to be.

Paul plopped down in the chair at his quarters’ comm terminal in Atlantis after another 29 hour training stint. He was due for a badly needed shower, then some food and downtime before heading to bed for 13 hours before getting up and repeating his 45 hour day. It was by far the heaviest workload he’d ever tried, but that’s what the advanced training group looked like now for all of the veterans. Paul spent more time here than most of the trailblazers, cycling to and from it between missions to the front or master builder duties within the ADZ.

He could feel the stress on him from the past 8 months that he’d been holding this insane cycle, for the workouts he was doing were not skill-oriented, for the most part, but effort-based in order to push his body’s power generation capabilities to new heights across the board. He was hanging in there well, having already gotten past the worst of it, he thought, and was now settled into the grind.

Right now he was delaying the shower in favor of checking for map updates…and finding one had come in through the relay grid. He downloaded it to his personal map and brought up the hologram of the war zones, seeing tiny colored dots representing star systems and a few with pulsing ‘update’ highlights. Wanting to know how things were going out there at all times, especially with regards to Cal-com and what the Voku and Preema were doing, he searched through and made himself aware of all the changes, most of which were small when compared to the overall battlefront.

But Paul was a details man for a reason, and his moniker of ‘The Admiral’ had stuck to this day partly for that reason. Star Force was engaging on a level of warfare that no one could have imaged back when the organization had been in its infancy, and with each upgrade they went through Paul and the others had to basically write the book on how to do these unprecedented things…and managing an interstellar war across thousands of star systems was more than a 1-trick pony for sure.

Though his time was best served in the advanced training group for the moment, he didn’t want to be out of the loop and made sure to keep himself in it with these constant checks, that way he wouldn’t have to waste hours going through new information if he only delved into the updates every week, or month.

It took him about half an hour to get through them all, but as he did so he began to feel a tingle of a headache. That wasn’t uncommon, for his body complained in any number of ways when going through training this intense, but this headache was a little bit different. It was an internal pressure that stuck around until he was in the shower, then it altered into something else, still light and in the background of his mind, with him not truly paying attention to it until he was about to hit the drying sequence and stopped with his hand midair.

He focused internally and caught a ‘whiff’ of something familiar, as far as his internal senses went. He held still under the falling water until he identified it, then with a raised eyebrow he sat down on the shower floor in a naked meditative pose as his internal mental structure altered and he pulled forth the faint trickle of an ascension that had somehow been lingering in the background of his senses.

That was new, for every time an Archon had an ascension it was loud and obvious, so he didn’t know what he was getting into here but it was an opportunity that he wasn’t going to pass up. Reaching out with his mind he telekinetically grabbed the biomonitor from the shelf outside and flew it through a crack in the shower top that he made, then resealed the panel and let the falling water continue as he attached it to his head and ventured into the unknown, not sure what this ascension was or where it would lead, but he’d be damned if he let it fade into the background again.

iTunes: "Headstrong"

www.aerkijyr.com

Cascade

1

November 19, 2888

Solar System

Earth

Paul sat there as the water fell, barely holding onto the ascension prompt that seemed to want to disappear again. It was so faint that he was surprised to have even noticed it, as well as curious as to what was actually going on. As the minutes passed and the sensation slowly grew under his prodding he felt he began to understand it, or at least had a theory. Other ascensions were pretty much automatic, hit the trigger and it’d send you into the conversion mode that, if handled ‘properly,’ would make small adjustments in increments that would eventually allow the final transformation and flash growth of new tissue in a controlled manner.

Paul and the others weren’t going for controlled, for they didn’t want to risk losing the ascension and not getting it back again since they didn’t know for sure what was causing it. That’s where the discomfort came from…rushing the preliminary into a short amount of time. It was the more direct course, rather than being an incorrect one, but it was definitely what left one wasted after the transformation, though to be honest no one had ever done it the slow way to find out how much easier it’d be.

This one, Paul figured, was due to a progressive trigger rather than a finite one. What they’d learned so far was that the triggers responded to different things, some being a fitness level stat, some being a momentary bio status…like being really stressed. That momentary status would disappear while the fitness level stat would stay the same or improve, for Paul and the others didn’t backslide.

The fitness level stat made it easy to share an ability using the twin link, for the person who had it didn’t have to do anything but get their partner to mimic their status and then their trigger would activate. For the status though the one with the ability had to recreate the stress or whatever it was that flipped their trigger, then link to the other person to make their trigger read the wrong bio data. That was very difficult to do, but Paul and the others had learned how to summon up a fake memory of the occurrence or what they needed to do in training in order to get their bodies/minds into the correct state.

Paul had the suspicion that this one, whatever it was, was a status ascension that he was just nibbling on the edge of. It might even be the case that his momentary alignment had now passed but since the ascension process had already started it was hanging around without any real power…hence the lack of internal fireworks. If that was the case then he’d stumbled onto it, probably very briefly, during his day of workouts, though which one was the question.

But it didn’t matter now, getting the new ability did, and so long as he had a sniff of an ascension to latch onto he was going to make this work…but at the same time he didn’t want to go after it too fast, knowing that the longer he dragged this out the more data his biomonitor would register. Paul already had all the known psionics, that they had triggers mapped out for anyway, so even if this one was something someone else had already achieved then they still needed more data. Him having Sav necessarily lengthened the process a bit, but he needed to drag his feet as much as he could without losing the ascension.

Both priorities were counterproductive, but Paul was having to work hard to hang onto it at all, so his near failure was accomplishing the stall tactic and he didn’t push any harder than he needed to in order to gain ground, with the instability steadily rising. The further it did the less chance he had of losing it, but his mind became more and more clouded with the mental storm and no one here to help him through it. He thought about calling for help but nixed the idea immediately. He could do this, as he’d done many times before, and he wasn’t about to back down from a challenge.

So what would have been a 20 min shower stretched on into an hour, then two hours, then a third hour and six more minutes before he got to four flashing red lights. At that point he was so exhausted he didn’t dare try and stretch it out further else he’d risk losing it altogether, so he committed himself to go fully into it and push past what seemed to be a very defiant limit…only to realize that he hadn’t been holding back much at all.

That sent a shock through his clouded mind, along with the fear that he might peg out and lose his energy and fall off the crescendo he was surfing. Doubling down he summoned up a surge of anger at the thought of losing this and the emotion steadied his effort. He gritted his teeth, suspecting he was in for a hell of a transformation if the resistance was this bad, and pushed the mental storm into the channels necessary to peak it out, having to apply so much pressure for so long he began to wonder if his trigger might be broken.

Minutes passed on as he was teetering on what he felt was the brim of the now very full cup…and wondering if he hadn’t delayed too long, for his fatigue was making his control jittery and he wasn’t sure how much strength he had left to channel the instability…then in a split second the pressure was gone, the storm’s strength shifted, and his entire body convulsed, knocking his head against the shower wall multiple times as tissue was flash grown through every part of his body.

Paul knew he had to ride it out, so he didn’t try to stand or do anything other than stay put and let it happen. He was only partially aware of his flopping around at the base of the shower, for inside him he was on fire and regretting the decision to push this ascension…for it was far worse than anything he’d experienced before, easily surpassing the bioshield upgrade which had a full body transformation similar to this.

He didn’t know how many seconds it lasted, or perhaps minutes, but somewhere in the torment the prescribed upgrade was met and the worse of the pain subsided, leaving him hurting but with a clearing head as he slumped to the wet floor and just held still, his head leaning against the clear sidewall as he took stock of his situation.

His entire body was numb and seeming to pulse with heat, and the ascension storm was still swirling in his mind, but with each second it passed it diminished by a chunk, with him knowing it would soon be gone and the aftermath of the transformation would remain…which in this case was going to be a very bad case of being fragged. He knew moving would make it worse so he stayed still and just let himself hurt before he tried…

“Paul?” a voice said along with a triple knock on the outside of his shower tube to get his attention, for he wasn’t moving. “Are you ok?” Rio asked.

No, he answer telepathically, which hurt enough on its own. He figured the movement of speaking would be even more traumatic.

“What happened? I heard you screaming from over a mile away.”

Ascension.

“You got another one?” the trailblazer asked, his eyebrows raising.

This one is full body, and the worst yet. Don’t try to move me, please.

“Don’t worry,” Rio said with a smirk, guessing at how much pain his peer was in. “I can improvise.”

The trailblazer raised his right index finger and concentrated, pooling the heat within it for a long moment before jabbing it into the clear material of the shower tube and melting through it. He slowly pulled his finger through a rough square, cutting out a section and tossing the piece aside as water droplets spilled out onto him and the floor, but he didn’t care. He let his finger cool off and reached his other hand through to grab the nearest part of Paul’s body, which was his ankle, and hacked his way into his nervous system and got his first look at the score.

What he saw/felt blew him away. Paul was totally wrecked, and in so much residual pain he was glad he had left him where he was. With an effort he numbed up his friend as much as he could, blocking the pain from getting to him and giving him an artificial soothingness to wrap his mind around.

Thank you…very…much.

“You are so fragged. I don’t think this is Ubven. It was really bad for me, but nothing like this.”

I tried to stretch it out to get more data. That should have made it easier. I don’t know what happened…unless this was easier.

“They said post-Sav ascensions were nastier…whoa, dude. You’ve got tissue growths all over your body.”

What kind?

“I don’t want to guess and be wrong.”

Just tell me. I can’t sense anything right now.

“Have a look through me then,” Rio said rather than making a pronouncement. He sent his mental image of his hacking into Paul’s body back to Paul, which made for a very weird mental echo, but it allowed him to see the new growths without all the mental disturbance that was clouding him out right now.

Damn, Paul said, knowing those type of growths intimately well. He laughed once, then immediately regretted it as the bodily pain shot through the number Rio had him under.

“Buddy, I think we need to use the regenerator on this one. I don’t think you even realize how tore up you are.”

Do it, Paul said without hesitation.

Rio looked around, knowing he couldn’t let go of Paul in his current state. He saw through the walls using his Pefbar into the other rooms of the quarters and even all the way out to the door that he’d broken through to get to Paul when he didn’t respond to telepathy, and blast it all, he didn’t have a portable comm device laying around. There was a terminal he could use, but it was in the next room and out of reach.

Reaching out with his Ikrid, he searched the surrounding minds in Atlantis out to the edge of his range, finding several Archons that could help him. Rather than explaining to them what was happening, he requested an Ensek link be established, with them using their own psionics as relay transmitters for him. None of the six he mentally contacted complained nor asked for an explanation, simply trusting in him and using their ability to relay his telepathy out to others beyond his range.

He found more and extended his chain across the city to a specific building, and as luck would have it, Davis was sitting in his office when the Ensek relay reached him.

I’m here, the Director responded using his limited telepathy, which then got amplified and sent across the city person to person.

It’s Rio. I’m in Paul’s quarters and I need you to send a V’kit’no’sat regenerator here immediately. He’s had a bad ascension and I can’t risk budging him. I’m numbing him up best I can, but that means I can’t leave either.

Is he dying?

No, he just wishes he was.

Stay there, I’ll get it to you as soon as possible, he responded, feeling the link disappear a moment later.

Davis brought up an order prompt and send a text message to the medical division, explaining the urgency and linking them Paul’s quarters’ location once he looked it up, then he headed there himself, hoping for Paul’s sake the regenerator arrived before he did.

The Kich’a’kat leads withdrew from Paul’s body after only a few seconds of being fully deployed, and with them went the insane pain and clouded mind, leaving Paul sitting at the bottom of his shower, naked, and four people standing outside it.

The trailblazer got to his feet slowly, still feeling wobbly as if all the connections in his brain weren’t fully functioning yet, and leaned against the sidewall for a moment.

“Want some help out?” Rio asked.

“No, I’ve got it,” Paul said, pushing aside the top panel and climbing out. He walked down the short staircase and grabbed a towel, rubbing his blue hair dry then slipping it around his waist before sitting down on the steps. “I’m not hurting anymore, but I am totally exhausted.”

“What happened?” Davis asked as a medtech and Aaron looked on and Rio leaned against the nearby wall, his eyes also on Paul.

“It’s strange, it didn’t jump me this time. It was in the background and I had to draw it out. I took my time and hopefully got a lot of bio data, but when it hit I was overwhelmed. I can’t believe Morgan went through that.”

“Meaning what?” Davis asked.

“We’re pretty sure it’s Jumat,” Rio explained as he glanced at the medtech. “Care to confirm that?”

“I don’t have a scanner with me, but if you’ll come down to the medbay I can tell you exactly what you got.”

Paul raised an arm up level to the ground and concentrated, trying to summon up some goosebumps and succeeding with ease. He tried to force them off his hand but they didn’t cooperate, flying off his arm randomly in all directions…and leaving him even more fatigued than before, which was saying a lot, given that he started out this whole mess at the end of a day of workouts.

The air from the invisible energy washed across the four men present, but only the Archons noticed the little push of air, leaving the medtech oblivious.

“Well that settles that,” Aaron concluded. “I wonder if your advancement made it worse. Morgan was so young when it happened to her…”

“Maybe Sav,” Rio added.

“Morgan walked out of that gravity trap,” Paul reminded them. “I don’t know if I could even have stood or not, but the pain was bad enough that I didn’t want to try. I’m not dissing her in this, but there’s no way she went through all that and made it out. There has to be something different.”

“Maybe hers processed more gradually during the duration of the enhanced gravity,” Davis suggested. “Though we still don’t know what the actual trigger is.”

Paul shook his head, glad that the movement didn’t ring his bell again. “I took my time…a long time, and still got fragged. Still first try, but I dragged it out to get more data.”

“How old are you?” Aaron asked.

Paul looked up at him, knowing full well that he knew how old he was, but that wasn’t the point. “Too young,” he answered.

“How many others have Jumat?” Davis asked, knowing the Archons had gone over the psionics records more times than he had, but he still remembered it was very few.

“98 thousand, give or take,” Paul answered. “The youngest of which was 29,000 when he got it.”

“We knew Morgan’s was a mistake…a fortuitous mistake,” Davis added, “but I’m guessing this is not. How do your skills match up with the others? I know there’s data on some of them in the pyramid.”

“The age numbers don’t match the skills,” Aaron answered. “They’re all over the place.”

“But,” Rio said, getting to the point, “even the weakest of them could kick Paul’s ass.”

“It could be a cascade,” the medtech said, almost apologizing with his glance when he realized he was interrupting an exclusive conversation.

“Meaning?” Paul asked.

“I’m not involved in the research, but I have heard suggestions that your psionics tissues have to be rearranged slightly when new growths come in. The more tissues you have, the more alignment is required…”

“Hence a cascade in alteration changes,” Paul said, pounding his right fist into the step, “that the V’kit’no’sat never had to worry about since they didn’t have all the psionics.”

“Now the reports I’ve been reading are making sense,” Davis added, thinking things through quickly and making the connections. “A lot of mage’s reports indicate that they’re taking their padawans through the ascension process in stages to lessen the fragging effect. The more psionics we add to the pool the harder the transition is going to be.”

“And we’ve got Sav,” Rio added.

“So the next time one of us ascends,” Aaron finished, “we either have to face this or let the ascension process partially run its course and cancel it, hoping to start over again the next time it pops up.”

“Except we don’t know that there will be a next time,” Paul argued.

“You also didn’t have any help,” Rio reminded him.

“I don’t think that had an effect on the fragging, but maybe on my fatigue. I need some ambrosia doses sooner rather than later. If I move around too much I feel like I’m going to keel over.”

Davis glanced at the medtech and he politely hurried off to fetch the required foodstuffs, but he hesitated before he got out the quarters door and came back into Paul’s large shower room. “How many doses are you taking?”

“213.”

The medtech did a double-take. “Per day?”

“Yah,” Aaron answered for him.

“That’s enough to kill a normal person.”

“Kill or render comatose?” Davis asked curiously.

“Still a debate on that. Fortunately no one has been stupid enough to overdose far enough to find out. Do you just want me to measure it off in liquid?” he asked Paul.

“I don’t care, I just need it in me. Between the ascension and the regenerator, I think I’m actually totally empty.”

“That’s not fun,” Rio commented.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” the medtech said, disappearing for keeps this time as Davis walked over and sat down next to Paul on the carpeted steps.

“Do you think this is intentional or an unforeseen complication?”

“The dragons are too good at what they do. Even if they didn’t expect any Zen’zat to attain this many psionics, they would have made contingency plans just in case. Us breeding was unexpected because it wasn’t allowed and contrary to the program design. Getting psionics is the point of advancement.”

“Another little test for us to pass?” Aaron wondered.

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“We’ve got to tell the padawans to take it slow,” Rio insisted. “Ubven really worked me over, and we can’t expect them to be as strong as us. Especially when we’re giving them psionics that were designed for a much fitter person.”

“Agreed,” Aaron echoed.

“Which brings us back to Morgan,” Davis deferred.

“It was her first ascension…actually, she got it even before all of tier 1.”

“There’s your answer,” Aaron pointed out. “No cascade effect…just her nearly getting crushed to death.”

“About that…got to be more involved than ‘moving around.’ I get his gist, but not the physical applications of it.”

“Perhaps a more intricate addition process,” Davis offered.

“I’d guess something like that,” Paul agreed.

“Once you get some ambrosia in you, feel like taking a nap on a med table?”

“Might as well figure this out sooner rather than later,” he agreed, slowly getting to his feet. “If I fall feel free to catch me.”

“Where you going?” Davis asked.

“To trade my towel in for some clothes. Morgan pulls off the nude patient thing better than I do.”

2

“Here,” Vortison said, pointing to the hologram that was situated beside the med table that Paul was now sleeping on. Curious as he was as to what was happening to him medically, his need for rest had called for a crash nap while the medical scanners did their work, arrayed over him like a giant arch.

“Here what?” Rio asked, looking on with Aaron and Davis at the small point somewhere inside Paul’s head that had been enlarged.

“Tissue displacement. And here,” the chief geneticist said, pointing to the base of Paul’s holographic neck, “bone restructuring.”

“Why bone?” Davis asked.

“Curious, isn’t it? The nodules that make up the Jumat emitters are located in all tissues, even the heart muscle. I’d guess this is due to transmission angles, but in the case of his skeleton the flash growth actually damaged the bone, for I can see the work the regenerator did creating new tissue,” he said, zooming in even further and highlighting a specific region around a tiny sphere.

“The flash growth actually broke his bones?” Rio asked.

“On a very small scale, yes. That’s correct. I think your insistence on pushing the ascensions immediately didn’t allow for a necessary conversion. In fact I can show you,” he said, bringing up a second hologram to Rio’s right that had Paul’s biomonitor data. The level of detail was far less, but it showed the same location in his neck.

“If I can loop this…” Vortison said, bringing the full, multi-hour process into a three second compression. “And there you go.”

The three Archons looked at the very small change in the tissue, almost too small to notice if the medtech hadn’t pointing it out to them.

“The bone was prepping,” Aaron realized.

“By beginning a ‘softening’ cycle that would allow the flash growth to be absorbed, then the bone density could even out afterwards or retain the higher density like a cocoon around the emitter. I’m not sure which, but either way that softening was never allowed to fully take place, hence you had a tiny bomb go off inside and break bone, along with probably damaging the new tissue at the same time from the collision.”

“Did the regenerator fix the Jumat tissue?” Davis wondered.

“It did,” Vortison said, bringing up two more holos, one the before view of Paul post-ascension and the other more detailed one of him currently. “All is functioning correctly now, though I only have Morgan’s file to compare with. I highly suggest you don’t try any more 1-time ascensions going forward, especially with the unknowns. There is no data on them for us to speculate on.”

“Was this problem in the database file on Jumat?”

“No, it wasn’t. And not a lot is. I don’t think they wanted people understanding the full depth of the psionics, medically speaking. Most of the files are geared towards maintenance and repair, not their actual construction. Ascensions aren’t even mentioned other than a transition period, and that was in the restricted files.”

“What about his current fatigue?” Rio asked, glancing down at Paul, lying motionless with his hands folded over his abdomen in a ‘Jedi trance’ pose.

“Jumat tissue is the densest and has the highest volume of all the psionics we’ve discovered. As a result it had to suck a lot of resources out of his body just for the building blocks, not to mention the energy expenditure. Add in his workout load, which you said was already full and completed for the day, then add the drain the regenerator has by cannibalizing even more tissue to make repairs…well, let’s just say he’s been hit on all angles and needs a good nap.”

“Anybody got some whipped cream and a feather?” Aaron asked, prompting a smirk from Davis before he pointed into one of the holograms.

“How crammed is his head getting with the new tissues?”

Vortison twisted his own neck to the side, as if in redundant thought that wouldn’t quite process. “If you’d asked me earlier I would have said you’d be experienced a world of problems by now, but every upgrade has fit in seamlessly, ignoring the first bit of nonsense with the latent abilities being suppressed through successive reproduction cycles. It’s all fitting in there, but there was a lot of reorganization going on this time, simply due to the size of his emitter particles…which are larger than Morgan’s, by the way. I don’t know why.”

“Did hers grow with time?” Rio wondered.

“In volume, no. Density yes, and number yes. It seems you add a few more as needed in response to training, but not in any localized area. The distribution pattern is like clockwork, and hers have increased by…” he paused, checking another file for the number, “18% since her first scan. Density has increased by 208% on the originals, less so on the newer growths due to them beginning at a higher…damn, that may be your answer right there.”

“Paul is more advanced,” Aaron said, catching on. “So maybe the dragons built in a curve to match power output to your fitness level.”

“No,” Rio differed. “Not unless volume is a variable. Have any of Morgan’s doubled up in the same location?”

“Never,” Vortison said firmly. “There is a wide distribution pattern.”

“How much bigger are Paul’s,” Davis asked.

“17%, each and every one,” the medtech testified. “The precision is machinelike.”

“Individual variation?” Rio floated.

“Possible,” Vortison allowed.

“Morgan is not going to like to hear that,” Aaron said, with Rio nodding. “Damn, what would this look like on a Zen’zat?”

“Given their larger size? No, it has no effect. Other psionics may grow larger under the stimulation, but I’m positive Jumat particles will not. They act almost like implants, rather than a functioning part of an entire system. Leaches, if you will, that suck ambrosia and other nutrients out of the system while remaining isolated from it. Same way with the bioshield emitters. They’re not part of your cognitive processes like the other tissues are, even if some of them are positioned within your skull. They’re ‘hardware,’ linked to software but independent of it.”

“Do you think we got enough data to locate the trigger?” Davis asked.

“Too early to say. The fact that we’ve got several hours’ worth is promising, but I don’t want to promise anything.”

“How soon will you know?”

“Maybe tomorrow…maybe 50 years from now. We have a stack of data to sort through looking for a needle. If it’s in there we’ll find it, but I can’t quote you a number, even if I have my own suspicions…none of which I feel like sharing, because they’re a total gut instinct that will probably prove wrong.”

“So insecure,” Aaron commented, shaking his head slightly.

Vortison frowned, then cringed as he decided to violate his own order. “I think Paul got enough, but each trigger is different so we won’t know until we actually find it…if we find it.”

“If you do,” Davis said, his voice imbuing importance, “then we will have a significant advantage against the V’kit’no’sat…assuming they hold to protocol.”

“You already do with Sav,” Vortison pointed out.

Rio shook his head. “No, Davis is right. Jumat isn’t a technique, it’s a literal biological cannon. If we all get this, par for the course, we’ll be able to take down other Zen’zat far more powerful than us…even some of the larger races. Jumat is pretty much the holy grail for the Zen’zat, and only a rare few have ever achieved it.”

“I know the numbers,” Vortison reminded him.

“But you haven’t seen it in action. Haven’t felt it hit you. Morgan has a huge advantage over the rest of us, and she’s learned to use it so well that no one could touch her until I got Ubven.”

“Unless she made a mistake,” Aaron added.

“She doesn’t make many. This is going to be very important if you can find the trigger.”

“And give the V’kit’no’sat even more reason to hunt down and eradicate us.”

Davis pointed a finger at the trailblazer. “Word.”

Aaron frowned at him. “Word?”

“It’s old school.”

“I know what it means, just didn’t expect you to use it.”

“My vocabulary altered going through basic, then some more in the sanctums afterwards.”

Rio glanced at Aaron. “We’re rubbing off on him.”

“It’s pithy, so therefore useful,” Davis clarified. “We know the V’kit’no’sat will want us dead. If we get Jumat we’ll be better able to defend ourselves, but it’ll enrage them even further.”

“How do you know that?” Vortison asked.

Davis hesitated to answer, trying to find the right words. “It’s an Archon/Zen’zat thing.”

“It means we’re getting to use the cool toys they’re banned from,” Aaron translated.

“Ah, now that makes a weird sort of sense,” Vortison said, returning to his data examination and dismissing all but the active hologram.

“How strong is he? Concussive wise?” Rio asked.

“Difficult to say, but he shouldn’t have any coordination. That will come with training, as you well know. I would guess he can produce a great deal more force than Morgan could initially, but nothing compared to her levels now.”

“The new emitters Morgan has got…gradual or flash growth?” Aaron asked, getting back to another point.

“She’s never mentioned any painful transitions, so I’m assuming gradual. The flash growth seems to only manifest during ascensions or under the stimulation of a regenerator. Something we still haven’t fully cracked, and it’s not a tech issue, I’m afraid. We’re not supplying the necessary genetic command codes. The ones the V’kit’no’sat use are so complicated even I don’t fully understand what I’m reading when I’m reviewing them…and like most things, they didn’t bother to leave an instruction manual in the database.”

“Does bioshield add more emitters?”

“Yes.”

“Volume increase?”

“No. They actually seem to be patterned the same way, or rather from the same source design material. The Jumat is larger, but they’re pretty much the same type of psionic tissue. Density increases along with number of particles equates to upgraded strength.”

“He was also the first to get bioshield,” Davis pointed out. “Any chance that’s a coincidence?”

“Discounting Morgan as an anomaly,” Aaron clarified.

“Actually it’s going to be one of the first avenues I pursue looking for the trigger,” Vortison said. “I’m hoping it’s not a coincidence and there is a correlation between the two.”

Rio gestured towards Paul. “How soon is he going to be back into training shape?”

“It’ll take more than a day for his body to digest the necessary foodstuffs to replace the redundant tissue that was cannibalized. Knowing him he’ll probably be back at it in 12 hours or so. I’d recommend taking it longer than that, but new psionics are like candy to you guys and you can’t help but pursuing them with equal fervor.”

“Change that to ‘donuts’ and you’d be about right,” Aaron said deadpan.

“Alright then,” Rio said, taking a step back and spinning around heading for the door. “If you find any more interesting stuff send me a report. I’m heading back to my own training. I’ll get with Paul later for…calibration issues.”

Vortison frowned at the retreating Archon. “Meaning what?”

“Nothing you have to worry about,” he said, walking out the door.

Synthia-462991 walked down a hallway of the advanced training group’s private sanctum within Atlantis, having located Paul’s mental signature in one of the many mediation chambers ahead and needing to find him. Her master was in an intense training session at the moment and couldn’t be disturbed so she’d been sent to relay the message to Paul personally, but she didn’t expect to see Paul naked until she turned left and walked into the mediation chamber to find him standing in the center and his clothes and shoes piled up on the edge of the circular room.

“Oh…I’m sorry,” she said, glancing down at the floor for a moment out of reflex before looking back at him again as he turned around to face her. “I didn’t think you’d be undressed.”

“If it mattered I would have closed the door. Am I in your way?”

“Way?” she said, looking him up and down twice approvingly.

“Do you need this chamber? I didn’t check the schedule, just grabbed an open one since this wing looked deserted.”

“No, no…I was just sent to find you. Rio is stuck in an endurance challenge but he wanted to grab you before you got busy too. He didn’t expect you’d be back in training after only 5 hours.”

“I had a really good crash nap,” Paul said, running his fingers through his short, blue hair. “And you can stop being awkward and just enjoy the view while you’ve got it.”

Synthia almost blushed. “That obvious?”

“Well, I do try to stay in shape…”

“I noticed,” she said, smiling widely. “Rio said it’s important, so he sent me to find you.”

“Important enough to bother me, but not stop his own workout?” Paul said, raising an eyebrow.

“Sorry. When I felt you in here I didn’t think I’d actually be disturbing you…do you always mediate naked? And where can I buy tickets?”

Paul laughed. “No. I’m not meditating, just needed some privacy to work on my new ability. The clothes really get in the way, hence they had to go.”

“If you wanted privacy you could have closed the door.”

“I’m displacing a lot of air, and connecting to the hallway makes it less turbulent. I didn’t know any hot padawans would be walking by.”

“Hot? Are you flirting with me?”

“A little.”

“Why…other than just messing with my head?”

“Returning the compliment in your eyes. I can get dressed if it’d make things easier on you?”

“I’ll manage, thanks.”

“Is there more to the message or did you just want to play cheer leader?”

“Can I?”

Paul smirked. “What is it that Rio wants?”

“He said something about wanting to get to your memories while they were fresh. Wouldn’t get into it when I asked anything further.”

“How long until he’s finished with his challenge?”

“A little less than 3 hours to go.”

“I’ll meet him when he’s done then.”

Synthia nodded, then walked over and leaned against the wall, still staring at Paul. “Don’t let me hold you up. What exactly are you doing anyway? I know it’s Jumat related, but…”

“Trying to get a feel for the damn triggering sensation,” Paul said, with a bit of frustration in his voice. “It feels like goosebumps, and I’m only able to do it about a third of the time I try. Once it starts I’m also having trouble sustaining it…and when I can it blows off me almost immediately. I have almost no control at all and ripped my shirt earlier, so I ditched the clothes. Until I can at least confine it to my arms and legs I’m better off naked.”

“Makes sense,” Synthia agreed. “Is it really invisible?”

“Save for a slight distortion, yes. Hold on…let me try again,” the titan said, closing his eyes and trying to make himself get goosebumps. It wasn’t something that he knew how to do, so he just tried to imagine himself in places of cold or excitement previously that had rendered the skin pucker. He had to run through four different memories before he got one to catch and a tingle manifested itself at the base of his neck.

He tried to latch onto it, which was like grabbing for a wet bar of soap under water, and managed to increase the volume a bit before it traveled down his back and mushroomed out into the air behind him.

Synthia laughed, covering her mouth with her hand before she said anything.

Paul frowned, then closed his eyes again. “You saw the distortion?”

“Yeah,” she said, giggling.

“No, it didn’t come off my butt,” he clarified. “Started in my neck and went down my back before releasing.”

“Took you a while.”

“It’s getting harder and harder to get goosebumps. My bag of tricks is wearing thin, but I’m not that close to finding a way to manually do it yet. This may sound odd, but it’s like getting a third arm that you’ve never used before that’s twitching around all over the place whenever you send a mental signal to it and…yeah, ok, bad metaphor. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Kind of like the bioshield?”

“Somewhat, but that’s a direct activation. This energy has to be generated, then released. Two step process that makes it a whole lot more trickier.”

“Are you ticklish?”

“Um…not sure, actually.”

“May I?” she asked, raising her eyebrows in an unsure gesture.

“Is this training related or are you flirting back?”

“Both,” she said honestly.

“That’s the best kind. Go ahead.”

The padawan walked over to him and stepped behind where he couldn’t see. “Don’t use your Pefbar. A blind reaction should be better.”

“Ok,” he said a moment before he felt her run her finger down his spine slowly.

The next thing Synthia knew the air in front of her face suddenly blossomed and kicked her hair back. “Worked?”

“Guess I am ticklish,” Paul admitted.

“Being naked is probably part of it. I’m guessing here, but as far as I know most Archons might get naked without flinching, but we are hardly ever touched when we are.”

“Good point,” Paul admitted.

“And since we don’t usually get laid, you should be really ticklish right now,” she said, running her finger across the left side of his waist and seeing/feeling another distortion manifest from his skin.

“Am I to take this to mean you’re wanting to help with my training?”

“Whatever keeps me here and you naked.”

Paul reached out telekinetically and hit the door controls, lowering a very wide door down and closing off the hallway from view.

“Alright then, I’ll indulge you in the name of more goosebumps. I figure I’ll numb up to your touch eventually, but do what you can now and hopefully I’ll hop the learning curve before that happens.”

“Why’d you shut the door?”

“Just in case someone else walks by.”

“Think they’d get the wrong idea?”

“No, but your touch is having a secondary effect and I’m a little bit shy regarding volume increases in public.”

Synthia couldn’t help but laugh, not at him but the idea that she could do that to him with just a finger brush on his back. “But you’re ok with me seeing it?”

“You’re standing behind me.”

“I have Pefbar,” she reminded him.

“Just shut up and poke,” he said, trying to keep from peeking himself to know when and where she was going to tickle him, for that would lessen the effect. “But don’t mention this to your master.”

“Embarrassed?”

“Just don’t want to make him jealous.”

“I will admit…he’s not as hot as you,” she said, stroking his neck with two fingertips this time and giving Paul easy access to another wave of goosebumps.

“That’s working fine,” he said, trying to focus the slippery energy inside his body and redirect it even a nudge before it automatically released. “You don’t have to add innuendo.”

“Waste not, want not,” she said, touching his waist and running her finger laterally across the small of his back.

3

Paul was waiting outside the training chamber in the sanctum when Rio walked out, drenched in sweat but not looking overly fatigued. The trailblazer pointed in the direction of the equipment room and Paul walked with him, getting the feeling that there was something he wanted to discuss in private. There weren’t many other Archons in the sanctum, but he sensed something was up so he went along quietly until they got into the equipment room and Rio still wouldn’t say anything.

What? he asked telepathically, almost shouting it as the other titan began to pull a set of fresh clothes from a rack on the wall.

Rio didn’t say anything, but he did stop picking out clothes and turned around to look at him.

Paul crossed his arms over his chest and stared back, wondering what the hell he was up to, and decided to wait him out. After a few minutes he got a battlemeld prompt from Rio and accepted it, then a series of images/thoughts flashed into his mind.

Rio immediately pointed a finger at him when he felt a twitch in his fellow Archon. “So you do recognize them?”

“I don’t know…what are you showing me?”

“You tell me.”

“I just said I…”

Rio raised his eyebrows, waiting for a response.

“Those aren’t sensory. Where did you get them?”

“A dream. A repetitive dream that is very illusive. You’ve had it too, otherwise you wouldn’t have reacted that way.”

“What way?”

“That flinch of recognition.”

“Dude, I really don’t know what this stuff is. I can’t remember ever seeing it before, and I don’t typically recall dreams so…”

“Well I do,” Rio said, dropping the battlemeld link. “I always have. Maybe not for long, but a few minutes after waking up they stick around…this one, however, is very elusive. What I just shared with you is fragments I’ve pieced together, and is probably half crap. It’s familiar to your subconscious mind, I sensed it in you, even if you can’t remember. That’s why I didn’t say anything coming over here. I wanted a raw response.”

“What is it you just showed me. For some reason I can’t picture it again.”

Rio shook his head in dismay. “Son of a bitch, they’re at it again.”

“They?”

“V’kit’no’sat, dragons…whoever wrote this part of the psionics. I’ve been having these dreams ever since Ubven, and I think I might have been having them even before that and the ascension just kicked them up a little higher into my consciousness. I’m wildly guessing here, Paul, but I think they might have started with Sav.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Show me again.”

“This is pretty much fiction I’ve compiled, like notes, because I can’t pull up the actual images when I’m awake,” he said, reestablishing the battlemeld and sending Paul a series of flashes of…

“The architecture looks V’kit’no’sat.”

“Yeah it does. I don’t know if that’s legit or my mind is just filling in the blanks with what I know, but that’s not the point. The glowy thing is.”

“Why do I see a whip and hat?”

“Again, filler from my memories. Focus on the context.”

“This is so muddled that…”

“You reacted to something in there. Try to find it,” Rio insisted.

Paul sighed and tried to go passive, feeling what he was ‘seeing’ and trying to get a sense of it. “Run it through a few times more quickly.”

Rio did as asked, but Paul couldn’t come up with anything definitive.

“I got nothing.”

“Focus on what’s missing.”

“Meaning?”

“Compare a moment ago when you didn’t know it was coming. Like a scary movie that you jump out of your seat at.”

“For the record, I’ve never done that.”

“Quit fighting me on this, it’s important,” Rio underscored. “Before your memory fades, compare the now to the then and see if anything is missing. A scary movie you don’t react to still has the memory of when you should be jumpy and don’t until you’ve seen it a lot of times.”

“Run it again,” Paul said, taking Rio at his word and trying to focus. It took seven more play-throughs of the collage of images and flashes of emotion before he finally spotted a tiny discrepancy.

“I don’t know if this is my imagination or not, but there feels like a dead spot.”

“Where?”

“Run it through slowly and I’ll stop you.”

Rio did as asked then Paul mentally pinged him when he hit the spot. It was an image of a forest landscape viewed from just above the treetops.

“This it?” Rio said, focusing and pausing that bit of the sequence.

“Yes, but I don’t know why.”

“Every time I run this through my head I think it degrades even more,” Rio admitted. “I get the dream again and if I can hang onto a piece of it it realigns. Sharing it with you might be causing the degradation to snowball.”

“So what now?”

“Now I try and focus on that bit the next time I have the dream.”

“You mean when you wake up for those first few minutes?”

“That’s my note taking time, but I think I’m still active in the dream. Just a hunch, because I’ve got nothing to back it up with.”

“So you think this is psionic related?”

“I thought I was being stupid earlier but couldn’t let it go. Now I know I’m not because you’ve seen the same thing whether you remember it now or not.”

“Why did you say Sav?”

Rio cringed.

“Just spit it out already.”

“This is so without merit that I’m afraid I’m going to bias you going forward.”

“Bias me then. I want to know what you’re thinking.”

Rio held up his left hand and extended two fingers out in a ‘V’ then pointed them up to his eyes in the old school hand signal for ‘keep your eyes open.’ It took a moment for Paul to realize that wasn’t what he was doing, rather, he was just pointing at his eyes…

His twinkling grey eyes.

“There’s no mention in the database for the color change,” Rio reminded him. “And if I’m guessing right, the dream started when I got them.”

“Tier 3,” Paul echoed, his mind racing with the possible implications…which were numerous considering they had so little data to rule anything out with. “To what end?”

“I don’t know, but I doubt it’s there without a reason.”

Paul glared at him. “And this was the first you thought about mentioning it to us?”

“Do you mention every whiff of thought that passes through your head? The only thing I have to go on is corroboration from you. Beyond that it’s just a daydream.”

“Oh no, you’re not getting away with that, buddy. You’ve been suspecting this a while, confirmation or no. You should have said something.”

“There are only four of us that have a pair of Tier 3s, and you’re the only addition since me. Your ascension is fresh, so I thought I’d try out this stupid theory and probably get made fun of for it…which is also why I wasn’t going to tell you if you didn’t respond to the images I sent you.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Just because we make fun of you doesn’t mean we don’t care,” he said with a touch of sarcasm.

“Have you ever tried to put meaning to your dreams?”

“Not when I’m awake, no. I figure they’re just incoherent nonsense that’s the result of thinking with only a piece of your brain active.”

“Well, I’ve always thought there was a little bit more to that and I wanted to explore those stupid notions in private.”

Paul held up a hand. “Alright, alright. You win. I have side projects that I’m working on and haven’t told you guys about, and won’t, unless they pan out, so I can see what you mean.”

Rio frowned. “What kind of side projects?”

“The kind that keep Clan Saber ahead of you morons. Don’t change the subject.”

The titan pointed an accusing finger at him. “Sharing is caring…especially when it involves new toys.”

“Like I said, I don’t share until I have something worth sharing…which basically means I’m arguing against myself as of two minutes ago. Fine, you kept these dreams to yourself but now we know a bit more. Where do you want to go from here?”

“I got more conscious access to the dreams after my second Tier 3. We need to confer with Jason and Morgan.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“I sense another stupid idea you’re holding back.”

Rio frowned. “The dreams are random. I can’t predict when they will happen, but it seems to be, on average, every 9 days or so. The stupid idea would be you trying to peek on my dreams and consciously see what I can’t.”

Paul sighed. “Yeah that is stupid…but it makes sense.”

“Except that we can’t realistically do that.”

“Oh can’t we?”

“You can’t lose hours staying awake watching me in the hopes of catching something.”

“Me, no. I’m in too heavy of training and I’ve got this brand new psionic to work out…but we can always recruit a few dozen other Archons to take shifts with you at night holding your hand.”

Rio cringed at the thought of having someone in his room and head while he tried to relax and rest. He wondered why that was, because he could sleep in the middle of a crowded, noisy room if he wanted to. His quarters, however, had become something of a sanctuary. A place he’d trained himself to let his guard down so he could more fully heal. If he was going to be watched he’d need to do it elsewhere so he didn’t break the habit.

“They can be hot chicks, right?”

“Is there an Archon girl that’s not hot?”

Rio considered that, rifling through his memories. “You’ve got a point there.”

“I’m sure you’ll get a fair amount of volunteers. Have each take a 1 or 2-hour shift and see if they come up with anything.”

“Why didn’t I think of doing that before?”

“Because it’s stupid,” Paul explained pithily. “But sometimes stupid works.”

“Do your conversations with Jason go like this?”

“No, ours are more intelligent. I only pick up the stupid vibe around you and a few others.”

Rio nodded. “Thought so. Thanks for the suggestion,” he said, brushing past Paul and heading for one of the shower booths. “I’ll comm you the results.”

“No problem,” Paul said, heading for the door and back to his quarters to do a little database digging before he dove back into his training regimen that had already been disrupted by the past day’s events. Something about what Rio told him felt…significant, and he really wished he’d mentioned it sooner so Paul and the others could have been on the look for it in their own sleep sessions.

Ielia-521993 pulled up a chair next to Rio’s bed in an empty set of generic quarters as he layed down, head hitting the pillow and wondering which posture he should choose, which she could guess by his awkwardness.

“Toss and turn all you want,” the striker said agreeably, “I’ll adjust to you. If you’re stiff, odds are you won’t enter dream state, so try and relax.”

“Thank you,” Rio said, rolling over on his right side as she slid her chair closer and put a hand gently on his neck. “If you see anything weird bouncing around my head I’m pleading ignorant.”

“I’m just a passive observer unless we hit pay dirt. Don’t want you kicking me out of the Clan for snooping around inside your head, now do I?”

“Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about that.”

“I’m here for the mission,” she said quickly. “I’ll stick to it, curiosity or not. Trust me or you’ll never get to sleep.”

“I can trust once…but not twice.”

“You won’t need twice. Me and the others have already discussed this. No prying, pranks, or anything other than business. If there’s a V’kit’no’sat secret buried in your dreams we want you to find it so you can pass it on to us down the road.”

“Kiss goodnight?”

Ielia leaned forward and gave him a peck on the side of his head. “Goodnight. Dream of superpowers.”

“Would if I could,” Rio said, closing his eyes. “But I’m afraid this is going to be totally random. Go ahead and knock me out, then let me surf on my own.”

“Alright,” Ielia said, using her touch to bypass the Ikrid blocks and Rio’s own defenses, which he had lowered, and to force him into unconsciousness. He went down into a sleep state without a fight, then she released her influence and just became the passive observer. When she let go he didn’t push his way back to consciousness, meaning that he really had trusted her and was now in a fairly deep sleep that was sliding even further. She didn’t know when the dreams would start, so she kept a link to the tiny piece of his conscious mind that was functioning, watching the blank ‘movie screen’ for about 20 minutes until bits and pieces of random stuff started popping up…all of which was skewed due to the lack of full brain power being applied.

Ielia had never looked at someone’s dreams before, and these looked like an artistic attempt at a stylistic cartoon that didn’t care for physics. Rio’s dreams held that semblance for a while until they crystalized a bit when Mario and Luigi got into a pie flinging fight with the Three Stooges…who had telekinesis and bioshields.

Halfway during that fight, which was in far more detail than the rest of his dreams, Ielia’s relief quietly snuck into the quarters through the unlocked door. The mage had a brief telepathic conversation with her so as not to wake Rio, then she lightly grabbed his wrist and they both watched another minute of the odd fight before Ielia let go of his neck and the mental feed shut off. She snuck out of the room ninja quiet and got halfway down the hallway before she busted out laughing, no longer needing to hold it in.

She’d always wondered what went through a trailblazer’s mind, and had suspected there might be all kinds of high end intellectual thought all the way down to primal, lustful fantasies…but honestly that pie fight was way better, and fit their reputation to a ‘T.’ The image of Luigi slinging a trio of pies at Curly and the bald guy blocking them all with a raised hand and a bioshield before uttering a ‘whoop, whoop, whoop’ taunt was too much for her to handle and had Ielia giggling for the next ten minutes.

She’d be back two days later to take another shift, one that had her coming in when Rio was already asleep. After that she’d drop in for one or two a week for the next two months before one of the ‘watchers’ hit what they thought was pay dirt.

4

January 30, 2889

Solar System

Earth

“Define block?” Paul said, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned against a wall in the hallway as one of the watchers explained to him and Rio about the anomaly.

“It’s pretty self-explanatory,” Paula-610445 said, a bit miffed. “I was monitoring his dreams just like I have every other night I’ve pulled a shift, then a piece of his mind disconnected from my vision. I didn’t lose my connection. I was still in his head and could monitor his body and most aspects of his mind, but wherever his bit of consciousness transitioned I was not allowed. It lasted through to the next shift for about five minutes then he came out of it and into a dreamless state. I stayed the entire time until he reverted back to normal. There was nothing external triggering it, or releasing him from it. I was simply blocked from seeing whatever he was thinking or dreaming at the time.”

“Well that was a gigantic waste of time,” Rio said, blowing out a frustrated breath.

“Yes and no,” Paul differed. “We’ve found a camouflage tarp. That means there’s something underneath meant to be hidden. Something important.”

“Well I can’t get at it,” Paula said apologetically. “Maybe someone stronger would have better luck.”

“I don’t doubt your skills, and I think if even Aaron had been the one observing he would have been blocked out as well. No, there’s something significant about these dreams that the designers don’t want anyone else to know about. Did you pull anything new this time?”

“No,” Rio said regretfully. “But I do know it was the same dream and I’ve got a little bit better retention of the details. They’ll probably fade like normal, but right now I don’t recognize anything new.”

“Show me.”

Rio took a moment then sent Paul a copy of his recollection. It was about the same as last time, but bits were missing that were there before, along with new pieces having been added. On the whole it was the same, but the fine details had shifted slightly, probably with Rio’s memory slurry having been degraded with repetitive ‘looks’ as he tried to analyze it. Paul sent him a battlemeld prompt and when he accepted they compared mental notes, allowing Rio to reconstruct a bit more using Paul’s perspective on what he’d shown him previously as a baseline.

The image of the sky over the forest, the supposed important part, added four dots that hadn’t been there before.

“I’ve seen those stars before,” Paul said, not being able to remember when, but knowing in his gut that they were familiar.

“Why do you call them stars?”

“I don’t…no, not stars. Suns. One is white…I don’t remember the others.”

“A centralized quad system,” Rio added, with the images seeming to pop back into memory…though for some reason he couldn’t make out the colors either.

“Not too many of those.”

“Map,” Rio said, glancing at Paula belatedly.

“I’m thinking I’m out of the loop now, aren’t I?” she asked.

“You’re welcome to tag along,” Paul offered.

The striker held up a hand. “No no. You guys run along to whatever it is you’re doing. Are we don’t with the night sessions or do you want us to keep looking.”

“Other than counting how many I have there’s no point. So no, we’re done. Thank you.”

“Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

“You gave us something useful,” Paul added. “But it looks like something we’re going to have to work from the inside out.”

Paula threw both trailblazers a two fingered salute as she spun on her heels, then silently walked off.

Rio looked at Paul.

“Before training,” he said, with both of them heading to find a secure terminal.

Kara sat in the command chair on the Clan Ghostblade Ma’kri-class warship as the ship’s captain and crew handled the rundown of the lizard jumpship, confident that they could do the task without her input after all these years of experience. It had already been snared by a slew of namies, now they were in the process of picking apart key systems with precision weapons strikes before it had a chance to flee like the rest of the convoy. The two jumpships that had been carrying cruisers never even bothered to deploy them in self-defense, jumping out along with the other 14 large vessels and abandoning the snared one to the Star Force ship, knowing that they didn’t have a chance of fighting it out and winning.

Back in the day they would have always gone after two lizard ships simultaneously, so that they could capture both then shunt the lizard crews over to one and send them on their way while keeping the other ship as their prize. But today, and in previous years, Kara had gotten in the habit of being a bit more bold on some smaller raids, and her catching the convoy in this system had been more luck than planning, so she was going to raid this ship in traditional pirate fashion, with the first task being to disarm the limited defensive weapons it had, including shield generators.

After that came comm systems and anything else shallow to the hull that could be smashed, but she left the ship’s gravity drives untouched. They were currently dampened by the namies, which had gone through considerable upgrades over the years, and were now sticking to the shields like ticks and emitting their IDF fields to neutralize the drives. When the shields went down they dropped down to the hull and likewise held the giant ship in place while the Ma’kri went about redecorating the hull as it liked.

When all preparations were underway and the system scans were reading clear, for the rest of the convoy had already jumped out of the system onto the next leg of its journey, she called in her own ships that were out on the system’s periphery and waited for the small flotilla to arrive before she stepped out of the hangar bay and flew over to the lizard ship ahead of the boarding craft to follow.

Once inside it was standard neutralization, stunning everything in sight either through weapons or psionics. The Ghostblade commandos that followed helped to do the same as techs came with them and began looting the ship of cargo that Kara wanted. While the Clan leader and the warriors played tag with the ship’s crew, the army of ant-like workers scurried around the massive cargo holds scouting out what was available and carrying back what they wanted to their dropships, making many round trips through the process.

Eventually Kara got half the ship napping before her ships’ holds were filled, for she hadn’t brought the necessary vessels to clear out everything, let alone to take the ship as a prize, so once the pirates were done they retreated to their dropships and left, with Kara being the last man out and flying over to the Ma’kri superman style as the dropships returned to their industry ships.

Kara had 97 of the vessels in this neutral system as a staging point to bring resources to from other raids. A jumpships full of cargo would find the fleet, slowly feed over the resources and receive back the finished products, whether it be machine parts, clothing, or ammunition, with none of the industry ships having the spare space to hold finished goods. They were all compact units designed for the task of creation, not storage, thus all the booty that Kara collected had to be stored on other ships waiting nearby.

Since she didn’t have any of those here now and had only hopped over to the star to jump the lizard convoy as it had the misfortune of coming through her secret rendezvous spot, what little cargo space they did have was filled to the brim now and would be replaced with the goods as the raw materials that they’d stolen were transformed into them.

Fortunately the industry ships had their own fleet of dropships and staff of personnel ranging from techs to accountants to warriors. Each ship was a mini-city of its own, small in size but when connected to the rest of the varied fleet became the Ghostblade civilization in a Battlestar Galactica sort of way. Some of the industry ships were ore processors, others were shipyards and bioharvest, while the ones that were eating the finished materials they’d stolen from the lizards were fabrication models. Each was staffed with specialized crew as well as some redundant facilities so people wouldn’t have to be hopping from one ship to another on a daily commute.

That said, ship to ship transfer via dropship was common, even in a fleet as small as this one. Kara currently had thousands of the industry ships under her command, scattered around lizard territory in a few select spots that kept changing as per her orders. If the lizards ever saw a pattern and went looking for them they’d be too late, for systems like this were only a temporary holding point. The Ghostblade ‘territory’ was actually these ships, rather than any geographic location.

They’d also been doing a bit of mining of their own in the system, for now that they had a decent sized fleet they weren’t relying only piracy to fuel it. Kara still wanted to grab as many lizard resources and ships as she could, and even had a few special industry ships designed for the exclusive purpose of stripping down captured vessels for recycling. None of those ‘chop shop’ ships were here though, for this was just an outreach group. The much larger fleets were roaming on the edge of Star Force borders where they could stay somewhat linked into current events.

Updates would flow out to the other fleets as available via courier ships, so it wasn’t until 4 months after Paul sent his initial message to her did Kara finally receive it two days after the raid when a Ghostblade jumpship arrived bringing with it a load of raw ore and database updates to pass along.

When Kara checked her messages she found not one, but two from Paul, with the first being his inquiry into Rio’s dreams. He said he also thought he had them but couldn’t remember even the slightest detail without prodding. The second message explained further how the dreams themselves were protected from external viewing and wanted to know if she knew anything about this.

Kara waited a long moment, hoping some insight would pop up in response to these revelations, but none did. She mentally sorted through everything she had learned over the years from the knowledge implants the Zak’de’ron had given her, but there was nothing relating to dreams that she had ever discovered and nothing new was popping up now. She waited until the next outgoing ship was available before she composed a reply, hoping something would change but it didn’t. Kara had no knowledge of this, nor could she ever remember having the dream, even though she had been given Sav and Rio suspected that was when this had all begun.

“I’m sorry, Paul, but I’ve got nothing. I’ve racked my brain trying to find even the slightest reference but nada. I can’t help you with this, and I doubt something is buried inside my head if it didn’t come out now. Always a possibility, but would be a break from form. I’m guessing the dragons didn’t feel like giving me a cheat sheet on this one. I’ll try to be on the lookout in my own dreams, but as far as I know I rarely have any, so I’m not too hopeful there.”

“Wish I could be more help. Keep me in the loop as often as you can. Maybe something more you learn will trigger a memory down the road. As for the system you described, I checked through the map myself and didn’t come up with anything either. 239 matching candidates and nothing about them stood out to me. I don’t know what else to do on this one other than to wait and cross my fingers, as useless as that sounds. Hope you and Rio have better luck.”

Paul watched the hologram shrug then Kara’s image disappeared. He kicked the wall under his terminal in frustration. She’d been their best hope of getting some answers, but whatever this was it seemed they were on their own. He’d had no luck with his own dreams, unable to remember ever having them other than weird corroborations when Rio showed him something. Morgan and Jason likewise couldn’t recall anything, though they hadn’t met up with them in person to get the telepathic images that Rio had given Paul. Maybe when that eventually happened down the road they’d recognize something, but for right now it was all on Rio and Paul…and all he could do was act as a calibrating rod and try to help Rio sort out what he learned and maintain the memory of it better.

“Well that’s a great way to start of the day,” he said as he spun up out of his chair and headed for the door, workout gear already on as he headed for the sanctum and his morning run of 10 miles. He completed it in the standard 42 minutes then headed over to another chamber to meet up with Rio and give him the good news.

When he opened the door he walked through a short airlock, letting the first door close before the second would open, then he was in the ‘danger room’ with a lot of small, orb-like objects flying around. Paul stayed on the edge and out of the engagement zone, but he could see Rio knocking several of them into the walls with telekinetic blows and knew to keep his eyes open in case one came his way.

“Need something?” Rio yelled without stopping his engagement with the hundreds of little stun bots that were desperately trying to make physical contact with him.

Got a message from Kara, Paul telepathically replied. She has absolutely no idea what we’re talking about. Not even a twitch of recollection.

Rio rolled to the side to avoid a dive of two of the little bots before telekinetically throwing them behind him, then he evaded a few more while he built up additional power in his Ubven nodules. When he peaked it out he batted a few more aside to give him space enough to detonate, then with a flinch of physical effort that Paul could see released the pent of Lachka energy.

It expanded out into a huge volume that swallowed up all the bots, invisible to the naked eye but visible to Paul if he’d bothered to use his Rentar ability. He didn’t, merely holding position against the wall as all the bots froze mid air, locked into a super dense telekinetic field that lingered on even after Rio released the effort. It’d remain there for several seconds, depending on the size of the field and the density that he’d created, but while everything solid and liquid was physically locked in place as if the room had suddenly filled up with invisible sand, Rio casually strolled through it, immune to his own effect due to a passive emission from his Ubven tissue.

Had Paul wanted to walk out to him he would have ran into a solid wall around the edges, but able to push his way in slowly if he used his Rental to ‘melt’ away the Lachka field. Rio’s immunity worked far better, with his stride barely showing any hindrance at all. When he got to the edge he reached out telekinetically to hit the switch on the wall ending the simulation a split second after the Ubven field fizzled and the orbs started to move about very slowly, gaining speed with every tenth of a second until they broke free into normal movement.

But by then the signal had already been sent out and they no longer angled towards Rio, rather flying up and towards wall niches that opened to allow them access to their docking berths.

“So what do we do now?” he asked, arms spread wide in a gesture of exasperation.

“I guess we do it the hard way,” Paul answered, not liking it either. “If this is a test, then we’re going to have to pass it as designed…and be ‘we’ I mean ‘you’ for the most part. Kara couldn’t remember the dreams either, and I’m guessing that no one with a single Tier 3 will be able to. Either Ubven is different or it’s just a quirk of being you that you’re able to pull enough to be aware of it.”

“I hate to say this…”

“…but what if we need all 8 Tier 3s?” Paul finished for him.

“It would explain why no Zen’zat ever had to deal with this, and maybe why Kara has no memory. Something so exclusive that they didn’t expect us to achieve it.”

“He did give her the Vorch’nas before he knew we could cheat our way into new abilities.”

“Share,” Rio corrected him. “At least one of us has to earn them.”

“True, and maybe this is the same deal.”

“Tier 4?” Rio floated.

Paul bit his lip. “Kara knows about Tier 4, but not these dreams.”

“She knows about Tier 3 too, but not our eyes,” Rio said, pointing at his own twinkling grey orbs.

“I really want it to be a gateway into Tier 4 too, but I wouldn’t put any credits on that.”

“Actually, if it’s not Tier 4 it’s gotta be something else that big if multiple Tier 3s are a prerequisite.”

“That thought alone is enough for me to keep a dream journal.”

Rio raised an eyebrow. “You’re keeping a dream journal?”

“Yeah. I keep a datapad beside my bed and write down whatever I can remember when I wake up before it fully fades.”

“Worth a try.”

“It’s still blank,” Paul said flatly.

5

March 13, 2890

Deering System (Core Region)

Gray (Clan Aquaman Capitol)

Lens-087 dove off the pier headfirst into the warm ocean that covered only a small fraction of the planet’s surface, but every liter of it belonged to Clan Aquaman while the land, save for a mile deep around the shore, belonged to Mainline Star Force and six other Clans. He’d built several narrow cities on the perimeter of the Tear Drop to function as intermediaries between his Clan and the rest of the planet, but most of his infrastructure and population was situated beneath the waves.

He hadn’t built any surface water cities, with everything sitting on the seafloor or dug in beneath it. At the center of the Tear Drop was a 19 mile deep hole, at the base of which sat a basin that held one of his largest and most secure cities. In the past Star Force couldn’t have built anything that deep, but their technology had progressed to the point where it wasn’t an issue now, though at those depths no free swimming was possible, not even for the scattering of Elarioni in his Clan.

Those few he’d been able to recruit due to Clan Aquaman still maintaining a narrow hold on aquatic dominance within Star Force, but most of the superior aquatics race that had chosen to join a Clan were now part of Clan Alterra. Erin had beat him to the punch and, as a result of recruiting Ariel to her Clan, had pulled all the best and brightest Elarioni to her save for a few. They’d helped her Clan jump their aquatics division up to rank #2, surpassing Kyler’s Clan Cloud only 9 years ago and creeping their way toward the Aquamen.

Len’s Clan was superior all around if you took the Elarioni out of the equation, despite the advancements they’d helped the Alterra make in terms of technology and tactics, but now that there were no rules regarding the makeup of a Clan the Elarioni were now counted in the scoring and were giving Erin’s civilization a huge boost…one that Lens was desperately trying to stay ahead of. Some of the Elarioni recognized his methodology was superior and wanted to help him out, hence they’d thrown in with his Clan, almost out of pity for how much the other Elarioni had shifted the balance of power within the ‘JV teams.’ The independent Elarioni civilization still held a considerable advantage, though no actual competitions were held to determine exactly how dominate they would be.

He privately thought Clan Alterra could best them now, but sadly Aquaman could not. Hand to hand in the water the Elarioni were just too damn agile. Equipment-wise was another story, and even with millennia of fine tuning, what the Elarioni had was not necessarily better than what Star Force was using now, thanks to the sharing Ariel and others had done, giving Star Force the benefit of their experience.

There were still some technological secrets that the Elarioni held on to, but for the most part everything they knew Star Force now knew, and Lens and the other aquatics leaders weren’t squeezing them for details. They were a private race in some regards, though they also wanted to exert influence with the other water dwelling races that Star Force had relations with, so there was a dichotomy in their social structure that inevitably led to a lot of sharing…including Star Force secrets flowing back to them from the Elarioni that served in the Mainline and now the Clans.

Lens didn’t think there were any thefts of material or schematics occurring, but what one individual learned they could always share with others. It was their personal knowledge and Star Force didn’t try to clamp down on such things, though there were sensitive items, like comm systems, that the individuals involved with knew not to share. A single leak there could lead to disaster, but as far as how to build better aquatics craft or engineer training drills was knowledge that was best shared within the Star Force community that included empire members and associates.

Though there were also a number of known links to less than friendly races who coopted former Star Force personnel for a price. Again, there was no theft going on there, just organizations and nations looking for a quick way to jump the learning curve by recruiting talent. It was a form of competition that Lens could appreciate, for he and Erin were doing the exact same thing by bringing in Elarioni, and he was still kicking himself for letting her get to Ariel first.

But that was behind him now and the landscape was set. Clan Aquaman would pull people from every race available to gain an advantage, and as of now he had some 19 different aquatics races and 4 non-aquatics under his command, all of which were working together to up their power ranking and further develop their little pocket civilization within Star Force. They had bits of territory on six other planets that had water and 4 that didn’t, with those 4 all being in Sol, but this Ocean was entirely theirs and where Lens was putting most of his resources into building a stronghold that even the V’kit’no’sat would have a tough time conquering.

19 miles of water made for a decent shield against orbital bombardment, though he knew some weapons would even be able to get through that, but the extra defense always made sense to him, which was why he put his largest city at the deepest point in the Tear Drop. Other infrastructure was spread out through the middle depths and the shallows, with one more recent addition being within half a mile of the shore but unconnected via subsurface tunnels.

That was a security issue, requiring one to swim to get to the location. Lens often chose to go the direct route rather than finding a ship to hop a ride on, with him wearing nothing but a wetsuit and breath mask today, preferring to feel the water on his skin rather than be insulated from it in a suit of armor.

As he dove beneath the surface he passed by schools of fish and other sea creatures, none large enough to try and eat him, but there were a few races in the depths that could. They normally avoided the shallows and anywhere there was infrastructure, but to be on the safe side there were barrier nets surrounding the shallows cities. The energy barriers allowed the water to flow through but not solids unless you had an access code. That allowed ships to pass through but the dangerous wildlife, none sufficiently advanced to actually talk to, were kept out and the miles of ‘safe’ territory had been screened thoroughly to make sure none had been missed.

That said, free water swimming was frowned upon outside the safe zones while not being technically banned. He trusted his people to know the difference as to when was a good time to go and not, but as for him he wasn’t concerned had this been deep water. His psionics allowed him to detect and deter even the largest of the aquatic predators if need be. It was the low level and non-Archons that were at risk, including the Elarioni, for some of the wildlife could match them in speed, which was quite alarming.

Some had questioned the wisdom of setting up in an unfriendly ocean, but Star Force had done it back on Earth originally and Lens wasn’t too concerned here. Yes, there were other bodies of water without predators or even wildlife at all, but this was the one that had become available to them via trade and he’d taken it, challenges and all, and his Clan was flourishing as a result…save for the competition from Clan Alterra.

Knowing that he wasn’t going to beat them at their own game concerning Elarioni recruitment he’d been searching for other angles and had finally found one…or rather created one, in a crazy co-op with the Dvapp to help them and Clan Alterra develop a new kind of aquatics technology. That was insane, given that the Dvapp didn’t live underwater, but his stupidity was beginning to show merit as a recently developed, and quiet, research facility had been built along the shore in the shallows and had Lens working there most days of the week.

Today was no exception, so as he swam by a few schools of tiny fish he dolphin-kicked his way down to an entrance and passed through a waterlock into the interior that was air-filled. Most Clan Alterra facilities were now water-filled, given the number of Elarioni, but Clan Aquaman was about 60/40 air to water. A lot of his aquatics races were also capable of air breathing, so he didn’t have issues with needing a lot of water-only structures. That said, his air-breathing ones often had submerged compartments or tunnels, with swimming from one location to another being as common as walking.

That had been deliberate to encourage casual swimming to further their skills through use rather than exclusively workouts…but Humans were still groundpounders and needed to live in that environment, as did the Dvapp who were working in this facility with him.

There were 329 of them here, and while they could move about under water it was a new experience for them. They didn’t breathe via lungs, but rather ‘soaked’ oxygen in through their crystalline bodies. They didn’t need much, and could get enough from the water if the concentration levels were high enough, but their swimming skills were still in their infancy and right now he needed them comfortable and focusing on their tech rather than struggling to get around in water-filled infrastructure.

So when Lens passed through the waterlock he entered a facility that was air-only save for the hangar bays where their prototypes were berthed and the lap pool where he was trying to teach some of them to swim, though with their amorphous bodies they had virtually an infinite number of propulsion possibilities. The Dvapp were intrigued with the idea of developing their own aquatics division and had agreed to help Lens advance his in exchange for them sharing the results of their research.

Lens pulled off his breath mask and retracted it into a small pouch behind his neck on the collar of his wetsuit, then walked with bare feet down the hallways as most of the staff did while the Dvapp moved around either in bipedal form or as long snakes wriggling to and fro. One of them coming down the hallway Lens was in stopped about ten meters in front of him and squished together into a thick puddle of what looked like white crystal mush, then it rose up from the center and resolved into a stocky biped with two arms, two legs, a stubby head and no facial features whatsoever.

“We have good news,” it said in English, though the pronunciation was coming from body vibrations rather than vocal chords. It gave it an echoing sound, but the words were spot on. The Dvapp, like most races in the ADZ, had incorporated English into their cultures, given that it was the trade language that all others used. The old one had receded in prominence, though it and many others were still used in various sectors, but the Star Force language is what bound everyone in the ADZ and expansion regions together, with the Dvapp realizing that they needed to learn and master it in order to facilitate their interconnection with the overall community, though that was still limited to very restricted activities, for they preferred their privacy in most cases.

“Tell me it’s the form shift?” Lens almost pleaded with ‘him,’ though technically Dvapp didn’t have a gender.

“It is,” Ga’rel confirmed, vibrating his body in a ripple that sounded like metallic clinking and was a sign of excitement for them. “An adjustment made last night compensated for the tension issues. The new crystal slurry is maintaining rigidity throughout under level 18 pressure.”

Lens pulled a slow, silent fist pump, knowing how significant that sentence was. This issue had been plaguing their research for the past 11 months and been holding back a whole line of experiments that could now begin. “Well done.”

“We knew we would solve the riddle eventually. Your formula is new to us, and its impressiveness will not deter our applying applications as we familiarize ourselves with it.”

“We just took yours and upgraded it.”

“You altered it in a way we had never considered. Now that we are becoming accustomed to it, I anticipate several more breakthroughs in the coming years.”

“I’m hoping,” Lens agreed. “Is the dart ready for its run?”

“It is as of 15 minutes ago.”

“I’m headed out then. Carry on.”

The Dvapp leaned forward and fell onto the floor, melting back into a snake and moving on down the hallway and around a corner. A lot of them chose bipedal form as a form of courtesy when talking with bipedals, but it seemed a lot of them preferred to move about as snakes. When he’d asked them about that earlier they said it was just a personal preference, but about two thirds of those assigned to this research mission were inclined to do the worm rather than walk.

Lens passed a few more as he navigated his way through one chamber to another enroute to one of seven hangars. It was the one meant for external use rather than construction, and in it were several of the sea-worthy prototypes, including the Dart-class speed craft that he’d helped design to replace the traditional streak that Star Force was still using.

Right now it didn’t look very speedy, for it sat bobbing in a cubical berth with an energy net set across the open side that connected to the communal pool, on the far side of which was a tunnel that led to a much larger waterlock, though this one had shield pass-through capability rather than double doors so traffic wouldn’t back up. It had doors as well, and right now they were closed, for very few missions were active right now. Most of their research was still in the developmental stage.

The dart was their most capable design, and the smallest, with it sitting in the pocket of water with an exposed seat on top. It was designed for a biped, which the Dvapp could accommodate to and therefore useable by both Star Force and their race down the road, and Lens hopped into the water beside the craft and swam a couple of meters to get to it, then climbed up the side using a series of handholds that were basically depressing into the rock solid goo. The artificial gravity drive had already been powered up, so the ball-like glob didn’t spin to the side when he climbed. Rather it compensated for his weight and only wobbled a few inches as he leveraged his way up on top and sat down in the bathtub-like depression.

The cockpit was made of traditional materials, as far as Star Force was concerned, with the bulk of the craft being the amorphous crystalline formula that the Dvapp had mastered over the course of their development and which Lens and a team of Star Force techs had upgraded, crudely, far beyond what the Dvapp had ever considered. Most of that upgrade had to do with compatibility with the water, though there were some higher level sciences involved taken from knowledge in the V’kit’no’sat database and transferred to the Dvapp tech, for which there was no matching counterpart in the records.

There were many shape-shifting technologies, but more like what the Voku used. The crystalline slurry was something the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t seen much of, and nothing on the level that the Dvapp used, so Len’s techs didn’t have the luxury of just copying and pasting the data…they had to figure this one out for themselves.

What they’d come up with they’d given over to the Dvapp, who were the real miracle workers here. The crude formula Lens gave them had been refined considerably given their experience with the technology, enough to form the bulk of the dart that he was now sitting in. When he hit a button on his control board, the depressions in the outer hull that he’d used to climb up with melted and disappeared. Simultaneously material from the bulk sitting below him in the water rose up around him, eventually climbing over his head with the wide tendrils touching and meshing together, completely sealing him inside a bubble that kept both water, air, and light out.

Internal illumination took over, with the crystalline structure actually glowing blow, though his control board was already lit up enough for him to see by. He remotely deactivated the energy gate and trolled the now covered blob out into the wide communal pool, getting several meters of distance away from the side walls before he triggered the transformation.

When he did his cockpit bulge sank lowered, partially submerging as the white crystalline material stretched out into a thick, but pointy needle giving it the ‘dart’ moniker. The thickest point was in the rear, where the solid cockpit now sat with a bit of material behind him that tapered down into a much shorter point for streamlining purposes.

Lens grabbed the steering wheel/joystick and moved the dart forward, turning to the right with the straight needle-shape of the craft bending to facilitate the turn. Even though he was moving at creeping speeds the agility of that bend was one of the glaring reasons why this tech was better than the rigid hulls that Star Force aquatics had used for centuries. Bendable tech could be fashioned, and had been in the past, but nothing like what this little baby was capable of.

His dart literally wrapped itself around the curve he ordered it to make, then it straightened out again as he headed through the short tunnel and through the protective energy fields that were keeping the seawater separate from the hangar and the wildlife outside. He kept his speeds low to avoid crushing any of them, then he went ahead and sent out a telepathic signal to cause them to move out of his way. They might not have been able to talk to him, but he could still communicate with them to a degree, which ironically allowed him to live up to the Clan name he’d chosen even before he knew psionics existed.

Trolling across the shallows ‘safe’ zone, he headed for the sea barriers beyond, where he intended to put the dart through its next round of field tests in the open water.

6

June 1, 2890

Jartul System (Calavari Region)

Daka

Mark-084 jogged across the hangar and jumped up into the open cockpit of his prototype skeet, sliding down onto the pommel and closing the canopy with a thought. The telepathic interlink allowed him to control the basic functions from range, but now that he was inside and placed his hands on the control bars that option was nullified, routing his control through his physical Ikrid. That way an outsider couldn’t telepathically override his controls and open the canopy or power down the craft in flight, as well as allowing him much greater control through a nexus-like interface.

Mark dived into it, submerging himself into an overall view of the hangar rather than looking out through the holograms that now covered the interior of his canopy. He didn’t even see them, for he was looking through the interface as he lifted the heavily armored skeet off the ground along with 9 others. They were all visually identical on the exterior, but inside they had no cockpits, save for a collapsible one in case Mark needed to fly a drone down to pick someone up, at which point the skeet would grow a bulge to carry the person or cargo.

But that was a side point. The purpose of these skeets was to fight remotely and use the internal space for additional equipment, while Mark’s skeet was the reverse. It only had limited weaponry and was far tankier than any skeet that had been developed before. Its flight characteristics were identical to the others, so it lacked nothing in agility or speed, but its purpose was to house the pilot for the squadron without visually giving away clues as to which craft he was in.

The drone skeets were also prototypes, and not in the traditional version. Mark and others had used computer programmed escorts to fight with before, but those were more like weapons that were pacing nearby that could be used to do limited fighting. They were useful in a wide variety of situations, but this new neural interface had allowed Mark to create something more. He was no longer mentally pressing buttons within a nexus, he was directly connected to his skeet as if it were an extension of his body…along with the other nine as well.

He was flying them as if they were all the same craft and his mind was suspended between them with no bias as to the one his body was actually in. In experiments he had been able to fly and fight with up to 21 before seeing a steep performance reduction, so taking out a standard squadron of 10 was well within his capabilities. Sav-enhanced he had no trouble lifting all of them up off the deck and flying them out through the open hangar door and into Daka’s thick atmosphere, but this test wasn’t so much about what he could do, as it was preparing a new generation of non-Sav pilots for what they could do…which meant he needed to refine the tech and tactics prior to bringing them into the new training program.

He had to get the bugs out, and the best way to do that was to run live missions against computer-controlled targets. Several ranges had been constructed on Daka for just this type of thing, and though they were live fire capable, he wasn’t going to be using that function. He needed the prototypes intact so he could run them through the gauntlet ad nausea without having to worry about replacing components every time he made a mistake or the course got the better of him, for he’d designed it to be challenging.

Putting pilots into aerial craft or mechs had always been an issue, because it put them in harm’s way unlike a naval pilot who flew his warship by remote, sitting inside a well-protected jumpship and able to fight his battles in a way that wasn’t concerned with the survivability of the drone. Star Force didn’t use them recklessly, but they could push combat in directions that couldn’t be achieved with living personnel. That said, aerial craft and mechs had to have pilots in them, for drones just weren’t effective enough.

Star Force had compensated by creating safeguards like the armored cocoon surrounding the cockpit that would allow a pilot to usually survive a crash, losing the craft but giving the person a chance to stay alive. Same was true of the mechs, though they always carried far more armor than aerial craft did. While drone tech had now improved to the point where Mark could sit inside a city and fly a drone skeet from within it he didn’t like relying on that option. Line of sight communication issues were always in play, limiting range, as well as the possibility of signal disruptions from countermeasures or compromised emitters.

There was a need to have a pilot in the cockpit in the middle of battle in a variety of situations and Mark believed that would always be the case, though there were some where remotely flown craft were definitely the way to go. In the cases where there needed to be a pilot the emphasis was always on reducing the risks, and this latest improvement was going to take a squadron of ten pilots and reduce them down to one, making it a bit of a shell game as to which skeet to shoot at from the enemy’s perspective.

Not only that, it would mean Star Force could deploy more aerial craft than they had pilots, much like Cora was doing with the mechs. The difference was, Mark was the only person in the skeet, whereas a mech star of drones was controlled by the backseat ride in a two-person morpheus. It was a piggyback system, but the project he was working on was based on the idea of taking a single skeet as the craft of choice for an advanced pilot and changing it into a squadron piloted in the same manner, by the same person, without any reduction in efficiency or reaction time.

That did leave a caveat, and that was that the squadron had to stay together. A few kilometers apart didn’t matter, but send one skeet off across hundreds of miles and you’d start to get microlag, which was a problem with the remote control method from cities or warships in orbit. The adjustments that Mark and other veteran pilots made were so precise that even the tiniest bit of delay could be felt when mind linked with the operating systems, and as a result would decrease their agility, even if it was just by a hair.

Mark didn’t believe in fighting handcuffed, but with the localized transmitters in the prototypes they would not only have no detectable lag but also be able to ignore most types of jamming. That technology had existed for a while, with the neural controls being what had hung the trailblazer up when he’d pursued this project before. Now that that was no longer an issue, it was game on into the next phase of aerial combat.

So as Mark flew his squadron out away from the hangar and over to the ranges he saw them and the landscape from a hive mind position. He could see and ‘feel’ everything from each of the craft, but he could also step back a bit and taken an omnipresent position…one that was critical when planning out strategy and analyzing the enemy’s movements rather than just living in the moment and trying to juke and evade the nearest enemy craft.

That was why it was important that the neural interface not overstress the pilots. Most couldn’t handle 10 craft, and it was Mark’s job to refine the neural interface enough that they could. Most Archons did not have Sav and wouldn’t in the coming years, so he had to get this project so smoothed out that they wouldn’t need it. His goal was a squadron of ten, but if he could even get his midline pilots flying 3 craft at a time it would be a success…though one with reduced firepower, for the ‘cradle’ skeet would always be underpowered due to the extra layers of protection, and in a trio that amounted to 33% of the craft being diminished, whereas in a full squadron that number was down to 10%.

But it wasn’t just about limiting the number of pilots in the air and allowing a drone or two to go down in flames to achieve an objective. It was the interplay between the skeets that most intrigued Mark. Teamwork was essential in any dogfight, and he had gotten very good at syncing his movements and attacks with others, but this new system went way beyond that, in that he didn’t have to coordinate at all. He was in control of all 10 craft, so he could use them in an unlimited number of new ways that had never been conceived of before.

The tactics had, of course, but the implementation had not, for you didn’t have time to discuss what you wanted to do over the next half second with your wingmen. Now Mark didn’t even have a tenth of a seconds delay, for he was all 10 craft and didn’t have to discuss anything with himself. Aerial combat was usually chaos with a bit of organization thrown in, but if Mark could get this project out of the prototype phase and into the field, Star Force’s half of that uncertainty would virtually evaporate and they’d be able to own the enemy in a way never seen before.

And the best way for a trailblazer, or any Archon, to modify tech or strategy was to throw them into simulated combat and let them make adjustments when failures happened, which is what Mark was going to continue to do today.

He’d already been at this several weeks, so when he lowered his squadron down to ground level and zipped them across the grassy plains he knew to keep them below 62 meters in altitude to avoid the targeting zone of the turrets ahead, as well as when to bring them up off the deck and into a crisscross pattern that left the automated guns chasing targets of his choosing as his ten skeets hopped up over terrain and back down behind it, leapfrogging across a scattered series of hills as they approached the turrets that he knew were designed to chase a single target until it was taken down, for he’d developed that program to counter the rotational strategies that Star Force preferred to keep shielded units in play.

He had to make this course hard, so he’d added in challenges that he wasn’t sure how to beat expecting to lose…as he had done on every run. So far he hadn’t even made it a third of the way through the course before the low-powered targeting beams registered enough hits on his shields to knock a skeet out of the air, which in this case was it disconnecting from Mark’s mind and flying off out of the challenge zone and to a waiting area.

The Achilles heel to this project was in his cradle ship, for if it went down the rest of the squadron would revert to normal drones operating on preprogrammed protocols or picked up by a remote controller. If he was working with other squadrons then his drones could be retasked to one of those pilots, but that still left the handful of manned skeets as the primary targets for the enemy, which was why he needed to fight with his in a way identical to the others.

To that end he had the same mauler cannons as the drones did, while they had a slew of additional weaponry. If he had them use it and his craft didn’t it would be a giveaway, but the maulers were the primary choice for most aerial combat and if he only used them there would be no obvious tell, for the short range transmissions were being emitted from every craft so no signal monitoring could pick up which craft he was actually in.

That was why he had his skeet going through the attack pattern on the turrets along with the others rather than lagging back and playing a more conservative role. He needed anonymity to protect him more than armor and a secondary shield, and he had to get used to fighting that way in these simulations now so it’d become second nature when he actually got out into the field against the lizards at a later date.

As for the basic design of the skeets, those had remained the same after all these centuries. T-shaped with spherical pods on each prong that held anti-grav units. The skeet could limp around on one if necessary, but all three were required for full maneuvering capability. The hull was thin save for a bump around the cockpit, with most of the weaponry lying in the crossbar up front with the sensors, shield emitters, and other support systems situated behind the cockpit in the tail.

Other auxiliary craft had been built for Mainline, such as the gunships and interceptors, but the skeets had remained the backbone of Star Force’s aerial division and would remain so, even with other factions deciding to use different craft. The Calavari Valeries were solid, and the other models were decent for Mark had helped in their construction, but none suited his style of combat more than the skeet. It’s narrow profile made it hard to target, and the T-shape mean there wasn’t much of a silhouette to shoot at from above or below. Overall it was simply the best design he had ever come across and Mainline and the Clans would continue using it until they found, or created, something better.

If the other factions wanted a unique craft, so be it. They weren’t going to let them build any junk, but Mark knew that combat could be achieved in a variety of approaches and if they wanted to pursue different ones then there was an advantage in that…coupled with disadvantages. Mark wanted his skeet because it was all around solid, rather than weighted in a single attack profile. Those singular attack profiles could be very effective when you got to choose your battles, but when defending and not having very many options he preferred to be piloting a craft that was nimble and could be utilized in multiple ways…which was the skeet.

Some of his fellow pilots that were working with him on this project had suggested outfitting the squadron with different ships, or even just altered models of skeets to give him some singular attack or defensive options but he wouldn’t have it. This project was complicated enough as it was, and making it even more convoluted by mixing up ship designs would put more stress on the pilot and reduce the amount of processing power he had. Mark could pull it off, but those without Sav wouldn’t be able to…at least not as well as he’d hoped. Keeping all the craft systematically identical was a way to reduce the mental load and free up some thought for other purposes.

That and he needed all the ships to look alike to hide the cradle.

Mark spun and crisscrossed his 10 skeets around the pair of turrets on the first rise, stitching them with mauler fire from all the ships and circling them around behind terrain to get the targeting programs to dismiss them and chase another skeet. There was no easy way to take down these turrets, so he just had to make it a slugging match without incurring hull damage. If he could do that he could buzz around and recharge shields before heading into the turret field ahead.

Those would require diving down into canyons to avoid, for if he pulled up out of them the crossfire would be so intense it was unlikely that he’d get all 10 ships through…and if he was really sloppy he’d lose all of them right then and there. He’d tried it on day 3 just to see how bad it’d get and hadn’t been disappointed, learning from the danger now that he knew what it was rather than having to guess, and pushed the canyon approaches with his skeets heading down multiple ones and out of sight of each other.

The transmitters were powerful enough to punch through a limited amount of rock and dirt, so he didn’t lose his linkage to the drones, but he had to keep them within a tight radius that he was also pressing out to find the fail point. This entire challenge run was more about finding ways to fail than finding a way through, for a lucky run wouldn’t do him much good.

He had to lose, over and over again, in order to build a playbook for this new type of aerial warfare, and while he certainly didn’t like losing, he had no problem thinking outside of the box and trying new approaches, no matter how odd or seemingly stupid. For when he was piloting a squadron solo he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone, and could experiment on a whim if necessary.

And that freedom was always necessary when searching out new ways to do something. Success on this course was learning, not finishing it. That would be bonus, and right now Mark seriously didn’t think there was a way through, for he’d made it overly hard and, honestly, not entirely fair, but in the back of his mind he just saw that as an even sweeter challenge.

Tell a trailblazer something couldn’t be done and half the time they’d find a way to do it anyway. He recognized that tendency within himself and the others and wasn’t above goading himself. He’d spent a long time planning out this course before putting all thought of designing it aside and switching his mindset over to beating it. Now it was just a fixed thing, immutable, with no one actively changing it up to thwart him. He’d created a monster, but it was a static monster that he was going to figure out how to beat if he could.

Meanwhile there were many betting pools in the pilot corps as to if and when he’d actually get around to pulling it off, with a little over 60% wagering on completion despite their knowing how insanely difficult the course was. They had that much faith in their top pilot to figure out this puzzle that they were willing to put credits on it, while others were hoping to clean up by betting against him, knowing that it would be a win/win scenario.

Either they’d get a boat load of credits or some valuable new tactics and equipment tweaks. Either way this was on Mark’s shoulders for now. What he was able to achieve, limited or whole in this endeavor, would set the stage for their contributions to this project to follow.

7

August 2, 2890

Solar System

Europa

Daniel-002 received the package from Lens on one of the surface landing pads that connected to the moon’s underwater cities through the thick ice sheath protecting them from space. It was a cargo crate the size of a house and had been dropped off via a cargo ship passing through the system with other ports of call to attend to. The slight detour had been negligible, but saved his fellow trailblazer the trouble of sending an entire jumpship to get him the package when sending it through the ‘mail’ was far much easier.

Time wasn’t an issue here but Daniel was glad he finally got it, for when he brought the crate down into the Clan Westley colony situated on the ocean floor he opened it to find a series of Dvapp aquatics gel packages. Daniel’s Clan was only ranked 28th in aquatics, but he’d been working with Lens for the past few decades in order to develop some new technologies in an effort to undercut Erin’s Elarioni advantage. Eventually the tech would get distributed out to Mainline and the other Clans, but for now it was a private affair that had Daniel more than eager to incorporate the advancements into his own Clan craft.

The gel had been a work in progress for a long time, but what Lens had sent him was the prototype for a new matrix that should allow Daniel to create the morphing properties he required for his Project Tentacle. Unlike Lens, who was building ‘standard’ aquatics craft, Daniel was going in a more Elarioni fashion and working on limbs rather than beams and torpedoes. He saw the potential in the gel that, while weaker than a solid plate of armor, had so many combat uses it was insane. First and foremost of those was the ability to reach out and touch someone by extending a tendril of gel out considerable distances.

The enemy wouldn’t know how far the ‘safe’ zone was and that would cause a lot of chaos in battle. Project Tentacle intended to create aquatic drones that could be controlled from a battleship or other protected location. The difference between these drones and others was the fact that these could morph into different craft as needed for the mission. They could be long and needle shaped for chasing operations or ball up into protective spheres for chokepoint defense.

The problem Daniel had had with the earlier forms of the aquatics gel was that it wasn’t responsive enough to create active drones, in that they could change shape while fighting. Those prototypes they currently had could morph then fight, rather than fighting through morphing. Lens had said this new gel slurry would be up to the task and had already sent Daniel the specs through the relay grid, but rather than building factories to produce the insanely complicated material…of which there were only two in existence…he’d sent along a lot of packets of it, each of which could be ‘grown’ by adding a specific set of raw materials.

That had been designed into them so they could repair themselves in the field without the need for a shipyard. They absorbed materials like a plant did, from both solids and the water, meaning that Daniel could take several of the packets and ‘plant’ them in larger containers in order to grow more material. None of it was biological, but a very complex crystalline technology that operated similar to how the Dvapp themselves were built. It wasn’t their body material, for that, while odd, was still biological despite its crystalline tendencies. At a casual glance the gel might look the same, but it wasn’t alive and never had been. Just a very useful piece of technology.

When Daniel opened the crate he pulled out a single packet and carried it off on a cargo sled to his research lab while the rest was spirited off to others for immediate use in experiments or for growing purposes. The packet that Daniel took, which was the size of a couch, he brought to a specific lab that he was spending a lot of time in. He personally levitated the packet up and tore a hole in the flexible casing, allowing the mushy material to spill out into a collection basin that looked like an elevated sandbox by the time he was done with it.

The trailblazer dipped a finger into the white ‘sand’ and tested the cloyingness. It flowed like a thick liquid, but didn’t snap back into level shape like water did. That confirmed his suspicions and he immediately inserted a probe into the eight inch thick pool, causing it to solidify into armor rigidity.

He poked another finger into it…or tried. It was now hard to the touch and would stand up to considerable pounding, but as far as armor was concerned it was subpar. His drones would compensate for that fact by having a lot of it on them, allowing them to bleed away material at a faster rate while still preserving the interior components. Those amounted to three floating orbs of traditional technology that would interface with and control the gel, and for experimental purposes here was accomplished by the probe.

Daniel ran the gel through a simple set of commands, confirming the upgrades Lens had made, then he dove into the task of reprogramming it to his personal needs. Part of that work had already been done previously, so all he had to do was download segments of the software, but the rest had to be configured on sight in response to additional test runs that he was now going to begin to execute.

First using one of the preprogrammed ones, Daniel had the gel change color, shifting from base white to blue, then pink, green, and finally black before cycling back to white. Next he caused the gel to segment into four pieces. As soon as they broke apart three of the pieces became dead weight, retaining their shape and not doing anything but that while the fourth segment that had the probe attached continued to morph into a cube while the others were just solidified puddles.

Daniel telekinetically pushed one over to touch the cube and it changed shape again until contact was broken, returning to statue mode. One facet of the gel was that it could only be controlled by ‘land lines,’ meaning that physical contact had to be made. Remote control was impossible without alternate technology being inserted into it, such as the probe now was. That was something that was going to remain set, for Daniel and Lens didn’t have a clue how to program a comm system into it. Maybe someday thousands of years into the future they could, but the V’kit’no’sat database was no help with this, for they didn’t have record of any similar technologies.

But for his goals there was no need to have a receiver built in. It just meant that if a piece of one of the drones got lopped off it’d go neutral and unresponsive, holding its shape until it was recovered or destroyed. The gel did have to be powered, and this batch had come fully charged, but when it lost power it was designed to lock into place as a solid rather than disperse as a gel or liquid.

There were multiple versions of the gel that Lens had developed, but the stiffer versions he was not interested in. Those were being used to form the hulls of his friend’s bendable warships, but Daniel’s drones had to go far beyond that, hence the even lower armor value. The more they morphed the less rigid their matrixes were, and the more rigid the matrixes were the higher their maximum armor value.

It was a cost of defense to include the flexibility that Daniel required, but that too was calculated. Lens wasn’t pursuing this path, nor were the Dvapp or any of the other four Clans involved in the research. The Aquamen were the leaders and handling most of the research, but what Daniel intended to make of it was something entirely new and going even beyond the bounds of what the Elarioni had built.

3 years later…

Daniel returned to Europa after a 3 month stint in the advanced training group getting beat up by Paul and Rio. It had been educational, but he was eager to get back to work on Project Tentacle, which his techs had continued in his absence with some late breakthroughs that had allowed them to fashion a working prototype at minimum volume, which was about equivalent to a big trash can.

“How do we look?” Daniel asked when he came into the lab and saw several familiar faces working at various stations.

“003 is waiting in the water, with 004 and 005 standing in their firing tubes on the destroyer.”

“Alright, set for recording mode and let’s get to this,” he said, stepping over to the control station and accessing the neural interface. It was only a minimal drain on his cognitive processes, for the miniaturized version of a command nexus didn’t have more than a few functions that the proper ones did, and at the moment he was only controlling a single drone.

It was sitting in the cold water outside the colony and not far from the destroyer on station there. Daniel set the spherical globe of gel into motion, traveling through the water at a troll then shifting into a more aerodynamic point as the trailblazer put it through several alterations as a general test of base functions they had established prior to his training vacation. When everything checked out he began running it through more advanced shapes, including the stretchable pylons that ended with fingers or hooks that could grasp objects at range.

He played with the outer limits, finding what they were by triggering a line too long and too thin for the minimal currents, snapping it a third of the way out and losing control of most of the line. Daniel withdrew the rest of it that he controlled and motored the mass over to the floating section, making physical contact again and calling it back into a thicker band that he then whipped around slowly, testing its strength against the water. He didn’t have to see the data collected as it came in, knowing that the rest of his staff was monitoring that and would alert him if there was a problem, so Daniel just played with it, testing its limits and trying to seek out problems if they were there.

After working through the lines he pulled the mass back together then spread it out into a canvas, immediately catching itself on the currents and moving about slowly in their direction. He let the material go almost totally limp and saw it scrunch up in several locations due to eddies as he caused it to get thinner and thinner in order to cover the most surface area. He had it out to nearly the size of a football field before holes began to tear in it.

He upped the solidity to keep them from spreading, but the moving water masses began cracking entire sections off. Daniel quickly pulled back what he had control of then sent out lines to hit the now drifting pieces, regaining control and bringing them back into the single mass. Next he signaled the destroyer to launch a target buoy, with it coming out of the fixed hull of the angular craft and speeding out to his location before slowing and moving on a circular path that had it tracing a lazy circle around his location.

Daniel paused, knowing this was the moment of truth, then had his ball of gel shoot off through the water in needle form towards the target, hunting it down and coming at it from the side in order to up the difficulty. Approaching from the front or behind would have been easier, but Daniel didn’t want easy.

When the drone got close to the probe the needle balled up again then sprouted three tentacles from a central mass as it continued to head straight towards the target. It eventually made contact, denting under the collision speed with a silent splat, then Daniel manually controlled all three tentacles and wrapped them around the probe, flattening them out in some places into paddles that held it tight like a cushions around an egg. The probe couldn’t escape the grip from any angle and Daniel locked it in by causing the pieces to solidify in their current form.

Next he tested the gravity drive buried inside the gel, pulling against the probe’s own unit in a tug of war that saw the drone being overpowered as the destroyer upped the thrust to continue its ordered path. Daniels job was to stop it, and he was failing. The little glob of gel couldn’t compete with the much larger gravity drive in the probe, meaning in this case that traditional tech was better.

Daniel sent a signal for the destroyer to launch 004 and soon he had control of the second globe and was simultaneously driving it over to the test area while he continued to wrestle with the probe, through thrust multiple directions as well as reconfiguring his hold on the probe to produce fins and even small sails to catch and redirect the water flow to give him more tugging options.

It wasn’t enough, but when the second drone got to the probe it latched on as well, morphing into the first one and becoming an integrated unit. The individual pieces inside, three each, remained separate and communicating with each other via short range signals, but the gel itself didn’t care which unit it belonged to and would go wherever it was signaled. Right now it behaved as a single unit that now had two gravity drives inside it, allowing for more pulling power as Daniel wobbled the probe off course multiple times before it eventually dragged its way back into a circular course that was now no longer mathematically precise, but rather a wibbly wobbly and ugly route, but the drones still couldn’t maintain full control.

That was solved when Daniel had the third one launched and combined it with the other two, giving him enough tugging power to force the probe off course and over to a designated location while the destroyer crew fought to prevent it. The wrestling match eventually went Daniel’s way, but the delay was considerable. He mentally noted that if actual capture missions were going to be launched, more units would be necessary for an expedient recovery process.

Once that part of the experiment was completed he had the now single drone release the probe and break apart again. He had to manually determine the break points or use a percentage program. He settled on the latter and let them split the gel up evenly between them before spreading them out and sending two nearby in station keeping while he worked with the third, spreading it out into a thin block wall that the destroyer then maneuvered the probe into, testing the gel’s blocking capability.

The first impact shattered the gel, with Daniel having to go around and pick up all the pieces before they could float off and be lost, for there was no homing capability built into them. On the next attempt he reduced the rigidity and saw the wall dent before being throw off the side of the probe by the continued movement. The drone just didn’t have the mass to stop it, but he was hoping that the amount of water it would have to displace behind the wall would compensate.

He brought in a second drone and combined them for the next attempt, spreading them out into a wider and slightly thicker sail before upping the rigidity a bit. When the probe hit it caught, denting it slightly, and suddenly having a huge amount of drag put on it as the sail didn’t slip off of one side like before thanks to a fest hasty tendrils that Daniel manually formed and stuck to the side like support lines.

One thing he was realizing with clarity was the amount of mental control necessary to use manual functions. With his Sav and experience he wasn’t having trouble, but he knew rookies and even veterans without Sav would, meaning that the more automated functions that could be toggled by button press, whether actual or virtual, were a must while the manual functions would allow the higher end users so much flexibility in their tactics that he felt like the Green Lantern, for he could shape the gel into any form his mind imagined…so long as his mind could account for and control every particle within the gel. That was the catch, but for the time being three drones was not enough to push his limits.

When they got around to mass producing these things he was going to see how many he could actually control, but for today this successful test was a huge step forward and a major deviation from established Star Force protocol involving aquatics. It was that deviation that he hoped would give his Clan an advantage over the others, and eventually give Star Force a whole a slew of new tactics to use in warfare beneath the waves.

8

August 5, 2890

Merovingian System (Core Region)

Low stellar orbit

Administrator Claven walked the decks of the Prometheus as he did every day, bypassing techs at work and visually inspecting that everything was in order. The massive Star Forge-class mining station was his to oversee and arguably the most important piece of property that Star Force had. A few other stations had been built after the Prometheus with more scheduled for construction, but those were mostly empty shells still waiting to be filled with equipment. Only his station was fully operational, and it had taken a long time to get it that way.

Gone were the research techs and Archons that had created it, tuned it, and filled its massive void with new factories that could operate at high capacity but low volume. Even now those were no longer considered new tech so the operation of the station had been transitioned over to a conventional staff, with Claven being appointed Administrator of the station. A title that was usually reserved for a full colony.

But here in this empty system all that there was of Star Force was the Prometheus and the Canderian sedas. He had no control over the latter, for they were simply neighbors in this system near to Sol. They were in the safest region Star Force controlled, perhaps even safer than Earth given that Merovingian had nothing of value in it for anyone else to come looking for. That said, Claven had a full complement of troops onboard, including a pair of Archon rangers, just in case the massive space station was boarded.

They also had some 72 naval drones situated in a higher holding orbit guarding the sister station to the Prometheus…which was little more than a disconnected piece of the monster, for it was a warehouse/starport located at an altitude that wouldn’t see it cooked from the stellar radiation. It was there that incoming cargo ships picked up and delivered supplies, then a fleet of specially shielded dropships would ferry traffic to and from the Prometheus as it sat so low it was nearly within the atmosphere of the star itself.

That ‘atmosphere’ was not a clear distinction, for there was so much turbulence that waves of material often washed over the Star Forge’s shields, ironically giving the station power with every hit. The stellar output was being absorbed as much as it was being reflected, providing the station with the bulk of its power output augmented by internal reactors. In fact, that absorption capability was the only way the Prometheus could function at full capacity, for the collection probes were so large that they literally gobbled it up. That was understandable, given that they had to resist the destructive power of the star when actually touching it, and the fact that they were comprised totally of shield energy themselves.

Right now Claven had 19 collection ‘straws’ inside the star reaching down more than 200 miles on a standard day and up to 480 on special occasions. That was barely scratching the surface of the star, but it was more than enough to get a good pull on the material of it. Each of those straws fanned out at the bottom into huge collection nets, each of which was comprised of clusters of tiny spheres that allowed only certain materials or types of materials to pass through, then what was collected was shunted up the connecting stalks and into the Prometheus for processing.

From there automation and the Administrator’s army of techs sorted out unwanted material and sent it back down into the star to save space on the Star Forge while anything valuable was shunted into holding tanks and cooled to desired levels. From there it was either held or sent into processing sectors where it would be converted into whatever products Claven ordered them to make. Most of the corovon they harvested was kept raw, but right now some 13% of it was being bonded into molecules on site to produce a variety of substances that were then shunted to another section of the station and combined with others into armor plating, structural beams, shield emitters, hand weapons, Archon armor, and hundreds of other things that were more economical to build right here and now than to ship off the raw materials to another star system for manufacturing.

The factories onboard the Star Forge were so condensed and automated that the station was extra heavy, even for something of its massive size. Any movement required a good tugging on the gravity drives, not to mention the constant strain of having to hover above the star, for they couldn’t suffer the lateral movement of orbit when they had shield tethers into the star’s surface. Those tethers literally latched them in place, forcing them to expend huge amounts of energy just to stay put and not fall into the star themselves.

The low altitude they held also acted as a defense against attack or curious onlookers, for the plasma gases swirling around them made quite the problem for primitive sensors. Most races had trouble even locating the Star Forge at this altitude, but Star Force’s advancements into Pro’phad energy gave the Administrator clear lines of sight around his station and well down into the star. He could scan deeper than he could reach at the moment, which allowed him to move the station around as needed to find the densest deposits to mine.

The starport above them didn’t orbit either, maintaining a more distant hover/rotation to match the location of the Prometheus as the star spun about on its axis. It too had absorption shields, but they didn’t pick up as much energy given that they were farther away. It was enough to keep them in their laggy orbit, but whenever a jumpship arrived to exchange cargo they had to keep their engines on or fall away from the station, making navigation a bit of a hassle, but one that Claven’s dropship pilots handled on a day to day basis with no trouble.

And the Administrator kept them busy shipping out finished products up to the warehouses and bringing back down whatever compounds couldn’t be harvested from the star…which were minimal considering they only focused on products that could be entirely or almost entirely made from the mining resources. Bits and pieces of other were brought in to add to them, but a lot of the supplies were meant for the station itself, for there were no bioharvest facilities or any other type of personal sustenance infrastructure on the station. They relied entirely on imports, though in a pinch the Canderians could cover for them in the way of supplies.

Normally a station of this size would have redundancies, but because it was located so close to the star and designed for a very select purpose the designers had scrapped the standard protocols and built this beast as a harvest engine with little else slowing her down. It was Claven’s responsibility to make sure she kept churning out raw materials and products round the clock, and he felt it was best to get his own eyes on his station as much as possible rather than relying exclusively on reports shunted to his office.

He oversaw the station operations from there, along with the rest of the 342,953 people on the station. None of them were here as visitors, nor were any allowed. Each and every one was a specialist in their field, for nothing less would allow them a transfer to what was considered an extremely critical position. While some materials, such as warship armor, were produced here because of the corovon being handy, the primary importance of this station was its ability to collect materials that were virtually nonexistent outside of stars. While corovon was always important, it was the solari that the Star Forge’s were designed to go after…and it was the solari that were allowing Star Force to take a huge leap into the next technological level and put them ahead of both the lizards and ADZ denizens alike.

Star Force had no equal now, though rumors about the Preema and Nexus were still abound. Claven knew they had advanced technology, but he also knew about the tech that wasn’t available to the public that Star Force was designing and currently using, a lot of which was incorporated into this station. He was also getting regular requests from highly placed techs and even Paul-024 himself with regards to new solari to hunt and in what numbers they needed, along with occasional explanations as to why.

All that was holding Star Force back in some lines of research was available solari, whether it be for actual experiments or sufficient bulk for prototype development. And even when they figured out how to build something they would need to mass produce it using the solari from this mining station and the other newer additions, none of which could hold a candle to the Prometheus’s current production quotas…which were more or less a joke, for with the swirling currents within the star you never knew for sure how much material you could collect or not. It was a fishing expedition, with Claven having the ultimate decisions about where to dip their rods.

That in itself was a huge responsibility, for it had a direct impact on Star Force’s upper end tech production. He’d gotten good at it over the years, but every day was a new challenge and he expected to have to move the station in a few more hours after sucking up as much from the current deposit of denomsi as they could get. The tiny globule had disconnected from a chunk deep within the star that, honestly, shouldn’t even be there. How this star had acquired a compound that was only typical of high mass stars was still a mystery, and getting down to harvest it directly was one of his standing goals, though they were far from that day. Whenever a bit of it would break off and float up to the surface regions where it was possible to collect it he immediately retasked the entire station, for it was just that damn valuable.

The Yamcha Star Forge, the third in the line to be produced, was currently working through the headaches of mining one of those insanely large stars, and it was from there that Star Force was getting the bulk of its limited denomsi supply. Whenever Claven could contribute to it he felt obligated, for it was the solari responsible for the newest and most powerful weapon that Star Force possessed…the Dre’mo’don. Without denomsi it couldn’t be built, and the same could be said of other solaris and technologies under development that this star had in far greater amounts.

The Administrator had to get to them, collected and process, then either fabricate or ship out to be used elsewhere on as regular an output schedule as he could manage. His crew was damn good at what they did, but this operation was always in flux due to the unknown hauls they would be bringing in.

As he hopped into a lift car to take him down a segment of the 94 mile long station, he selected a region where a transition was being made. One of the factory segments was shifting from haviti saturation to chori condensation thanks to the band of the latter that they’d had the luck of hitting, or rather being hit by, as it cycled through the subsurface currents. The condensation process was meant for packaging, diminishing the volume required by stacking the element in its raw form into tightly linked molecular handshakes…that were difficult to uncouple later, but that wasn’t his problem.

There were only so many jumpships available to haul cargo and he had to get his output compressed as tightly as he could in order to load them up and keep from having to scale back production to match the traffic flow. Though in truth he could get as many jumpships as he requested, giving the importance of this operation, but after centuries of working within Star Force he hated being inefficient and didn’t want to waste a jumpship that could be put to use someplace else just because he couldn’t pack tightly enough.

When he got off the lift he walked a considerable distance through mostly empty corridors until he got to the section that had been transitioned, according to the report, but it was good to see with his own eyes that all was operating smoothly as he walked into the command booth with four other men working or monitoring their stations.

“How we doing fellas?”

“Purring like a kitten,” the eldest of them said, bringing up the large hologram so the Administrator could see for himself. Most of the sector’s internal machinery had multiple uses and only a few specialized components, allowing it to be transitioned from task to task in order to save space and the diagram showed that everything was now into chori condensation mode, with bricks of the element being sealed inside protective casings so they wouldn’t react with the environment and go boom…or probably more like melt through a deck or two via various chemical reactions that would simultaneously create a noxious cloud that would kill anyone nearby. Such things didn’t happen under Star Force’s careful attention, but anytime you had raw solari in such density there were bound to be violent reactions if exposed to a ‘natural’ environment.

One of the other techs frowned at their chief. “What’s a kitten?”

“A baby cat,” the older man explained, throwing a glance at his age peer in Claven.

“Cat…like Scionate cat?” the tech asked, still confused.

“No,” the Administrator explained before the chief could. “It’s a race that now lives exclusively in the sanctuaries. Back in the day they were kept as pets and would make a soft rumbling sound when they were asleep or happy.”

“What’s a pet?” another of the younger techs asked.

Claven sighed, looking at the chief. “I’ll leave that one to you. We’re good here? Aside from their lack of dark age cultural knowledge.”

“We’re good, though I think in a couple, maybe three days we’ll have to pull a maintenance shutdown given the amounts coming in. Gotta manually scrub those headers.”

Claven nodded. “Make the call when necessary. Still no word on the upgrade yet.”

“That’s alright, boss. I don’t mind the manual labor. Gives us something to do other than watch holograms and push buttons.”

“I prefer it that way,” Claven differed. “If you get busy that means things are breaking and I’m having a really bad day. So stay bored, please.”

“As ordered.”

“Carry on,” the Administrator said, walking out of the booth and back into the hallway to continue his rounds. He couldn’t hit everywhere on the station, for it was just too freaking huge, but he chose a few vital areas and then stopped by locations he hadn’t in the previous days. There was something wrong about being in command of a facility that you never set foot in, not because he didn’t trust his crew to do their jobs, he just didn’t like to be out of the loop.

An hour later his wrist beeped and he held up his arm lateral in front of him to activate the holographic torso of one of his assistants.

“What is it?”

“Supply convoy is here early. Do you want me to get the ball rolling or wait for you?”

“Anything unusual in the manifests?”

“Just getting them now.”

“Are they all loaded?”

“Seven ships in total, two are empty.”

“Start filling them with the armor pallets. I’ll handle the rest when I get back.”

“Offloads?”

“Put them in the bays the pallets leave.”

“What about bay 7?”

Claven shook his head. “No, we’ll have to slow production here when the backup hits. Keep bay 7 open for the chori.”

“Understood. I’ll tell them to hold off until they can shovel out their own floor space.”

“I’ll be back inside half an hour,” Claven promised, deactivating his communicator and casually walking on, cutting his inspection tour short, but hitting two more locations before heading back up to the command center and his staff of 6. If he didn’t make these tours those 6 would be the only faces he saw on a regular basis, for given the size of the station and the automation his crew of over a quarter million were so spread out that they didn’t bump into each other much during work, and Claven spent most of his time working or training, with almost no interactions in the residential zones.

He was in them to eat, sleep, and train…all of which he did quickly and usually alone, then he was back in his office or roaming the station. This posting was too important for him to allow himself time off, so he never did. If a time came when he needed a break he’d resign and let someone else fill the slot. Until then he was on call round the clock in order to make sure this behemoth kept functioning and feeding Star Force the valuable materials that only it and its twins could produce, and until they caught up with the Prometheus’s production levels the weight was even more on their shoulders.

Or rather his, for he deferred everything to himself while allowing the crew the downtime he did not. They all had shifts and replacements to take over while they decompressed and pursued personal agendas, but there was only one Administrator, and even when he slept he kept his communicator on just in case something went wrong. From the day he stepped on this station to the day he left it he considered himself never to be off duty, for he knew that trouble could come at any time and any place, and it didn’t have off hours.

9

May 9, 2891

Solar System

Earth

Paul stood in the center of a small circle, arm raised and redirecting towards various thuds as they were thrown at him from a narrow arc. As each one came he summoned up a small burst of concussive energy in his bare arm and threw it forward from his palm, intercepting and knocking down the little balls before they could hit him. His aim was improving, but it was still difficult to emit a precise blast, for the Jumat was more like a tsunami than a rifle shot. Still, he could throw enough over a certain vector to block a single thud coming at him, with this drill focusing on his aim and repetition.

He no longer had trouble summoning up the goosebumps that the energy manifested from. That was now a skill that he could trigger at will, with many other aspects of the psionic being added in these first few years thanks mainly to Morgan’s notes, for she had kept and formed a training database on the ability from her first year to the present. In it she listed mental tricks that had helped Paul learn the summoning skill faster than she had, as well as numerous training simulations that she’d developed over the years and that now Paul had the benefit of using straight off.

His progress with the Jumat was far faster than hers had been, and now he felt that he truly understood why Ginsi was climbing the ranks as fast as she was. He’d always been the trailblazer figuring things out or with his peers, and now he got the opportunity to see what it looked like to be following someone else through and gaining from their experience.

It was literally night and day, for he didn’t have to figure out ways to train…Morgan had already done that for him. All he had to do was throw himself into the drills and challenges and work on improving. He was literally a kid in a candy store, and that combined with the fact that he’d started out with more raw power than Morgan had put him way ahead of her progression rate and he intended to keep it that way, for he was so far behind her that he doubted he’d ever catch her. She had centuries of working to develop her Jumat as an advantage over him, and though they hadn’t met up to spar yet, for she was busy waging her private war against the lizards in Ninja Monkey territory, Paul knew it would be a laughably one sided affair.

Hitting and pushing back the thuds took a decent amount of his energy, but if he’d wanted to he could knock a person off their feet with ease…he just couldn’t do it with repetition. His tissues were so new that they didn’t hold charge well, though with his ambrosia levels being so high he had yet another advantage over the Morgan of the past, for the Jumat consumed ambrosia as a quick resupply fuel source. Problem was Paul’s tissue wasn’t good at absorbing it, at least not as good as Morgan, so whenever he tried something big he usually got one or two shots at it before he had to take a sip from his ambrosia bottle and wait for it to process.

He literally had enough ambrosia in that one bottle to service 1000 adepts for months. Paul didn’t want to have to constantly run off for supplies, so he’d had a concentrated liter of it made up for him so he could ingest it at will without having to fill himself up on foodstuffs or water. Overdosing was a big danger, for he couldn’t measure accurately sipping through a straw, but he was managing it well enough. Plus all he had to do to overcome a mistake was fire off some more Jumat blasts as soon as his tissues soaked up the abundant fuel source.

Per Morgan’s notes he knew the best way to increase his abilities wasn’t in going big, but in working on repetition and getting his cycling rate up. He hadn’t yet learned how to manifest the energy outside his clothing, but he had learned to channel it to various parts of his body, forgoing the need to train naked when all he had to do was keep one arm bare. Today he was wearing a sleeveless shirt so he could alternate arms, but neither one of them would fatigue, for his entire body was producing the energy and transmitting it to a given location. His arms, or whatever other body part he chose, became his firing array, not the generation point.

Right now he’d learned to use his arms and chest as emitters, for it took a while to calibrate the mental control necessary to use other body parts. The chest he’d only added within the previous year, doing a DBZ flex in order to pool the energy just below the surface and transfer it out in a finishing move-like attack. For that he had to be shirtless, but today he wasn’t working in it so he’d donned his sleeveless tank that was now soaked with sweat after four hours of work, first of which began on the track and now had transitioned into the thud firing chamber.

Using the Jumat was exhausting, which was why these smaller bursts were key in developing his endurance and teaching his tissues to soak up ambrosia faster. They could charge through other means, but all were slower. The key to using Jumat as a serious weapon was in having the ambrosia handy, otherwise it was just going to be a surprise or last ditch attack that he’d have to hoard. Once expended, the Jumat tissues would take hours, if not more than a day to fully recharge naturally while the ambrosia would hit his bloodstream and he’d feel the effects within a minute.

As useful as telekinesis was, there was no substitute for Jumat. It was literally the cannon to the Lachka sword. It was crude in comparison, but he had so much firepower available now, in burst at least, that he understood how vitally important an advantage he now had over the Zen’zat that he had kept his non-training activities to a minimum and been making the advanced training group his semi-permanent home as he worked to get a handle on this oh so impressive Tier 3 ability.

Paul secluded himself in training so much that others had started interrupting him via comm when they needed something, knowing that if they waited he might not come out of the sanctum for more than a day. So as Paul was batting one thud out of the air at a time a voice filled the chamber and he kept going without delay.

“I’m here,” Paul said, twitching his arm to the left and surging another pulse of invisible energy to cancel its momentum and lightly bounce it back towards the wall and the collection ring at the bottom. “What do you need?”

“Just got word from Vortison,” Rio’s voice said eagerly. “He says he’s found the trigger and wants you to verify it.”

Paul stopped what he was doing and looked towards the ceiling out of reflex. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” Rio said as the next thud came out and hit Paul in the chest, bouncing off him and ending the drill in failure, but he didn’t care.

“Now?”

“If you can spare the time.”

“Dumb question,” Paul said, telekinetically grabbing his ambrosia bottle and heading out the door. “On my way.”

Paul walked into the lab along with Rio, both clad in fresh clothes as the medtech in charge of genetic research waved them over with a pair of curled fingers as he was manipulating a hologram with his other hand.

“Talk to me,” Paul said, walking up on his shoulder.

“I’ve always wondered why this one was so elusive, and now I have my answer. I think it’s a resistance measurement with a temporal cap restriction of at least a few minutes so some freak attack or condition wouldn’t trigger it. Morgan’s gravity damage and her resistance to it was prolonged and, I think, enough to push her over the edge. Your level of training, without considerable breaks, pegged you out. Step into the scanner please.”

Paul listened as he walked over to the duplicate of the V’kit’no’sat medical station made from Star Force tech. It wasn’t nearly as advanced in the alterations department, but they’d been able to fully copy the scanning tech. As soon as Paul walked in a hologram of his body lit up on Vortison’s console and he began manipulating it to get the suspected trigger under scrutiny.

“Hmmn,” Vortison said, looking at the live data.

“What?” Rio asked, more than eager to get his own Jumat.

“His is turned off.”

“Meaning what?” Paul asked, for his Jumat ability was most definitely ‘on.’

“The trigger and ascension protocol are separate on this one. Or to be more precise, there’s not the usual overlap. Most of the triggers we’ve discovered are a completion measure, so that once you attain that, for lack of a better word, ‘fitness’ level you activate the trigger. This means it’s always turned on so long as you’re maintaining or improving…which allows you to share them. Right now Paul’s isn’t on, so it isn’t just a matter of finding which part of yourself to mimic.”

“I have to recreate the stress level,” Paul guessed.

Vortison nodded. “Yeah, I think so. What I don’t know is how long the trigger will be on. Could be a few seconds or a few hours. Think of it like a coffer with a small hole in it. You fill it with stress until it overflows the brim, but if you stop adding stress the level will diminish and eventually dry up completely.”

“So I’m going to have to catch him during hard workouts?” Rio figured.

Paul shook his head. “We’ve got to figure out how much stress is required, then program a biomonitor to measure in realtime.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Vortison confirmed. “I need you to hang out right where you are for the next hour or so, and hopefully I can create a program to measure how close to peaking out you are.”

“Limit break?” Rio asked, glancing at Paul.

“Done.”

“Done what?” Vortison asked as he worked.

“Naming stuff,” Paul explained as he crossed his arms over his chest as he stood more or less still. There was nothing for him to do but wait, though in this case he wasn’t going to complain. “Is it possible to overfill the coffer?”

“Also on my to-find list. I need your active stats to determine that as your stress levels recede. It’s a good thing you can straight from training.”

“I wasn’t hitting it that hard, to be honest. I was working on my Jumat’s finer control. Stressful in its own way, but not what I’d image this trigger is looking for.”

“It has to be full body,” Vortison confirmed, “to get the necessary levels. If you got your arm chopped off it wouldn’t be enough because it was region specific. You need to feel it all over and, I think, you need to be pressing back, so damage alone won’t trigger it.”

“Trying to walk under heavy gravity,” Rio said, drawing another conclusion.

“I’m not an Archon, but I think that would be the most efficient means of reaching it.”

“It doesn’t work,” Paul said, dashing his hopes and drawing a curious glance from the medtech. “I tried long ago. The level Morgan probably survived I’ve matched and exceeded in training. It’s not going to be enough unless we allow ourselves to be damaged at the same time, and we’re not stupid enough to risk that. She almost died, and I think we’d have to do the same in order to get at it that way.”

“So how did you get at it?”

“Cumulative effect would be my guess.”

“Specifically?”

“Workout load. Not one specific drill or action, but the effect of everything adding up into a giant weight that will crush you if you don’t rest or know how to manage it. I’ve learned and press it harder in training in order to up my resistance to that kind of stress. I think it’s fair to say I’ve gone further in that area than anyone else?” Paul asked, looking at Rio.

“Holistically, yeah, I’d say you have. Vermaire, however…”

“Damn, why hasn’t he popped the trigger,” Paul said, thinking hard.

“Mass,” Vortison said off hand.

“What?”

“It’s his mass…I mean I’m just guessing here, but the larger you are the more tissue you have to spread the load through.”

“Wait a sec…” Rio said, with Paul thinking the same thing.

“If it’s proportional to size, then the Zen’zat growth enhancements are actually hindering their ability to achieve Jumat?”

“I’ll know more after we peg this down, but I’d hesitantly say yes…assuming that the smaller individuals were competing on the same level. You’re both stronger than Vermaire, I assume.”

Rio cringed. “Not exactly.”

“No?”

“Hand to hand,” Paul admitted, “he pretty much owns us.”

“Is he stronger, in terms of muscles, per fiber?”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Actually, I don’t know which one of us is stronger per fiber.”

“Boris is the smallest, though not by much.”

“Percentage strength,” Vortison explained. “If you lift a static amount of mass, the effort is spread out through your fibers. The Knights have far more than you, so is Vermaire creating as much force, and inversely as much strain, as you are?”

“I’ve never thought of it that way,” Paul admitted. “He’s done what seems impossible by virtually undoing his speed penalty for his larger size. He moves as fast as us, and coupled with his mass that gives him a huge advantage in raw power.”

“Vortison is right,” Rio agreed. “He’s a badass, but there’s a lot more of him to absorb punishment. If this trigger is taking the whole person into account, then we’re ahead of him.”

“Not by that much,” Paul argued.

“These triggers were designed for Zen’zat,” Vortison reminded them. “The others aren’t affected by size. This one, I can say, probably is…but if we can identify how much stress it takes it won’t matter.”

“It will if others want to share it,” Rio said, thinking ahead. “They’ll have to find their own limit breaks.”

“Damn, you’re right,” Paul agreed. “Only me and Morgan have reached them, and hers was a fluke that she was lucky to survive.”

“So Paul just shared it with everyone,” Vortison said as if it was obvious.

“For the trailblazers that’s not an issue,” Rio explained. “But going forward when there are thousands of titans he can’t be pinned down playing Yoda.”

“You’re reserving it for titans?”

“Actually,” Paul said, thinking ahead. “I think we’ll stick with Sav as the titan upgrade. We haven’t discussed it in detail because it’s the only Tier 3 trigger we had, but I think we should save Jumat for the next level.”

“Which will be?” Vortison asked.

“We haven’t named it yet,” Rio answered, but his eyes were on Paul. “There are 8 Tier 3. You really want to divvy them out one per level?”

“The padawans have their hands full getting all the Tier 2s, some of which we’re still waiting on the triggers for,” Paul said irreverently.

“I can’t give you triggers for abilities that you haven’t unlocked,” the geneticist pointed out.

“I’m referring to the others, but fair enough. They’re going to have a lot more to learn than we did, then they need to spend their mage years mastering them. Add Sav at titan and everything changes again. We take it for granted because we’re still learning its effects, but if we throw too much at the second gen they’ll skip and piecemeal their way forward. What we need them to do is grind it out and develop techniques that don’t directly affect their levels.”

“Like Ginsi,” Rio pointed out.

“Exactly. She’s narrow focused. We don’t want to encourage that, so spreading out the Tier 3s is probably a good idea.”

“500 levels to integrate Sav seems like an overkill.”

“And to continue developing the Tier 2s,” Paul added.

Rio considered that, assuming that they did eventually unlock them all. “Ok, I’m sold. So long as I get Jumat before then.”

“We’re always exempt,” Paul said unnecessarily.

“Why is that?” Vortison asked, his focus mostly on his displays.

“Because we have to figure out how everything works,” Rio explained, “so we can write the instruction manual.”

“And the writer’s block is real,” Paul added.

“That…is something I totally understand. After all these centuries I’m still trying to catch up with what the V’kit’no’sat geneticists know. The learning curve, even with the abundant data we have, is massive.”

“It ought to be for a civilization that persists millions of years,” Paul pointed out. “But don’t let that be an excuse to sandbag. Rio wants that trigger ASAP.”

“Yes he does,” the trailblazer agreed.

“Impatient twerps,” Vortison mumbled. “Lucky for you I’m one too. You’ll have what you need shortly, then it’ll be up to you,” he said, pointing at Paul, “to replicate the necessary stress levels.”

The titan smiled. “Challenge accepted.”

10

May 27, 2891

Solar System

Earth

Paul flipped backwards, landing on his hands and continuing to flip over to his feet again in sequence, doing a line of some 100+ back handsprings with such a fluid grace it was almost boring. When he reached the end of the line he paused for a moment, just long enough to turn around and head back the other way on Balboa Lane and finish his 18th lap. Halfway down it the tiny biomonitor on his head chirped a series of Artoo beeps but Paul didn’t stop and continued with his gymnastics tumbles.

He went ahead and did two more laps, then shook the dizziness from his head as he jogged through the sanctum and took to a climb wall at speed, knowing that he needed to push his stress level higher than the trigger required. Last time he’d pegged out he’d stopped and called Rio, but the stress levels diminished enough in the next few minutes that by the time the trailblazer got to him it was too late. He’d tried to get it back again shortly, but for some reason he couldn’t and he thought it was probably a chain effect.

That meant a sequence of stress hits some hundred or even thousand long, which if broken would have to start all over again. Unfortunately this time he didn’t have the luxury of an ascension prompt that could linger on after the stress diminished, so he had to get himself up to proper levels and then go beyond it so that he’d have some extra to lose without taking him low enough to turn his now pointless trigger off.

Pointless as far as the V’kit’no’sat were concerned, for they had no idea that there would be a way to cheat the process.

As Paul climbed the wall he got another series of electronic bleeps telling him that he’d just ratcheted up another level. Switching actions, he’d learned, helped increase the stress whereas if he’d just stuck with the tumbles he would have become immune to it after a while, plus his fatigue would have diminished his movement speed. By switching to another activity that used his muscles in a ‘fresh’ way he would get more bang for his buck and cause his stress levels to skyrocket…so that’s what he had been doing these past few weeks, with his biomonitor now programmed to tell him how far above the trigger he was.

It also sent out a signal on its own telling Rio to get his ass over to Paul. This one happened to catch him while he was sleeping, so by the time he got out of bed and over to the sanctum Paul was a half mile into his never ending wall climb and busy grasping and throwing himself up a meter or two at a time from the knobs and ledges, forcing the pace so hard he was almost falling, but with little danger there considering he was only 3 meters off the ground as he fought to stay ahead of the vertical treadmill’s safety slow that would activate when he got within a meter of the ground.

I’m here, Rio told him telepathically, standing off to the side as he watched his peer climbing the moving wall with such recklessness it was a mix of comical and awe-inspiring.

Five more minutes. I want the cushion.

I’ll be ready when you are, Rio said, sitting down crosslegged and clearing his mind as he ran himself through the basics of the twin link again. It took a few seconds of calibration each time he tried it with someone and he hoped to shave one of those off if he could with a little preemptive mental alignment. Paul was of no help to him right now, but he could reach out and sense the other to a degree, allowing him to create a mental handshake that was ready and waiting when Paul suddenly flipped backwards off the wall and landed on the floor feet first, only to be dumped backwards by the momentum and his weak limbs.

He got up and jogged over to Rio, sitting down while mentally establishing the twin link between them as he felt his repetitive numbness begin to diminish as the rest break ate into it. A moment later he could sense what Rio did, and vice versa, but in order to get the trigger to transfer they had to share a specific section of their biotelemetry, and in order to do that they had to go deep. Since they couldn’t cheery pick very well they had to go broad spectrum and link as much of their minds together as possible, accomplished via continuous transmission rather than battlemeld…for that was the only way the cheat could work. Battlemeld was designed to not activate triggers, but the twin link was an anomaly that let one think that the other’s body was actually theirs, if they got the bond strong enough.

Both Paul and Rio had done this many times before with their padawans and others they were sharing abilities with, but this was the only one they had a countdown on. They’d practiced many times over the past weeks after workouts, trying to shorten the connection time and by now they had it down to a step by step process that brought them closer with each connection. After a few seconds the two began to lose their individuality and think as a pair, with Rio’s biomonitor popping up to 3 green soon thereafter.

Rio could see it through Paul’s eyes, so there was no need to talk. Their twin link was now unnecessary, but they held it up until he reached 1 yellow, at which time Paul broke free and Rio concentrated internally, though the other titan did establish a regular Ikrid link to help him stabilize the growing storm inside.

“Patience,” he urged. “You’re not going for it this time.”

“Kill joy,” Rio said as he fought to keep the storm brewing inside him without snuffing it out entirely. The plan was to stay in yellow and not hit red, allowing his body to start prepping for the flash growth later so to avoid the cascade that Paul had experienced, though with an extra Tier 3 to his credit, Rio’s would probably be even worse. “I got this. Just stand by in case I lose it.”

Paul withdrew his deep stabilizing presence and just observed what was happening. Unlike his own, Rio’s ascension prompt started stronger, but still weaker than the other psionics. Perhaps that was because his their bodies knew the toll that this was going to take under the cascade or perhaps something just unique to Jumat. Either way, Rio had to go against his standard operating procedure of pushing for red and this time try to avoid it and make the process linger in order to prep for the transformation later…and by later he meant not today, which Paul knew would require him pushing himself to the trigger again tomorrow or the next day, and perhaps several times more to get Rio where he needed to be.

After about ten minutes, with Rio still holding his 2 yellow bars, a rude Artoo bleep indicated that Paul had slipped beneath the trigger level.

“I’m out,” Paul said.

“I’ve got it from here. Go ahead and get back to normal training.”

“Training? I’m going to get some Mariokart action in then head to bed. I’m exhausted.”

“Don’t rest up too much. I’ll need you to hit it again tomorrow.”

“Two days…don’t push it.”

“Fine,” Rio grumbled.

“Don’t go red,” Paul warned, standing up.

“I won’t. Thanks, buddy.”

“I’m serious. Don’t go there yet.”

“Dude, I’m not lying. Playing it the wussy way.”

“You don’t want that cascade, trust me.”

“Last one was bad enough, thanks. I’ll take the slow route this time. Just don’t like having you trash yourself over and over again to get at it.”

“It’s a tradeoff. My skill work is sucking, but it’s getting easier to reach this level. A century or two from now I’ll probably be hitting the trigger in daily workouts without trying, so I’m guessing this is as hard as it’ll get.”

“Still think you’re going to catch Morgan?”

“I am going to catch her,” Paul said firmly. “In about 7 months if I don’t have too many guests come looking for psionic handouts.”

Rio smiled. “I’m not going to be able to pass it on, you know.”

“I know, but as long as Morgan is out there fighting she’s losing ground to me. This overload training is useful, but it won’t factor into the scaling until down the road. I’d prefer to get top spot back soon, but I can wait as long as necessary knowing that I’m pulling ahead of her off the charts anyway.”

“You are one badass muther.”

“Ya mon,” Paul said, accepting the compliment and walking off to let Rio spend as much time as he wanted, or could, in the ascension…which amounted to a good hour and a half until his grip slipped and he started to head up into red uncontrollably, at which point he forcibly ended the ascension, with the mental storm disappearing and Rio left with a bit of a headache.

By that time Paul was gone so he let him be and went back to bed, letting the prep work soak in and got back to his own training the next day. No calls came in for him, just as Paul had said, and he wondered if his fellow trailblazer wasn’t pushing himself to that level or had just turned his calling device off. Either way, Rio got in a good days training and entered his next sleep cycle, which was offset from Paul’s given that they each had a different length of training day.

That meant he was woke up in the middle of his night again when the call came, with Rio happily getting out of bed and tracking Paul down inside the sanctum. This time he was running laps on the halo track, so Rio jogged over to the transition incline and ran up onto the ‘wall’ and took off to the right, disappearing into the tunnel that ran a complete circle more than mile wide. It’d taken some reworking into Atlantis’s architecture, but the standard quarter mile oval was no longer useful to the trailblazers. The speeds they ran at were hampered by the sharp turns, hence the halo track had been developed that had no turns, rather they ran in a straight line that gradually bent upward and looped back on itself, with artificial gravity allowing them to run horizontal around the inside of the hoop while feeling as if they were upright.

With that large of a track it took some time for Rio to catch up to Paul, but he had taken off the opposite direction so to meet up with him as quickly as they paths crossed rather than trying to race to overtake him the hard way. When he eventually did see Paul’s feet appear far ahead he slowed to a stop and let the sweat-soaked Archon come to a stop next to him. Both sat down off to the side of the road-sized track and linked up, with Rio’s body/mind thinking Paul’s status was its own and the trigger popping him into another ascension.

“I’m going to take it slow, but I’m going for this one.”

“Big surprise,” Paul said, releasing the twin link.

“Might be a good idea to get a medical scanner on me.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “That it would. Can you walk or do you want a ride?”

“I’d rather stay on top of this,” Rio said, with him already 3 bars into the yellow.

“Turn inward and I’ll get you there without any bumps.”

“Hopefully they’ll learn a bit about the cascade when I’m fried,” he said before blocking out most external stimuli and turning inward as Paul suggested.

“Let’s hope it’s less this time,” the level 134 titan said, telekinetically lifting Rio off the ground on an invisible plate that allowed him to still sit crosslegged. He started walking forward with him in tow, then got tired of it and just ran. It looked weird, but Paul’s Lachka was more than strong enough to do it, and he even added a wind shield around him so Rio wouldn’t notice.

When he got to the nearest track entrance, for there were many on the giant hula hoop, he transitioned back into a walk and headed through the sanctum and out into Atlantis’s corridors drawing odd stares from everyone he passed with his floating passenger in tow. He got Rio into the closest lift car and transitioned to the medical wing where Vortison was busy at work on something when he entered the main lab. He saw the man do a double-take from his office, then jump up from his console and come out into the larger work room.

“He’s working on his second ascension,” Paul explained, “and is going to push it through to completion. Thought you’d like to get some active sensors on him.”

Vortison nodded. “We never have seen you guys actually go through the process. Put him on that table,” the medtech said, pointing to one of their work stations, “and we’ll bring the equipment to him. How long does he have?”

“I’d guess he’ll be working on it for an hour or so, but there’s no way to tell. When your control slips you either have to push it through or cancel it.”

“Quickly people,” Vortison said with a snap of his fingers and his team splitting up like an angry hive of bees as they moved around to grab whatever tech they required.

Paul set Rio down on the workstation, which was at the moment deactivated so his butt wouldn’t be pressing any buttons, and left him there just as he had been on the track, turned inward and processing. He gently grabbed his wrist and took a peek inside his head while noting that his biomonitor was at 4 yellow.

We’re here and the medtechs are setting up. Can you give them a few minutes?

I’ll be at this longer than that. As much as I want Jumat I don’t want my head to explode.

No promises. You can still cancel out and go for it on a third try.

No, I’m going for it this time. Need a baseline to figure out how much processing others will need to go through to avoid the cascade. If I cut it too short we’ll know what not to do.

Well that’s brilliant.

Am I wrong?

No…just reckless. As usual.

For all of us.

Shut up and focus. I’ll make sure they have a regenerator standing by.

Don’t use it unless I ask for it. Gonna try and stick this out the hard way if I can.

Alright. Do what you need to do. If you want help stabilizing I’ll be here poking around in your head.

That’s comforting.

Sorry, no hot chicks available this time.

On that note…

We’ll deal with the dream later. Get this thing now.

I intend to.

Paul let their conversation end there and stayed with him through the latter stages. He did ask for help then, trying to ride out 4 red for a while longer in the hopes of minimizing the pain to come. Eventually Rio warned him off and Paul broke the link, then his biomonitor started flashing red and he saw Rio’s body wriggle around a bit like he had an itch running down his back that he couldn’t scratch.

The holographic monitor off to the side displaying Rio’s body exploded with fireworks that showed the flash tissue growth inside of him over the next few seconds, with all of the medtechs going wide eyed when they witnessed just how fast and widespread it was. While his mass didn’t change, only repositioned within his body, it looked like he gained over a pound and a half of tissue, which accounted for .9% of his biomass…which was insane, judging from Vortison’s expression.

Soon the fireworks settled and Rio slumped over, leaning a hand on the table for balance.

“How bad?” Paul asked.

“Not as bad as last time, but it still hurts like a...I don’t know. Get the regenerator.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t as bad?”

“I can’t train like this, and I want to get started tomorrow.”

Paul nodded and turned to Vortison. “Get the wuss his binky.”

Rio’s lip curled in a snarl that was fueled by the pain washing through him. “I hate you.”

“Kerrie’s not here to say it, so I did.”

“She probably would,” he said, leaning back and half falling as his left arm collapsed down to where his elbow hit the tabletop. “Ok, maybe this is as bad as last time.”

“It’ll be over in a few seconds,” a medtech said, bringing the regenerator over to him.

“Wait!” Vortison yelled, and the assistant froze in place a few inches away from making contact with the trailblazer’s body.

“I hate you too,” Rio added.

“I just need a few seconds,” he said, reconfiguring one of the sensors. “If we monitor what the Kich’a’kat repairs then we’ll know how the cascade is damaging you and may be able to create a dampener of sorts.”

“Worth,” Rio said, looking at Paul and adding in a whisper, “Give him 60, then smack that thing on me.”

“Just a moment more,” Vortison said, punching keys and swiping touchscreens in a fury. “Ok, do it now.”

The medtech set the regenerator against Rio’s bare neck and it clung there, melting against his skin and diving into it with tiny tendrils that looked oh so torturous, but Paul knew from experience that he couldn’t feel them, for they were numbing everything as they went. On the monitor the tendrils spread throughout the interior of Rio’s body but didn’t linger for long, eventually pulling back on their tiny paths and healing the microdamage they created during the pullback. When the tiny bits of machine pooled into globs on the surface they melted back into their original rigid form and the device fell away from his neck with the medtech catching it before it could land in his lap.

“Damn, wish I’d used that last time,” Rio said, flexing his jaw and blinking several times.

“You were right to come here,” Vortison commented, his eyes on his consoles and not the pair of trailblazers. “We’ve got a slew of information to sift through that we’ve never had before.”

“Come on gumby,” Paul said, pulling Rio off the table and holding onto his arm knowing that his legs were going to be a bit weak with his first steps. “Nap time for you.”

“No arguments there.”

“Later, fellas,” Paul said as they were gathering around Vortison and largely ignoring the two Archons.

“Ingrates,” Rio muttered as they left the lab and headed back to their turf inside Atlantis.

Half an hour after Rio hit the pillows and passed out, his mind became blocked to outside vision and he slipped into the recurrent dream again, working his way through a process that he had never recalled before, but when he woke some 13 hours later he gathered his thoughts and found he was able to remember a few new details…or rather details that he hadn’t been able to recall previously. The places he had been, including that particular sky with 4 suns in it, were now almost recognizable, but still just out of mind’s reach, as if he had a word on the tip of his tongue and couldn’t remember it.

What he did remember was a short sentence that he’d constructed while in the dream itself. Something that he had done many times before but failed to remember. He had been trying to send his waking self a message, and this time enough of it remained to survive the passage between dream world and real world.

Pass the test.

Divergent

1

July 3, 2896

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Jyra Hemman stood in the hold of a Mantis-class aerial transport, fully geared up as the rear hatched opened. She watched as the door transitioned into a ramp as a gust of wind entered, but she didn’t feel the ship’s rapid deceleration due to the IDF, though she could see the snow-covered trees below whipping by. Those trees gradually slowed and the mantis came to hover over a small hillside with an unnatural clearing on top.

Jyra walked out onto the ramp and stepped off, with the Commando dropping a few meters and landing in the six inch deep snow. She dropped into a crouch and her knee hit the ground as her foot slipped, but she otherwise held her form as the mantis gained altitude and slowly accelerated away with her catching a glimpse of its ramp closing before the surrounding trees blocked her view.

“Well then,” she said to herself from inside her helmet as her breath created a small cloud beneath her exhaust ports on her chin. The temperature was frigid, but not as bad as she’d experienced on Vandermen. That mission against the lizards had her unit fighting through snowdrifts taller than they were and a temperature so cold that her faceplate had iced up numerous times. This was a vacation in comparison, so long as she had her armor to keep herself warm.

Jyra set the internal controls to station keeping, meaning they’d use power drawn from her movement to operate a combination of heating and cooling units. Her body had gotten used to wearing the armor so much that it felt like a second skin to her now and as a result her body’s internal temperature regulation didn’t fight it much, but she’d usually end up with a slightly sweaty sheen underneath the internal padding.

She took a look around, seeing nothing but a square cut out of the forest the size of a basketball court. That had been created intentionally, for the rest of the forest had no natural gaps, but there was nothing else here. No technology or biology. The entire planet was devoid of animal life, leaving her alone with the trees and snow hundreds of miles away from civilization. Huge tracts of the planet had been colonized, but there were still chunks of it that had been preserved in its natural form for training and other purposes, with this clearing where she’d been dropped off being the start point for her next challenge.

Jyra stood up and started walking, carrying a very full pack with only a pistol for weaponry. That was for emergency purposes, for most of her equipment was supplies. This wasn’t a combat mission, nor was it a training skirmish. This was to be a survival test, with only a small beacon in her pack as a backup in case something went wrong. Other than that she was on her own and not under surveillance of any kind. That had been impressed on her during her briefing four hours ago, for if she wanted to become an Arc Commando it would require long missions away from the rest of the army and she had to not only be able to move and survive alone, but to flourish in that type of environment.

When Jyra passed by the nearest of the trees she extended an armored hand out and touched the bark, seeing her white armor matching the snow plastered on the outer side. It was colored for camouflage rather than the standard Commando colors, as was most of their equipment. She was meant to be as much of a ghost as possible, and even a little thing as altering the armor from dirty white to pure white could make a difference in an environment such as this.

Like the pistol, the rest of her equipment was outfitted for multiple scenarios despite there being no threats here. Corneria was the second most populated planet next to Earth and just as secure. Jyra was here to learn rather than fight, and had spent the previous 3 years doing so after getting the very exclusive invite to train to become an Arc Commando.

At the time she hadn’t even known there were Arc Commandos, aside from rumors. There was no official listing of them in the public databases, and even in the military records that she had previous access to there was no such rank or class mentioned. The same was true of the Arc Knights, but they’d been seen by many Commandos assisting them on the battlefield. Arc Commandos were never seen and many Commandos believed they were either a myth or misunderstanding, and now that she was in their training program the veteran knew why.

When Jyra had been approached by the Archons it had been due to her service record. 189 missions in 26 campaigns over the past 340 years and a level 203 Commando rating put her in the upper 10% of the Mainline army, but at present there were only 600 Arc Commandos in existence, meaning that a lot of other Commandos that rated higher than her had been passed over in the selection process. The Archons had explained that some didn’t want the different duties when offered, but that most were not fit for the special combat units that they were building and they thought that she might be.

They were elite units, she’d been told, and that was enough for Jyra. When she’d signed on she had immediately been removed from combat duty and sent to Corneria only to be subjected to an entirely different brand of training than she was used to, with this solo expedition being yet another example.

As Jyra walked under the trees and got herself acclimated to her surroundings she checked her HUD. In it she had only access to a simple map, for the traditional battlemap of the planet had been blocked. She could reactivate it if necessary, another emergency contingency, but if she did it would disqualify her from this mission and that was something she would never do. The very fact that she had the option, including the pistol and other non-essential gear for this mission, underscored the mandate of the Arc Commandos.

Combat could happen at any time, in any place, and Arc Commandos were selected for their ability to think outside the box. In truth all Commandos were, but Arc Commandos took it to the extreme. Her training since arriving here had not been combat oriented, for she already knew how to fight and had more experience doing so than a lot of Archons did. No, this training was centered around thinking and figuring things out when one didn’t have clear orders to follow or a clear path to attack the enemy. Normally Archons would adapt their orders to the situation, but as Star Force grew by leaps and bounds the Archon ranks were not keeping up in numbers.

Jyra was being trained to operate without Archon leadership, and to do that required that they learn to think like Archons…at least as far as ground combat was concerned, specifically small unit tasks. Archons were trained to lead all forms of armies, from large planet-spanning conflicts down to behind enemy lines missions amounting to only a handful of personnel. On top of that they were also masters of all 5 divisions, from naval to aquatics, and Jyra wasn’t going to be able to match them on that. Like the Knights, Commandos were the peers of the Archons, some would say, in their individual disciplines because she and others would train exclusively in one area while the Archons split their time between many…and not only were they warriors, they were builders and diplomats.

Pretty much, they were masters at everything. And Jyra most definitely wasn’t.

But what she was good at was solo missions, and that was why she’d been recruited. Her combat record against the lizards saw her posted to numerous scouting and special team operations, in which she excelled, but her training here had gone far beyond that.

Checking her limited map she saw only a directional marker that pointed north and a distant waypoint that was her first destination on this cross country scavenger hunt. Jyra didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to get to the waypoint and figure things out from there. According to the waypoint numbers it was located some 129 miles away over slightly rolling terrain.

“That’s one hell of a first leg,” she said, transitioning the waypoint to her HUD permanently but dismissing all other data before taking off at a jog through the inch-deep snow underneath the trees. Everything was covered by it but the branches seemed to have collected most of it, allowing her a fairly easy time setting a pace. How to navigate the geography was something she was going to have to play by ear, for she didn’t have a topographical map to utilize, so she started by simply heading in a straight line until she found a reason to deviate from it.

The ‘straight line’ was actually a weave between the tree trunks and scrub brush, for there were no trails nor anything in this region to make them. Thankfully the cold climate and dim lighting, thanks to the snow covered branches, had kept the undergrowth to a minimum, but that only emphasized the desolation of the place. No one lived here, let alone passed through. Aside from the small artificial clearing there was nothing here different from when Star Force had first arrived to colonize the planet and Jyra could feel the disconnect.

That ‘disconnect’ was something she’d been trained to embrace and utilize, for most people, regardless of race, avoided it like the plague. People naturally operated with a hive mind, some more than others, and that left blind spots that could be exploited. It was in those blind spots that stealth was often achieved, and the more she could learn to think as a disconnected entity the easier it would be to identify them. That said, she’d always be able to connect with the army and Star Force. Her 3 centuries of service ensured that, so this training wasn’t designed to replace it, but rather enhance that bond of brotherhood by giving her a second mode to slip into…a mode that could be used to protect and attack as necessary, derived by her own judgement rather than orders.

That new mode was active, for she could feel herself slipping into it now that she was off the grid. She’d been told that other training missions where commandos were sent out alone had always been secretly monitored in order for the trainers to be able to intervene if something went wrong. If the trainees knew about that they’d operate differently, so they had to keep it secret. This fact was entrusted to her and the handful of other Arc Commando trainees she was working through the program with because they would not be operating under similar procedures.

None of them were rookies, for all were combat veterans at least 200 years old. They could take care of themselves, but there was always risk. Star Force didn’t want to lose them to an accident, which was why there were safety protocols in their equipment so they could break from the parameters of the mission if deemed necessary, but that choice was theirs rather than a trainer’s. If Jyra fell off a cliff and smacked herself unconscious there would be no help coming, for she wouldn’t be able to call for it.

Risk was everywhere, and while Star Force couldn’t prevent it they could and did minimize it. Those minimizations were now lessened, but not removed, in order to give her a chance to get away from everyone and operate in the dark for a while. With so much population on Star Force worlds it was virtually unheard of not to see another Human, even if just walking from your quarters to the cafeteria. The same was true in the military, so her being here, surrounded by miles of uninhabited territory, was a rare thing that she’d been getting a lot of in her Arc Commando training.

Enough that she was now comfortable with it, and in some ways preferred it. Not only was she being entrusted with this ‘alone time’ but she and the other trainees were also given special access codes to Star Force databases, allowing them almost free reign to move about through their cities wherever and whenever she wanted. Staying in the dark even when amongst the masses, it had been explained to her, and to that end on a previous mission she had been tasked with making her way through restricted areas under security’s nose. An Archon has been stationed with security to call them off if she was detected, so no misunderstandings could occur, but that hadn’t been necessary for Jyra had made it through in the shadows using a combination of guile and computer codes that security didn’t even know existed.

Her Archon instructors had explained the duplicity to her as an invisible layer of protection. Rather than playing games with their own people, she was learning how to back them up off the grid where potential enemies couldn’t look. While Star Force computer and comm systems were difficult to hack, there was always the possibility of it happening. If it did, an enemy could use their own systems against Star Force, hence they needed another layer of defense…and in this case, that second layer was trust.

The Archons had their own brotherhood that they held to fiercely, and through it all they trusted one another to do the right thing. For the Commandos it was less so. They hoped they would do the right thing, but kept an eye on them just in case. The same was true for the other 4 military divisions, and in most cases that oversight was unnecessary. Where the Archons led the soldiers followed, and so long as the good guys were in charge there wasn’t going to be any fertile ground for misbehavior within the ranks. Jyra knew this from her time serving as a Commando, but she’d only recently come to realize that most of her fellow soldiers were going along with the flow rather than thinking for themselves.

With the knowledge Star Force gave their people through training, going with the flow was a shortcut to understanding how the universe worked. Once a person made it to that point they were unlikely to forget, but they were only learning the knowledge that was passed onto them. The Archons wanted the Arc Commandos to be more than that, and therefore they were recruiting individuals who showed an aptitude to take what they’d learned and expand upon it by thinking outside of what they’d been taught and making new connections…essentially doing what the Archons had done to create that database of knowledge.

Above and beyond that, they wanted individuals that they could trust to use their instincts and ferret out injustice, inconsistencies, anything that might be amiss. Simply following orders wasn’t enough. They had to act on their own volition and not rely on orders. With the responsibilities, equipment, and knowledge that the Archons were giving to Jyra and the others, the most impressive and humbling gift being given to them was that of trust. Trust to act without oversight and to do what the Archons would do.

Except the Arc Commandos were being trained in a very narrow slice of Archon responsibilities, namely the solo and small group combat missions, traveling behind enemy lines and, if the worst came to pass, able to disappear within Star Force if it was ever compromised. The Arc Commandos, in their limited focus, were now another spear tip, with no one to follow. They led the way, not for others to follow, but to aid them by taking out targets and accomplishing missions that most would never know occurred.

That’s why Arc Commandos were not publically recognized and that the military itself didn’t know of their existence beyond rumor…and that level of trust and secrecy was why Jyra had fully committed herself to this extreme training. It was difficult physically, as was all Star Force training, but what made this secret program so extreme was that it required her to become an Arc Commando completely, from her red hair down to the tips of her toes. This wasn’t a job or profession, it was to become her identity.

And that was something she wanted, more than anything in her life. She’d always wanted to be an Archon, but her testing hadn’t warranted it. She’d retaken the tests multiple times throughout her life, each of which was different, but she’d never passed. This new role, which held equal status to the Archons in terms of independence and responsibility was equal to, no, actually better than becoming an Archon.

Naval, aquatic, aerial, and mech combat were interesting but never truly appealed to her, nor were administrative duties and empire construction. Jyra was a fighter who belonged on the battlefield, not a builder, so Arc Commando was a perfect match for her and she was extremely grateful for the wisdom of the Archons in seeing that in her. That vision was one thing that she lacked, but now that she’d found her niche she never wanted to do anything else again. She still had about another year to go in her training, she guessed, and she still had to earn that position, but Jyra had no doubts as to whether it would happen.

There was a way to accomplish it, and if there was a way she’d find it. She was fully committed to becoming an Arc Commando and nothing they’d thrown at her yet, training wise, had been more than she could handle.

This long distance solitary mission was something new, but she suspected it was more of a confirmation ordeal rather than a grueling endurance test. There was no time limit involved, at least not on this stage of it. She simply had to get from point to point across the snow-covered forest and could take as much time as she needed or wanted. That said, with her objective location known she didn’t feel like delaying and set a fairly aggressive pace, tempered by the fact that she knew she’d been running for at least 10 hours before she settled down for the ‘night,’ though with her nightvision tech the time of day didn’t matter, rather it was whenever she became exhausted that she’d stop, and she’d already decided to play it safe and cut off before that happened.

While this leg of her mission might be simple, she had no way of knowing what the next one would entail…and she didn’t want to head into possible difficulty at a disadvantage. So she set a pace that would double as the workouts she was unable to do out here in the middle of nowhere and got to work covering ground, not knowing what was ahead of her other than the tiny triangular dot emblazoned on her HUD marking her target location’s direction.

2

The terrain seemed endless, with forest over rolling hills that was always different yet remarkably the same. If it wasn’t for her HUD and the distant waypoint Jyra would have been thoroughly lost in this wilderness but that one bit of information was all she needed to navigate, with the significance of that razor edge not being lost on her. More so than ever before Jyra was coming to grips with the fact that the galaxy was a wild and dangerous place with no safety nets other than what you created yourself. Star Force had done so well in that regard that most people didn’t realize what it was like outside their cities.

For here and now a single navigational point was making the difference between having a path forward and wandering aimlessly to her eventual death. Yes, she had a backup beacon in case something went wrong, but had that not been the case she’d be relying on the gear in her helmet to survive. If it was lost or damaged then she would be in a world of hurt, unlikely to be able to stay alive longer than her supplies lasted, for these trees were not fruit bearing. Roots perhaps could be scrounged, but that would just be a delaying tactic.

If she couldn’t get to the waypoint she would be lost.

Now that she had plenty of time to consider that, the danger of life began to sink into her. She’d been through numerous battles and never thought of those as ‘dangerous’ because she had a fighting chance, but the idea of being in a no-win scenario was truly terrifying. She was a fighter, and not having some path to victory, no matter how unlikely, left her completely vulnerable and dependent on the little device in her helmet.

She didn’t like being dependent, nor did Star Force, hence the redundancy they built into their infrastructure, but as an Arc Commando she didn’t have that luxury. She had to go where others wouldn’t, or couldn’t, and sometimes that would mean walking the razor’s edge. Jyra hadn’t expected that to be the case on this mission, for it was little more than a long run across terrain, but now that she was here, unwatched, reality was dawning on her.

It was both scary yet liberating. She was in control, so long as her equipment functioned, and unlike being under water she wasn’t going to die immediately if her air cut off or her armor breached…which was one reason why she wasn’t fond of aquatics. No, out here she’d last for a long time, it was that inevitable defeat looming at the edge of her mind that worried her. As a last ditch effort she could always try and make it to one of the distant cities, so there was a slim chance she could survive and that would give her something to fight for, but the isolation here made it feel like the entire planet was empty…and that made her think through the ramifications of being on another world that had no cities, and what she would do then.

The disturbing answer was nothing, for there was nothing to be done but wait and hope for rescue. Dependent on someone else again, unable to win, let alone even fight, if she was lost on a world with no way off it. She knew better than to give up, for there might be some unseen angle she was missing…a way to win that was hidden, and if you gave up you were precluding that possibility, but since this was a theoretical situation she allowed herself to consider the what-ifs of being in a position where there was no way out.

Jyra didn’t have an answer for that. She was a fighter and could never stop trying, it just wasn’t in her nature, and perhaps that is why the thought of a no-win scenario was so damn frightening. It was like a line that you could not cross, yet drawn plainly in front of you, with no one forcing you over it. Knowingly you’d never cross it, but the fact that it was there and danger lay on the other side meant that if you accidently crossed it you’d be doomed.

But then she’d still be in control, wary but wise enough not to cross that line. But what if that line shifted, or she lost her focus and wandered across? That was the truly scary part, that she could end up where she didn’t want to be on accident…and her HUD failing would be just such an accident in this situation.

Normally Jyra’s mind didn’t wander this much, but she literally had nothing to do other than keep running. The terrain was mildly challenging, but not enough to consume her conscious mind so her thoughts wondered up until she finally decided to stop and rest after having traveled some 82 miles, straight line. How far she’d actually ran with all the twists and turns she didn’t know, for her HUD wasn’t set up to track it with this limited capability.

With the terrain all seeming the same Jyra just came to a stop when she felt like it and looked around, finding a suitable gap between tree trunks and walking over to it, then taking a moment to pull her helmet off and breathe deeply, bending at the waist and resting her right hand on her knee. She hadn’t been running fast, but only now that she’d stopped did her fatigue begin to fully register. She could have gone on further with ease, but apparently she’d dipped into a bit of combat mode numbness that had blocked her mind from fully realizing the extent of her physical depletion.

In those few seconds her face and hair frosted over in the cold, but it felt good at the moment so she kept her helmet off as she got her breathing under control and stood up, disconnecting and pulling off her heavy pack. She set it down in the snow and laid her helmet on top before reaching inside and pulling out a small knife that she used to cut away a few bits of scrub brush to form a bigger clearing. Those tumbleweeds she tossed aside into the snow where small rays of sunlight were breaking through the canopy and painting the dim white with numerous bright spots.

Night would be on her soon though, for the planet had a 22-hour day and she’d began just after dawn. Had she not been equipped by Star Force that would have been an issue, for the nights would get considerably colder, but her armor and survival equipment would make that a moot point.

Jyra took a moment to go through a few stretching exercises, making use of the flexibility her armor allowed and working out her stiff body, for the running motion, while dynamic enough, didn’t allow for certain movements and she’d gotten a bit rigid in those areas. Above that the stretching just felt good, especially in contrast with her warm body and chilling head.

Once finished she began kicking away the snow and getting down to the frozen dirt below. When she had her campsite cleared she put her helmet back on to keep from getting too cold and pulled out a cylinder from her pack about the length of her forearm. She set it down in the center of the clearing and pressed a button before taking a step back. Four seconds later the hard canister broke apart and began to unfurl a thin prefab building.

It spread out into a flat octagon, then rose up as it stretched its cloth-like walls rigid around telescoping supports that interlocked automatically. Once the building reached its height of 2.8 meters the material of the walls and ceiling solidified as the tiny segments firmly locked together. Altogether it took 18 seconds to form, with Jyra tapping an armored finger on it to check on its rigidity before grabbing her pack and going inside.

The door was solid but unpowered, operating on a hinge that swung outward. Jyra closed it behind her then walked to the far side of the 6.4 meter wide room and set her pack down, from which she pulled out a small power source the size of her thumb and inserted it into a matching slot in the center of the floor. Once connected nothing happened, but the equally small heating element and light that she unpacked next slid into slots on the ceiling that then drew power from the generator, bathing the interior in blue and starting to warm the chilly air.

More items followed, being plugged into additional slots on the floor and ceiling. Star Force built smaller survival ‘tents’ but on a mission like this there was no need to skimp, though she did have one of their smallest units as a backup in case the one she was in now became lost or damaged. Redundancy was the name of the game, and Star Force had gone to great lengths to devise and fabricate personal gear that could be condensed down to as convenient travel size as possible.

While the chamber warmed Jyra pulled out a roll of what looked like candy discs, popping one into her mouth before stowing the rest. Her body had been fully depleted of ambrosia, she realized after the fact as she sluggishly moved around and her heartrate diminished, with the ‘candy’ being a very condensed supply. Each disc was equal to her typical daily requirement of 13.2 doses, which another roll had small bits in lesser amount so she wouldn’t have to try and break the tiny discs apart to manage her levels. Each roll had been custom designed for the dosage levels she required, and while it wasn’t mission critical it was, to her, one of the most important items in her pack.

One item that was more of a luxury was a chair that she unpacked, setting it into a slot in the floor that locked into place and then expanded in size as the components realigned. It required power, for it was more than just for sitting on. It had a small backrest, on which was a button that altered modes. She punched it with her little finger and saw the seat uncover into a toilet seat as she pulled off her helmet and began taking off her armor. It was a segmented version rather than the all-in-one units that most preferred nowadays, and gave her a slightly greater defense rating due to the rigid pieces. It was also unpowered, which had been a requirement of this mission, but from the inside it felt virtually identical to all the other versions she’d worn, for only under extreme situations did she utilize their powered-augmented movement capability.

The air wasn’t fully warmed by the time she stepped out of her boots and tossed them into a corner with the rest of her sweaty armor but she didn’t feel like waiting a few more minutes, for her bladder that had been quiet the last few hours of her run was now reasserting itself. She pulled off her uniform pants and sat down, glad to have the chair in her inventory, for otherwise she would have had to go out in the snow and relieve herself the old fashioned way and use a portable scraper.

She had one in her pack as well, but the chair had a unit built in so when she finished she hit a button and a cleansing force field scraped across her butt cleaning and sanitizing far better than the old fashioned toilet paper ever did. When she felt the wipe finish she stood up and pulled her pants back on, flicking the ‘compress’ button that would take her waste material and dehydrate it into pellets that she could toss into the forest later. For now they were stored in the base of the chair along with the pure water recovered. That could be critical in other environments, but with all the snow here she wasn’t going to have to worry about water conservation on this mission.

On that note she also pulled out a water bottle from her pack and downed it in one long drink before pulling out some prepackaged foodstuffs that were also volume compressed. She ate quickly then pulled off her clothes once the chamber had fully heated up, stepping into a ring on the floor that she had already installed, along with its opposite on the ceiling. Using her toe she flicked a button on the floor and the two rings encapsulated her in a weak shield tube that she could break out of if necessary. With it a second plate-like energy shield began bouncing from one ring to the other in slow motion, operating similar to the scraper and pulling some of the grime and sweat off her body.

It was nicknamed the ‘tickler’ and functioned as a lesser replacement for a water shower. Originally developed for races that didn’t take well to the water, it was used by some Human civilians that preferred it but mostly used as a backup when water was scarce. It never worked well on Jyra’s hair, but got most of the workout stench off of her. In the field that was a luxury, and on a lot of occasions she slept in her armor, sweat and all, until she could get to a secure facility.

But since there were going to be no secure facilities on this mission the extra amenities were appropriate, and Jyra had chosen to carry the extra weight to accommodate them. This was a longevity mission, and any small augmentations to her survival inventory would factor in down the line. She could rough it out in her armor and no shelter, but that wasn’t a good way to operate long term and Jyra hadn’t been told how long this mission would actually last.

A lot of that depended on how fast she traveled, and with the solitude beginning to wear on her she didn’t intend to linger any longer than necessary. After a few minutes in the tickler she got out and put her clothing inside it, allowing the sweat and grime in them to be mostly removed, then pulled them back on save for the socks. Knowing it wasn’t super cold outside and wanting to give her feet a chance to breathe, she grabbed four small cubes out of her pack and opened the door, stepping out barefoot onto the frozen ground and shutting the door quickly to minimize the heat loss.

Jyra sucked in a deep breath, feeling her body begin to chill instantly and taking a moment to absorb the sensation along with the first few trickles of ambrosia hitting her bloodstream. She looked around in the dimming light and listened, not expecting to hearing anything but taking the moment just the same. There wasn’t anything mechanical or living to be heard in the eerily silent forest, but to be on the safe side she walked out into the snow, feeling and resisting the cold on her tiny feet as she moved out about 20 meters and attached one of the cubes to a tree trunk.

She walked in a long circle around her octagonal structure, placing the other three devices at approximate cardinal points while curiously wondering how long she could tolerate the snow on her bare feet. Residual heat would offer her a bit of a shield, but as it bled off she’d start to get into trouble. She’d never tested that notion before to see how long it would take, and to her surprise she was still ok by the time she completed her circuit and got back to the door.

Jyra opened it and quickly got back inside then wiggled her toes around, finding that her feet had already started to get numb.

She raised an eyebrow, making a mental note to not trust her senses on that one in the future. If they were numbing up that would allow her to move about in the snow better under combat conditions, but it would also not inform her as to their condition and what damage could incur. Cold wasn’t something that you could mess with and was as dangerous as heat in ample amounts, but this environment wasn’t that frigid so she knew a little exposure would be alright so long as she kept it brief.

Yet another razor’s edge to walk, but this little barefoot mission hadn’t gone too far and now she had a baseline for the future…though she hoped she was never caught without her boots or shoes in the future, for that would be a major pain in the ass.

For that reason many Commandos slept in them when in the field. After running for so many hours Jyra knew that would be a bad idea, but if she kept her uniform shoes with her the perimeter sensors that she’d just set up would hopefully give her a few seconds to slip them on if something did happened.

It wasn’t a good situation to be in, for she was alone and there was no one to take watch while she slept, but she had to make due and didn’t want to sleep in either her boots or the shoes that slipped into them. A few Commandos wore the boots without shoes underneath, and they were adjustable for that purpose, but she never did, wanting to have them on for when she got out of her armor.

Jyra configured another device she had plugged into the floor to sound an alarm if any heat or technological signatures came within scanning radius, excluding those already present and extending the minimum range out to the confines of her building so if she moved around inside it wouldn’t go off. If she stepped outside it would, but she also configured the alarm to transmit to an earpiece that she slipped on rather than audible to everyone…which in this case would be anyone outside trying to sneak up on her.

There was no one on Corneria to bother her, not even any wildlife, but she wanted the extra layer of security regardless, for you never knew what unknown factors were in play.

Jyra grabbed her shoes and stuffed her socks into them as she set them to the side and unrolled her sleeping sleeve. She plugged it into the a slot on the floor then slipped her bare feet inside and crawled into the double-sided blanket that would regulate her internal temperature while blocking her external heat signature. There was a head cover that she didn’t bother using, but she did trigger the underlayer to inflate and lift her an inch off the hard floor, along with a pillow section that rose another couple inches up.

Keeping her shoes and socks next to her head and ready to grab at a moment’s notice she closed her eyes and got to sleep quickly, not intending to linger here any longer than necessary for her to rest and recharge. The alarm system had also been configured to wake her in 7 hours, meaning she’d be off before sunrise and onto the waypoint, hopefully, by the end of the next day.

3

July 4, 2896

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Jyra had gotten up just before sunrise and taken off on her second running segment of this journey but had found that she’d pressed herself too much the previous day and intentionally cut it short after only a few hours, took some downtime and a long nap, then went back out to complete the rest of the first leg of this mission, eventually arriving at the waypoint…which was floating in virtual form over top of a small frozen lake.

“So much for easy,” she told herself on the shore as a weak beacon appeared beneath it, indicating that there was something under the ice for her to get to. To that end she disconnected her pack and dropped it into the thick snow before gingerly walking out onto the ice. It was frozen thick enough to hold her, so she moved out further from shore until she was directly over the beacon location and actually standing inside the virtual waypoint. Shutting the vents on her mask and switching over to backup oxygen Jyra jumped into the air, hearing the ice crack beneath her, then pulled her knees up towards her chest midair before smashing her legs back down like a jackhammer and breaking through.

The ice was thicker than she thought and only her legs went through, with the jagged corners of the ice pinning her waist above water level until she added a few fist smashes and her white armor sank below the ice and out of view. All was quiet for more than a minute, but before the water could begin to refreeze her helmet poked up through into the air and an arm came out, pressing down and breaking off another piece of ice.

Jyra clawed further into that small indentation, getting her elbow on one side and reached up out of the water with her other arm to throw a small canister clear before using that hand as a counterbalance to gently ease her upper body out of the water and onto the ice like a worm, crawling inch by inch over cracking ice until she was completely out of the water and could roll to the side a couple of turns and up onto her feet. She walked over and picked up the canister while opening her air vents and allowing her reserves to start gradually replenishing.

The Commando waited until she was back on shore before she chanced to open it, finding only a small databurst module inside. She toggled it on and linked to it via her HUD and got the flash transmission of data…which in this case was just another set of coordinates for the next leg of her mission.

“52 miles. They’re making this too easy,” she said, closing the lid on the canister and leaving it on the lake shore as she grabbed her pack, intending to get another couple hours of running in before she stopped for a rest. Not knowing what would be at this waypoint she’d conserved energy so she could run or fight if necessary, but now that that appeared to be unnecessary she might as well get a move on.

It was already dark, so she took to the forest again using her nightvision before eventually stopping 18 miles later and setting up camp. She took a longer rest there then hit the next section in the daylight and made it all the way up to within a kilometer of the 2nd waypoint before stopping again. Maybe it was another navigational marker, perhaps it was something else, but she might as well find out with a fresh set of legs than when exhausted, so Jyra pulled out her tent canister again and repeated the process that was now becoming routine.

She ate and went to sleep, then woke up hours later when it was dark and packed up, traveling the last kilometer on foot and ready for action when the waypoint guided her to an anonymous bit of forest that had a speeder bike laying on the ground.

“Hello,” she said, cautiously approaching and looking for any booby-traps when she noticed the crate sitting behind it with another databurst module on top inside a clear case sleeve. She pulled the coordinates from it, finding that there were actually 18 different waypoints updated, all of which were scattered around her current position and not in order. No further information was given, and it seemed to her that this was a collection mission now. For what she didn’t know, but having the speeder meant she could avoid having to run out to all of them…which was fortunate, for they were spread over an area with a radius of 130 miles.

Jyra flicked the ‘on’ switch but the speeder didn’t respond, drawing a sinking feeling from the commando. She tried again but nothing, then pulled open the front panel and saw that the bike was in mechanical disarray with missing components and disconnected wires…including a burnt out chunk that functioned as the cooling unit for the gravity drive.

Her eyes flicked to the crate.

“You had better be spare parts,” she said, opening it and sighing with relief when she saw that was just the case. Apparently she had to repair the speeder or submit herself to hiking the insane back and forth distance, for which she probably would have to ration her supplies. That wasn’t doable when one was physically propelling oneself across miles of forest, meaning that if she didn’t get the bike fixed she was in a world of hurt.

Mechanical repair wasn’t something Commandos were heavily trained in, but they were taught the basics of how to tinker with their equipment in the field. That underlying knowledge had been expanded upon heavily in her Arc Commando training, giving her more options for situations just like this. She didn’t carry a full tech rating, but repairing speeders was one of a handful of tasks that she had been taught how to do, along with bypassing the control interface to circumvent any locking mechanisms if necessary, though today that didn’t seem to be an issue. Star Force speeders were typically free use and had no key sequences required, but a lot of civilian craft did, including those that Star Force produced and sold on the open market.

Those didn’t have weapons, but this one did. A single sammy barrel mounted on the front of the bike. Jyra knew it was more powerful than a sniper blast, but not as potent. More for blowing away a chunk of mass than punching a small hole through armor. Why this was an armed variety made her wonder if combat wasn’t forthcoming on this mission…or more likely some type of impediment that would difficult to remove without the weapon.

Didn’t matter now, for if she couldn’t repair the bike she wasn’t going anywhere with it, for the gravity drive would overheat even if she got the power supply hooked up, and it was missing several conduits to both the drive and the controls, which was why she hadn’t been able to turn it on. Going back to the bike she pulled out all the damaged components and made a mental list of everything that was missing, then starting fishing items out of the crate and assembling them up until her gloved hands became too thick to get into some of the smaller areas.

Jyra disconnected her right glove but kept her left on, allowing her thin fingers to slip into certain crevices and keep working up until the cold started to numb her touch, then she switched hands, putting her glove back on and taking the other off. She kept switching back and forth until she got the bike working, then started it up and ran it through some basic diagnostics ensuring that all functions were operational.

With it floating half a meter off the ground she closed the access panel and grabbed her own pack, which she’d taken off when she realized it wasn’t going to be a quick fix. Checking her internal clock she noted that she’d spent some 4 hours working on the bike, most of which was due to a number of unforeseen problems with components that appeared to be intact but were really sabotaged in a subtle manner…and then she had to fix two pieces that she didn’t have replacements for.

Whoever had set this up had made it difficult on purpose, but Jyra thought she finally had everything working and was glad to hear the faint hum of the cooling device and no extraneous noise, suggesting to her that it was, in fact, now working properly. After reattaching her pack she slid onto the small seat that could accommodate two people in a crunch, she gripped the control bars and elevated the speeder up through a small gap in the canopy that she had to search around for, passing through the snow-covered branches and dumping a lot of it off onto the ground as she pushed through…then she was above the treetops looking out at the snow-covered landscape that showed little bits of green in between the white dunes covering the branches.

Highlighting the nearest waypoint, Jyra accelerated the nearly silent bike in its direction and began covering ground in a blink of an eye compared to her having had to run it on foot. Skimming the treetops also allowed her to make a straight line path rather than the weave she had to make around trees and up and down over hills on foot, making her appreciate the speeder for all it was worth as she headed for the waypoint.

Knowing not to run up on top of it, Jyra stopped early and landed, choosing to approach on foot and finding another beacon…but this one was coming from underground. It was two meters down, but there was no visible way to get at it. Frowning, Jyra pulled her pack off and got a small cubical rectangle out that unfolded into a shovel. She began digging, immediately finding the ground frozen and having to chip away at it until the soil softened with depth, but even then it was still firm and didn’t look to have been recently dug up anytime soon.

When she got down to the depth that the beacon was coming from, for she could measure it to the inch on her HUD, she found absolutely nothing. It took her a moment to dig a little deeper, then she tossed the shovel out of the hole and angrily climbed out of it.

“Shit…I’m so stupid,” she said, looking around in the trees above her and in the scrub brush nearby. At first she couldn’t find anything, but eventually she stumbled across a tiny box stuck in the side of one of the tree trunks some 20 meters off, virtually unnoticeable, and Jyra knew it was a signal misdirection device. The actual beacon signal was coming from somewhere else, but with this one transmitting a counter signal it had altered the calculations her helmet was making and caused it to indicate a position that was where neither device existed.

Knowing that she could do the math and use the false point and the actual one of the disrupter to determine the true location of the beacon, she input a waypoint on top of the tiny device and had her helmet do the calculations…which resulted in a third waypoint that she walked over to, finding a ditch that was almost completely filled with snow. She scooped it out with her hands like a dog digging down through sand and eventually found the book-sized box at the bottom. Pulling it out she headed back to where she’d dropped her pack and subsequently retrieved her shovel before kneeling down and opening the box.

Inside it was two foodstuff packets, a small amount of ambrosia, and a puzzle piece-like component that she guessed would interlink with others found to form something, but at the moment she had no clue what it was, for it had no buttons or markings of any kind.

Jyra sighed. “Scavenger hunt indeed,” she said, looking over to the spot where she’d dug that unnecessary hole and wasted so much time. “Guess that’s my punishment for being stupid…all self-imposed.”

Grabbing the items and stowing them in her pack, Jyra took a moment to rest and clear her head before getting back on the bike and heading towards the next waypoint, plotting out a course that would mean the least amount of travel, for her power cell on the bike hadn’t been fully charged and if she wandered around too much she’d end up finishing this hunt on foot. That was another facepalm moment that she was glad she spotted before it’d bitch-slapped her…and she assumed there were probably many more coming her way with equal subtlety.

It was becoming clear this mission wasn’t about overcoming obvious challenges, but rather in picking up on the small ones that could easily go unnoticed. Warning herself to be extra observant, Jyra took off back up through the treetops then accelerated heavily until she could feel the tug of the air against her helmet and torso and held that velocity. The bike could go faster, but the last thing she wanted was to get knocked off it by the turbulence and fall down through the forest only to go on a multiple mile hunt for the bike that would cut thrust and coast to a stop when her hands left the controls.

And anti-grav craft had a tendency to coast a really long way before coming to a stop…not to mention this bike didn’t have a homing beacon, so all around it was better to keep it fast, but not too fast.

Jyra got through three more locations before calling it quits and setting up camp. Each was different, with one going so far as to have her climbing through the snow in the treetops to find a case that had a vague beacon that was highlighting a region rather than a point. It took her more than two hours to find it, and had she not been wearing armor she would have been frozen stiff by that point crawling across branches that held the snow aloft and even having to dig tunnels through some of the deeper sections.

She fell four times, counting on a branch to be there then finding a way to slip through where she thought her body would catch. If there was an easy way to find that one she missed it entirely and ended up slipping into her blanket sleeve more frustrated than tired. In each of the boxes, though, there were bits and pieces of supplies, which gave her the impression that this mission was going to last long beyond this current scavenger hunt.

Taking that into consideration she decided to pull back on her pace a bit and work through the upcoming waypoints with a bit of ease rather than urgency. Knowing that these challenges were more brain oriented than combat, she told herself to take the advantage of the lack of schedule and work in some down time…else she’d go crazy with frustration at not being able to find these damn boxes in any predictable manner.

She’d gotten in a brief workout before heading to sleep, going for a run outside of armor and doing some flexibility drills out in the snow as long as she could stand the cold, then warming up inside and doing some mediation work to further cleanse her mind enough that she could get to sleep without running things through her head nonstop. Without the long runs to drain her of energy she needed the release of the workouts, not to mention to maintain her fitness levels, which were going to take a significant hit if this mission dragged on as it was with her riding the speeder and not doing much more than looking around and small activities like digging and crawling.

Tomorrow…which would actually occur at night…she was going to start with a workout then head off to the next waypoint, hopefully do three or four then set up camp again and rest/train for a few more hours and continue splitting it up in that fashion going forward. If she tried to plan out a timetable going forward she was going to get frustrated, for these waypoints were meant to keep things unpredictable.

In order to counter that she had to let go of expectations and just play it out as events progressed. Not what she wanted to do initially, thinking of this mission as partially a race, but an Arc Commando had to adapt more than other soldiers, and to be prudent she stopped assuming there would be a finish to this mission and prepared herself for an unending one…which meant she had to sustain herself through training and supplies, to which end she began rationing her ambrosia usage, having a gut feeling that she was going to be maneuvered into a situation where she’d potentially be forced to run out and have to face that headache as well.

A little prudence now could possibly circumvent that, and she’d rather run low now and work through partial doses rather than have none at all later.

Then again she could just be getting paranoid, and that was yet another part of this mission, she was sure. Not knowing what was coming didn’t allow you to prepare for it, so it was left to guesswork and improvisation…both of which were unpredictable.

“Live in the moment,” she whispered to herself as her head hit the inflated pillow, “and be ready for anything.”

For now that meant getting to sleep, so she put all other concerns out of her mind and slipped off into blissful rest, grateful to have a warm structure to sleep in rather than roughing it in her armor.

4

July 9, 2896

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Jyra slid the last component into the plate-sized disc that she’d been assembling from all of the puzzle pieces and immediately saw the thing light up with power. Three gold lights appeared along with a countdown timer of 2:28. Frowning with both uncertainty and displeasure, the Commando realized this was another test and that she’d probably only get one shot at it. There were only three buttons on the entire device, each of which sat below the lights, so she pressed one and received a small hologram of a rotating triangle. Recognizing it as a prompt to level the device, she put the disc down on the ground and the triangle disappeared, immediately replaced by a foot and a half tall image of a metal skeleton.

“Oh no,” she moaned as it remained motionless. After a few seconds of it doing nothing she pressed another button that removed the hologram but put nothing in its place. Seeing the countdown continue, she didn’t have time to think it over so she pressed the third button and a holographic map appeared marking a series of locations.

On impulse she brought up her helmet’s empty map, save for the now useless waypoints, and aligned it with what she was seeing before placing new waypoints of her own at approximately the same spots as the map indicated, leaving her with 26 seconds remaining. Jyra hit the other buttons again, bringing back the metal skeleton and removing it with the ‘empty’ button. She tried a few combinations but got nothing new, then tossed the disc away from her and stepped behind a tree.

A moment later it exploded with energy, a bit of which hit her arm that hadn’t gotten tucked in behind the trunk. She felt a slight tingle of stun energy, then her armor pulled it out of her body and returned her limb to full functioning status, but armor or no, had she been holding that device when it went off she would have been rendered unconscious.

Jyra walked out of cover and looked at it, still lying on the ground where she had left it but with the three lights now gone. She assumed it was dead, and knew from previous examination of the pieces that it contained nothing of use, but something in the back of her mind said to take it with her. She had no obvious reason to do so, but if she ended up needing it later she didn’t want to have to spend hours or days searching the forest for this position.

It wasn’t going to fit in her pack, and worried that it might contain a hidden transmitter she decided to simply put a waypoint on this position on her map and leave the device where it lay. If it turned out she did need it later she’d know where to come to, assuming no one was out here and came to mess with it. That metal skeleton was a message, telling her that she was now going to be hunted and that her mission was to avoid capture. She also figured the stun blast was a way of giving her hunters a head start and she was glad she had gotten behind the tree when she did.

But there was still the matter of that second button. It had done nothing, but it did cancel the other two, as if it was supposed to be doing something…or was doing something that she didn’t see.

“I bet they had me transmitting my position,” she said in disgust, knowing that she had to get moving quickly. Investigating the points on the map was a priority, but getting out of here soon was paramount. She didn’t want to lose the speeder just yet, but it was almost out of charge and none of her supply drops had any additional batteries or a portable recharger in them. She could cannibalize her personal power supply to run the speeder for a short while, but she didn’t want to give up her living accommodations just yet, so she was going to preserve that power supply unless she ran into a pinch.

“Doing it to myself again,” she said as she ran over to the speeder that she’d parked a kilometer away before retrieving the last component from a box hidden in a camouflage blind that she’d only managed to find by tripping over it. She’d spent some 3 hours looking and had wanted to set up camp again, but she couldn’t here and maybe not at all going forward if what was after her was what she thought.

It could be trainers, but odds were they were drones, fitting in with this being a solitary test…and she bet there were going to be more of them than she had shots in her pistol for.

Jyra hopped on her speeder and took off, easing back up through the trees and into the clear air then heading towards one of her new waypoints, knowing that she wasn’t going to get even close to it, for it was located some 149 miles off, but fortunately all of them were clustered around that region within a radius of 20 or so miles. She hadn’t had time to study it intently, but intended to get as much distance out of her speeder as possible.

She kept searching the horizon looking for trouble headed her way, both from ahead and behind her, but nothing showed up during her 34 mile stint that ended with the warning light flaring, indicating that she was almost out of power. She ignored it and got another 2 miles in before the safety mechanisms activated and gradually dropped her down into the trees against her will…which sent her ramming into snow drifts and branches alike for a few seconds before all power went out and the speeder became a dead weight that got jammed on a thick branch before it could punch through the canopy and hit the ground.

“Worth,” she declared, forcing aside branches and crawling out of the gentle crash. Once free she jumped down to the ground and immediately began running, wanting to put some distance between herself and the speeder just in case it was being tracked. She made it some 12 miles before needing to stop and rest, with her setting up her tent-like building and establishing her defensive perimeter before taking a quick tingle shower, eating, and forcing herself to get to sleep…but this time she kept her armor on, save for her helmet, which she had beside her at arm’s reach along with her pistol.

She expected to wake up into a mess of trouble, but Jyra knew better than to try to go without sleep, and not setting up camp would be just as bad as being forced to flee and lose it, so knowing that she could rough it in her armor alone if needed, she’d decided to go ahead and make use of the heated interior and luxuries while she had them rather than to go without out of fear. That sort of self-induced punishment would fit this mission perfectly, and she didn’t feel like indulging her own discomfort.

The armor was cushioned interiorly, but it was by no means the equivalent of her blanket sleeve. That said, she wasn’t going to risk getting caught outside her armor, for it would take too long to put it back on even if she got a perimeter warning first. However the point was moot, because when her alarm woke her it wasn’t the danger version, but rather the time elapse she had programmed. She woke quickly and cleared her head, realizing that she’d gone the entire 7 hours without incident.

Not trusting her luck, she pulled her helmet on and grabbed her pistol, slipping outside and having a look around before shrugging and heading back inside to relieve herself, melt and store some water, and grab a bite to eat before packing up and heading off again. Through it all she kept wondering what exactly was chasing her and if they were out there actively looking or waiting for her to get to the region where the waypoints were.

If they wanted to track her it wouldn’t be hard once they stumbled across her trail. The speeder had avoided any footprints from the site of the message/stun bomb, but from the landing site on, the snow was leaving too good of tracks for anyone to miss. Unfortunately that couldn’t be helped unless she wanted to try and lose pursuit by climbing up into the trees and traveling from branch to branch for a bit, but that would take forever and only get her a short distance…and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t pick up her new trail again, so she just decided to move on as she normally would and wait for the first sign of trouble before deciding what to do.

Knowing that if/when the hunters got to her she was going to be unable to rest, she took short running sessions and longer breaks, almost taunting the enemy to attack her. If they didn’t then she’d get rested up. If they did then she’d get to see who or what was after her well before she got to the waypoints and whatever trouble they represented.

But nothing came for her, and while she counted that as good fortune it also worried her. Something was in the works, and Jyra preferred knowing what it was and combating it rather than waiting for it to jump her unexpectedly.

Three days later, when she was approaching within a few miles of the first of the destination waypoints, knowing that she was going to have to look around a lot since she didn’t have a precise, to the meter, position on them, a buzzing sound began to approach from in front of her…then a moment later she realized it was coming from every direction. Slipping out her pistol into her left hand she stopped running and fell silent, listening and looking for the source.

She didn’t have to wait long before movement to her left caught her eye and a miniaturized spark drone appeared through the tree trunks…followed by another, and another, and who knew how many more, for Jyra didn’t stay put and sprinted off in a random direction. When she came up on another of the floating devices she fired a plasma lance directly into it and it agreeably dropped to the ground with the single hit. A full Spark-class drone would take a whole lot more damage, but this baby version clearly wasn’t designed the same. She’d never seen this version before but guessed they held weaponry even if they lacked shields and she didn’t want to linger around long enough to find out.

Unfortunately the four others nearby didn’t let her go so easily, firing off pink stun blasts and catching her in the upper right arm and lower left leg as she ran, though many more shots missed due to her agility and the tree trunks that got in the way. Her form got sloppy, but between the glancing hits, her armor absorbing and then soaking the energy that got through it back out of her body, Jyra managed to stay on her feet and running until her left foot suddenly gave out.

She tumbled to the ground, with her pack luckily having been latched on otherwise it would have been sheared off. Next thing she knew a metallic little quadruped resembling a gopher ran into her helmet and she heard/felt another stun blast. Thankfully most of her face wasn’t touching the inside of the helmet and the energy was dissipated around her head save for a patch on top. Her forehead went numb, but her arm swung accurately and punched the little thing off her before it could deliver another jolt.

Jyra climbed to a knee and shot another one of the things before jamming her numb leg into the ground and feeling some sensation return. She knew she hadn’t taken a full hit thanks to her armor, but the slowing effect was bad enough as she limped a single, broken step that turned into a repetitive, ugly stride that gradually smoothed out as she spent most of her pistol’s ammunition on keeping a few of the little machines off her and downing two more of the floating spheres before most of her running gait returned and she was able to get moving at decent speed.

That kept most of the machines off her, but as she stole glances behind at the sound of the persistent buzz she saw that the mini sparks were keeping pace with her, but apparently not firing until they got a decent shot. Weaving between trees as she was they wouldn’t be able to accomplish that until they were right on top of her, and at the moment there were none of the little critters nipping at her feet, but she didn’t have time to take a thorough look at the ground and assumed they were following as well.

Forcing herself to try and outrun them, she sprinted as much as her foot would allow and eventually outpaced them as her feeling returned, though the pins and needles only added to her stumbling until she eventually beat them into submission and had her full range of motion back. Knowing that stopping was a really bad idea she ran on, outdistancing her pursuit and hearing the buzz diminish while another source grew louder to her right. Veering away from it she ran and ran, finding more sources that kept following her.

It couldn’t be heat tracking, for her armor blocked her body’s infrared glow. It could be auditory or motion, but the denseness of the forest should let her get away from that eventually, for with the snow under her feet she wasn’t making much noise and even she couldn’t see the pursuit behind her when she glanced back. It could just be her imagination, but she had the feeling they had an advantage on her and she was quickly running through the available options of how that could have been engineered.

A spotter up top couldn’t see through the trees most of the time, but it was possible. There could also be tracking devices imbedded in the forest in this region, but that would have meant a whole lot of them out here because they didn’t know exactly where she was going to travel through. Beyond that she didn’t think…

Jyra had a flash of insight and a sinking feeling in her gut, then used a mix of audible, blink, and mental commands to search through her limited HUD options. There was nothing on the map save from the waypoints and she had no connectivity to the planetary battlemap, but that didn’t mean this armor’s operating system was any different from the others.

Digging into the options on the run was slow going, but she managed it without running into any trees or tripping over rocks as she checked out her hunch.

“Son of a bitch! I hate you guys…” she said, deactivating her helmet’s transponder that had been sending out a tracking signal. As soon as she did that Jyra took a hard left and ran perpendicular to her previous course, hoping to shake the pursuit behind her. She didn’t stop to try and hide, not sure if the signal had been the only way they’d kept on her scent, but with the other groups around she had to zig and zag quite a bit before she got away from that incessant buzzing.

But still she didn’t stop, running away from the region she was tasking to travel to and just putting distance between her and the machines before eventually allowing herself to rest and taking up position behind a thick tree while she waited and watched. Jyra stayed there for more than 20 minutes before finally allowing herself to sit down and dig into her HUD options again, pulling up the log and finding that the transponder had been activated days ago at approximately the same time she’d completed the disc.

“That stupid button turned it on…I did it to myself again!” she said inside the confines of her helmet, then forced herself to stop. Without instructions the only way to figure out what to do was to experiment, and not pressing all the buttons would have led her nowhere. There was a lesson in this, she realized, and it was that there wasn’t always a clear cut solution to follow. No protocol to trust in. Jyra had to take action and deal with the consequences, for staying put and doing nothing was a road to nowhere. When inaction wasn’t an option, well, she was just going to have to play things by ear and dig herself out of whatever trouble she got into.

Jyra didn’t like that, but this mission was showing her the hard way that the odds of her guessing right and having a ‘clean’ run were laughable. She had to be a scrapper, and mentally kicking her own ass was only going to slow her down. The trainers had set up this ambush and she’d fallen for it, and would probably fall for more to come. If she could avoid a few it would be by prudence and luck, but when she did fall for one she had to act quickly and adapt. Self-recriminations wouldn’t help, and in truth she hadn’t made a misstep, for that would require her having known or been told at some point what to do, and in this situation she was flying completely blind.

“Live, learn, and move on,” she reminded herself, but for the moment she just pulled her helmet off and sucked air, letting her body cool down what heat wasn’t being dissipated by the internal regulation systems as well as testing a theory as to whether or not the machines could track body heat.

A few minutes later when the buzzing started again and grew rapidly stronger she had her answer, with Jyra putting her helmet back on again and running off out of range and into a wide circle that eventually put her back on course towards the waypoints and whatever lovely surprises they held for her.

5

July 28, 2896

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Jyra dropped the final prize in her scavenger hunt on the tabletop in front of her Archon instructor, her body still covered in her white armor but with her helmet tucked under her right arm and a slight breeze carrying in fresh snowflakes through the open doorway to the forest outside.

“For the record,” she said with a stern look on her face. “I hate you.”

“Have some trouble?” San-1299 said innocently.

“Psshh,” Jyra said, closing her eyes and shaking her head.

“Learn anything?”

“Quite a bit, thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, sitting in a chair within the small modular firebase that had been dropped into this section of forest.

“How did you know I’d be here if you weren’t monitoring me?” she asked as the slowly falling precipitation outside blew in past her sweat-dampened hair and stuck in a few places.

“Perimeter scans. I only got here half an hour ago.”

“Hmmn…are we done, or is this just another waypoint?”

“This mission is complete, but you are far from done, Trainee.”

“How’d I do on time compared to the others?”

“Time isn’t a measurement on this one, simply completion.”

“But how did I compare?”

San looked up at her from his sitting position. “18th overall, but if time had been an element I believe the others would have gone faster.”

“Just curious as to how much trouble they had.”

“That I can’t tell you. We don’t monitor you, so unless you feel like telling stories, what happened to you out there is something only you know.”

Jyra leaned forward, setting her helmet on the table and propping her torso up on both extended arms. “So no one was controlling those little droids…or whatever they were?”

“Automation only.”

“You’ve programmed them well then.”

“They’ve been in the works for a while now, first designed to test the trailblazers in a special Trial. Since then we’ve found other uses for them.”

“You cleaning up the playground or leaving the ones I trashed out there?”

“The ones that are active will be recovered, along with anything else we spot, but we’re not searching miles of forest to pick up pieces.”

“Sloppy. And I will note that I found one of your earlier pieces with my boot.”

“If you didn’t see it that’s your fault. Plenty of rocks out there too.”

“It was buried in snow,” Jyra said in disgust, but she knew he was right. “It’s gonna get cluttered out there eventually.”

“If we had hundreds of thousands of trainees coming through it’d be a concern, but so far we’re only through a few hundred and this program is already 22 years old.”

“Funny. No one’s ever mentioned that before.”

“You’re training to become the elite of the elite…outside of the Archons anyway. Not even Arc Knights are being given the range and depth of training and responsibility that you are, if you complete the program.”

“Oh? I thought we were pretty much carbon copies.”

“Not at all. The Arc Knights have become public knowledge, more or less. The particulars, which you’ll learn about later, they don’t know, but their role is as limited as the Knights. They’re meant to dominate hand to hand combat, and the Arc Knights do so in much greater effect. You’re being trained to fight in a myriad of other ways, often quiet ways, which is why the few Arc Commandos out there now are active ghosts and we intend for it to stay that way. That’s why you get no special armor, whereas the Arc Knights do, color-wise anyway.”

“So you’re saying they’re just mega bruisers?”

“They’re smart mega bruisers.”

“And they didn’t have to go through this kind of bullshit scavenger hunt?”

“Nope. How are your food and ambrosia levels?”

“I’m alright.”

San nodded. “Some of the others came in on rationing. Two came in with nothing left and in not so good condition, but they chose to stick it out rather than hit the emergency transponder.”

“Would they have gotten a second chance if they did?”

“Let’s just say their course to becoming Arc Commandos would have veered down another path. You don’t get a second shot at this course…and you will never mention it to anyone else, save for other Arc Commandos that have already completed it. Understood?”

Jyra nodded.

“Just know, that this mission was a solitary affair, so you might want to keep what happened to yourself.”

“Why?”

“If you want to become an Arc Commando you need to get comfortable with keeping secrets from everyone else except yourself…and not because the rest of us are untrustworthy. We have to be able to trust one another, from the trailblazers down to the newest tech. But the thing with trust is that we don’t have to check up on each other. Like this mission, you will be entrusted to keep secrets of your own in order to aid Star Force. What they are only you will know, but it’ll be a backup in case we’re compromised someday.”

“Compromised? Are you talking technologically or traitors?”

“Both, though the latter should never happen. That said, we can never be sure. Take off your right glove.”

Jyra raised an eyebrow but did as told, disconnecting the armor piece and laying it on the table.

San raised his own hand. “With Archons you will learn that a handshake is more than a gesture. Take my hand.”

“Going to let me in on one of your tricks?”

“Just one,” San said, feeling her moist hand within his. “I want you to think of an alphanumeric sequence 4 digits long of your choice.”

There was a moment of silence, then San looked her in the eye and said aloud. “H93C.”

Jyra went wide-eyed. “What the hell? You can read my mind?”

San released her hand and waved his own fingers in the air before her. “It requires flesh to flesh contact for Humans, but with other races we can do it remotely so long as we’re not too far away.”

“How?”

“That’s a secret we will keep for now, but know that there are other races out there that can do the same. Fortunately none near the ADZ, but we know of at least one within the Nexus that has telepathic powers, and the Preema also have considerable ability in this area, to what extent we’re still not fully sure. I can tell you that it depends on the strength of the individual, and that the ‘power’ responds to training like other things.”

“You’re afraid of someone compromising security by being brain scanned?”

“It’s not a big worry at the moment, and Humans have some blocks that only allow flesh to flesh connections. That won’t protect the other races in Star Force, but we don’t think the Preema or the Dsevmat have touch telepathy. That should make Humans immune, and there are other ways to defend your mind, but the best defense is the person being interrogated not having the information in the first place.”

“Doesn’t exactly fit with the free flow of information that Star Force operates on.”

“We’re not going to start keeping people in the dark,” San assured her. “But there are already some secrets we have that even a Commando of your rank doesn’t know. It’s not even those I’m referring to when I’m referencing trust, but rather things that you will create going forward.”

“Create?”

“How do you feel when you’re depleted of ambrosia?” the Archon asked, seeming to change subjects.

“Not good,” Jyra admitted.

“Incapacitated?”

“Reduced,” she offered instead.

“Then if someone could destroy our ambrosia supplies we would be…reduced, and at a disadvantage. Unless someone hid a small stash that no one else knew about.”

San saw a spark of understanding in her eyes.

“That’s what I mean by trust. Arc Commandos will be trusted, encouraged, even expected to operate off the grid. It’s not a betrayal of oversight, for those who are trustworthy don’t require oversight. If we all know where everything is, then one of us being compromised, or even turning traitor, allows our enemies a battlemap. But if there are elements they do not know exist, or perhaps even do not expect to exist, they are at a disadvantage similar to what you just experienced on this mission.”

“I can only prepare for what is before me or what I know is out there,” Jyra translated. “Everything else I have to wait to deal with until it ambushes me.”

San raised a warning finger. “It’s not a matter of deception, not regarding other Star Force personnel. Trusting you means I don’t pry, and vice versa. Some people erroneously believe that trust means having no secrets, but in truth, trust means being comfortable with someone having secrets and having no worries about them betraying you. Secrets can be weapons, the more powerful my friends are the stronger Star Force becomes.”

“I get what you mean, and understand the significance of it, but other than playing packrat what do you have in mind for us to do?”

“Arc Commandos are given codes, some of which you are already learning to use, that will allow you to bypass security measures and go where you like. There will also be specialized equipment that Regulars don’t get, and some very specialized toys made specifically for Arc Commandos. But all of that isn’t the point. You have to learn to be sneaky on a regular basis, but to do so without disconnecting yourselves from the rest of us. Your ability to function as a team cannot be hindered. You have to learn how to switch from being a teammate to a rogue unit in a fraction of a second. It has to become a secondary mode that you can slip into, but the only way to train that skill is internally. We can’t train you to do that, or a lot of other stuff that Arc Commandos are mandated for.”

“So we each have to customize ourselves?”

“All people do, warriors more than others, and Arc Commandos even more so.”

“I’ve noticed something before, but didn’t think until now to ask. Why don’t you refer to us as soldiers?”

“I’m not a soldier. Neither are you.”

“I’m not?”

“Not if you’re in this program, no. Ideally no one within Star Force is, though that’s only partly true. What do you think a soldier actually is?”

“Someone who fights in an army.”

“That’s one definition…a simplistic one. Shut the door, it’s getting cold in here.”

Jyra turned around and hit the button on the inside of the door frame, with the view of the outside falling snow being eclipsed by the sliding panel.

“What a soldier actually is,” San explained, “is a hybrid. Take a normal person under the instruction of a warrior and the warrior passes on knowledge through instruction and training that the normal person would never have been able to accomplish on their own. Not because of a lack of time or resources, but because they don’t have an intuitive mind. They’re copy cats, people who grow strong from training but have no idea what they’re doing. They follow instructions but do not know how it is affecting them. I can write workouts for other people because I understand training. The people who do those workouts probably won’t, but by using my knowledge they gain power that they otherwise would never have achieved.”

“Then a warrior is…?”

“Someone who can self-navigate. All Commandos can to some degree, you’re not mindless machines following protocol and nothing else, which is why you’re part soldier, part warrior. Archons are full warriors, as are Arc Commandos.”

“Because we can operate off the grid without instructions.”

“Exactly. Soldiers are created by militaries. Militaries are created by warriors. Star Force doesn’t utilize traditional soldiers, like the lizards or Skarrons or hundreds of other races do. We recruit and encourage people to think, and if you can’t do that at least partially you don’t make the cut. That’s why Archons don’t usually refer to anyone within our military as soldiers.”

“We’ve always used that term as a matter of pride.”

“How so?”

“It separates us from the useless civilians…well, useless as far as combat. Techs aren’t useless. And technically the lazy ass freeloaders serve to increase the population, but being a soldier is a huge responsibility and honor. In a firefight we can’t rely on others to aim our weapons or micromanage our movements. We have to think on our feet and act quickly and effectively, else we’re probably going to get injured or killed. So I guess I’ve always thought of ‘soldiers’ as your definition of ‘warriors.’”

“Then I would amend your definition to include that soldiers operate partially within a framework that connects them to other soldiers, gives them missions, and takes a portion of the thinking process out of the equation. Warriors can and do fight in this manner, but they can also step away from it at will where a soldier cannot. If a trailblazer is commanding a naval fleet from within a nexus I trust they know what they’re doing and will follow their cues, which allows me to be more efficient in my tasks by taking some of the thinking involved and having another do it for me.”

“But if Arc Commandos operate off the grid,” Jyra said, making the full connection, “we have to do all the thinking, planning, and reacting ourselves. We can’t rely on anyone else.”

“And you have to thrive in that environment, not simply survive it.”

“And this mission was to prod those warrior circuits within me?”

“You can’t learn to improvise from others, or by studying. You have to grow through experience…hence we’re giving you an opportunity for that.”

“Without monitoring us to see if we’re succeeding?”

“You made it here, therefore you succeeded. How you did it is immaterial. Each Arc Commando will develop tendencies and skills. You’ll share some with each other, if you choose, and some you’ll develop exactly the same by coincidence. But having everyone operate in exactly the same way makes you predictable, and we don’t want that. Letting each of you develop individually, somewhat in secret, makes you more effective. It also allows you to discover new ways of doing things, which perhaps aren’t the best, but if you followed a protocol you wouldn’t experiment and discover them.”

“So chaos is our friend in this?”

“In the learning process, yes. The bulk of your training over the next year, if you can handle it, will be split between individual drills like this and a lot of co-op with one or two others. Arc Commandos aren’t just soloist, we want you to excel in small team functions as well, but do not get a team identity stuck in your head. You can share what you learn with each other, and we encourage you to, but you have to be able to be a rogue and a teammate at the same time with your peers. That’s not easy to do, even harder to explain, and it’ll be your ultimate hurdle to completing your training.”

“I have no idea how to do both simultaneously,” Jyra admitted.

“Most don’t at this stage. You have to develop both independently of each other before you can try and meld the two. It’s not something you pick up quickly, but we’ll be giving you a lot of headaches to learn from. Unless you gain the skills you won’t complete the final missions…but how you go about doing it is always up to you. One thing that you’re probably already aware of is that there are never any guarantees, and the missions going forward are going to emphasize that.”

“Oh goodie,” Jyra said sarcastically.

“Reality can hit harder than you think, especially in subtle ways. We’re giving you training sufficient enough to give you a taste of that. Going easy on you wouldn’t do you much good.”

“When this is all done and over with I might agree with you, but for right now I’m still pretty sure I hate you.”

San smiled. “That means the training is working.”

6

May 4, 2897

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Jyra held her inverted pose, hands steady on the floor and the blood rushing to her head being kept in check by years of training and prep to her body enough for her to actually be able to meditate while in the handstand. Right now she was in a good place, having cleared her mind and feeling the stress from the morning workouts and the mission the previous day seeping out as only a mediation would allow.

The trick was to remain active on a low level mentally, but not so deep that you fell asleep…which was why Jyra preferred the handstand, which made it impossible to nod off while one was keeping their balance, though at the moment it almost felt like she was anyway. If she stayed like this more than 40 minutes her head would start to pound and the inverted state would begin to get to her, but with each session that she did her elapsed time would increase, and had been doing so ever since her third year as a Commando when she finally learned to do a proper handstand that wasn’t requiring her constant concentration to hold.

Since then it’d become natural, though gravity still eventually won out and her insides would begin to complain at the inversion, but right now she had just enough tension in her body to maintain her form and simultaneously structure her mind enough that it gelled into a neutral state where she was listening to what was around her without making any noise, outside or inside her mind, and being an observer rather than a driver of events.

After a few more minutes she heard someone else enter the exclusive training area reserved for the Commandos invited to attempt the program, of which she was very near to completing. A few more weeks and she’d be at her final trial, but for today and tomorrow she was on a pure training block that was her responsibility to fill. At this level no one told her what workouts to do, for no one knew her body better than her and what it needed at this moment. Training was a way to customize oneself into what you wanted, and the only person that could truly do that for her was herself. Back in her maturia days the workouts had been provided so they’d get the benefits even if they didn’t understand what they were doing, but ever since entering this program she’d never been told to do so much as a pushup…rather given blocks of time such as this to work on her core fitness. The scheduled sessions were always new skill related, or for testing.

Jyra heard someone else join the six of them that were in the gymnasium, but this set of footsteps headed her way and seemed to stop nearby her empty corner where she was paralleling a wall without touching it. She opened her eyes slowly, then saw an upside down version of Keith standing in front of her.

“Need something?” she asked, holding the pose but mildly upset by the disturbance.

“You’re close to the end, aren’t you?”

“So I’m told.”

“How tough does it get?”

“Dude, I’ve told you before I can’t give away mission secrets.”

“I know that…and that’s not what I’m asking.”

“Then what are you asking?”

“Do you think I’ll make it through?”

Jyra sighed and gave up on her meditation, extending a foot back to the wall and kicking off and collapsing over into an upside down ‘V’ that she then stood up from, spinning around to face the slightly smaller man that was one of the newer faces here. “I have no way of knowing that.”

“But do you see any weaknesses that I should address?”

“Honestly I don’t know you that well.”

“Bull shit. If you’re like the rest of us you’ve studied the personnel files of everyone else here.”

Jyra raised an eyebrow. “That’s common practice?”

“You’re saying you didn’t?”

“No, it just didn’t come up in any of my previous discussions. In fact, most of my friends have moved on already.”

“Passed or washed out?”

“I don’t know of anyone who has washed out.”

“Really? I know two who have in the past month.”

“Who?”

“Mark Dalley and Henry Kirshner.”

“Washed out or quit?”

“I…don’t know, for sure. Either way they’re gone and they didn’t exactly stop by to state their reasons.”

“No one is allowed to talk upon departure. When someone passes their final trial they’re immediately removed. We know this going in.”

“What if they fail?”

“Then you wash out and don’t get a second chance.”

“Ouch,” Kevin said, realizing the implications of that. “Even Archons get a second shot at it.”

“Do they? I never heard more than rumors about their training.”

“I’ve got a few that are friends. One actually gave me the referral to this program. She said that if you fail the final Archon trial you have to start the program all over again with a new class…or quit.”

“Archons don’t quit.”

“I think that’s the point. Making them go through it all over again to test their commitment. But why the line of no return for us?”

“It makes sense.”

“How so?”

“You’re new, but you’ll get the vibe later in your training.”

“Vibe?”

“There’s an unofficial motto that’s been passed down through trainees here. ‘Do or do not. There is no try.’ I’d recommend you keep that in mind going forward.”

Kevin thought about it for a moment. “How does that apply to no second chances?”

“You have to find a way to make it happen.”

“That’s counter to everything Star Force stands for, training wise.”

“No.”

“No? What am I missing?”

“Arc Commandos are meant to be the elite, in ways that even I’m still learning. None of us are rookies, and we didn’t earn our way into this program, we were invited. I think the Archons are looking for people with special aptitudes and this training is meant to confirm those picks and enhance what we’re doing naturally. That’s pure speculation, but it’s been echoed by a few others that have come before me.”

“I thought everything could be trained, eventually? That’s why even the Archon tests can be taken an infinite number of times.”

“And yet those that do keep taking it over and over again don’t seem to ever make it.”

“I have no idea. Where did you hear that?”

“San. I asked him why we were chosen rather than tested, and he said they had an eye for talent that precluded the need for public testing…which would also defeat the purpose of keeping us a pseudo-secret. He said those who became Archons usually passed the test the first time, then mentioned something about ingenuity being difficult to measure, and if you can’t measure it you can’t train for it.”

“So why do they allow the extra testing?”

“I asked him that too. He said it was in case they were wrong and missed someone the first time.”

“That could apply here as well.”

“We didn’t come here untrained. Archons typically go in raw.”

“Some don’t.”

“And for some reason those late comers don’t end up setting records.”

“San tell you that?”

“No. I did some checking of my own.”

“You have access to Archon records?”

Jyra winked at him as she turned to the right and knelt down to pick up her water bottle. She stood up, took a long swig of it, then looked back at Kevin. “If you want some advice, I’d say stop worrying about prepping for anything specific and just try to be as well rounded in your skills as possible. They’re not going to tell you what’s coming, so there’s no point in running the possibilities through your head nonstop. Took me a while to learn that. Best to keep your mind empty until you have something current to chew on.”

Kevin frowned. “Weren’t we trained as Commandos to think ahead?”

“If you have something to work with. If you’re going in blind the mental games are just a waste of time.”

“And they keep us blind this entire program?”

“As far as I’ve come, yes.”

“Why?”

“I know now…and you will too, at the end.”

“That’s not helpful, but it is enticing.”

“While you’re here, could I entice you into some sparring?” Jyra asked, letting go her mediation and choosing to move on.

“Fair enough since I interrupted you.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Well if you put it that way, never mind.”

“No, no…you misunderstand. I’m the rookie here, obviously, and I’d like to help out the experienced ones if I can rather than being a drag. San said I should ask for help and advice, but I’d prefer more of a two way street.”

“We all do, so don’t sweat it. I usually end up sparring with bots because everyone else is busy, so if you’ve got some time I could use an opponent that can think.”

“Happy to. How hard do you want?”

“Don’t hold back,” she said, gesturing to an open ring nearby and walking towards it.

“Um, don’t mean to brag, but my Commando ranking is 18 levels above yours.”

“I know.”

“So you want to get beat up?”

“If you want to help me, give me a challenge.”

“As you wish,” Kevin said, stepping into the ring and flexing his shoulders a bit. “How do you want to do this?”

“I need some arm work.”

“Alright,” he said, mentally disconnecting most of his movement options and leg attacks/defenses and prepping himself to go at it with his upper body only in a series of drills that were competitive, but designed to test and train reflexes more than determine a winner. “Ready when you are.”

Two weeks later Jyra met San at a door in the training facility that she’d never seen the other side of and hadn’t been able to use her codes to bypass. She’d spent several hours sneaking around trying to find out what was behind all the locked doors and this was one of the few that she could never access…but to her dismay it opened for San simply as he walked up to it and motioned her to go inside.

She stepped through into darkness, walking into a room that only had the angular slab of light coming in through the door to guide her, then it disappeared plunging everything into darkness. A moment later the lights came on and a solitary pillar stood at the center of the room some 30 meters in front of her in the circular chamber.

“Your final mission,” San said, staying in the small tunnel between door and wall perimeter, “is to reach the top and retrieve the object there. You pass when you bring it back and place it in my hand. Clear?”

“Clear as mud,” Jyra answered as she looked around for potential hazards hidden in the open architecture. “Time limit?”

“Preferably sometime before lunch.”

Jyra rolled her eyes, but San was standing behind her and couldn’t see. “Anything else you’d like to add?”

“Nope.”

“Wonderful,” she said, standing still and glad she hadn’t already set off some sort of trap. The floor was solid and flat, or at least appeared to be. Same went for the walls and ceiling, but the pillar had grooves in it. Irregular pattern and easy to conceal crap in, but it was the smoothness that truly concerned her, for she suspected there was something beneath hidden doors or maybe even camouflaged via holograms out there…yeah, with so much empty space holograms were probably in use.

Not liking this one bit and knowing that failure would see her out of the program entirely, she took a small step forward and waited, getting no response. She took another, again without any reaction and San being totally silent only made the situation worse. Jyra had no idea where the attack would come from, but multiple options were flowing through her head as she thought about what might be here. There was no proof either way, so all she had to work with was experimentation.

To that end she stood still and pulled her shirt off, revealing the jog bra she had underneath as she wadded the garment up into a ball, tying the sleeves together so it wouldn’t unravel in the air turbulence, then threw it towards the pillar. It sailed in a clean arc and hit the side, bouncing off lightly to hit the ground nearby where it rolled to a halt without drawing any reaction whatsoever.

Jyra’s lip curled to the right in a curious frown. That left her with no option other than walking up to the pillar and taking her chances, so she took another baby step and proceeded with that tactic over the next few minutes, taking her precious time and trying to play this safe…but at the same time knowing from all her training that there usually wasn’t a ‘safe’ play to make and that she’d just have to wing this given the lack of data for her to use in order to minimize what were as of now unseen hazards.

Closer and closer she crept, with every step and lack of response making her more nervous all the way up to the pillar. She refrained from touching it and made a slow circle around it, inspecting the grooves carefully and looking for clues. Nothing appeared to be there, aside from useful finger and toe holds, but the lines and indents almost looked like a form of writing. If it said ‘don’t do that’ and she went ahead and did Jyra would be kicking herself for the rest of her life, so she took her time again and tried to decipher what she was seeing.

But it was no use, which left her with two options: keep trying and not rush into a bad situation…or rush into it and avoid spending forever here looking at something that wasn’t actually text. Either way it made sense as a way for her to display her stupidity and punish herself, which was definitely this program’s mojo. One thing she could do was pick up her shirt, so she walked around to it and retrieved her projectile, but before putting it back on she stepped back and hurled it up to the top of the 8 meter high pillar.

She tossed it several times, hitting different sections, but there was still no response. Eventually she untied it and put it back on, then walked up to the pillar and hesitated before touching it, half expecting to get a stun shock from contact. Jyra thought through everything for the hundredth time, but if there was something for her to figure out here she was either missing it or was being duped into wasting time prior to climbing the pillar. She could wait here as long as she wanted chewing on this, for rushing wasn’t worth screwing this up…but at the same time she would be waiting here indefinitely if there was nothing to find.

Once again there was no right course to follow, at least not an obvious one, so she gave herself a few more minutes to think before she started climbing. When nothing came of it she reached out gently and touched the pillar with her left index finger…again drawing no reaction.

Jyra bit her lip and committed herself to this, spotting finger and toe holds a moment before she reached out and got her weight off the floor, hanging a few inches up as she very slowly began to climb. The indentations weren’t deep, but they were much easier to manage than some of the climbing walls she’d been training on. Fortunately she didn’t have to search minutes for the next hold and could make her way up fairly fast if she wanted, but the Commando instead decided to take a ponderously long time climbing as she was looking for any deviation in the pillar or room, for something coming up behind her when she wasn’t watching would fit just right into this situation.

Every meter she climbed she grew more nervous, feeling the moment coming as the distance shrank. When she was hanging directly under the top she stopped, taking another long look around before finally sliding her fingertips up on top of the flat cap while holding on firmly with her other three grip points, expecting to be stunned or attacked in some way that would toss her off and onto the hard ground below.

When her fingers brushed the top…nothing happened. She pulled herself up a bit more and got her eye line over the edge, seeing a small blue orb sitting suspended in a field, either energy or magnetic, but it was hovering an inch over a slight depression. Now guessing that it was either protected or would trigger the fireworks when removed, Jyra moved up more and got her elbow on top before reaching out and waving a hand around the object in multiple directions, feeling for something invisible. Nothing triggered, so she bit her lip again, making sure her grip points were solid, then reached out and grasped the orb.

When her hand hit it she felt a bobble, but otherwise nothing happened. She held it in place for a moment, then pulled it away while glancing around. Wanting her hand free she tucked it awkwardly inside her bra, giving her a third breast, then got her hand back onto the grooves and began to slowly climb down, expecting something to jump or shoot her and monitoring what she could see of the walls and floor intently. Stopping just before she reached the bottom, Jyra extended her left foot out and tapped the floor, half expecting it to fall out beneath her.

Again, nothing happened and she got the feeling that she was about to run into an idiot trap just shy of completing the mission. San had said she had to get it back to him, and he wasn’t walking out to congratulate her. Nor had he moved from the short walkway, suggesting that the floor outside, or maybe the airspace, wasn’t safe. She wished there was a way to smoke out whatever was waiting for her other than using her own body, but that was a luxury she didn’t have in this situation.

She stepped down onto the floor, hanging onto a pair of grooves with her hands just in case, but when the floor didn’t disappear beneath her she began walking around the pillar until she was on a straight line to San.

That might not be a good idea. Maybe she had to approach from a flanking angle to avoid triggering the trap. Damn it, she wished she had something to work with here, but the chamber was exactly the same as it had been when she…

No, wait. Something was different. There was a smell that wasn’t there before. It was faint and coppery, almost undetectable, but it definitely had not been there before. Jyra didn’t recognize it but thought fast, wondering what it could be as the scent increased in intensity. She definitely did not like the feel of this and took another step forward, thinking hard.

Another step followed but still no response. Feeling like she was about to walk into a huge trap she continued forward, for the smell was increasing like a countdown. When she was a third of the way to San she abandoned the tiny steps and just walked normally, looking down and around and on her guard as much as she could be. She got to the halfway point and continued strolling on as the smell increased to the point that it felt like it was starting to clog her nose.

With the tension in her running at an all-time high she walked the last few meters and up in front of San who held out his hand. Glancing right and left she looked for something to attack her at the last moment, then cringed and pulled out the orb and reached it towards him…

The palm-sized ball landed neatly in his hand and his fingers curled up around it as she let go.

“Well done,” he said, tossing it into the air playfully and catching it again.

Jyra frowned. “That’s it?”

San nodded. “What were you expecting?”

“Oh fuck that!” she said, backtracking a few steps and closing her eyes in vexation before clenching her hands into angry fists and mentally kicking herself for letting him do it to her again. “What the hell is this?”

“Your final trial,” he said casually.

“What, climbing that?”

“I said it was your final trial. I never said it would be hard.”

“Fuck you, San. Do you have any idea…oh, damn it. I did it all to myself again, didn’t I?”

“Well, you certainly didn’t set any speed records, but you still completed the mission.”

“So the whole, ‘you only get one shot at this’ was just a load of bull?”

“No, you did only get one shot. If you can’t climb that and grab a stupid ball,” he said, tossing and catching it again for emphasis, “then there’s no way in hell you deserve to be a Commando, let alone an Arc Commando.”

“I really hate you now.”

“I did nothing.”

“That’s exactly why. You made me kick my own ass again,” she said, letting a bit of a smile slip. Through it all she hadn’t missed the fact that she had actually passed, worthless of a final test as this was.

“Sometimes the mission is a lot simpler than you think.”

“Final lesson then?”

“If you ever stop learning, then quit and go civie. We have to stay adaptable. Come on then, what are you waiting for. We’ve got stuff to do.”

“Like what?”

“Like making you an Arc Commando. It’s not just a title you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Follow me and find out,” San said, turning and walking off with the door opening before him again. He left Jyra there until she jolted out of her angry/happy stupor and jogged a few steps to catch back up with him as they left the final challenge chamber and its coppery stench, heading off to who knew where.

7

May 6, 2897

Solar System

Earth

The mantis Jyra and San were flying in set down on a pad atop an unremarkable bioharvest facility in Antarctica, with the Commando eyeing him questioningly.

“Can I talk now?”

San rolled his eyes. “Follow me,” he said as the boarding ramp opened and the two passengers got out, stepping down onto the thin layer of snow amidst a storm that was kept back via a bubble shield covering the landing pads. It was coming down so hard that the few times it had to be lowered to allow ships to come and go the falling snow had blanketed the surface. The temperature was frigid regardless, causing the Archon to shiver a bit when it first hit him, but he walked across the snowy tarmac to the nearest visible bunker that contained a lift down into the facility.

Jyra walked behind him, wrapping her arms around herself and wishing she had her armor on instead of a casual uniform, but they spent no more than 20 seconds outside before stepping through the door and into a lift shaft that wasn’t much warmer. They traveled down a few levels then a wall of warm air hit her as they stepped into the facility and San headed off without saying a word.

“Come on,” she whispered as they passed several workers. “Tell me something.”

“We’re not here for a snack,” he said, then continued on through the unfamiliar hallways making twists and turns as if he’d come here a lot. To her it just looked like a cramped facility maximized for volume output and turned into a cozy labyrinth as a result. She had no idea what they’d do in this place, but she had a sneaking suspicion it didn’t involve food.

Eventually they turned a corner and ran smack into a guarded checkpoint…with six Commandos in armor standing in front of a closed door. San put his hand on a scanner that identified him as an Archon mage, which gave him the authority to bring guests past the doors, though he’d need to have Jyra logged in as well, so he stepped to the side and pointed her to the scanner.

She raised an eyebrow when her ID popped up as a hologram, similar to San’s, except hers was labeled ‘Arc Commando.’ The guards exchanged glances with each other, but didn’t say anything. They let them both pass and San opened the door with a special code that he tapped into a rubrics cube-like color system.

“What you see beyond this point doesn’t exist. Understood?” San asked as he was punching squares with his fingertip.

“Understood,” Jyra said, her curiosity and eagerness spiking.

The doors pulled open and revealed a personnel lift, into which the pair walked but San didn’t turn around to face the door. Jyra mimicked him and kept her back to the guards, then the doors shut and they began to move, though neither could feel it given the IDF field insulating them from inertia. Should the lift fall they’d live through a crash…so long as something spikey didn’t come shooting up through the floor to impale them.

“Where are we going?”

“To the beginning,” San said cryptically. “What you’re about to see is why Davis began Star Force in the first place, and why we’re in constant danger.”

“Danger? From the lizards?” she asked, expecting that not to be right.

“No. They’re pushovers. You, me, every Human in existence descends from Zen’zat, which are an altered form of Ter’nat. Zen’zat were never meant to reproduce, so our psionic legacy has gone dormant over time. I was brought here to wake mine up when I became an Archon, and the same is true of the Arc Knights. More recently the Arc Commandos have joined us and a limited number of highly placed civilians. I have dozens of abilities, but all of us have a basic 7. Yours never developed because they were genetically inactive. By the end of today that will no longer be the case.”

The wall in front of them opened into a concealed set of doors leading them out onto a wide landing platform…save for they were underground in a very tall chamber, on the other side of which was an angled wall made of a green/black material that was unlike anything Star Force used and clashed with the walls and floor halfway up to it, then the footing changed over to the same material.

“Welcome home,” San said, starting to walk across the artificial platform built to nestle up against the tiered nature of the huge structure in order to create a flat plain that stretched off into the distance so far that Jyra couldn’t see the end of it, but she did see a couple of parked mechs nearby, both combat models, along with a host of industrial mechs, hover trucks, and smaller bits of equipment.

“What is this place?” she asked, wide eyed as a group of workers were shipping Star Force crates in through a gigantic open doorway, ostensibly from another lift shaft more accommodating cargo traffic.

“Davis found it buried underneath the snow of Antarctica and began a clandestine excavation project. It’s a massive pyramid miles wide, built of a technology that we are still trying to master. It’s been driving our technological progress all these years, but we still haven’t caught up yet.”

“These Ter’nat built it?”

“No. Ter’nat are a slave race that Zen’zat are pulled from, then enhanced to function as infantry for a conglomeration of races called the V’kit’no’sat. Their empire suffered a civil war when one of them rebelled and it caused the outer border regions to be abandoned. Earth was one of numerous worlds that held colonies out in what is the wilds as far as the V’kit’no’sat are concerned,” he said as they crossed from the Star Force deck plates onto the green/black stone. “A battle was fought here, in which the rebels won. They trashed the planet and left, but apparently a few Zen’zat were missed and became our ancestors. Abandoned here and choosing to reproduce against their mandate.”

“Mandate?”

“Zen’zat serve the V’kit’no’sat as individuals because the Ter’nat race is considered inferior. When one is upgraded into a Zen’zat, they are forbidden from reproducing in exchange for the enhancements given to them. Passing on those enhancements to offspring is a treasonous offense. The Zen’zat and their offspring would both be killed. If the V’kit’no’sat ever return to reclaim their lost colony they will kill us all.”

Jyra considered that for a moment, still not fully understanding but making several connections. The purpose of the Archons and the military throughout Star Force history now got a thorough revamp in her mind, leading to the obvious question.

“Where are they?”

“Most of their empire exists in the galactic core. We only have outdated maps, but it stretches to cover so much territory that it makes the Skarron domain look small.”

“Shit,” Jyra said as they approached the doors and a row of mongooses parked outside.

“Climb on behind me,” San said, sliding onto the nearest one. “It’ll take forever to get around inside if we walk.”

“Who are these other races that make up the…Vick.”

“V’kit’no’sat,” San repeated as she slid on behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He stared up the mongoose and slowly wheeled them over towards the huge doors, avoiding the light traffic coming in and out that kept the pyramid supply lines functioning. “Did the maturias mention anything about dinosaurs?”

“No, but I’ve heard of them in some video games.”

“The dinosaurs are the V’kit’no’sat. We found their skeletal remains long before this place. Everyone thought they were primitives, but in truth they’re superior to Humans.”

“Superior how?”

“Smarter, stronger, sometimes faster, and a whole lot bigger,” he said as they passed through the doors and Jyra could see the size of the interior hallways. “Hence the supersized infrastructure.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, taking it all in as San drove them on.

“Nope. And even after eight and a half centuries, with this place and their database fully at our disposal, we still haven’t caught up with them tech wise. Psionics, however, we’re a bit more even. We even have a few advantages that we don’t…or more accurately, the trailblazers do. That’s a story we’ll get into later. The reason you’re here, in addition to letting you see all this, is to use the medical tech to give your genetics a scrubbing and get rid of all the rust. It’ll also enable you to grow the tissues you’re missing without complications and do so in a matter of seconds. We can’t match that yet with our own tech, but every year that passes we come closer.”

“So you’re saying we all have dormant superpowers?”

“The basic 7, yes. Upgrades have to be earned through the unlocking of genetic triggers. You have the potential for those, but the Archons have figured out how to share them with each other. When I reached padawan rank I was given a lot of new ones by my mage master. For Arc Knights and Arc Commandos it’s different, and to be honest we’re not totally sure about where both will go, but that won’t matter to you for a long time, because Archons have to be a mid level ranger before they’re even physically capable of sharing abilities. We’re not supposed to be able to do it. It’s a glitch we stumbled upon, and yet another reason why the V’kit’no’sat will kill us on sight.”

“How many people know about this?”

“Every Archon and a lot of upper level personnel. Pretty much those who need to know and those we trust not to spill the secret.”

“And there haven’t been any leaks in 800 years?” she asked disbelievingly as San drove them up a ramp next to what looked like oddly shaped, giant-sized stairs.

“About this site, no. But people know Archons have powers, even if we never officially confirmed that.”

“Do our allies know about this place?”

“No. And only Humans within Star Force know of it…save for the Dragons.”

“There are dragons?”

“Long story. And it’s something most Archons don’t know about either.”

“So you can’t tell me?”

“I can, and will, but there’s a lot for you to absorb and I don’t want to jump ahead to the details when you’re just learning the basics. In fact, you’ll know a few things that most lower level Archons don’t after we’re done, so keep them to yourself.”

“What about other Arc Commandos, or Arc Knights?”

“Arc Commandos you can discuss anything with. Arc Knights have a different mandate and do not have a full picture. They’re brought here and let in on the secret when they get their genetic wash, but their focus is on dominating hand to hand combat. Yours is more broad in scope and you need to be in the know.”

“Makes your pain in the ass training worth it,” she said, looking around at what appeared to be a busy city with Human techs and a few Archons moving about everywhere. “Almost.”

“If it was easy anyone could do it.”

“I’m not going to argue with you today.”

“That’ll be new,” San said, transitioning over to another up ramp. “The Zen’zat levels are near the top. After you get your treatment we’ll spend a couple days exploring and get you up to speed…somewhat.”

“How much danger are we in at the moment?”

“We never know. The V’kit’no’sat are too far away for us to spy on, and we’ve decided not to try, else we risk revealing ourselves. We’re basically holding our breath and hoping they don’t show up today, and it’s been that way ever since day 1.”

“That’s crazy.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“How far ahead of us are they, military wise?”

“We can scratch them now navally, and Zen’zat vs Archon is pretty much even, but bottom line is we can’t stand toe to toe with them and hope to survive. If they come we have to run, and will probably lose a lot of people anyway.”

“I thought you said we had their database? What’s in it?”

“Everything. But their tech is so advanced we’re still trying to figure out the intricacies of it. Now that we have the star forges we’re making more rapid progress, but we’re not going to get caught up anytime soon.”

“What’s a star forge?”

“Mining facility that pulls rare materials out of stars. The V’kit’no’sat weapons and other tech require compounds that we couldn’t synthesize or mine prior to the star forges’ development.”

“Where are they at?”

“When you get your real codes you’ll be able to fish that out of our databases. The ones you’ve been using in training were limited.”

“I get the feeling that Arc Commandos are a bit higher level than I thought.”

“You’re an experiment,” San said honestly. “What you become is ultimately up to you. We’re giving you our tools and knowledge with a much smaller focus. Even though there are only a few hundred of you right now, and there are over a million Archons, we don’t have enough Archons to accomplish all we need to. Some of those duties, specifically strike missions, will be given over to you, but what your eventual incarnation will be is still up in the air.”

“So you’re basically giving us all the cool toys and saying ‘impress us?’”

“Pretty much.”

“No pressure,” Jyra said as they passed, or rather were passed by a group of what she assumed were Archons out of their armor and running in formation along the traffic flow, then darting off across a huge cavern that had Star Force buildings set up inside it.

“One step at a time, youngling. And your first step is getting your basic psionics. After that things begin to get interesting.”

“And this isn’t?” Jyra said, referring to everything around her.

“Right now you’re the equivalent of a tourist. Once you get your psionics you’re going to see things in entirely new ways…especially considering one of them, called Pefbar, allows you to see in every direction simultaneously.”

“How?”

“It works like a sensor, and there’s no point in trying to explain it now. You’ll have your own inside the hour.”

“An hour? This treatment works that fast?”

San laughed. “Remember this moment when we discuss flash growth and ascensions later. Your tissue growth is going to be painless.”

“And yours wasn’t?”

“Like I said, things get interesting, and very complicated, going forward.”

“I’m game.”

“Good, because you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

8

May 12, 2897

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Jyra rode her speeder just above the treetops, save for these weren’t covered with snowdrifts. While a lot of her field training had been in the frozen forests of the planet, a few missions had been to the warmer regions but none had been to the southern hemisphere’s region 3 that she was now zipping through. The forest was denser here than anywhere else on the planet and bordered on jungle humidity, making it impossible to fly through the trees at any speed.

She couldn’t feel the heat in her armor, but that wouldn’t be an issue either way today. She was no longer being sent on training missions, for with her Tier 1 psionics being unlocked and her enlightening tour throughout the V’kit’no’sat pyramid, her time in the program was at an end. When she had returned to Corneria it was as a full Arc Commando with a new assignment.

That assignment hadn’t been spelled out, though San had insisted that this wasn’t another test. He said she’d get all the information she needed when she arrived on site, so Jyra had grabbed a speeder from within one of the cities that ringed the region 3 forest and headed for the coordinates he’d given her.

It was a long way to travel, but on a speeder it was easy enough. A few hours of zipping over the treetops brought her to the upper third of the unused wilderness area where she saw nothing on the battlemap. Not a city, building, outpost, or relay beacon. It was called a wilderness area for a reason, and there was nothing here as far as the interlinked Star Force comm systems could tell, but San had also given her a code to use at these coordinates, so when Jyra hit the approximate area she typed it into the speeder’s comm board and transmitted it in a single pulse.

She got an instantaneous reply, also a single pulse, that updated her battlemap with a ghost icon…meaning that it wasn’t an active signal, but a memory of the location the pulse had identified. It wasn’t exactly matching the coordinates that San had given her but fairly close by and only took Jyra another 3 minutes to get there.

The Arc Commando slowed to a stop, looking down at the thick trees and seeing nothing despite sitting directly on top of the waypoint that was on both her helmet and her comm board. She sent out the signal again, but this time there was no response. Jyra tried twice more but nada. The transponder was silent.

“Single use code. Savvy,” she said, looking for a place to push down through the treetops. There was literally nothing below her, so she flew off a hundred meters or so to the south and found a nook that she very carefully lowered her speeder into, finding it a shallow depression rather than a shaft to the ground.

“Crap,” she said, not seeing where to go and also not wanting to just try and break branches that she couldn’t see through the leaves…or could she?

Concentrating, Jyra was able to turn her new Pefbar on and see all around her. The sense still freaked her out a bit and only stretched a couple of meters, but it let her see each and every leaf, including the branches they were attached to below her. Her mind was overwhelmed with sensor detail and she couldn’t hold it for long, but she got just enough information that when she did release it back to her normal senses she knew to move the bike two meters to the left then depress one.

Jyra sank on her metal steed with a sea of leaves moving in around her standard issue, dirty white armor as she turned her spherical sight on again and plotted her next bit of movement…which was forward a meter and a half, then to the right one. After that her head sank into the leaves and out of the sunlight, with her continuing to navigate down through the thick canopy until she finally got her speeder into the void below.

Very little light made it this far down, leaving it perpetually dark with just a green glow emanating from above like a nightlight. Aside from a bit of hardy grass there was no underbrush, just tightly packed tree trunks that looked like toothpicks for their lack of limbs this far down. Jyra had to move slowly, making constant twists and turns, but she was able to find enough gaps to fly between the trees and back over to the waypoint.

“Hiding in anonymity, huh?” she said as she parked her speeder on the ground, deactivating the anti-grav after extending the landing gear. She slid off the pommel seat and walked a few steps over to the simple circular hatch just sitting on the forest floor. It wasn’t camouflaged at all, but it was flat to the ground without so much as a lip sticking up, meaning you’d have to be standing next to it in order to see it, and with hundreds of miles of forest to search through, this was pretty much as hidden as you needed.

Still, Jyra thought you could have covered it with dirt and left a smaller marker up top.

The newly minted Arc Commando took a knee and slid her armored fingers into the small lip near the edge, finding an overhang to give her enough grip to lift the circular plug up a few inches but no further. It took her a moment to realize it was on a pivot point, then she rotated it around to expose a short shaft and ladder that bottomed out about 4 meters below, though she had to use her nightvision to see that, for the forest was too dark and her Pefbar wouldn’t reach that far.

Jyra stepped over the edge and climbed down the ladder, leaving the hatch open for the moment, and eventually stepped off into a small room barely wider than arms’ reach. A glowing marker on the wall was visible, but only in nightvision, highlighting an area with a simple circle. She walked over to it and ran her hand along the wall, finding nothing there. Feeling like this was another test, she used her knew psionics to look into the wall where she saw a small interior switch.

Jyra bit her lip. Her telekinesis, which the V’kit’no’sat called ‘Lachka,’ was very hard to use and she had almost no power in it at all at this point, but apparently the switch had been designed with that in mind. Using her Pefbar to watch and control the Lachka, she reached past the solid wall and just brushed the stick-like switch inside. It moved slightly, but apparently that was enough, for a section of the left wall pushed inward then transitioned to the side revealing a lit hallway that stretched on a considerable way before dead-ending.

“Cool,” she said, walking down the very narrow walkway that would force anyone passing another to scrunch up against the walls. The ceiling was low too, so much so that a Knight would have to duck down…or a Zen’zat, for they were the size of Knights.

When she got to the end of the hall it had a stairway descending to the right, which she followed down for some distance as it curled around itself in a boxy corners, eventually dumping her out into a wide room that had a thick, but open door. It was what one would call a ‘blast door’ but at the moment it wasn’t attempting to keep anyone out, and considering the two turrets built into the walls flanking it, she was pretty sure this was a kill box that could be used in case of attack to defend whatever was beyond this point, for all she could see was a short hallway leading to what looked like another dead end.

Jyra walked past the retracted blast door, seeing that it was about 14 inches thick. Overkill, unless what was down here was really important.

When she came to the end of the hallway there were two staircases headed off in either direction, but they were only a few steps deep and allowed her the view of a large room in each. She went right, then realized that it was actually one giant room that the hallway was blocked from view of.

There was no one here, but it was definitely meant to be lived in. There were couches, vid screens, tables, stools, what looked like a kitchen and storage cabinets. Jyra walked further in, then saw that on the backside of the stairway ‘T’ was a wall with a holographic scene playing out from Star Wars, particularly the battle of Nephosis in episode 19, but when she got within a meter of it the sight of Jedi fighting off rock monsters disappeared and a real life Commando replaced the fiction.

In front of him were three colored orbs, which Jyra knew were message prompts. She touched the green one first, for basic information was usually colored as such.

“Hello, Arc Commando. This facility is what we refer to as the ‘Nest.’ Archons have their sanctums, we have our nests. This is where you will do the bulk of your psionic training, though in a pinch you can also use the sanctums. You have code access, and if a lower level Archon questions you being there, just show them your psionics and that should confuse them enough to not bother you. Right now only rangers and above know about Arc Commandos, so feel free to masquerade as an Archon in order to get your workouts done in the field that require the special training equipment for your psionics.”

“But usually we will come to a facility such as this to do the majority of our training in private. This is where we develop and hone our skills, as well as share experience and help one another when we cross paths. The Archons have left instruction manuals on the psionics, but they will not teach us how to use them personally. They want us to develop them on our own, tailoring their use to our needs, and perhaps discovering a new trick or two that we otherwise wouldn’t if we just patterned after them.”

“The bottom line is, this is Arc Commando territory only. Even the Archons don’t come here and it’s completely off the grid. No battlemap location, and information is acquired through a landline tap of the closest cities so there is no signal to trace back here. We’re ghosts here, and intend to keep it that way, so don’t ever bring guests.”

“Beyond that we are Arc Commandos and charting our own path. Learn from those that have come before you while also figuring things out on your own. The Archons didn’t develop their corps quickly, and neither will we. Patience, persistence, and ingenuity will shape our legion going forward. Add what you can and welcome to the club.”

The hologram ceased talking, so Jyra hit the yellow button and the image of the armored man disappeared, replaced by lists of data. She realized they were an instruction manual of sorts…and 259 pages long. Not going to sift through that all right now, she pressed the red button and a holographic schematic of the facility replaced the data, with her realizing that this room was but the tip of the iceberg. It was as big or bigger than an Archon sanctum, and from the look of it held numerous training chambers, some of which were labeled for things that she wasn’t familiar with yet, though the track and pool were obvious.

“Damn, we’ve got a halo track here?” she said with a laugh, knowing those were only for individuals too fast to use a standard one. Jyra zoomed in and out on the map, wondering how the hell they had built this place without tearing up the forest above. Remembering what the man had said, she moved around the schematic until she found the landlines, which were buried cables stretching out in three directions from the facility all the way across the forest to the bordering cities.

Which meant someone had dug tiny tunnels across hundreds of miles in order to keep this place off the map. And now that she looked at it, the upper coating of the facility was made of sensor dampening armor, meaning it would be very difficult for orbit or aerial scans to detect the difference between this place and the bedrock it had been carved out of.

“They certainly threw in all the bells and whistles on this one,” she said, disconnecting her helmet and tossing it onto a nearby couch, then thought twice and decided to shed all her armor before she started to have a look around. The pieces of it ended up on the seat cushions as well, then Jyra found one of two other entrance/exits to the commons room and began walking the corridors in her casual uniform, wondering if anyone else was here.

It wasn’t until a few hours later, when she started to rifle through the more than ample food stores that she found the ‘welcome button,’ for that’s literally what it was labeled on the wall behind the holographic Star Wars battle. It was oddly hidden there, for she only saw it during a few sequences where there were gaps to see through.

She poked her head behind the active hologram, then saw a few sentences explaining what it was for. Press the button and a signal would go out through the entire facility letting them know someone had just arrived, so she did just that and decided to hang out here until someone came to her. That said, she knew there were only a few hundred Arc Commandos, so she wasn’t sure how many there would be stationed here for training.

As she walked over and sat down on the couch, pulling up the vid feeds from the cities and finding a movie to watch she realized her speeder was parked up top…and she hadn’t seen any others. With a frown she walked over to a terminal in the room and began going through the database she had found earlier looking for some type of hangar, or at least a protocol for what she should do with it.

When she couldn’t find anything in the search function she went back over to the hologram and tried there, rifling through the pages of instructions that seemed to be for newbs like her. They weren’t indexed, so she had to go through them line by line and decided to make an event out of it, for everything she came across seemed to be of importance.

Before she found out about ‘parking’ she came to a section that indicated they had to check in and out of the facility for it was rarely used. If someone was here a small orb would appear at the top of the hologram. Jyra let it go back to the Star Wars sequence just to be sure, but there were no floating orbs on top of it, meaning that she was here alone.

She read a bit more, then found the command that would log her in. It was another hidden switch underneath the ‘doorbell,’ and when she flicked it with her Lachka a single orb popped up above the hologram no matter what setting she was using. Another switch over the doorbell would log her out and she tried it just to make sure it worked, then logged herself back in, with it only being a presence indicator rather than an ID. No logs were kept as to who was here or not, given that this was a clandestine facility.

“Well then,” she said, thinking about what to do next. There were no instructions about that, and it seemed like she was on her own from here on out. She decided to finish reading the instructions until she came across he query, then went back topside to move her speeder inside a concealment canopy situated half a mile off. Once it was tucked away she headed back down, closed the hatch behind her, then stripped down to her underwear, grabbed some sugar sticks from the pantry, and laid out on one of the couches and decided to make a movie night of it…both as a chance to take a rare off day, and to test the nagging feeling in the back of her mind that she was still being watched and evaluated.

She didn’t think it was true, but being totally off the grid and without assignment seemed so odd she needed to poke it with a stick to make sure it was truly her imagination…and an imitation of laziness would be the best way to draw a reaction.

In the meantime she’d just visibly chill, while trying to work through in her head what her next move would be. If she really was alone and free to do whatever, then she needed a plan and a damn good one. All throughout her training she’d been goaded into figuring things out on her own, and it seemed like this was now going to be put to practical use. She had to learn to use her psionics and turn them into both weapons and tools…and how she did that was totally up to her.

But first things first. Pretend to be a lazy twit and do all sorts of things a soldier/warrior would never do and get a feel for this newfound freedom by being a bit stupid, then if she was still left alone, get to work on developing the skills that she never thought she’d have. Superpowers were for Archons, and they’d deemed her worthy enough to share.

Jyra wasn’t totally sure what that meant going forward, but she expected it to be something big…though getting to that point seemed to be another challenge without a clear cut path. One thing she knew was that whatever she did, she needed to do it her way from here on out.

Now she just needed to figure out what her way was…

9

November 22, 2897

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Jyra stood in one of the training chambers in the Nest, this one tailored for some wild Lachka work that she was nowhere near ready to try, but it also had some novice settings and the one she was using now had a small thud suspended in an IDF field three meters in front of her. Where she stood was outside the field, with the transition being invisible to the eye but noticeable in her Pefbar. It was a thin barrier, but the energy made a small ripple in her spherical vision, which at this point she’d learned to focus into a cone to get greater range.

Thanks the IDF, there was no gravity effect on the thud and it floated aimlessly with her tugging on it with her telekinesis. One of the first tricks she’d learned from the Archons’ notes was that she could tie the mental commands to a physical stimulus, and Jyra had been relying on that heavily in her early training as both her skill and raw power grew. Now she was trying to undo that handicap, for her mind didn’t want to use her Lachka without the physical commands.

That too had been detailed by those who had developed these powers before her, but oddly enough it was virtually unmentioned in the Archons’ notes. Rather it was in a much smaller collection of data compiled by other Arc Commandos, and to which she would be adding when she learned anything of merit. Apparently they had encountered the same problem, in which their mind had developed a ‘thinking’ mode and an ‘acting’ mode with the Lachka. The physical theatrics separated the two, and they had also had to unlearn the distinction early on, for a few that didn’t had a world of trouble figuring out how to do things without having a hand or twitching an eyebrow to get it to engage.

Getting it to engage was the problem, for as Jyra made the little thud move ever so slightly away from her she intended to curve it to the right also…but the command never executed. Instead the mashable marble continued towards the back of the cylinder where the edge of the IDF was. When it got there it would pass through and fall to the ground, so Jyra reluctantly raised her right arm and motioned for it to return. Her Lachka engaged without fail and brought it back, allowing her to spin it around in a corkscrew without too much trouble. It was amazing how much control she had by using her arm, despite the fact that it was purely for theatrics. The tissues in her mind were emitting the Lachka field, and she’d wished she started learning to control it directly from the beginning.

It had been so difficult to just get a twitch that using the physical coordination had been recommended by the Archons, but they hadn’t said anything about untraining it later. Maybe they didn’t have this issue or maybe it just wasn’t a big deal for them. They were Archons after all, and Arc Commando or not, they were still far beyond her in multiple disciplines. Perhaps all that intellect they sported made this easy, but for her it had become a pain in the ass.

When she steadied the thud inside the field she let her arm drop back to her side and focused only with her mind, missing the first 3 times before the fourth finally took and started it floating towards her. She tried to get it to move to the right into a crude, box-like corkscrew but couldn’t get it again until the third try. After that it took six tries to make the next turn, then four for the next with the thud getting closer and close to the edge as it spun outward.

But at least she was able to do it every now and then, even if it wasn’t reliable at this point. That meant she could train it, and in time it would get easier…or so the other Arc Commandos had noted.

Just as Jyra was about to use her arm to keep it from flying out again a tone sounded in the chamber that spooked her enough that she lost her lock on the little thud. She glanced up, pondering what the sound was as the thud dropped out of the invisible field and fell towards the floor.

The Arc Commando reacted instantly, reaching a hand towards it and pulling it towards her just in time to avoid it hitting the ground. It flew up into her palm and she clamped down on it tightly with her hand, smirking with the realization that that was both the fastest and strongest pull she’d managed to date, and all on instinct. Maybe her problem was she was overthinking this too much.

But to the sound her mind returned, with one possibility rising to the forefront. She knew there was a ‘doorbell’ but she’d never heard what it sounded like. If that was the case that meant someone else had arrived, which would be her first guest since she’d arrived at the Nest 6 months ago.

Jyra chucked the thud off to the side of the chamber where it would eventually roll into a collection moat, then hit the ‘off’ controls on the way out before accelerating into a jog and heading back through the huge facility to the commons room to find an armored figure looking at the hologram with the introductory data and one tiny orb floating about it indicating her presence here, though she doubted he knew that if he was also a newb.

“Hello?” she said as she stepped inside, prompting him to turn around and stare at her through his solid helmet that gave no clue as to his identity. If she’d been wearing her armor it would have identified him, but on most days she was in casual or training gear, with today being the later.

“Hello,” he mimicked, though his voice was a bit altered by the speakers to give it that telltale Commando tinge.

“You fresh out of training or one of the vets?”

“Just got back from Antarctica.”

“Well then, take your armor off and have a seat,” she said, pointing to a couch while she jumped over the edge of another and laid down with her feet up. “I’ll fill you in on what I can. I’m about 6 months ahead of you.”

A pop sounded as he disconnected his helmet and pulled it off, revealing short black hair and pale skin, but a face she wasn’t familiar with. “You’re Jyra?”

“That’s right. Have we met?”

“Not exactly,” he said, pulling apart his armor and stacking it in a neat pile on the floor. “I saw you a few times in the hallways and other people mentioned you.”

“Sorry, I should remember you, but my mind’s not clicking.”

“That’s alright. It’s not like we were there to socialize. What am I here for?”

“To chart our own course, apparently,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and looking him over. “Nobody was here when I arrived and I’ve been alone ever since. Training and learning, mostly.”

“Is there anything else?”

“There can be,” she said ambiguously. “It seems this facility is completely unmonitored. I did some crazy stuff early on just to test that theory and nobody came to give me a lecture.”

“Six months alone?”

“Yeah. I thought there’d be more Arc Commandos popping in and out, but nada so far.”

“Is that what this place is for?”

“It’s called the Nest and is a huge training facility reserved explicitly for us. I haven’t received a single order since I arrived, and I don’t think I will until I figure out how to use my psionics and the other stuff they have here.”

“What stuff?” the man asked, finally free of his armor and sitting down on the couch.

“A lot of cool toys I’ve never seen before, and a list of codes that will make your head hurt. The ones we got in training were the small ones, it seems. These are very high access and extremely hush hush. Do you have a name?”

“Oh, sorry. My bad. I’m Linty. Linty Innon.”

“Jyra Hemman, if you didn’t catch my last name.”

“No I didn’t. So Jyra, what kind of crazy stuff were you talking about?”

She shrugged innocently. “The kind of stuff you don’t have to explain when no one is watching.”

“So me being here is going to crimp your style, then?”

“Unless you want to join in.”

“Hmmn, I feel obligated to ask what we’re supposed to be doing first.”

“Did you come alone?”

“Yes.”

“Speeder?”

He nodded.

“There’s a hidden parking lot nearby. I’ll show you where in a moment, but for now you need to trust me.”

“Ok…”

“Stand up,” she said, doing likewise.

“And?” he said, looking at her and seeing that they were spot on the same height.

“Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“Trust me,” she said in all seriousness.

He eyed her for a moment, then decided to just go with it, suspecting some sort of test. When he pulled his shirt off Jyra did the same, mimicking his disrobing until both of them were standing there in the nude.

“How do you feel now?” she asked.

“Odd. What’s this about?”

“Turn around and walk to the edge of the couch.”

“An explanation would be good.”

“Walk,” she insisted.

He sighed, then turned around with Jyra moving in a flash as soon as his eyes were off her. She headed the other way, grabbed two throw pillows off another couch, and winged one at him.

It hit him in the head, spinning him around on instinct. “What is this?”

“Defend yourself,” she said, winging the other one at him then grabbing for more elsewhere in the room.

“Are you serious?” he said in a laugh.

“Defend or be pummeled,” she said, picking up a pair and, instead of throwing them at him, ran towards him and whacked him across the face with one melee style. He ducked the next slash and dove onto the couch, grabbing one of his own before stepping into the throw pillow fight with both of them hitting each other with more accurate and skilled attacks than any sleepover could hope to imagine.

“Is that the best you’ve got, rookie!” she yelled, bringing both in front of her and using them as a battering ram to knock him back onto the couch, then she stood over him and whacked him multiple times before he leg swept her and she fell onto the floor giving him enough time to roll over the back of the couch and escape.

He laughed uncontrollably. “I don’t know what this is about, but I’m really starting to like you.”

“Good,” she said, chucking another pillow his way. This time he caught it out of the air and added it to his own arsenal as Jyra backtracked and went to find more ammunition. When she came back to him the pillow fighting got more serious, with her trying to take him down and him noticeably resisting. She feigned an opening, let him knock her legs out from under her with a pillow whack to the thigh, then she did a somersault curl around his legs to half get behind them, then she knocked his left slightly askew with a pillow hit before snaking her arms through and around his ankles enough to dump him backwards onto the not so soft floor.

A moment later she was on top of him and wresting to pin his arms to the ground, but the best she could do was get them over his chest. She locked him up there, then stared him down.

“How do you feel now?”

“Very confused,” he said with a smile.

“This isn’t all play, I promise.”

“Then what is it?”

“A shortcut.”

“To what, pregnancy?”

Jyra snorted. “Hell no. Besides, we’ve both had our genes reworked so that isn’t possible.”

“You said something about trust earlier. Or is this just the result of you spending 6 months alone and going stir crazy?”

“Maybe a little, but you know damn well we’re training to operate solo for as long as necessary.”

“So then why are we inches away from making magic?”

“Like I said, it’s a shortcut. I’ll admit, it’s a very odd shortcut, but then again that’s the point. I never would have considered anything like this before, but it all comes back to trust. What did San tell you about our mandate?”

“Are we really going to have this conversation like this?”

“Yes, and you’re going to like it. Now answer my question.”

“He said a lot of stuff, actually.”

“What did he tell you about trust?”

Linty frowned, trying to draw a connection and think this through, whereas a normal person would have been just happy to have a hot, nude chick on top of him.

“That the Archons trust us to operate off the grid, no oversight.”

“And how are we supposed to operate?”

“Like ghosts.”

“No, I mean how are we supposed to do things when they’re not watching?”

It took him a moment, then his eyes flashed in realization. “This is your idea of how Arc Commandos should, what, say hi?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” she admitted.

“You are crazy,” he said in a nice, almost complimentary way.

“No, just savvy. I’ve had 6 months to think this through, though I’ll admit only coming up with this idea in the past few minutes. If there’s a fun way to do something, why do it any other way?”

“I’m still waiting on the ‘something’ bit. How does this mission relate, or do you just really need to get laid?”

“We’re not fucking,” she said apologetically. “That would inhibit thinking. I just need us exposed and on the verge to get us fully awake.”

“Oh, I’m definitely awake.”

“Good, now just listen and learn. Or rather, unlearn. I was sent here with no instructions, and I’m assuming you are the same way. We’ve been tasked to operate on our own, and how we train to use our psionics and everything else past this point is totally on us. The Archons aren’t guiding us anymore, we’re on autopilot. It finally dawned on me a while back that they’re not interested in making us into mini Archons, they want us to become something different. Something unique that we create ourselves, so we shouldn’t be holding to Archon protocol, or a lot of other stuff we’ve picked up over the years. First in the maturia, then Commando training, and in the field, and then the training you just finished.”

“So you think we should be sexually promiscuous?”

“Wow. That word is such a killjoy.”

“You know what I mean. The Archons have a strict code, and Commandos usually go along with it.”

Jyra pulled one hand off of where she had his pinned and tapped him on the forehead. “And there’s where you’re wrong. The Archons don’t follow a code.”

“No?”

“No rules. San told me that himself when I asked. He said rules are for the young, the inexperienced, and the untrustworthy. Arc Commandos are none of those.”

Linty looked at her a moment, feeling some semblance of logic working beneath her red locks and intense eyes…then it finally clicked.

“It’s a question of loyalty to the mission, which for us was answered beyond a shadow of a doubt before we became Arc Commandos.”

“Go on.”

“We don’t need the restrictive guidelines and code that helped get us here. In fact, it will probably hinder us in living up to our mandate, therefore we must ‘unlearn’ what we have learned.”

Jyra smiled, glad this little gambit of hers had worked. She’d almost been too shy to even try it. “And everything about this current situation screams a violation of everything we’ve been taught.”

“Yet we’re still loyal to the mission. And when we’re trustworthy we don’t need rules.”

“And when we don’t follow rules we can do things in…funner ways.”

“Like you getting me naked in order to explain this?”

Jyra flashed her eyebrows twice. “Savvy?”

Linty smiled. “And rather than take baby steps, why not jump in head first and strip away the lingering protocol along with our clothes?”

“You are a smart boy.”

“You planning to instruct everyone else that comes here like this?”

“Honestly I have no idea how long I’m going to be here, so I’m just playing this by ear and it seemed like a good idea a few minutes ago.”

“And now?”

“You tell me.”

Linty smiled widely. “Part of me wants to say this is just all frivolous, but another part realizes your logic is spot on. If we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the Archons and other Commandos then we have to break free of established habits…and this is about as fast of a method as I can think of stripping away established protocol.”

“So we’re in agreement? I’m not crazy?”

“Oh you’re crazy…like a fox.”

“Good,” she said, suddenly getting up off him and leaving Linty a bit disappointed. That caught him off guard, but he shook it off and stood up.

“Lesson over then?”

“The lessons are just beginning. Time for a tour and to get you up to speed on what the Archons left for us. What we make of it going forward is anyone’s guess, but there are some notes left behind by other Arc Commandos. Still, we’re near the tip of the spear and don’t have much in the way of trailblazers to key off of. We have to make this up as we go and I’ll be glad for the help.”

“Tour it is then,” Linty said, walking back to the couch to grab his clothes.

“Uhuh,” Jyra said, stopping him with a hand on his shoulder. “Habits don’t break that fast. You stay naked for now.”

“Until when?” he asked with a wry grin.

“Until we no longer feel naked.”

“And what if someone else shows up?”

“Only Arc Commandos come here, and if another comes in we get them naked too. You take the girls and I’ll take the guys and we’ll share what we’ve learned via pillow fights.”

Linty laughed. “And what if they’re older Arc Commandos?”

“Then we tell them what we’re doing and ask if they want to join in. No shame here. We’re not misbehaving, just handling our mandate in a way that most other people wouldn’t approve of. If we’re going to be off the grid, then we don’t need to concern ourselves with what they think, because they’ll never know. We can’t have their rigidity and protocol slowing us down. We have to keep open minds and clear heads, hence the reason why I’m not going to fuck you, despite the urge I have to do so right now.”

“Likewise.”

“I can see that,” she said, glancing down at his waist.

“You said no shame.”

“None at all,” she agreed. “Though that’s got to be awkward walking around with.”

“It is, trust me.”

“How long before you deflate?”

“Good question. If you’re not putting your clothes back on either, could be a while.”

“I would offer to pop you off, but that would be counter-productive I think?”

Linty shook his head in dismay. “I swear, when you first started that pillow fight I thought you were…”

“Out of bounds?”

“Yeah, but to your point. When you’re loyal to the mission, or in this case mandate, there is no out of bounds. I guess this is a weakness I’ve got, and the only way to get used to being around you naked is to see it through the less fun way. Just try not to bump into me or you’ll kill whatever slack I start to get.”

“No promises rookie. I may do it intentionally now. Just enough to keep you on edge and burn away whatever protocol you’ve got clogging your mind.”

“And what about you?”

“I don’t have external sex organs, but feel free to poke where you like. I can take it without losing my head.”

“This is by far the strangest lesson I’ve ever had.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“We really are off the grid here, right? No monitoring at all?”

“Nada. It took me a while to really wrap my head around that and loosen up. Didn’t realize how constricted I was beforehand until it happened…then I got a little crazy to push it further.”

“Well, I like your crazy and see the wisdom in it. On top of that, I think this next stage of training is going to be the funnest of all time.”

“Why not?” she shrugged. “As long as we still accomplish our goals?”

“And keep it a secret from everyone else.”

“No one else is supposed to know what we do anyway.”

“Well, then. If we’re going to jump off this boat, how about we make all leisure downtime nude? Not just for us, but everyone. We can put up a sign that says so.”

Jyra laughed. “I’m glad you didn’t include training. Running naked is…uncomfortably bouncy.”

“Ditto there.”

Jyra raised an eyebrow at him. “Is my crazy rubbing off on you?”

“Looks like.”

“Good,” she said, lightly tapping her wrist against his crotch as she walked by. “Follow me and I’ll show you around your new digs.”

Linty took a moment to center himself and followed her, feeling exposed and stupid, but in a fresh way that, honestly, was going to take some getting used to, but he already could feel a wall forming between himself and the outside world, with Jyra on the inside of it and the both of them being saner for it. He’d never have done anything like this on his own, but coming from another Arc Commando he was less resistant…and it did make sense. Perfect sense. And he wasn’t going to let the fun aspect of it discourage him.

Then he began to wonder why ‘fun’ should ever discourage anything.

10

December 2, 2900

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Mace Ortel descended the T-shaped stairway entrance to the Nest on the left side, turning an immediate right and spotting two people sitting on a couch watching a vid screen. Before he said anything to them he turned the corner and looked at the holo, seeing some 18 dots circling above it. That surprised him, for typically the Nest only had 1 or 2 Arc Commandos in it at a time. Maybe the growing number of their ranks was changing that, but still 18 seemed damn high.

He used his Lachka to toggle the hidden switch, adding another dot as he logged himself in and pressed the doorbell to announce his presence to the facility, though the pair sitting with their backs to him didn’t hear it in this chamber.

“Hi,” he said, retracting his helmet into the lump of material around the back of his armor’s neckline as he looked down at the pair of heads, both of which turned around, apparently a bit shocked to see him. The vid screen was loud, and if these Arc Commandos were new then their Pefbar and Ikrid probably weren’t that advanced yet to pick him up coming down behind them.

“Hey, new guy is here.”

“Old guy, actually,” he said as the pair stood up and he saw that both the guy and girl were naked. “What the hell?”

“That’s the standard reaction we get from new people,” Veronica said, pointing to her left. “Read.”

Mace followed her finger line until he saw an addition to the Nest in the form of a sign on the wall that read:

Sexuality can have a strong influence on the weak minded.

We are NOT weak minded.

So prove it.

“What exactly does that mean?” Mace asked, a bit peeved.

“I thought the same thing when I got here,” Chad said, raising a hand to forestall the typical reaction. “Thought everyone had gone civie and insane, but there’s a method to the madness if you take long enough to think it through.”

Mace looked at both of them in turn, then back at Chad. “Regale me then.”

“You’re…Mace, right?” Veronica asked.

“Yes.”

“Thought so. I tried to memorize the personnel files. By the way,” she said, pointing two fingers at her eyes, then moving them down to her chest, “my breasts are down here.”

“What she means to say,” Chad interrupted, “is that we’ve instituted a…voluntary…program of sexuality training into our private culture.”

“Program, huh?”

“Yeah,” Chad said, rubbing his sandy blonde hair. “You’re the first old timer we’ve greeted. Or rather, that I’ve greeted. Mostly we see newbs coming in.”

“And you just wait here naked as a doorman?”

“Easy, Mace,” Veronica cautioned. “We just got finished with our workouts and we’re on downtime. Everyone else is either training or sleeping. We haven’t gone nuts, just taking an angle on sexuality that the Archons wouldn’t approve of.”

“And that being?”

“We use it.”

Mace rolled his eyes. “Oh boy.”

“Are you the ‘never get laid type?’”

“No, I’m the ‘do the mission, not your buddy type.’”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Veronica insisted, crossing her arms over her chest.

“How about I let you two talk this out,” Chad said, pointing off to the other side of the room. “I don’t have the compatibility to ease the introduction.”

“That’s probably best,” Veronica said as Chad walked over and sat down on a distant couch, turning on another vid screen and ignoring that the two of them were there. “You and I have a lot to go through.”

“That’s right, you were going to explain why you’re not acting like a Commando.”

“Want to have a seat first?”

“No, I think I’m better standing. Now talk before I feel like kicking your ass.”

Veronica’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t let the lack of clothes fool you. I can handle myself.”

“You’re fit, I’ll give you that, but you’re not going to stand up to more than a few punches,” he said, flexing his armored hand for emphasis.

“News flash, bro. We’re basically naked outside of our armor anyway. Putting a T-shirt on doesn’t change that much.”

“Granted,” he allowed.

“We figure that if we’re vulnerable outside of our armor then we might as well have fun with it, so long as it serves a purpose. Everyone here goes naked when not in training. Just a part of our secret little society. No Archon has come to beat some sense into us, like you’re thinking about doing now, so it’s also a way to confirm they’re not spying on us like they promised, but the bottom line is what the sign says. If we’re not weak minded then we shouldn’t have to avoid sexuality. For us, we’ve taken it as a challenge. We don’t avoid it, we embrace it. And if someone can’t keep their focus then they don’t deserve to be an Arc Commando.”

“Then why not go nude in training too?”

“Because most of the time you bounce, whether you’re a guy or girl, and that creates problems, but where we can without disadvantage we do. We even spar nude on occasion, for training sake.”

“Explain that.”

“Battle can come at any place at any time, and our enemies aren’t going to wait for us to get dressed if they catch us naked.”

“What about the ‘bounciness’ then?”

“We learn to work around or negate as much of it as we can, and that requires practice.”

“Is that why so many of you are here? Typically the Nest doesn’t see more than 3 at a time.”

Veronica shrugged. “Maybe. When I got here there were 9. Some have come and gone, including a couple of old timers like you. Once they gave it a chance they understood what we were doing and joined in. If you don’t want to strip down right away that’s fine, just don’t write us off as traitors. We’re loyal to the mission, and per our mandate we’re thinking outside the box. We’re just also thinking outside the Archon box as well. They may avoid sex like a plague, but we’re using it to our advantage.”

“So you’re just not walking around naked, you’re banging each other as well?”

Veronica nodded. “No more than once every three days, which is standard when scheduling will allow.”

“Scheduling?” Mace said in dismay.

“We have to practice,” Veronica emphasized, “in order to learn. Ignoring it isn’t something we choose to do anymore…though to be honest some of us never did to begin with. Now we’ve just taken it from being a random thing and turned it into a beneficial culture.”

Mace shook his head, not believing what he was hearing. “You guys have gone nuts.”

“Please have more faith in us than that,” she said, not arguing but asking openly. “The outside world doesn’t exist here. We’re off the grid and we’ve found a way to maximize that. The Archons wouldn’t approve, but we’re supposed to do things our own way. They didn’t give us a plan for just that reason. We’re meant to improvise, learn, and craft the Arc Commandos into something of our own making. We’re not mini Archons, so why would we pattern ourselves off of them?”

“Because they kick ass.”

“Of course they do. And the ‘no sex’ rule works for them. This works for us.”

“Fine,” Mace relented, glancing over her body again, head to toes and back up. “I’ll hear you out…and me not having to look at someone else’s dick while listening was a good call.”

“Simple biology dude,” Chad said from across the room.

“Lose the armor and we’ll take a walk,” Veronica suggested.

“Do you go topside like that?” Mace asked as he triggered the automatic release and his armor peeled apart, with him stepping out of it a moment later.

“Nope. This part of being an Arc Commando only happens in the Nest. Though there is never any guarantee of safety, this is about as close as it gets. And like I said, we’re pretty much naked without our armor anyway, so we’ve chosen to just go the next step here, but only here.”

“What about the other Nests?”

Veronica raised an eyebrow. “Other Nests?”

“There are two more, at present.”

Chad’s head turned around as they walked behind him towards the door leading to the rest of the facility. “Why haven’t we heard about that?”

“I’m guessing because you’re newbs,” Mace said with some disdain. “Such information travels by word of mouth only.”

“To answer your question, I guess it will eventually,” Veronica said as they passed through the open doorway leaving Chad and the commons room behind.

“If you have your way.”

“It’s not my way, or at least the initial idea wasn’t.”

“Who started this craziness?”

“I’m told it was Jyra, but we’ve been adding other bits and pieces as we go along…like the 3 day rule. We experimented with every day but found it left our minds gummy. 3 days allows us to stay sharp, and we wouldn’t have figured that out without trying to figure it out.”

“Define gummy?”

“Answer my earlier question. Do you do anyone?”

“On occasion, but none since I became an Arc Commando.”

“Why not?”

“Busy mostly. And the other times were special circumstances. I don’t make a habit of it.”

“Why not?”

“The Archons are right in that there is a disadvantage to it, training wise and fighting wise.”

“We know that, but rather than bury it away in our subconscious to the point where it almost shuts off entirely, we take the opposite route, feeling it out and learning how to minimize the disadvantage. What we practice when we fuck is our recovery time afterward. So long as I don’t violate the 3 day rule, or in this case it would be ‘guideline’ since we don’t use rules, I can snap myself out of the daze within a few minutes, for the most part.”

“You time it?”

“Not like that, but only because we can’t measure it. We thought about using biomonitors but that would require letting the techs in on our inner workings, and we do not let anyone know what goes on inside the Nest. That is one rule we do keep.”

“Embarrassed?”

“Nope. I was in the beginning but it wore off pretty quick. Other people don’t understand, so it’s best to keep them in the dark. And it would be a huge mistake living under the constraints of what other people can understand.”

“You’re making a little sense, but I’m not sold.”

“We’re sexual as a default, and even the Archons haven’t tried to genetically strip that away.”

“That’d be cowardice if they did.”

“Exactly my point. A strong mind can override sexuality with ease, so why can it not also function while indulging in it?”

“But why indulge in the first place if our mission is tactical, not reproductive?”

“Several reasons. First is to negate the disadvantages. Would you keep a ship in your hangar that you know absolutely nothing about, or do you fly everything and figure out the intricacies of how they work? We have sexual systems. They may not be very important considering what we do as Arc Commandos, but that doesn’t mean we have to ignore them. And if we can find a beneficial use for them aside from baby making, why not go there?”

“What beneficial use are you referring to?”

“We hardly ever see one another, right? I’m asking because I’m still in training phase and my psionics aren’t up to snuff enough to go out into the field yet, at least not for the big assignments. You do, so you tell me. You said 3 was usually tops for the Nest.”

“You see a lot of your unit, if you’re assigned to one. But no, we rarely cross paths with others.”

“When you’ve gotten laid before, who was it with? I don’t need a name, but what did they do?”

“A few other Commandos and one tech. All of which were situational, no relationships involved.”

“None here either. We fuck everyone and love doesn’t factor in, but we do develop beneficial bonds. That’s something you’re probably not aware of if you’ve been banging for recreational purposes.”

“Everyone?” Mace asked, raising an eyebrow at her.

“Yes,” she answered automatically until she caught his gist. “Everyone biologically compatible. There are more guys here than girls, so our schedules are always full while the guys usually have holes in theirs…but as we’ve come to say, ‘no whining over missed fucks.’ We do make an exception for new arrivals, so you get priority. Our way of saying ‘hi’ or ‘welcome back.’”

“You’re saying if I wanted to, you’d fuck me right now?”

“No, sorry. I did yesterday, and we only do it on schedule, never impulse. I can bump you into my next slot though, or you can pick some other girl.”

“Just like that?”

“We’ve learned not to be shy, and it actually forms a bond between us that we’ve never had before. Not something sick, but something familiar. We’re separated from everyone else because we’re Arc Commandos, so when we’re in the Nest we take advantage of the time when we’re actually together. We’ve already decided that if we meet up in the field that doesn’t matter. We only indulge this part of our culture here…or in the other Nests, now that we know they exist.”

“Any other guidelines you’ve come up with?” he asked as they passed another Arc Commando in the hallway, though this one was dressed in skintight shorts and running shoes.

“Getting indocted?” Linty asked.

“Working on him,” Veronica said as they stopped. “He’s old school.”

“A challenge then,” the topless and very sweaty Arc Commando said as he looked Mace over. “Sorry, don’t recognize you. I’m Linty.”

“Mace,” he said, extending his hand in greeting and glad that the guy had pants on.

“Back for some additional training or what?”

“Actually I’m here to recruit a replacement for my unit.”

“Replacement?” Veronica asked, her eyes narrowing. “Did we lose someone?”

“No, just a reassignment. We’re adding more teams as our numbers grow and Darren is heading up his own now. We need a replacement for Alpha 9 and I was told to come here to find one…though now I’m wondering if it wasn’t a setup. Has Brandon been initiated into your divergent clan?”

Veronica smiled widely. “Yep. Did him once myself. He didn’t stick around too long, and he didn’t mention anything about other Nests either.”

Mace signed. “Son of a bitch. He didn’t say anything about this to us.”

“Probably knew how you’d react,” Linty said, with his body language suggesting that he was eager to get moving again. “Are you looking for someone in particular?”

“I was told Jyra was here…but now I have my doubts as to whether or not Brandon was serious or just wanted me to pick up his date.”

“She’s on the halo,” Linty offered as he began walking on to wherever he was going next.

“Thanks,” Mace said distractedly. He couldn’t believe Brandon had gone in for this…then again maybe there was some value here he was overlooking. In fact, he realized he was resisting the notion for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on. After a few seconds of silence he realized Veronica was patiently waiting on him, just staring at his face with a devious smile.

“What?”

“Just watching the walls break down.”

Mace sighed. “Brandon has been an Arc Commando longer than I have. If he thinks there’s some value in this…I don’t know.”

“Then let me fill you in further as we head to Jyra,” she said, grabbing him by the elbow and dragging him forward. “We’ve learned a few tricks, and I’m not referring to anything kinky. We’re not doing this to have some sort of orgy, that’s civie crap. We’re just making use of our biological hardware, stripping away all the nonsense and dealing with what’s really there. We’re warriors, not sex toys, and we learned that if we try to be sex toys our heads fog up even more.”

“So you tried the kinky route?”

“Before I got here, but others did. It’s not something to be afraid of, it’s just stupid. They learned from it and moved on. It seems the fictitious stuff that people try to use to raise their libidos is what really messes with your head. Recognizing that someone is attractive does not. It’s the mental simulations that go nutsy. Archons rightly avoid them, but we’ve found that if we indulge in the physical act of mating, giving our minds actual data to process rather than fiction, it also solves the problem.”

“Eating so much candy that you make yourself sick of it?”

“No…but you’re kind of getting the point. We have sexuality and we have mating mode. Sexuality is just the, let’s say ‘sensor package’ that allows us to see who’s hot and who’s not. Mating mode is when your head does go all foggy. Your combat drive is powered down in the process, then comes back online when you get out of mating mode. Thing is people tend to get stuck in it, at least part way, and that is a very bad thing to have happen. We’ve been working on being able to switch in and out of that mode very fast and cleanly. No hybrid states. But to do that we need practice, hence the fucking schedules.”

“And once you learn, does it stop there?”

“No. It’s still a social thing, just between Arc Commandos, when we’re in the Nest. Call it a fun way to continually test your mental caliber. If you can’t shake yourself out of mating mode and get your head all messed up then you obviously don’t belong in the field and need to train yourself back into combat fitness.”

“So you admit it’s partly for fun?”

“Why do we play video games?” she countered.

“Ok, you have a point there.”

“We’re trained to go on very long solo missions and be comfortable with that. When we’re here we go the opposite way, just because we can. If we can’t handle that vast duality, then again, it shows a weakness that a person needs to work on eliminating rather than burying it away out of sight.”

“You’re criticizing the Archons there, I assume?”

“Honestly I don’t know what they do, all I know is what we do and this is smart. It’s unusual, deviant as you said considering normal society, but we don’t exist in normal society anymore. We’re off the grid for a purpose, and this serves a purpose for us. Might not work for anyone else, but it works for us. At the end of the day you just have to try it and risk being stupid for a little while. If that does happen you just shake it off and move on, a few days lost to a cloudy head. Is there a risk greater than that?”

“Theoretically no, it’s just out of habit…”

Veronica raised her eyebrows victoriously.

“…which is what we were trained to break,” Mace finished.

“Keep thinking, don’t block anything out. If we’re all fools then logical analysis should prove it.”

“Why are you starting to make sense?”

“Because it does make sense.”

“What else have you guys learned?”

“Beds are for sleeping, not fucking. Don’t mix the two.”

“Really?”

Veronica nodded as they approached one of the entrances to the halo track. “Best place is in the shower tube.”

“Standing up?”

“Or floating, your choice. But it’s important not to linger or rest afterwards. You have to go straight into a workout to flush the residual fog out of your head. It also trains you to switch modes quickly by forcing the change. A bit awkward at first, because you just want to soak in the moment, but once you make a habit of it fucking just becomes a part of your routine that doesn’t affect anything else. And after a while walking around nude doesn’t turn you on. Maybe it would if you’ve spent 5 years in the field and then come back, but once you’re here for a while you adjust and it’s just normal. Breezy, but normal.”

“And you never go topside?”

“Well…we’re not supposed to, but a few of us have gone on a few nude ninja missions at night just to see how we function in the forest. It’s not really fun, but it does get you used to knowing what you can and can’t do without clothes on. I found I miss my shoes the most. But that’s not part of our new culture here, just something a few of us tried so we could learn from it. We did discuss the possibility of trying some similar missions within the city and avoiding anyone seeing us, but we nixed that idea pretty quick. We want to be able to let our hair down, metaphorically speaking, in the Nest whenever we’re here, which we think will help us rest and recover better from whatever crap happens to us in the field.”

“More like letting your clothes down.”

“Semantics. We’ve learned a few things already, but we’re experimenting and picking up some more as we go, though we’ve got a good structure in place now. Think about trying it and resist the urge to be shy. It doesn’t befit an Arc Commando.”

Mace sighed. “I’m glad we’re not being monitored, because I get the feeling Brandon would be loving this if he was watching.”

“He had a rough time adjusting too, if I remember correctly.”

“And what about you?”

Veronica shrugged. “I was a newb and figured I’d just go along with what everyone else was doing. You’re my peers and supposed to know what you’re doing, so I stuffed my doubts into the back of my mind and just tried it. They said it was voluntary, but with everyone else walking around nude I eventually shed my clothes after a few days and went from there. I’ll admit, it is a bit of a shock at first, but now I’m glad for the bonding it gives us.”

“How does that work guy to guy?”

“I don’t know about guy to guy, but girl to girl it’s a camaraderie thing. We’re in the same club and not hiding anything from each other. We talk about everything, as we’re supposed to do, and share knowledge, but you’re right in that the physical component is missing. I feel the bond more strongly with the guys, but that’s just biology. We’re all on the same page, separated from the rest of society and off the grid. I don’t get a buzz from seeing the other girls naked, but it doesn’t put me off like it did initially, especially when you’d accidently brush up against someone in the hallway. Now I don’t care. They’re not strangers and they’re not sex partners, just sisters.”

“Same thing with the guys then?”

“Well…apparently it’s not as easy for them. Apparently dicks are magnetic and repel each other,” she said with a giggle. “Completely foreign thinking to me, but whatever. Guys do have their erogenous zone on the outside so I guess that makes things a bit more sensitive, bumping wise, but they say they eventually tune each other out. You’re a little uncomfortable even having this conversation, aren’t you?”

“I’ll admit, I am a bit. And you’re right, that’s a sign that I have a mental block that I shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to,” he said as they were standing on the entrance to the halo track as Veronica pointed through the wall. “Jyra is coming, if you want to catch her.”

Mace had sensed a mind moving at speed towards them, but hadn’t known who it was. “Thanks, I will.”

“Shall I put you on my schedule?” she said with a gleaming smile.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said, waving a friendly goodbye as he jogged up the curved wall and onto the track, turning left and accelerated so he could match the Arc Commando catching up to him rapidly. She wore shorts and a jog bra, standard training gear, while Mace wore a casual uniform with basic shoes, but he was still able to match her stride for stride.

“Hi there,” Jyra said between mild breaths.

“You’re Jyra?”

“Yep. You new?”

“I’m not a newb,” he said as they ran in a straight line that would never bend left or right, but that ever so gradually rose up to loop back around on their position, but to him it felt like they were running on a never-ending road. “I’m here to find you, actually.”

“Why me?”

“I was told to come offer you a slot on Alpha 9, though now I’m not so sure, considering you’re responsible for this nude fest.”

Jyra laughed. “Everyone reacts that way when they first get here. And I only started the ball rolling. Others have been adding to it and made it what it is.”

“It sounds like a nightmare.”

“Feel free to check our training logs. You’re see we’re not progressing more slowly because of it.”

“I also think Brandon sent me here on purpose to get ‘indoctrinated.’”

“Did he tell you beforehand?”

“No he didn’t.”

“Ha. I think he just wants you to go through the same uncomfortable transition as he did. He put up one hell of a fight before he realized we hadn’t gone insane.”

“I’m not there yet.”

“You will be. What’s Alpha 9, exactly?”

“Special ops field unit. We’re expanding the teams and took one of our regulars out to start another, leaving us with the need for a fourth.”

“And you want me?”

“I was told you were spending an inordinate amount of time here polishing your psionics, though now I think I know the real reason.”

“That is the real reason, though ‘polish’ isn’t the term I’d use. Now that I have them, I feel like a freaking newb rather than a combat vet. I want to get skilled enough that I don’t screw something up on a mission before I go back out.”

“Well, you’ll be a newb on a team of veterans, but apparently Brandon thinks you’re ready.”

“How soon do you have to be back?”

“He didn’t say, but I assumed I’d spend a couple of days training here then take you back with me.”

“No good, you’ll need at least 3 weeks.”

“3 weeks?”

“There are seven girls here, times 3 days…”

“I never said I was buying into this.”

“I’ll just wait until you do then.”

Mace couldn’t believe her ego. “Oh really? You’re not the only Arc Commando available.”

“No, and I really do want that slot if Brandon thinks I’m ready. But you need to experience what we’ve got here, so for your sake I’m going to drag my feet,” she said with an innocent smile.

Mace was silent for a moment, not sure what to say to that and looking for something stinging in reply but nothing was coming to mind. “Did Brandon set this up with you?”

“Nope.”

“Feels like it.”

“Don’t confuse fun with stupid. Like the sign up front says, we’re not weak minded. And if there’s even a shred of value in this, why should we not pursue it?”

“I’m trying really hard to find a fault in your logic right now.”

“And?”

“Failing miserably, but it still feels…”

“Wrong?”

“Off mission. If the Archons don’t embrace their sexuality there’s probably a good reason for it.”

“Well, they’re not telling us anything, making us figure out things on our own, and this is what we’ve figured out. Besides, we don’t have armies to lead and cities to build and races to annex. Our mandate is much smaller and more focused. Maybe that has something to do with the difference or maybe they’re just bigger badasses than us. I don’t know. I just know that there is wisdom in using our sexuality rather than shoving it in the proverbial closet and not making use of a biological function we have. That’s as bad as having a rifle in the armory that you’re told never to use.”

“Stop it, already,” Mace pleaded with her, sarcastically this time. “You’re making too much sense.”

Jyra smiled, not saying anything, but threw him a ‘got you now’ look.

“This had better not affect your combat skills,” he cautioned. “I don’t want some lizard shooting me in the back while your head is off in lala land.”

“Never happen,” she said firmly. “Our sexuality gets put into storage when we leave the Nest. We only make use of it here when it won’t be a detriment.”

Mace saw another exit on the track coming up ahead and decided to bail out. “Better be. We’re going to have to slow down enough as it is to accommodate you.”

“I’ll try to minimize that as much as I can,” she said in all seriousness.

“Do that,” he said, coasting to a stop by the open doorway and letting her run on. He stood there for a moment, watching her disappear up the long hallway until only her shoes remained visible, then he sighed and tried to think this all through again.

“Brandon, I am so going to kick your ass when I get back.”

Resistance

1

February 24, 2933

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Nephasil

Sara-012 sat in the nexus onboard her warship, not heavily engaged in anything but keeping an eye on the fleets while they were in orbit of the lizard world sitting too far up the gravity well for the enemy’s anti-orbital batteries to reach them and already having beaten the massive lizard fleet that was on station here. It had taken more than a week to get through the naval battle, for this system was one of the extremely valuable dots connecting the lizard core worlds and their holdings in the chunk they’d bitten out of Skarron territory.

The Voku and Preema had likewise carved a huge chunk of territory out of the far side of lizard territory all the way over to the midline that Cal-com had agreed upon. They stopped there, expanding their wedge of conquest laterally and, in the case of the Preema, all the way to the coreward edge of the galactic arm in order to try and get ahead of the lizard spread there. The ships they were devoting to actually aiding the Skarrons were limited on the far side, but they were taking names and kicking ass all along the closest border to Preema territory and leaving a swath of empty systems for the Voku and others to keep unoccupied.

Star Force had likewise been pressing towards the midline while the H’kar were headed rimward. In truth Star Force was attacking on multiple fronts, but their emphasis was on getting at least a strand of systems out to the midline so they could connect with the Voku and establish a firm linkage while severing what the lizards had. While there were hundreds of systems along the ‘middle’ of enemy territory, the lizards had been fortifying a single line through, expecting to lose the others.

This one had been so well fortified navally that even the huge Star Force fleet Sara had brought with her and Kiran-011 had had its hands full. They’d chewed threw more than a million enemy ships by the time it was done, losing a third of their drones in the process, including six of the new Ravager-class warships that Paul had designed. Each year that passed saw them getting smaller and smaller as the techs refined the Dre’mo’don specs, but the ones that she had in her fleet were among the oldest versions…though still damn more powerful than any of the other drones.

She had 11 left and Kiran had 8, plus 182 Warship-class jumpships between them and 4 command ships, not to mention the supply and transport fleet that was fueling the ground invasion. There were two inhabited planets in this system plus a scattering of outposts and Star Force had chosen to go for the biggest of them first. Right now Sara was keeping an eye on events below, as well as the relatively quiet orbit. There were still some lizard ships out there, she knew, sneaking around the system. If they slipped up she’d get them, but they were no threat to her fleet.

However, if they got to ground they could cause a lot of trouble for their armies, which was why she was standing guard in the nexus for a few hours, taking turns with Kiran and other veteran Archons just in case the lizards pulled something fancy…or kamikaze. Her ship had shields to deal with ramming debris but you had to set it up first, so staying vigilant was essential. Her crew could handle that, but there was something in her gut that told her this wasn’t going to be a regular ‘cleansing’ mission.

The only activity going on right now was the ambush groups around the star. Giving that this was on the lizard lifeline between the two hemispheres of their territory there was a massive amount of cargo transit occurring through this location. Her ships were stationed to poach them as they came into, then tried to round the star and get to the exiting jumppoint for the next leg of their journey. Most of them were easy kills and normally she’d feel bad about that, blasting away at cargo ships that couldn’t defend themselves, but in truth none of the lizard ships could defend themselves against an equally sized Star Force vessel. The tech levels were too far apart, despite the impressive gains the enemy had been making in recent decades.

But the bottom line was that there were too many lizards to play nice with, and even if you did bother capturing them they’d try and kill you the moment they had an opportunity or, barring that, try and kill themselves. Knowing what they were and what they’d done, for instance this planet used to belong to a race known as the Bmat that was now extinct because of them, Sara was comfortable simply blasting away at them as they came within range, for if she let them go they’d only aid the rest of their empire, perhaps against Star Force, or maybe against someone else less able to defend themselves.

If it was the Skarrons she’d think twice about letting them go, just so they could fight it out, but this juggernaut of an empire was just too deadly. Not to Star Force anymore, but Sara could remember back when it had been. When they’d been the lesser and hanging on by a thread. The Hycre had saved them back then, and they’d since repaid that favor with returning the bulk of their conquered worlds back to them, but she wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking that the lizards were less dangerous than before. She and the others had simply gotten a lot more dangerous themselves, though to unknown races out there far, far away it wouldn’t matter. The lizards would simply run them over and slaughter them.

With that in mind, Sara kept her warships at the main jumppoints with orders to blow away anything lizard on sight.

One factoid that she’d been noticing, and confirming what the Voku had already told them, was that the lizard cargo ships were only full heading coreward, with the bulk of them returning empty. That suggested the lizards were heavily favoring the combat in the Skarron zone…not a bad move considering that Star Force and its allies were winning out here and pressing ever closer to the lizards’ core worlds. If they’d devoted those resources here it would have delayed things further, but not stopped it. Though now that they were effectively blocking off their internal highway those ships and supplies would be staying put and fortifying the rimward half even more.

There were plenty of other systems still in lizard hands to send convoys through, which they no doubt would begin to divert through until Star Force and the Preema/Voku eventually spread out to take those systems as well, but any ships traveling off this line were vulnerable to ambush because there wasn’t heavy lizard defenses waiting to screen for them. If they could break this link in the chain the lizards would either have to risk being ambushed constantly, which they would be as the Voku were already doing a very good job of it throughout this area, or have their empire effectively cut in two.

And it was for that reason that Sara felt uneasy about this. It’d been a hard fought win to claim naval dominance, but her gut said it wasn’t over yet.

When an unusually large number of incoming ships popped up on sensors arriving at a jumppoint on the rimward side of the star she took notice, with her warships and their drone fleets ambushing them as they arrived…but they kept coming in a long convoy that didn’t stop, eventually dumping off enough cruisers to fill the jumppoint with a beehive of contacts that kept getting larger by the minute, for they were jumping in so close to each other that she knew this wasn’t a standard shipment.

Already linked into the nexus she started giving a flurry of orders to both her fleet and Kiran’s. Sara didn’t know where he was at present, but he wasn’t logged into a nexus so she had priority command. Taking control of every ship in the system she began maneuvering her chess pieces around and pouring a chunk of them in towards the star including her command ship, for she couldn’t suffer the lag involved if she was going to micromanage the arrival point battle.

Her connection cut out when the ship made its microjump, with the speed messing with the battlemap reception. Rather than send corrupted signals the technology switched to observation mode until the braking microjump was made and the speeds of location and ship returned to relative stability. As the battlemap updated so did the ship counts, with the lizards literally ramming their empty jumpships into her fleet.

She saw one of the massive jumpships flash into the side of four drones, vaporizing them on impact with a shiver running down Sara’s spine. The drones had been starside, meaning the lizards couldn’t accelerate off the gravitational mass at system’s center. Rather they’d have to push off of distant planets for slow movement navigating the star, but this one hadn’t. Where they normally would have been safe from such a tactic, her fleet was getting hammered by what was obviously an upgrade in gravity drives.

The lizards now had binary versions.

Another flash ended before it began, with a command ship on site bracing against the kamikaze jumpship. The dampening shields had gotten up in time, and given the short distance between the two vessels the lizard jumpship hadn’t been able to accumulate a massive amount of speed. As if punishing it for its impudence, the command ship lit up the jumpship’s surface with dozens of weapon strikes visible at range, including a bloon launch that carved a crater into the bow, spraying debris out in a quickly expanding halo.

Sara made adjustments to her ship formations immediately, recognizing this battle was quickly turning into chaos. The lizards weren’t just trying to damage the Star Force ships, they were buying time for the new ones coming in to dump their cruisers before they could get sheared off their docking ports by Star Force’s superior weaponry.

And there were more and more coming, with no way for her to scan to see how many were on the way. Star Force transmitted signals ahead of them when entering friendly systems, but the lizards were not, meaning there was an unknown number of ships coming in and she was losing drones rapidly from the kamikaze runs, not by the cruisers, but by the humongous jumpships. That was a waste of resources she’d rarely seen the lizards commit, but this system was their lifeline to the other half of their empire and it seemed they were more than willing to commit excessive reinforcements to try and hold it.

That meant they had a genuine war on their hands this time, not the one-sided affairs that Star Force had to work for, but whose ultimate outcome was never really in doubt.

“So be it, then,” Sara whispered, stretching her Sav-enhanced limits and taking a deeper control of the fleet movements, yanking priorities out of captains’ and remote pilots’ hands and making this her personal battle more so than normal.

She broke off a group of drones and sent them bypassing the lizards at the forefront, diving in between their fleets and heading for the incoming jumppoint itself, which was creeping outward into the system like a slowly deploying rug laying down ships. It was there that the loaded jumpships were coming in, and it was those that Sara wanted to hit before they could unload, figuring that they wouldn’t go kamikaze until they did so, as well as realizing that there were other lizards ships in the way up front that they would run into.

With that front line being the collision risk, the trailblazer forced part of the fighting behind their lines, getting far closer than normal. Typically it was Star Force that stood off and sniped from range, but now they were doing the reverse across the battlefield as Sara ordered all incoming ships into pointblank range to lessen the impact velocities of any ramming vessels. She knew she was going to lose a lot of ships, but better to fight this here and now than give them easy access to the system.

Sara kept calling in more ships from planetary orbit, but didn’t pull them all out, for she didn’t want them running reinforcements down to the surface where the ground battles were only 2 months old. The planet was still mostly in lizard hands, and it would be easy to reinforce them if they could get their ships down inside the safety zone that the planetary defenses provided.

She sent a message to the commander there to form a defense line at the jumppoint in from the star and at several of the subsidiaries coming off the planets. If the lizards did try that tactic they’d have to approach much slower or creep in on an indirect jumpline, but for now the battle was here and Sara tried to focus as much as she could without overloading herself.

Minutes passed with the carnage continuing to escalate, then a chunk of the ships under her direct command were siphoned off by another person in the network. The only one who had access to override her was Kiran, whose command ship had just jumped into stellar orbit and was on approach. Thankful for the help, both in firepower and mental workload, the two trailblazers split up the battle into two parts…the front line and the flankers. Sara was already working the flankers in between the enemy ships so Kiran let her keep those, pulling the main defense line to his control and reworking it slightly to fit his combat preferences.

That Sara didn’t mind, for each commander handled things a bit differently. She could see the changes happening as she watched the overall battle in mind’s eye, but most of her focus was on the weapon strikes she was coordinating to cripple jumpships within a few seconds of their shields going down. Boring strikes down deep into the hull to knock out gravity drives and power generators, she left the ships otherwise intact but unable to summon up the energy for kamikaze dives…or at least not very fast ones, for hitting every single gravity drive within a jumpship was difficult, for in the lizard designs they were spread throughout the ship in numerous locations.

But taking out some of their capability left them to limp around to be destroyed later, for they weren’t leaving the system in such a state unless they wanted to spend years in transit to the closest star system. With her goal being just that, she had numerous drones firing in coordination that a crew of pilots couldn’t handle as well, for all the ships were the pieces of one player, that being Sara, in this computerized hive mind that she was working through.

But there were so many lizard ships now that she was overwhelmed, losing a few drones here and there to cruiser fire or collisions, but unable to stop the wellspring and having it force forward into Kiran’s lines. Rather than let it get to them, both trailblazers did what they had to do…collapse their widespread lines down into solidified groups that could chew through enemy ships. Let them get spread out and the lizards would do the same to them, tech advantage or no.

But that also meant sections of the massive lizard fleet that was continuing to roll in were left to do as they pleased. Many pressed the attack, but some sections of it started to form a wall in space that well over half an hour later shielded for a different group of jumpships to come in. These carried troops and supplies, pooling in a series of groups with escorts and then making microjumps elsewhere into the system while Sara and Kiran were still fighting the warships and just trying to knock them down as fast as they could while they were still somewhat unorganized.

The first reinforcement convoy jumped into planetary orbit behind its wedge of cruisers and empty jumpships that just rammed the Star Force lines, forcing blunt stops and running interference while the support ships flew past and raced towards low orbit and the range where the planetary anti-orbit guns could cover them. Sara and Kiran were out of the loop on this behind far too many seconds of lag, but the mage in command of the orbital defense dispatched small groups of ships to take down some of the reinforcements while the rest were left dealing with the attacking warships.

A swarm of blocky drones shot after the blockade runners far faster than the lizard ships could move, binary drives or not, and came up behind them to open fire where the lizards own planetary weapons couldn’t target them. Chewing into their ships from behind with a ravenous appetite, the drones followed the lizard ships down into the atmosphere, dropping more of them as they progressed down the line as a few huge pink phaser blasts leapt up at them. A few drones got hit and were lost, but the rest stayed tucked in with their prey and continued to kill them up until the point where the lizard ships scattered, forcing the drones to choose who to chase.

But at that point the mage ordered them to hold fire and simply follow the ships at extremely close range to avoid the defense batteries. If they shot the lizard ships down they’d be exposed, and the mage wanted them to get to ground as well. The lizard cities couldn’t admit their own ships with the drones tucked in, so they had a problem to deal with.

When the split happened a lot of the transports got away, but the drones stayed with some and found blindspots in the terrain where the anti-orbital guns couldn’t hit them. Stashing them away there for future use, the mage continued to fight the short-lived battle in orbit only to have another group with escorts coming in.

There were so many lizard ships in the system, both at the star and coming in to the planet, that Star Force couldn’t stop them all. They were destroying them left and right, and taking a beating as they did it, but hundreds and then thousands of ships made it down to the planet in an anti-like flow as the never-ending convoy kept pouring more ships into the system with no end in sight.

2

February 26, 2933

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Nephasil

Harris-739221 stood atop a lizard building on the outskirts of one of their cities that Star Force had invaded some 4 days ago. They’d met up with heavy resistance but had succeeded in claiming a slice of the southeast quadrant, essentially a crescent moon with the middle starting to widen out and push further in. The still smoking remains of the city’s single anti-orbital battery lay to the northwest, having fallen victim to the costly orbital bombardment that had seen many drones get junked cutting the invasion force a blind spot to land troops inside. Now it was up to them to take out the rest of the planet from the ground.

The ranger had been in 3 large campaigns prior to this one, but none of them had seen fighting like this. Even in this city alone there were lizards pouring in from reinforcement lines as other cities shifted their resources to fight here rather than wait for the invaders to get to them. Six cities lay wasted behind them, with this one and two others currently under Star Force attack with hundreds more across the planet for them to get through, but right now that wasn’t a concern.

From his vantage point up top, while the rest of his unit were taking a quick nap below in a prefab firebase that they’d actually set up inside a gutted lizard building for the visual cover, he could see the mech battles taking place around the city. The lizards were fighting through the interior but also trying to flank the invaders, which was why they’d attacked on a wide swath. It would give them a ‘safe’ zone in the middle that they could fall back to if necessary, but the mechs were determined to keep the tank swarms and fighters at bay. He could see several of the Porcupine-class quadruped mechs patrolling behind the front lines daring the lizard fighters to come within range, but the suicidal pilots were backing off at the moment, with the once barren countryside getting a lot of yellow/tan metallic boulders added to the natural pale pink ones.

With the number of porcupines that they had in play, Harris knew they’d be safe from all but the largest of the wisp swarms. Those had been present when they’d initially attacked the city, but the perimeter had been an easy approach in that there were no boundary walls. Typically lizard cities didn’t have them, for they were constantly growing and pushing out their borders, but they did have defense turrets and towers that a group of heavy walkers had to take down from range. Two Rafael-class walkers, the largest that Star Force produced, had knocked out the visible turrets from afar and were now parked out behind them in what was essentially the middle of the invasion zone. They were too big to enter the city, unless you wanted to squash buildings while walking over them, but they did a remarkable job of keeping enemy tanks away through intimidation alone.

The current engagements were happening further around the curve of the city where their firing lines did not connect. Harris could see a lot going on, and was taking a moment to check out what the battlemap was telling him before he got back into the action. This city looked like it was going to take weeks to conquer, based on the number of reinforcements that were pouring in, but Star Force was grinding its way forward and he had to take rest sooner or later. He’d spent an 18 hour stint fighting before coming here to grab some food and rest rather than redeploying back to a safer Star Force ground base. Many others were doing the same, and now that he was up he wanted to take stock of the larger picture before he got consumed in hand to hand fighting alongside the Commandos and Knights while higher ranking Archons pressed forward sniffing out traps that could collapse buildings down on top of you.

His helmet had a magnification function built into the cameras hidden within the hard exterior. There was no faceplate on this version, relaying entirely on a holographic HUD inside to allow him to see. Some of the old models were still used but Harris, like most other Archons, preferred not to have a weaker section of armor covering his eyes. The plate hovering just in front of his face was the thickest on his body and would allow him to take several direct blasts without penetrating. The fact that he looked like a robot from the outside didn’t bother him, for most of the Commandos with him were likewise wearing similar ‘faceless’ helmets.

With the zoom function expanding out, he was watching one Starbright-class mech battle with a dozen or so lizard tanks when he noticed a dark cloud in the distance behind them. At first he thought it was a storm wall approaching, for this planet regularly had wet weather, which was odd considering the plant-less, rocky terrain. Both lizard and Star Force aerial fighters could navigate through clouds and rain well enough, but lightning strikes were going to make things tricky for them and he wondered if the lizards weren’t going to try and make a play in the storm when it got here.

Harris moved his line of sight forward as far as he could until the edge of the city eclipsed his view. The mech battles were continuing beyond his line of sight, but it looked like there were groups of tanks trying to rush past them and dive into the city streets behind Star Force lines in an attempt to the flank the ground troops within. He saw one Keema streak mildly disrupt the skyline before melting/exploding one of the tanks in a single strike, followed by four more shots in the next 5 seconds coming from one of the rafaels that ended their little flanking run before they could make the buildings.

The lizards had pushed too far and paid the price for it, but the fact that they were even trying showed how desperate they were. No…desperate wasn’t the right word. They had a different feel to them right now, aggressive for sure, and reckless to a fault, but he got the sense that something else was in play. He zoomed out his battlemap to cover the distance mech fights and saw a huge army of tanks behind those within his line of sight, on the order of several thousand all trying to cut in on the edge of the crescent and get behind the troop positions within the city.

Just then a warning beacon registered in his HUD calling everyone to battle, including those on sleep cycles. Harris was already up so he didn’t need to do anything yet, merely waiting on orders for where his unit was meant to go, but wondering what the urgency was beyond the tanks, he expanded his battlemap out to cover the entire city looking for the source of the warning.

He found not one, but six beacon markers indicating extreme threats. Five marked reinforcement lines coming in from neighboring cities on an order of magnitude far beyond what they’d been getting. No doubt a result of the new arrivals that had been pouring down from orbit with naval unable to stop most of them from getting to ground. He’d wondered when those troops would come into play, and unfortunately it looked like they were going to dump them on his position rather than spreading them out piecemeal across the planet.

“Shit,” he said, hoping Star Force was sending reinforcements as well, for there was no way they could hold out against that many…then he noticed the sixth beacon’s location and snapped his head back towards the approaching zoom and engaged maximum zoom, seeing that it was closing on them rapidly. The dark ‘cloud’ was now resolved down to tiny granules of moving objects, which his battlemap was tagging as lizard wisps.

Harris didn’t have anything to say to that, with the approaching doom clamping down on any verbal retort. There were so many wisps that his battlemap couldn’t get an accurate count, and they were all headed straight here.

The porcupines began moving a few seconds later, increasing their spacing while other mechs moved in to flank them. It took less than half a minute after that before Harris’s orders came in, with a waypoint directing him and his unit down into the substructure of the city and off the streets.

The ranger pulled back his zoom and turned away from the approaching wisp storm, sliding off the edge of the roof and dropping down to the alley three stories below where he joined his Commandos coming out and racing for one of the entrances to the undercity and away from the aerial attack about to hammer them.

Harris waited for the last of his men to come out, then followed up the rear along with a pair of Knights as he heard the porcupines’ array of sammies begin to fire off so fast he couldn’t count the number. By the time he ducked into the building entrance that would lead them down and out of sight, the sound of the phaser storm began to build to monstrous levels and he was very glad he wasn’t out there in a mech right now, though when those ground troops got here he didn’t expect to be much better off.

Three days later…

“What have you got?”Jyra asked, walking in with Mace and Leo as Brandon was leaning over a holographic table in their small private chamber onboard trailblazer Sara’s command ship.

“Have a look,” he said, zooming out to a regional map of the planet’s surface where Star Force still held positions. They’d been forced back into three captured cities and two defense outposts they’d constructed of their own, though those were being heavily engaged by the lizard ground troops.

Jyra looked at the basic map, noting a few small updates but seeing nothing of consequence…as far as a mission for them was concerned. Star Force was getting its ass kicked, having to give up ground to avoid being obliterated while a single key strongpoint was being constructed. Right now it lay at the center of their territory inside a captured lizard city. That had seemed odd to Jyra, for Star Force usually preferred to construct its own digs, but for whatever the reason the trailblazers had chosen to set up there and were coordinating all of the retreats to buy time to layer it with tech from the fleet in orbit that was barely hanging on to an overhead slot.

It was a turtling up strategy that was daring the lizards to hit them and suffer the consequences, but it also meant that the enemy could now land reinforcements on the far side of the planet without contest and move them across land or air given enough time. If they tried anything closer they’d be harassed or shot down, and even now there were some naval groups out elsewhere around the planet and system doing just that to the lizards, but the bulk was with the command ship Jyra was on that was protecting the ground troops and feeding them supplies. Without them providing cover the lizards could kamikaze ram their cruisers into the captured cities and it’d be bye bye ground troops.

“What am I looking at?” Jyra asked.

“A nightmare situation,” Brandon said, referencing the entire ground campaign, “but not one without holes to exploit. We can’t do anything about the supplies coming down from orbit, and blowing up a few on the ground won’t do much good, but these lizard cities are still actively producing material and warm bodies to throw at us. If we knock down even one wellspring it could make a sizeable difference over the months to come when you do the math.”

“I think ‘negligible’ is the term you’re looking for,” Leo countered.

“We’re not going to win the war on our own,” Mace agreed with Brandon, “but we can save our guys some trouble by taking out factories and avoiding them having to face off against the produce later on. Almost impossible to measure something like that, but it’ll have a real effect so long as we don’t eventually concede the planet and withdraw.”

Jyra raised an eyebrow. “Is that actually being considered?”

Brandon shook his head. “I don’t know, but unless the trailblazers can pull some magic on a scale I’ve never heard of, there’s no way we can win this without a lot of reinforcements. Even then this is going to be a bitch on the ground. We could be looking at a decade-long planetary engagement.”

“Or worse,” Leo added.

“So one factory out of commission adds up to a lot of stuff not being produced over that timespan,” Brandon summed up.

“Alright then. Where do you want us to go?” Mace asked.

Brandon pointed to one city in particular, then looked at the other three Arc Commandos for their reactions.

“Behind enemy lines?” Jyra spoke out what the other two were thinking.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Brandon offered.

“This,” Mace said, pointing into the hologram of the city that spanned more than a 60 mile radius, “would be a first. Our troops only took down a tiny slice of the exterior. That means it’s still lizard central and it’s where they’re routing the reinforcements through.”

“Part of the reinforcements, and it’s not the front line anymore thanks to the ass kicking we’re getting down there. That means it won’t be heavily defended. They’re throwing everything at our troops, not putting up defenses in the rear.”

Leo reached over to the controls, nudging Brandon aside, and zoomed in on the city in question. He brought up the formerly Star Force section of it and jabbed a finger at the new construction zones popping up.

“They’re rebuilding the turret defense.”

“Which will take time. We’ve got a window of opportunity to hit them where they’re not expecting us to. If we wait it disappears.”

“Most of their troops are moving through,” Mace commented, thinking hard. “They’re not hunkered down in defensive slots, which is odd if they were worried about counterattack, especially with their shield emitters being slagged.”

“They’re not even thinking about a counterattack,” Brandon emphasized.

“How much damage could we do?” Jyra asked.

Brandon zoomed in again, showing several markers he’d placed earlier on key facilities, including the bigger defense turrets near the city center.

“We can’t touch these, they’re too well defended. But these,” he said, bringing up 19 different locations spread across the entirety of the city, “I think are doable.”

“All of them?”

“No, unfortunately. We can’t carry enough explosives for more than two, I’d guess. And unless we want to get really bold and put them on long timers, we can’t come and go several times to get them all loaded up. If we can sneak down to the planet and patiently work our way in, I think we’ve got a shot at doing this once. More than that, at this location anyway, would be pushing it.”

“And you think this isn’t pushing it already?” Leo asked.

“If we stay in the shadows no. The question is whether we’re sneaky enough.”

“If we’re exposed we’re as good as dead,” Mace commented.

“We can go underground as a backup. Hide out and make them chase us, so it’s not an instant death fail.”

“That’s so reassuring,” Leo mumbled.

“If you want to nix it, just say so. We can find somewhere else to pitch in.”

“No, you’re right,” Jyra said, looking at the map. “This will matter if we can pull it off. Putting us four on defensive engagements doesn’t gain much. We need to go on the offense and hit something big.”

“Unfortunately the ‘big’ stuff is out of our reach,” Leo argued, looking back at Brandon. “What’s our exit strategy…other than running and hiding?”

“Arrange an evac point outside the city and sneak back out.”

“After we blow it?”

“We can set short timers, I just don’t want to leave the bombs where they can be found over the course of time.”

“Bombs as in what?”

Brandon frowned. “Nothing pretty this time. Just what we can carry in our packs along with survival gear for a few weeks.”

“So not much then,” Mace summed up.

“We’ll have to be creative in the placement.”

Jyra looked at Mace, with both of them in agreement, then she glanced at Leo and gave him a mental ‘boink’ sound and question mark in a telepathic burst.

“This is dumb,” he said plainly, “which is why the lizards wouldn’t see it coming. If we can stay dark it’s doable, otherwise we’re toast. I’m game if you have a really good plan.”

“I do, but I haven’t cleared it yet. Needed you guys onboard first.”

“We are,” Leo confirmed. “Call it in.”

Brandon walked away from the holo table to a pedestal on the other side of the small room, putting his back to his team as he placed a bare hand on it, linking into the telepathic device interface and connecting to the ship’s nexus where the trailblazer was. Through it they had a brief conversation even as she was guiding ships in orbit and coordinating the fighting retreat on the ground. Alpha 9 was the only Arc Commando team involved in this campaign and she’d been saving them for special missions, letting them choose when and where to get involved, but even Brandon wasn’t sure she would go for this one.

He sensed some hesitation when he had completed his proposal, but within a few seconds he got confirmation along with an added wrinkle to the plan to give them some better insertion cover. The Arc Commando withdrew his hand from the pedestal, severing the connection to the computerized hive mind that was organizing this invasion, and turned to his three peers.

“We’re approved and on the clock. 33 minutes to get geared up and in position. Our ride is going to be a bit more flamboyant than I had planned.”

3

The command ship moved down into low orbit as far as it could without endangering itself from the anti-orbital batteries, though some of them were painting its shields will diffuse blasts that were exceeding their effective range. While they did so a portion of the shield was lowered while a few railgun-equipped drones flew down in the shadow of the ship then flanked it, loosing their slugs at the lizard cities without the ability to aim properly given the distance, though hitting their miles-wide shield plates wasn’t going to be an issue.

When the first few fell to ground the anti-air batteries hit them, but couldn’t stop them. Slightly deformed from the light strikes they rammed into the flat shield discs over top the cities and began draining them of power…but at a rate far too low to be effective on a planet-wide assault, else the invasion force would have come equipped with far more. Lizard shields had upgraded to the degree where physical impact didn’t drain them as much as it once had, ironically giving them more of a defense again the kamikaze attacks they themselves employed regularly.

The railgun slugs were basically that, though on a much smaller scale. The anti-orbital batteries couldn’t track and hit them, given the speed at which they were falling, otherwise they never would have made it to ground. After a couple minutes of bombardment the command ship joined in, save for the fact that it didn’t have any rail guns.

What it fired down towards the planet were much larger objects, but at the same insane speeds. Essentially large asteroids, these slugs would do considerably more damage when they hit…but they weren’t aimed at the cities, rather a stretch of uninhabited land in between where they came crashing down with huge craters being carved out from the impacts and the resulting dust clouds filling the air even as a rainstorm was wetting the ground.

All together the command ship sent down 134 objects, with thedrones’ railgun bombardment continuing a few minutes more before cancelling the attack well prior to the massive shields being penetrated. The ship and its escorts retreated back up to its holding orbit, with the anti-orbital guns ceasing their likewise ineffective attack, leaving all quiet for the moment at the attack sites while the ground battles continued to occur in 5 locations to the east.

Where the dust cloud was being chewed into by the rain, what remained of the asteroids were shielded from lizard view being located at the base of the newly formed craters. The giant ‘rocks’ had held together fairly well, with the exterior having been deformed by the impact, though the shields protecting it had done well to soften the blow before they breached and the material took the rest of the hit. But inside those house-sized rocks were hollow pockets with IDF protecting the contents. So long as the shells didn’t breach or the fields overload, the Spark-class drones inside didn’t feel a thing in the crashes, soon coming online when the cases were explosively released opening up the contents to the falling rain.

With controllers in orbit handling them, the little anti-grav spheres lifted up out of their protective cocoons having bypassed the planetary defenses and were now located behind enemy lines a bit. Each of the 134 craters were spaced out so none ran the risk of hitting each other on impact for they were totally unguided on reentry, so each of the little groups of sparks began to flow out of the craters like a line of ants heading towards mutual rendezvous points where they would form up into 6 different columns, traveling overland rapidly towards the flank of the lizard armies that were continuing to push Star Force’s troops backwards.

But these sparks weren’t headed for the main battle, rather they were headed for the lines of reinforcements feeding them, intent on ambushing those overland convoys for while a lot were being moved in vehicles there were so many lizard infantry units in play that they were approaching on foot from the nearest cities. Those were exposed while the bulk of the wisp swarms were well ahead playing tag with the Star Force anti-air defenses.

Whether they stayed there or redeployed to counter the sparks wasn’t an issue. Getting those units into the field at the position they did was key, for it was outside the ‘safe’ corridor that Star Force had blown into the anti-orbital defenses and where they weren’t expecting anything containing cargo or troops to come down in. If the sparks were all destroyed by the wisps before they could get to the infantry columns then so be it, for that would give the defenders a much needed break from the persistent air attacks and an opening to counterattack, briefly, on the ground. Either way it was of strategic value, however costly in terms of equipment and ammunition. They couldn’t employ the same tactic again, not from this command ship anyway, for Sara had sent down their full complement of drop pods.

As the sparks left their one-way transports behind the interiors of the empty shells began to fill up with rain water, a few inches at least by the time Alpha 9 decided it was time to get moving. They’d come down inside one of the pods, huddled up in a smaller cocoon with a backup IDF in case the main one failed. It hadn’t, and now the four man Arc Commando team was on the planet behind enemy lines in the middle of nowhere, hopefully undetected and going to stay that way.

Inside the hollow sphere where a few sparks had ridden were several other packages, from which four speeder bikes were removed and loaded up with cargo canisters where applicable. Jyra climbed onto her floating steed with extra fuel packs and supplies stashed around the seat with just enough room for her to slide her legs over, then she pulled a special sleeve that covered the front of the bike up over her head and attached it to the rear giving her the aerodynamic look of a fat needle.

The other three did likewise, obscuring each other from view save for a tiny spec of a camera on the nose of the bikes that fed into their HUDs. Through that they could see ahead, but not behind or to the sides. That wasn’t the best feeling in the world, but Jyra knew it was a necessity as she hit the interior button that activated the cloaking sheath. Her bike vanished from view, replaced with a black blot that no light was being emitted or reflected from. The other three did likewise, turning into phantoms that rose up into the rain under the dark of night undetectable to lizard sensors or eyes. Had they come in the daylight the black blurs would be noticeable, but at night it was almost impossible to tell dim light from nothing at all so long as the concealed bikes didn’t pass in front of a light source.

It wasn’t a scifi ‘cloaking field’ in the traditional sense, but it would allow the Arc Commandos to move around the countryside unnoticed so long as their ruse had worked and no one was nearby to pay attention to the crash site…withthe cloud cover and rain being an added bonus that virtually insured they’d go undetected.

They still had half the night to work with, but they couldn’t take a straight line approach to their destination city. The four of them hovered out of the drop pod in sequence then took off into the night navigating solely by telepathy to keep from bumping into one another, for the dark shadows the bikes made in the rain were almost indistinguishable from the rest of the night even when they were directly in front of you.

That meant the four of them had to stay close together given their limited Ikrid range, with Jyra’s being the weakest. They kept her in the middle of their tri-point formation, with Brandon’s speeder ahead. She could see a bit of his distortion wake as his canopy busted through the raindrops in her nightvision, but he was too far away to see with her Pefbar, though every now and then she could catch a glimpse of the ground beneath her as they skimmed a ridge. There were minimum altitude sensors underneath the bikes that would keep them from dropping too low, but in order to keep from bouncing up and down constantly they were flying in as straight of a line as possible.

All she had to do was follow Brandon, for it was his job to navigate as best he could without good vision or lateral sensors, and he had them traveling at considerable speed. They could always increase altitude, for the bikes had no maximum, but the more they could hug the terrain the better they all felt, so they were playing it cagy and a bit reckless at the same time.

But she trusted their team leader and just did her part to keep up. The few times he eased out of her Ikrid range Mace and Leo were beside her to orient off of. They had greater range and didn’t lose track of him, allowing her to creep back up to the point where she could sense his presence, though his bike was still thoroughly a blank spot as far as her nightvision was concerned.

As far as navigating to their destination they had no help there. The bike’s navigation systems could pick up the orbital signals from the warships to give them a read-only link to the battlemap, but those systems were powered down when underneath the stealth sheath, for it would block all incoming signals. That meant Brandon had to play it by ear and guestimate their heading and distance traveled up until he found some convenient terrain and they stopped within a steep canyon.

By that time they were out of the rainstorm and the first hint of light began to illuminate the western horizon, with them parking their bikes between rock formations where they’d be all but impossible to see. They kept their cloaking sheaths on, making only a visible inspection from directly above possible of spotting the black dots and hopefully they would be in shadow once the sun rose, but the four Arc Commandos slid out from underneath their rides and had a look around the area, finding an elevated position from which to get their bearings.

Jyra crawled up top a small mount next to the other four as the sky began to brighten to hazy blue, barely enough to make out the first bits of sight without their nightvision, but the distant lizard cities were easy enough to make out, for their buildings rose up well above the terrain. There were three within easy viewing and a scattering of others whose tips were just poking above the horizon. None of them were their target, meaning they were going to have to lay low throughout the day and travel another leg over the next night, but first they needed an accurate vector.

Jyra saw a new waypoint uploaded onto her HUD from Brandon’s helmet and synced with the battlemap being transmitted from orbit, but per their sneaking orders they’d set their own transmitters to stay silent aside from a very weak signal that would only register within a few dozen meters. That may have been a bit paranoid considering their comm signals were already camouflaged, but with the ever increasing level of lizard tech they didn’t want to take any chances.

“Looks like we’re clear,” Leo commented, the first words any of them had spoken all night long.

“Let’s hope it stays that way,” Brandon said, continuing to have a look around. “I don’t think the lizards have any reason for being out here on foot, but I don’t want to take the chance of a stray ship spotting us. If anyone sees a nice camping spot, don’t keep it to yourself.”

“I’ve got a ledge to the south,” Mace commented. “Plenty of boulders to find some shady spots.”

“I suppose a cave is too much to ask for?” Jyra said, looking around with the others in her nightvision.

“How long do we have to look?” Leo asked.

“About 5 minutes.”

“Couldn’t you have put us down sooner?” Mace complained.

“Woulda, coulda, shoulda…it’s a moot point now.”

“I’ll take the north,” Jyra said, crawling over the top and sliding down the rocky hillside there.

“South,” Leo said, taking off the opposite direction and leaving the other two the remaining cardinal points. They scrambled around on the ground, running once they were below vision height of the surrounding area, and looking for the best cover they could find, hoping they wouldn’t have to be stuck in a square meter or two for the next 19 hours.

Mace won out in the scavenger hunt, finding a deep overhang that was essentially a wall-less cave on three sides. It wasn’t big enough to bring all their bikes under, but they did head back to them and retrieve bits of equipment that they then hiked a short distance and out of sight of the bikes to dump underneath the overhang as the sun finally broke over the horizon.

“Good one, Mace,” Jyra said as she pulled off her helmet and tasted the slightly pungent air that had oxygen levels higher than Star Force standard. “Who wants first watch?”

“I will,” Brandon offered. “Get your digs set up and chill. No workouts, unfortunately.”

“At least we can get out of our armor,” Leo said, pulling his helmet off as Jyra began unpacking their portable tents.

“No, use the big one,” Brandon told her.

“Will it fit?”

“I think so. Try anyway, we’ve got plenty of time to kill.”

Jyra shrugged and pulled out the larger unit as Leo smoothed off the ground as much as possible, kicking some small rocks out of the way before she deployed the canister and they all stepped back from the perimeter but still stayed under the aerial cover of the ledge. The pale pink rocks would stand out in stark contrast to their pitch black armor, for they’d chosen that color for their nighttime operations in the hasty prep they’d had on the command ship prior to insertion.

The tent rose up and kissed the ceiling, getting pinned there a few inches from full deployment.

“Close enough?” Mace wondered.

“It’s not rigid,” Jyra pointed out.

“Will it still work?” Leo asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Never had to deal with this before.”

“We don’t need the walls, it’s the stuff inside.”

“Well,” Jyra said, pushing the door flap aside and walking in. “The floor and ceiling are solid, and I assume the power lines in the walls are either flexible or in the poles.”

“Try it,” Brandon said, tossing her the power pack.

“Please work,” she whispered. “I really want a shower.”

She slid the small device in then got handed the other pieces of equipment through the doorway by the others. When she plugged them in they lit up with power, but it wasn’t until she stepped inside the shower ring and tapped the button with her armored toe did it come on. She let it scrub the outer layer of her armor until it did a full circuit up and down, with the few missing inches of height apparently not affecting it negatively.

“Seems ok,” she said, turning it off and stepping out.

“Something to add to the Nest notes,” Brandon said, staying outside. “I’m on watch. Get to sleep.”

“How about some cards?” Mace asked.

“After we relieve ourselves,” Leo noted. “I’d prefer to do that in private, thank you very much.”

“Yeah,” Jyra agreed. “Go ahead. I’ve got second.”

“Are we showering in private too?” Mace wondered.

“Let’s just camp outside and give everyone some alone time,” Jyra suggested. “Though it is weird that the idea of showering in front of you guys doesn’t bother me, but I really don’t like taking a dump with you watching.”

“Ditto,” Leo agreed. “Might as well give each other some space while we can.”

“Let us know when you’re done,” Mace said, walking back outside and finding a bit of ground to sit on looking out at the ever increasing sunlight kissing the rocks. A huge shadow was overtop the ledge and most of the canyon, but he could see the sunlight line on the walls was moving ever so slowly down.

Jyra sat down next to him, with Brandon to the far left still with his helmet on. He’d stay that way until his watch was over, with the other two letting him keep the look out while Jyra leaned back on the ground and stretched out, literally, after having been cramped up on the speeder for hours. She yawned, not really tired but thoroughly bored.

“Should have brought a game mod,” she said, sitting back up and mentally settling in to the process of waiting for nightfall to come again.

4

February 27, 2933

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Nephasil

Jyra and her team packed up their gear just before sunset and crept over to their speeders when the light finally went down. Throughout the entire day they hadn’t seen or heard so much as a peep from the lizards, but with their lives hanging on by a thread they didn’t want to take any chances. When deep night finally reigned they mounted up and took off on the next leg of their journey, traveling north around a city then angling northeast in a zigzag between two others before finally finding some less than suitable terrain to lay low in during the next day.

There they didn’t have the luxury of an overhang, barely finding enough boulders to hide their bikes in and having to stay in armor tucked into crevices for most of the day. When night finally fell they took an hour to set up camp and shower, then they immediately packed back up and headed off on their bikes towards their destination city.

They got to the perimeter with a few hours left to spare but didn’t think that would be enough time to accomplish their mission, so they searched around and actually found a cave to hide in about 20 miles outside the city. There they waited through the day cycle, sleeping in turns while one always kept watch with a fair amount of air traffic passing nearby them. They weren’t disturbed and no wisps or transports did a double pass so the team assumed they’d gone undetected, then when the day began to wane it was almost time to get going and make this happen, with Jyra watching battlemap updates being transmitted from orbit detailing how the ground battles were faring.

She wasn’t pulling live vids, for she couldn’t request additional data with the blackout protocols, but the basis statistics showed that they were losing, but in a controlled manner. Bleeding the enemy of troops as they slowly withdrew, but Star Force only had so much ground to give. The ‘had to hold’ points were still secure, but the pressure on them was mounting and Jyra wasn’t sure what the outcome of this one was going to be unless they got reinforcements…for the enemy’s never-ending stream was going to wear down their troops eventually, with the lizard body trails already being visible from orbit.

“Anyone else thinking that we might be a bit too late?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the cave where she could get decent reception on her helmet, but just far enough in side that she was still in shadow.

“Looks that way,” Mace answered. “But if Sara let us come down here, then I’d guess they don’t see it that way.”

“We’re going to need backup.”

“Might already be on the way.”

“Regardless,” Brandon added, “we haven’t seen this much resistance on the ground since…well, as long as I can remember.”

“I don’t think the lizards want us severing their empire’s lifeline,” Leo summed up. “I think we’re in for a whole new level of spamming here.”

“Not us, if we do our job right,” Brandon corrected. “Let’s hope their backline is asleep.”

“When do they sleep?” Jyra wondered. “And how much?”

“A good question,” Brandon agreed. “Let’s not try and a find out this trip, okay?”

“Not like I was going to go around interviewing them,” Jyra mumbled. “Just wondering how much a slice of day they miss in snooze zone.”

“Once every three days, give or take,” Leo answered.

Brandon turned his helmet to look at him. “How do you know that?”

“Recon report.”

“By who?”

“The Queen of Diamonds. She’s pulled a lot of solo missions behind enemy lines studying them. I’ve been able to get into most of the reports. Makes for good reading.”

“I didn’t think our codes would work on the trailblazers’ stuff?”

“She’s not one of them.”

“Scuttlebutt says she is,” Jyra disagreed.

“No, she just has some experimental flying armor,” Mace explained.

“Have you found confirmation of that?” Brandon asked.

“In reports, no. But I have pulled visuals from some of the battles she’s been in. Those aren’t hard to find.”

“Ok, lizard expert,” Brandon said. “Anything else we should know before heading in there?”

“They don’t like losing,” Leo said, watching his own HUD with the realtime battlemap.

“Well they’re going to lose a little to us. Let’s get packed up,” he said, grabbing a water jug while the others picked up the spare pieces of equipment that didn’t go in their packs and loaded them up while Leo took down their tent and did likewise. When they were all set they mounted up within the cave and eased their way out one by one, hugging low to the terrain and following Brandon out as he navigated their way through the dark getting them closer to the city.

The cameras on the tips of the speeders picked up the aerial traffic easily enough, with ships coming and going constantly from other cities delivering troops and supplies that would then be sent on ahead to the front. No infantry convoys were present, however, but there were a lot of rapidly moving hovertrucks coming in, apparently shuttling the hordes of lizards to this rendezvous point where they could gather and then approach en mass under their own power.

That meant the four speeders had to be careful when approaching to choose a vector that didn’t have traffic, but a couple of miles shy of the outer buildings they stopped their approach and flew low in a wide circle checking the terrain and keeping off the rocky mounts. Eventually they found a bit of cover and set down, hiding two of the bikes there and doubling up on the others. They planned to fly their way over the buildings and through the streets rather than trying to huff it on foot, but if something went wrong and they lost their rides they didn’t want to get caught out in the countryside on foot, for their evac point was far from here.

It didn’t hurt to have a backup plan, but it was a very tight fit underneath the cloaking sheaths with Jyra having to almost lay down around Mace’s waist to fit. Her head wasn’t upright, but then again she couldn’t see anything other than the camera transmitting to her HUD, and that didn’t matter since she wasn’t driving.

The Arc Commando did watch as Brandon and Mace flew up to the outer ring of buildings, picking their spot carefully as they eased up to one and all but landed on the roof of the 4 story tall structure. It didn’t have windows, which was common for their low lying structures. They knew enough about lizard infrastructure to know it was an industrial warehouse of some sort, the contents of which they didn’t know, nor were they going to find out. They had a variety of targets available to them to hit, but right now staying hidden was all that mattered.

Creeping from roof to roof and zipping across sections of city where they found a hole in the traffic patterns, the two speeders stayed together and traveled far inside the outer perimeter, avoiding the heavily defended infrastructure and zigzagging across the mundane structures. Most of those were residential or more warehouses, and they set down on the roof of one residential complex when their primary target came within sight.

Or rather the top of it, most of the hatchery was situated below ground but the entrances were fairly well defended. They were going to have to sneak their way in from here, and the best way they knew how was to go underground themselves and travel over to the facility via the tunnel network.

Jyra slid out from under the cloaking sheath along with Mace and jogged over to one of the roof entrances that Leo was already working on cutting into, for it wasn’t a personnel entrance, but rather an exhaust vent. The Archons might be able to walk down through a lizard building, wave their hands and make all the occupants forget seeing them, but the Arc Commandos’ Ikrid abilities were not so advanced. With the cover of night and luck having allowed them to get this far, and their bikes wedged up against roof outcroppings where they would hopefully not be noticed, they were going to take the ventilation system route to get into the substructure and therefore hopefully preserve the anonymity of their exit point.

But in truth, from here on out they were making up everything as they went.

Leo lifted the grated cover off and Jyra slid into the meter-wide shaft first, having to wiggle around to get her pack to fit inside. With her legs and arms spread out like a vice, she lowered herself with a controlled slide all the way through the building down into the substructure where the environmental systems where gathering the excess heat produced within the building and shunting it outside so the lizards wouldn’t cook themselves in the close confines of their packed city.

This wasn’t the first time she’d been in such a shaft and Jyra knew what to do at the base, using a cutting tool to make a hole just above the bottom that led into a maintenance crawlway. One good thing about lizard infrastructure was that it almost never changed, and each planet had identical buildings created from a very large playbook. Learn it, and you’d be able to get around anywhere within their cities no matter what arrangement they placed the buildings in.

“Clear,” Jyra said over their short range comm as she kicked her legs through the opening and slid out of the shaft as the other three started to come down. Maneuvering with her pack on was difficult, but it was something she’d gotten used to on previous missions and didn’t hold her up much now. Leading the way into an empty room, checked beforehand with her Ikrid, she slid out of the crawlway and got onto her feet, brandishing a pair of stun pistols and walking across to the nearby open doorway and held position there while the others caught up.

“How we doing?” Brandon asked, bringing up the rear.

“Not a peep yet.”

He passed her by and took the lead as the foursome began to move through the bottom of the residential complex until they came to the interconnecting tunnels buried deep underground. There they found their first live lizards in the form of a line pushing hover crates down a long, highway-like lateral shaft.

“Can’t go that way,” Mace commented.

“No, we’re going across,” Brandon said.

“Across?” Jyra clarified.

“We’ll have to distract them.”

“There are too many.”

“We wait for a gap…it’ll work.”

“Too risky,” she urged.

“Not sure what you’re thinking, bro,” Leo added.

“I’m thinking that if we have to take a detour around this we’re going to waste a couple of extra hours and probably have to go back topside anyway.”

“There might be some auxiliary shafts crisscrossing this main,” Jyra offered.

Mace gently shook his head. “It’s a main for a reason. If there are auxiliaries they’ll be power lines or other utilities. We could spend hours looking and find nothing. He’s right, we gotta get across here. I just don’t know a good way.”

“The doorway on the other side is clear, we just have to sprint across when they’re not looking.”

“They’re all looking this way from the left,” Jyra argued, “and who knows when someone will come back from the right side.”

“Mace, you’re up first.”

“First for what?” he asked Brandon, but stepped up alongside him just shy of the doorway and out of sight to the left of the lizards passing by.

“When I say go, quietly and quickly cross to the other side.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

Mace sighed. “Ok, buddy. You better know what you’re doing.”

Brandon closed his eyes and concentrated all his focus in one direction, reaching out with his Ikrid and touching the lizard minds closest on the left. Within his range he could sense six, with a seventh approaching as another crossed their path and he discounted that one. So long as he and the others didn’t turn around they shouldn’t have to worry about them.

It was the ones pushing the crates in their direction that could see them, so he gently froze their perceptions with a light haze, causing their thoughts to wonder a bit while their actions remained the same. They could see ahead, but weren’t paying attention to what was around them, and as soon as he was sure it was working he double tapped Brandon on the shoulder and the Arc Commando jogged out into the open directly behind the lizard that had just passed him.

He crossed two meters behind him, stepping as quietly as he could over to the far doorway and around the corner, getting out of sight.

“We clear over there?” Jyra asked.

“Standby,” Mace said, then after a long moment he added, “Clear.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said in amazement.

“We’re not done yet,” Brandon said, keeping rudimentary contact with the minds to the left but releasing one that just passed them by and picked up another one as it came into range. “Leo, you’re up.”

“Ready,” he said, taking a knee next to Brandon around the corner. He got the double tap on the shoulder then jerked backwards instantly when Mace called him off.

“Wait!” he warned.

“What’s up?” Jyra asked so Brandon didn’t have to.

“30 seconds. Got a roamer here.”

“Just one?”

“Yeah, and he’s taking his time.”

“You ok?”

“I’m out of view, but the doorway isn’t.”

“Standing by,” Leo announced as they waited…then they sensed a pair of minds coming up behind them.

“Jyra, you’re up next,” Brandon said, changing his mind. “Leo, deal with those two.”

“On it,” the second strongest psionic among them said, backtracking a few meters and ducking into another maintenance chamber with a host of pipes running up and down through the closet-like room. Leo reached out with his mind and caused one of the two lizards to hear something behind him, causing him to turn around and look, buying them a couple more seconds. After that he used a few more Jedi mind tricks to delay them as best he could.

“We’re going to have to move,” he eventually reported. “They’re coming to this doorway.”

“Clear,” Mace reported.

“We can use that,” Brandon said as he sent Jyra on across. “Hide.”

The remaining duo pulled back further and ducked into different side chambers, waiting for the lizards to come to them and having stun guns ready if they happened to be headed for one of those locations. Killing them would send up a smell of blood that the rest of the lizards wouldn’t miss, so stun weapons were what they were carrying for the most part, though the sound alone would be trouble enough.

When the pair got to them they walked on past, out into the subsurface ‘highway’ with Brandon and Leo stepping out behind them and numbing their minds to their footsteps. So long as they didn’t turn around to see them they’d be ok, with Leo keeping both of their minds under his scrutiny while Brandon tricked the crate pushers into ‘seeing’ two more lizards in their place.

The real pair crossed in front of one of the crates and turned left, heading the opposite direction and prompting the Arc Commandos to scurry their last few steps so they didn’t get within their peripheral vision. They ducked into the far doorway and got out of sight from everyone save for the single crate pusher that happened to be passing at that moment. Keeping the ruse in place for him was a bit more difficult because the real lizards were now out of view and there was nothing active for Brandon to copy, but he dampened his mind enough to allow him to pass without looking to his left and seeing them as they disappeared into side nooks.

“See,” Brandon said as he stood next to a bulky pillar that was supporting the structure above them, “no trouble.”

“I wish I could do that,” Jyra said in envy.

“One day, youngling. One day,” Brandon said as he stepped out of his nook and walked down the hallway, turning the corner as the others came out and followed him through the much smaller hallways. They got about 20 seconds before having to backtrack and hide briefly, then it was more of the same moving onwards and navigating by guess given that they didn’t have any blueprints for these lower levels. Orbital sensors couldn’t penetrate beneath the shielding that all lizard cities seemed to have nowadays, so there was no way to know how long it’d take them to get to their target.

It was entirely possible that they would have to spend the day down here hiding out before night came again, but for now they had hours to work with and didn’t intend to waste them if not absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen, with them having to backtrack multiple times as they ran into bottlenecks that they couldn’t bypass. Too many minds in one place and not even all the mind tricks the four of them could produce would be enough to avoid detection, plus the security cameras that popped up here and there had to be avoided, but those at least were predictable. These were low security areas and not under potential scrutiny up until they got close to the hatchery.

That was when they spent another few hours working their way around the subsurface perimeter looking for a way in and having to choose between several bad alternatives, leading them to run out of night to escape in and forcing them to find a quiet room to hide out in while they took turns making scouting runs of the area and adding it to their battlemaps that they would share when meeting up again. Through that process they began to get the layout of the entire western side of the huge facility while they took turns getting an hour or two of sleep each while another stood watch right under the enemy’s nose.

5

“Alright, Jyra,” Brandon said over the comm. “Go.”

Standing in a wall nook, she stepped out of cover and ran three quick steps down the hall, coming up behind a librarian variant that had just come out of the hatchery complex and stuck her stun pistol into its back and discharged it as quietly as possible. The was a muffled ‘zap’ and it fell over, with Jyra catching it before it hit the ground and dragging the lizard off to a nearby room while the others were providing psionic distractions.

Half a minute later Leo came in, followed by the others with Brandon bringing up the tail end and heading straight for the unconscious lizard lying on the floor. He took his armored glove off and touched the big, angled forehead of the lizard to increase his Ikrid contact and dove into its memories as best he could, looking for recent information about the facility it had just walked out of.

Librarians were always a treasure trove of information, with their minds being the easiest to read of all the lizard types. Brandon only knew about standard varieties from experience, with the librarians being ground crew running logistical operations and kept well away from combat. This was the first time he’d been able to see one in person and as soon as he made contact he felt the difference in its mind. The standard variants were elusive in that their focus lay on the matter at hand, which was always changing. This one was altered, in that its mind was segmented into easily recognizable sections much like a library, making it a simple task to look for and retrieve what you wanted to know.

Brandon assumed that was part of their genetic design, for this one could probably store and analyze data better than the others given this mental structure. It was a thinking mind, not an impulsive one, and thankfully for the Arc Commandos this one was naturally observant, with the path it’d just walked through the facility being mostly intact in its memory, giving Brandon the position of the checkpoints, security cameras, and traffic levels inside the sections it had passed through.

“Damn,” he whispered, looking for some auxiliary information while he had the chance.

“Fortified?” Leo asked.

“No, just impossible to get in unnoticed.”

“Cameras?”

“Several, but it’s the traffic flow that concerns me. Too many bodies around,” he said, then fell quiet as he searched for another way in. “594.”

“What?”

Brandon glanced up at him. “That’s how many lizards this facility produces on average…per day.”

“What’s their incubation time?” Mace asked.

Brandon hesitated a moment. “7 months, give or take.”

“That’s faster,” Jyra commented.

“Looks like they’ve been upgrading their biotech too,” Mace stated with dissatisfaction. “Might not mean a lot planetwide, but if we take this out of commission it’ll make a dent in their future numbers. We just gotta make sure we wreck it good, because you know they’re going to rebuild.”

“That’s still around 120,000 lizards we can kill before they wake up,” Jyra said, doing the math. “Worth it in my opinion.”

“Plus however many they don’t grow while rebuilding,” Leo added as he watched the entrance and stood ready to distract any lizards that veered too near their section of what was a utility promenade around the base of the hatchery, feeding it power, water, and other materials through pipes that passed through this junction. There were a lot of monitors around them, meaning this was a ‘come and see if there’s a problem’ room rather than a workstation, and therefore hopefully wouldn’t be visited.

“Hold on,” Brandon said. “We might have some relocating to do.”

“Meaning?” Jyra asked.

“Carry him,” he said, releasing the lizard’s head and pulling his glove back on. “Make sure he stays out.”

“Looks like I’ve got a date,” she said to the lizard before pumping another stun shot into his chest with the barrel pushed into his flesh, then she pulled him over her shoulders with most of his weight resting on top of her pack as the others led the way out. They used their more powerful psionics to chart a course through the lizard infrastructure and distract where needed until they came to another one of thousands of innocuous rooms along the labyrinth of small, subsurface hallways, with Leo ducking inside the doorway quickly.

Jyra heard a pair of stun shots, but by the time she rounded the corner the pair of lizards in the room were already down. Both were standard varieties.

“One of us is going to have to stay here,” Brandon said apologetically.

“I will,” Jyra offered.

“No, I will,” Leo said. “Your psionics aren’t strong enough.”

“Take these three somewhere else nearby,” Brandon said as he moved to a specific panel and pressed a few of the lizard buttons that he knew how to operate, “then get back here.”

“I’ve got these two,” Mace said, picking up the smaller lizards as Leo took point and went searching for someplace to stash them. Soon Jyra got a waypoint beacon and she and Mace took their prisoners out of the room leaving Brandon to work on opening up the water pipes that led into the hatchery. Apparently the facility used quite a lot, for there were three different links for water coming in, with this being one of them. A lot of other pipes were routed through this room as well, but it was the 1.4 meter wide water pipe that was going to be their ticket inside.

Brandon deactivated the water flow, then took out a cutting tool and began slicing open the top of the pipe after insuring that the pressure on this side was reduced so it wouldn’t spill up out onto the floor, but that didn’t stop a small geyser of water/steam to shoot out for a few seconds when he punctured through it the first time. He waited for it to subside, then turned the small hole into a line that eventually circled back on itself until the chunk of pipe fell down into the water, splashing out more onto the floor from the manhole-sized breach point.

“We’re coming back out this way if we can,” Brandon told Leo, “so keep this location secure.”

“Understood.”

“We’ve got about 300 meters to swim, so give me a couple minutes head start. No point in your wasting oxygen while I’m cutting on the other end,” Brandon said as he climbed up on top of the pipe and straddled it.

“Where does this lead?” Jyra asked.

“To a lot of smaller pipes that we can’t fit into, but we’re getting out early on the other side of the wall.”

“If you say so.”

“Not the best idea, but it’s the only way I know of to stay hidden.”

“Let’s make it work then.”

“Mace second, you third. Trade out your gear for Leo’s explosives.”

“On it,” she said, disconnecting her pack from her armor and setting it on the floor as Leo did likewise.

Brandon took a deep breath, realizing that he was going to be on the clock here, then let it out slowly as he readied himself. Leaning forward, he let himself fall down into the water, which gushed out onto the floor from the displacement, then he began crawling/swimming down the dark pipe using his Pefbar to see the circular walls as his helmet’s air vents automatically closed against the presence of water and his backup oxygen supply kicked in.

His battlemap sensors mapped out the tube as he went, giving him distance markings so he knew approximately how far to go before pushing out his Pefbar to look beyond the pipe. He passed by several chambers that were on the wrong side of the main wall, but he wasn’t sure exactly where it was. Taking his best guess he went a bit further than that, then started looking for minds nearby.

He eventually came across one room that had none in it, with the pipe traveling mostly in the walls and ‘thick’ sections of infrastructure were a person couldn’t fit, leaving him with only a handful of rooms to choose from. Taking his luck for what it was, he stopped his movement and stretched his Pefbar out as far as he could to see what the room was like. It too didn’t have a door on it, just an opening to the hallway beyond, but he didn’t sense any minds nearby at all, so hopefully this section of the hatchery wasn’t staffed.

From the librarian he’d learned where exactly the workers were, with most of the facility being made up of equipment that had to be looked after rather than operated, making chunks of it ghost towns save for the random visit. Hopefully this was one of them.

He used his cutting tool and got to work on the top of the pipe, not wanting to flood the area by opening up the side or bottom, for there was still a whole lot of water in the tube, though he was noticing a few inches of air up top now. Those inside the facility may have noticed the lack of water pressure, and if they did hopefully this room wasn’t where they’d check first.

The water vaporized around the tip of the cutter as he seared through the casing, beginning to trace a slow path around another man-sized hole and making sure to make it large enough for them to exit with their packs on as Mace swam up behind him and stopped just shy of his feet. Jyra showed up as well before Brandon got finished, then the hard casing fell down into the water and he pushed it further down the tube before standing up and having a look around with water gushing out onto the floor but not spreading as far as the doorway.

The room was dark save for indicator lights, which was a good sign. No minds were within his sensing range, so Brandon stepped out and let his oxygen supply begin to recharge as he started taking in outside air again.

“Clear,” he reported, taking up station near the doorway and sneaking a peak outside. Both directions of the hallway were empty, with him breathing a sigh of relief. This was actually doable now.

Mace and Jyra joined him, then the three of them moved out and heading in different directions to start building a battlemap and looking for the nearest minds, spending a few minutes orienting themselves before Brandon got a feel for where they were in the hatchery. This one was larger than the one Star Force had built from lizard tech, but the basic layout was the same, only redundantly made larger.

“Alright,” Brandon said when they’d pulled back to their entry point, making sure no one had stumbled onto their hole in the pipe or the water on the floor. “Time to hide the easter eggs. Set for remote and timer. 10 hours or…let’s just make it 3 am. Place as many as you can, but do not be seen.”

“Sneaking as ordered,” Mace confirmed, with the three splitting up and heading to the periphery of their scouted area. When Jyra got to her section she kept her limited psionics engaged constantly, looking for nearby minds as well as using her Pefbar to see through corners to look for security cameras. She took her time and eventually came to one of the inhabited sections, requiring a bit of sneaking by with the lizards opening up fully developed pods and releasing the adult, but just ‘born’ lizards one at a time.

She noticed one that came out shook violently when it was exposed to the air for the first time, with the three others around it having to physically restrain it as it lashed out wildly until it came to its senses and saw that it was with other lizards. Jyra mentally noted never to wake one up and expect a ‘good morning,’ for it seemed they were always wired to fight as their basic instinct. It was still impressive though, how the brand new lizard actually spoke to its greeting party. That meant they did have knowledge preprogrammed into their genetics…either that or there was some sort of download occurring within the pods.

Jyra avoided that pod and several others that had lizards prepping them for release, instead sneaking over to some that were still in waiting, lined up on a long bay floor in rows that gave her ample cover if she crouched down. She could tell from the construction that they were moveable, with the empty one that the brand new lizard had come out of confirming that suspicion as it sank down into a hole in the floor and disappeared into a recycling facility that would prep it for another occupant.

A moment later another one appeared in its place, coming down from the ceiling, meaning that Jyra couldn’t place the bombs on the pods themselves or they’d disappear with them, and if they did get through 598 a day then most of these would be looked at before the timers expired. That meant she had to find someplace else to stash her first little gem, with a bank of what looked like support lines and tanks on the far wall being the obvious second choice.

As she stalked her way over to them, doing her best Solid Snake impression to avoid the few lizards walking about checking on pods, she pulled a small square ‘hockey puck’ out of her pack and linked to it via her HUD, activating it and programming it accordingly with a few quick commands. The Arc Commando dropped all the way to the floor and scooted as far as she could get between several small pipes, then slid it back under them even further before using her full Lachka power to nudge it along the floor sideways until it was out of sight and resting behind a support strut.

One down, 35 to go.

Brandon had reserved the busiest section for himself, heading to the embryo stages where genetic material was being inserted into tiny pods full of gel that would begin the development cycle. That process was actually pretty simple and quick, but there were teams of lizards moving around prepping empty pods with the gel and hooking them up to the support infrastructure, making it very hard for him to move around unnoticed, with him having to use a mind trick twice to get by bottlenecks.

Being patient and stealthy, he moved around from ward to ward, hiding an explosive or two in each, then moving on to later stages of development. Many of the chambers were the same, but once they reached a certain point in the timeline they were transferred to the larger pods, which was also a beehive of activity. He made sure to drop a present everywhere it would do a lot of damage, not enough to bring the building down, but to junk the internal equipment and cause them to replace all of it. It would also kill the developing lizards, and as much as he hated spawn point camping this had to be done.

These lizards hadn’t done anything against Star Force yet, and if they’d been another race they wouldn’t have been using this type of tactic, but never in the history of Star Force had a lizard not wanted to kill them. These developing here would do the same when they got released, so it was best to kill them now before they could fire their first shot. They were going to be enemies regardless, every last one of them. If there had even been a shred of doubt about that they wouldn’t be here doing this, at least not in this way, but Brandon and the others were sure. They had to be, for one didn’t want to make a mistake and kill someone who wasn’t going to try and kill you.

That was one disadvantage the lizards had…they were all united with a common purpose. After so many centuries of warfare for Star Force to learn about them through, they no longer needed to be careful to not target the innocent bystanders, for the lizards had proved there were none within their race. This planet had been given the opportunity to surrender, which it hadn’t taken, and wouldn’t as the offer was repeated over the coming years, so that meant it all had to be destroyed, right down to every last lizard, including the ones in these pods.

Brandon and the others did keep running through the logic in their minds though, rather than taking it as a foregone conclusion. They had to make sure what they were doing was right, and in this case, on this mission, it was, leaving Brandon without any regrets or doubts. He just hated killing like this, but the lizards weren’t giving the galaxy much choice. It was kill or be killed, and when it came to that Star Force could and would prove itself superior in that skillset…it just didn’t usually show it off, out of caution to make sure it stayed on mission.

But today, on this planet, that mission was destruction, pure and simple.

Brandon kept moving around planting explosives and calibrating them to the clock in his helmet to insure that they’d all go off simultaneously, but there was one more place he had to go and that was in the genetic repository that held the precious little hand-sized crates that could create an army for each and every one of them. Typically the lizards didn’t have many of those on hand, and guarded them carefully against destruction…but since they didn’t know anyone was here, and this hatchery was still fully operational, they should be located in the control areas where the monitoring staff were.

That was going to be the hardest to sneak into, which was why Brandon left it last on the list, for he was going to need the others’ help to get in there.

6

Jyra walked ever so softly in her armor’s boots, coated in dampening treads over top the hardened under soles, trying to be as smooth as possible as she strode past a lizard at a work station. There were 8 of them in the room, all doing this or that with 5 of them staying put. Three others were roaming from station to station, based on the patterns the Arc Commandos had been monitoring via Pefbar through the walls and nearby rooms before sliding a tiny remote camera in through the doorway. They’d used it to get more info on the control room, including the placement of two security cameras that Jyra was walking around…right in view of the rest of the lizards.

Those lizards were attending to their work and she wasn’t noticed, for Mace and Brandon were working them over with psionics during what they thought would be another few minutes of inactivity from the roamers. Right now two of them were seated and the third was standing in front of monitoring displays. It had been doing that regularly before transitioning over to check another, more formal station.

Jyra and the others had spent over an hour watching their movements in order to plan this out, and now that she was doing it she could feel the danger around her. One look was all it would take to blow their cover and they’d be on the run, but they really wanted to make sure the genetic material didn’t survive the explosions and the only way to make sure of that was detonating one of their little hockey pucks directly on them, else their protective shells would more than likely keep them intact.

The three of them had planned this out prior to her entry, and Jyra was walking a very deliberate course around and through the workstation. The lizard directly to her left all but had its eyes on her, but they were tilted down slightly to look at his station screen and a heavy dose of Ikrid influence to make him keep them there.

Jyra moved slowly, at approximately the speed the roamers moved, with that image being put into the minds of any of them that happened to turn in her direction. They couldn’t psionically dampen all 8 at once, so they were working on the ones most likely to spot her with Jyra’s psionics being used as a backup in case something went wrong.

She made a hard left past its station, then ever so carefully dropped to the ground and crawled past another station that had a security camera over it, she turned right and went within a meter of one sitting lizard’s tail that was sticking out the back of its chair, twitching lazily in the air a few inches off the ground. She made sure not to touch it and kept moving.

After a few more zigzags she ended up in the back room where another security camera was covering the genetic repository, which was basically an elaborate closet indented into the wall. The second camera was there, covering it, for which she opened her hand and a small piece of material they’d scrounged from the cover of a supply canister in the pod prep area gently floated up into the air. Her psionics might not be that strong yet, but make the object as light as a big pebble and she could work it around just fine.

It rose up and put its flat width in front of the camera mount, blocking the view and held it there. Both of the others were busy keeping the lizard minds occupied, so it was her job to multitask and keep it aloft in that precise space while she dug into her open pack and pulled out her last bomb. There wasn’t much in the way of places to hide it, but they knew from experience that the genetic material was so dense that multiple canisters would not be needed for months, so the likelihood of someone coming over here to pick up another one anytime soon was slim.

There was a small lip behind the cartons that held the protective canisters and she set the explosive there, making sure it was out of the line of sight of the camera. There was nothing covering it, but Jyra could only make out a bit of it from above when she pulled her arm back, and fortunately the lizards were shorter than her. Confident that it would go unnoticed despite not being hidden well, she began to make her way back out into the control room, tugging the little piece of thin material back into her hand.

If someone was actively watching the cameras then they’d notice an interruption, but they wouldn’t see her black armor. Given how low level the security was here, for there were no invading troops in this city anymore, they’d wagered that not every camera in the entire city would be monitored and were probably there for use in an active situation or for replay after the fact. It was a bit of a gamble, and if someone was watching and came to check on the camera it would increase the likelihood of the explosive being found, which was why as she backed away she toggled the explosive’s settings to include movement detonation.

Hopefully this planet didn’t have earthquakes, for aside from that it wouldn’t go off unless someone picked it up or something really big crashed nearby and vibrated the floor. But if there was going to be someone to find the explosive before the timer expired, it would be best for the rest of the lizards not to know what was going on and give them a chance to search for more. Dead men tell no tales, and that would certainly be the case with anyone who found this one, though the others spread throughout the hatchery were not so set, for some of them were in locations where there could be vibrations, plus they were hid a lot better.

Jyra walked/crawled her course in reverse, then casually stepped out of the control room and turned the corner, breathing a huge sigh of relief as Brandon signaled danger to the right. She stretched out her senses and found another mind approaching from that direction so the Arc Commandos went left down the wide hallway and ducked into a side room to let this lizard pass one way or another.

I can’t believe we pulled that off, Jyra said telepathically as they hid out. It never should have worked.

Never underestimate the stupidity of a lizard, Mace responded.

Or the power of psionics, Brandon added as the one they were mentally watching turned to the right and out of their hallway headed away from the control room and into one of the growth chambers. Let’s go.

The three of them played their now familiar game of hide and seek, crossing the hatchery and taking their time doing it to keep their cover secure, all the time wondering if/when someone would show up to inspect that camera. They didn’t pass anyone that looked to be in a hurry on their way back to their entry point, but the sooner they left the better.

Psionics said the room was empty before Brandon rounded the corner and looked inside with his eyes. The puddles on the floor had since dried, but apparently no one had come in here to see the damage. How long the lack of pressure would go unnoticed he wasn’t sure, knowing that this was only one water feed into the facility. Had it been the only one an immediate problem would have arisen, and in truth he didn’t know whether or not a lizard team was already on the case, for looking at this mundane section of pipe was probably not going to solve their problem…unless they expected an invasion team to cut their way out of it.

“Leo, how we doing?” Brandon asked.

“Good to go. You all done?”

“Headed back through the pipe now,” he said, motioning for Jyra to head in first.

Without hesitation she walked over and pushed her helmeted head into the water, sliding into the pipe with her feet disappearing last. Mace gave her a 5 count then went in after her, with both of them splashing water out, though not as much as last time.

Brandon waited a bit longer, searching the area around him with his Ikrid then checking on the status of the bombs in his HUD. They’d lose their short range tracking signals soon, but he gave them one last pulse command that triggered a return pulse. All of them updated on his HUD with an extra hour on their timers, for it had taken them longer with the control room than he’d thought and it would be best if they could make it back to their speeders before they blew, though even with the extra hour there was no guarantee of that.

He dove into the pipe after one last look around, happy to have gotten this far successfully. Now it was time to run, but they had to do so as carefully as before with a city full of lizards all around them.

That thought was on his mind as he crawled/swam through the dark pipe until he came to the bit of light at the far end where he pushed his helmet back up into the air next to the mental signatures of his team. Leo extended a hand down and helped pull him out, with his armor dripping off excess water within a few seconds thanks to the non-stick coating on the surface.

His boots stepped into a small puddle, but he didn’t linger there as Mace was already out the door charting their way back. Jyra followed him out next, then Leo, with Brandon bringing up the rear. They’d be in range of a kamikaze burst transmission for a while, which could set off the explosives remotely, but the more city they put between themselves and them would diminish the signal’s reach…plus one that loud would be picked up by the lizards, cloaked nature or not. Brandon also knew that it wouldn’t penetrate the shielding the lizard buildings had at surface level, but if they were discovered in the next little bit he could still trigger the bombs early.

Fortunately that wasn’t needed and the trek back across the undercity was much like it was coming in, with the dart across the highway becoming a bit more dicey. The long convoy of crate pushers was gone, replaced by groups of individuals walking in either direction. They had to wait it out looking for an opening then play Frogger to get across one by one while the others dampened the minds closest to them. It took time but they managed to get everyone across, then they worked their way back to the ventilation shaft and sent Leo up first, with him psionically checking out the rooftop.

It was night already, a few hours in, and there were no minds present, prompting him to climb on out and stand up in the planetary atmosphere again after spending so much time buried in infrastructure. He couldn’t feel the wind on his skin, but he could taste the difference in the air as he breathed it in and relished the freedom it invited.

As the others came up he headed over to where they’d stashed their two speeders, relieved to see that they were exactly where they’d left them and that the two dark blots had ridden out the day cycle without drawing suspicion from aerial traffic.

He pulled up the sheath on one of them and slid onto the seat with Mace following him and working his armored body around his fellow Arc Commando’s in a very awkward riding style, but after the climb through the ventilation shaft and the water pipe this was easy in comparison, requiring him to do nothing but hang on and ride.

Jyra took the other bike and Brandon likewise wrapped himself around her waist, then the two speeders pulled up their landing gear and eased up over the rooftop and across to the next building, beginning another hide and seek game to get themselves back to the edge of the city. They took their time, knowing that being reckless right now when they were so close to getting away would be the epitome of stupid, and they were about 2 miles from the rocky wastelands beyond when the timers expired and the bombs exploded.

Jyra didn’t see or hear anything, simply noting that the countdown inside her helmet expired. She deleted it from her HUD and flew on, knowing that the lizards would be alerted to some form of trouble, but right now it was behind them and they intended to keep it that way.

With her and Leo being even more cautious on these last few sections of building hopping and stopping more often than not, they eventually came to the low buildings on the perimeter at the same location as before, passing between defense turrets and dropping to the ground in the night on the city’s edge, then slowly easing their way further out and using what terrain there was to further hide the shadows that were their bikes.

Knowing that they were in the clear now both drivers kept their movements fluid, retracing the path they’d came in by that was still logged in their battlemap and which led them out to the other two hidden bikes that were agreeably still where they’d left them. Jyra let Brandon slide off low to the ground then took a moment to swing her legs off her pommel seat, stretching out a bit before the four of them mounted up again and headed across the countryside for as far as they could get before having to put down and make camp before the sun began to rise.

Six days later Alpha 9 came up on their extraction coordinates, which were little more than an anonymous spot out in the barren countryside near to the front lines and just on the Star Force side…but far away from any of the captured cities or friendly firebases. They set down inside a shallow canyon and sent a signal straight up to orbit where the lizards couldn’t detect it, telling the fleet that they were here and needed to get pulled out. Their speeders’ fuel cells were almost on zero charge, as expected, and they couldn’t fly the rest of the way to one of the Star Force held regions if they’d wanted to, though they didn’t, for that would invite wisp attention that the speeder bikes were ill equipped to handle anyway.

After a couple of hours a dropship was sent down from orbit along with a convoy heading towards one of the secure landing zones. It split off from the group near the surface and buzzed the terrain all the way out to their position with the lizards not bothering to follow it, fortunately. Jyra watched it coming on the battlemap that they were now fully reconnected with given their distance from any functioning lizard city…though there was one about 75 miles out that had been reduced to rubble. It had been the first they’d targeted from orbit and thoroughly razed in order to clear a decent perimeter to set down their first prefab structures around. Since then they’d been taking the other cities over land save for the anti-orbital guns and shield generators that they’d plucked from them.

Destroying an entire city took time and Star Force hadn’t brought many bombs with them, knowing how inefficient such weapons were in a long campaign. The charred wreck beyond them had been taken down with energy weapons only, with all of the high buildings being torn down to the point where Jyra had only been able to see a few jutted pieces on the horizon before they’d come down into the canyon.

There was nothing left there to pick up their signals even if they’d transmitted in the open, so using their normal ‘secure’ signals was of no conceivable threat this far out. And if even they were picked up, there were no lizard units nearby to intercept them…so long as their ride got here, otherwise they’d be in a heap of trouble.

But it came without incident, zipping into the canyon and dropping down right over their location. It opened its boarding ramp midair and the four speeders flew into the hold of the Falcon-class dropship, passing inside its IDF field and allowing the craft to start accelerating away before the door had even began to shut.

Jyra popped out the landing gear and set the speeder down on the deck, with the cloaking sheath having already been powered down but not removed, for it had been firmly attached at a few points before the mission. She peeled it back and climbed off at the same time the others did to find an Archon acolyte standing at the end of the bay looking at them.

“You guys alright?” he asked.

Leo pulled off his helmet and looked at the helmetless Archon that was otherwise fully clad in his silver armor. “We’re good.”

“Blow up anything useful?”

“We didn’t stick around for the fireworks,” Brandon said, likewise removing his helmet, “but unless they found and disarmed the bombs, which I think is highly unlikely, then you can scratch one lizard hatchery off the list.”

“A hatchery?” he said with a satisfied nod. “I was under the impression you were going for some firearms warehouses, or maybe a production facility.”

“Gotta have lizards to shoot them or they don’t work,” Jyra said as she and Mace also pulled off their helmets.

“True,” the Archon said, looking them over. “I gotta ask…why the old armor?”

Brandon shrugged. “We haven’t always used it, but I personally like the extra 7% armor on it.”

“Yet you aren’t wearing the heavy model that has 46% more?”

“A little too bulky for my taste. Maybe if we were as fast and strong as you guys we would, but it slows me down a bit too much.”

“I’m just an acolyte, so my strength probably doesn’t exceed yours…yet,” he said, motioning behind him to the passenger section. “Come on, brought some hot food for you guys.”

“Ah…” Jyra sighed. “I love you.”

“How’s the fighting going?” Brandon asked as Jyra slid past the Archon and out of sight into the forward section.

“Tooth and nail. We’ve got reinforcements on the way, but we’ve got to hold onto our orbital slot and at least one ground site until they get here. Since you left the lizards got one of the anti-orbital guns working again. If we don’t start expanding our foothold soon, we’ll either have to fight another costly bombardment war or pull back our cover of the ground troops…which we cannot do.”

“Damn,” Mace whispered. “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“They’re flooding us with swarms of a size we’ve never seen before, from wisps to tanks to infantry, and the cruiser count in orbit is going up faster than we can cull them. I think the lizards have been letting us take worlds while they focused their attention on Skarron territory, but they know they can’t lose this link in their supply chain so we’re getting the full hammer, and they know what it takes to beat us. We’ve given them plenty of lessons in the past of how many troops are not enough. They’re not making that mistake this time.”

“Any word on another mission for us?” Brandon asked.

“Not yet. Eat up, rest, and get some training in. If you think of anything on your own again, don’t hesitate to ask. If you really did get a hatchery, it’ll have an effect. Too bad we can’t confirm it from orbit.”

“Sorry,” Leo offered, heading past the Archon to find Jyra and the food. “Those bombs are too heavy to carry.”

7

March 3, 2934

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Far Outer Zone (on approach)

Paul waited in the command nexus onboard the Excalibur in the final stages of his journey to the Gvaris System where all available Star Force fleets were diverting. Those closest to the invasion point that had been engaged in attacks on less defended systems had already been diverted to reinforce the foothold Sara had gained on one of the two inhabited planets there, but in her updated report sent out via courier ship she’d indicated that the situation had grown far worse despite the reinforcements.

IT’S GOING DOWN. EVERYONE GET HERE NOW OR WE’RE LOSING THIS ONE.

Per her summarization, he had heeded her request and dropped what he was doing in the ADZ and gathered up as many Clan Saber ships as he could, namely the ravagers that he’d been producing independently from Mainline, but he had also grabbed whatever else he could naval wise and set off to aid the others that were also converging on that point with a variety of fleets.

So it only mildly shocked Paul when just prior to deceleration they picked up a repetitive warning signal being transmitted from the enemy system. It was Star Force, and indicating that a huge swath of the jumpline in near the star was a ‘no go’ zone. That meant something was blocking their path and a collision was imminent, or some other type of nastiness was waiting for them.

Acting quickly, for the signal strength wasn’t up to interstellar relay standards and could only reach them a short ways out, he ordered his fleet to come out at a different jumppoint further out in the system, requiring a much harder deceleration. Had he not been in the nexus someone on the bridge crew would have acted on the warning, but he got to it first and sent the signal out to the ships following the Excalibur and giving them a bit more of a heads up before they all began to push against the limited gravity pull of the star ahead sooner than normal.

In addition to that the Star Force ships exerted more than normal power, for typically one didn’t overexert gravity drives during system to system travel unless you were in a massive hurry. The Clan Saber fleet hadn’t been going slowly and were making good time, but they always kept some engine power in reserve for just this reason. Flying blind into a star system was a good way to run into a debris field that hadn’t been there before, and the lizards had tried that trick at Brenaldfor, damaging sixteen jumpships on arrival but failing to kill any of them thanks to the slower speeds of impact.

Since then Star Force ships entering an unknown system often went in on irregular jumplines or more slowly using a considerable portion of their gravity drives’ tugging power to actually decelerate slightly off jumpline by pulling on a planet or even going into a slingshot deceleration curve around the star where the lizards could not anticipate them.

Paul and the others hadn’t seen many more debris mining attempts, but if they really were pulling out all the stops for this one then it made sense for them to have thrown out a bunch of rocks for his fleet to run into, and cleaning up such things took a lot of time, which was why Star Force didn’t use the tactic, not to mention for the possibility of snagging other ships entering that were not the enemy.

So when the Excalibur decelerated hard, coming out of the jump first in the convoy, Paul expected to receive the battlemap information from the other ships in the system and see debris fields blocking several of the jumplines…and he wasn’t disappointed, save for the fact that the field seemed to cover huge swaths of space around the star, and the millions of ‘rocks’ were in fact lizard ships.

“Damn, Sara,” he said, mentally diverting the Excalibur off the jumpline and sending out orders for the rest of his fleet to do likewise, heading for one of the smaller outer planets where a priority tag was situated, “they really don’t want us getting this one.”

As the battlemap transmissions were picked up, the ship’s computer made them instantly accessible to Paul’s mind, allowing him to read through them far faster than his eyes alone would have allowed. Rather than going through the summaries he instead went straight for the tactical feeds and used his Sav to start running through the battle history since the last records Sara had given them as his ships continued to drop out of their jumps and follow his command ship over to the priority tag slowly.

The situation was not good. The lizards held naval dominance throughout the system save for several points that Star Force was hunkered down in. The main planet still had a Star Force fleet in an orbital slot covering their ground invasion corridor, which had added another lizard city to its possession since the last report, but otherwise was still hemmed in firmly by the enemy in an Alamo-type scenario, save this one was taking place across a region hundreds of miles in radius.

What had not been in the previous report, at least not by the time he’d left the relay network, was Star Force bases on not one, but four outer worlds. Two were moons around a distant and cold gas giant, with the other two being on planets that held no atmosphere at all. Each of them had a defense fleet guarding what was listed as active construction projects, one of which Liam’s ID marker was at, in addition to 3 other trailblazers that had apparently already made it to the system to reinforce Sara and Kiran.

There were also lizard fleets around those planets/moons, spamming swaths with nothing but cruisers, and Paul intended to head not to the ‘safe’ zone above this planet’s outpost, but directly into the lizards to say ‘hi’ on his way in.  He didn’t even bother to wait for the rest of his fleet to catch up, instead barreling straight into the outer band with a quick microjump that wouldn’t allow his presence to be detected given the lag of the lizard sensors.

When the big donut of a ship decelerated he was within 120 miles of the nearest lizard ships and drifting closer on purpose, eventually coasting to a near stop within weapons range as the cruisers inexplicably ran rather than stood their ground and fought. Paul raised an eyebrow and took off after some of them, for while his ship was bigger it was also the faster. He succeeded in killing a few dozen cruisers before a holographic transmission from Liam appeared in his nexus and off his right shoulder.

“You won’t get many that way,” his fellow naval expert advised. “They’re blocking transit of smaller craft but refusing to engage short of insane numbers. If we take after them in force they’ll counter with the same, but otherwise this has become a chess game that we are badly in need of more pieces to move around…especially those ravagers you brought.”

“You’re welcome. Now tell me what the hell is going on? The last report I got didn’t indicate a lizard fleet one tenth of this size. Where are they coming from?”

“Both directions, but the masses are coming from their core systems. I think we’re seeing the reserves they’ve been holding onto, but not the last of them. There’s been a continuous flow of ships coming in, and despite some initial successes at sniping them on arrival, the lizards are doing a good job of preventing that now. I can’t stop them with that many ships around the star, which if you’ll look at closely contains some chess pieces of their own…which are also growing in number.”

Paul bit his lip even as he was controlling the still ongoing hunt for some of the cruisers in orbit with part of his mind while he spoke to Liam. “26 invokers? Please tell me you’ve killed at least one?”

“And 13 assault pillars,” he added. “No, we haven’t been able to get close. We can’t jump in on top of them with so many ships around, and we get swarmed when we try the front door. I think they’re going to mount an attack on our surface troops with the assault pillars, which is why we’re building additional bases out here.”

“Explain that.”

“We need resources to build our own anti-orbital battery.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Why not request a Sentinel?”

“I get the feeling the moment we bring one in we’ll invite a counterattack to take it out before it can be assembled. I don’t want to risk that until we can properly defend it. We need a strong point, at least one Keema battery that can reach out and pound an invoker or assault pillar and provide a pocket for assembly. Then we can bring in the Sentinels, several hopefully.”

Paul thought about that for a moment as another pair of cruisers bit the dust to drones that had deployed mid microjump and cut them off on their run to a larger group of ships that were also beginning to pull back towards the stellar jumppoint.

“You think we can build one without them knowing about it?”

Liam nodded. “Totally subsurface. I’ve already got the site picked and being prepped, but the lizards are forcing us to use jumpship convoys to get the resources from planet to planet. Dropships are being chased down when we try, hence the chaperones you’re greeting now.”

“And if we kill all these off they just replace them with more?”

“At the rate they’re getting reinforcements we can’t piecemeal them to death. 100 cruisers, 1 drone, if they scatter most will get away and they’ll win the numbers game by the looks of it. We’ve made some deeper attack runs near the star, but those they will not relent on. If you want to do some hunting around the edges be my guest, but your ravagers are going to draw a lot of attention. They know now to focus them.”

“Figured they would. I…damn,” Paul said as his mental update on the battle reports finally came to one particular entry. “They tried to ram an assault pillar into the planet?”

“Thankfully Kiran saw it coming and diverted it. But yeah, they’re gonna use them as big missiles if they can.”

A sick feeling crept into Paul’s gut. He knew the lizards were capable of this, but up until now their kamikaze tendencies had been smaller scale or a last resort. He pulled a bit more of his mind away from organizing the orbital hunt and left that to his bridge crew as he analyzed what had been an approach to the main planet. Kiran had taken his own command ship directly into the cruiser swarm behind a wedge of drones that had acted as blockers, ramming the lizard ships as necessary to get him through.

But then the assault pillar had turned off, apparently realizing it wasn’t going to get within range to hit the ground…or at least not where it had intended, for the command ship could nudge it off course and land it on the lizard-held sections of the planet easily enough. That was one perk for only controlling a tiny sliver of the surface. They had to hit a very narrow target and even a bump at range could send them hundreds of miles off course.

“You’re also worried about them ramming the Sentinels?”

“Less so. They can move if needed, but I think they’ll turn into bug zappers with the cruisers going for them. Big pieces are a liability at this point. We need scores of drones to cover while we place them appropriately. I’ve also requested some special tech from back home, but will try to build some of it here. Right now we need raw materials, so any spare techs you have onboard please send down. We’re more short on hands than equipment at this point.”

“You sent for more, I assume?”

Liam nodded. “We’re building war colonies on these outer worlds while just trying to hold onto our piece of the main prize. That way they can’t take out everything we have in just one surface strike.”

“We need kinetic shield generators…big ones.”

“That’s what I sent off for, but if we’re going to block an assault pillar modular units won’t cut it. Right now a planetary Keema battery is higher on my want list.”

“Why are we still trying to take lizard cities if we’re planning to build our way out of this?”

“For as many reinforcements they have coming in, they’re still building and growing plenty on site. If we can take some of those factories offline, so much the better.”

“And more ground for us to defend.”

“Sara’s on it. We’re claiming a few strategic locations then torching the rest, capturing the cities long enough to gut them. If the lizards want to take them back they’ll find a few surprises waiting for them.”

Paul smiled. “Bit of justified irony there.”

“I know you just got here, but what are your impressions?”

“That we’re fighting the war we thought we’d have in the core out here first.”

“Not quite, but close. They know this will sever their empire in two and that any future convoys will be ambush bait. They either hold here or cellular divide into two separate entities. If we can split them, I think their pushing into Skarron territory will diminish without their industrial powerbase feeding it.”

“It may slow them down, but I’ve been going over the Voku reports in detail and I think they’ve already prepared for that eventuality. They’re bulking up key worlds on the other side of the border in what looks like the outer reaches of a new core network. Not sure where it is yet, but I get the feeling it’s already out there and growing by the day. Too bad the Skarrons aren’t living up to their rep. Even with the light Preema support they’re not making any counter gains, just stemming the tide a bit. Cal-com even admitted that they’ve pushed near to the edge of the galactic arm coreward and beyond his ability to monitor.”

Liam closed his eyes. “I didn’t realize it was that bad. I was working off the maps they’ve given us.”

“Which are no longer accurate. The lizards have not only surpassed our coreward border, they’ve also spread beyond the Voku’s detection range and apparently even the Preema have not been able to keep up with them with Skarron intelligence. There’s word of tendrils shooting off everywhere and cherry-picking going on rather than just a massive wall moving forward. All unsubstantiated, but Cal-com shares such rumors with me. It’s against his nature to report on anything that could be inaccurate, but he trusts me to be able to sort things through myself.”

“Still don’t know why he’s taken to you more than the rest of us, but I’m glad he’s sharing. No help here though?”

“He offered some light assistance, but I told him to make use of it elsewhere. If the lizards are pouring all this here, more so than I realized at the time, then there are worlds out there that won’t be getting supplemented. He’s going to hop the lines a bit too and hit some bigger targets. If he pulls some heat off of us so much the better. If not he should take them a lot easier than previously expected.”

“Assuming we survive this, good call.”

“The lizards aren’t the only ones who can fight in multiple places at once.”

“The Nexus really should have killed these guys when they were weak and small.”

“Agreed, but at least they’re finally pushing back a bit on the H’kar border.”

“Small victories,” Liam conceded. “If you let me handle the Grand Admiral role here, you’re free to go hunting with your ravagers. Just leave me a few extra defense ships if you can.”

Paul smiled. “You know me too well.”

“You designed the crude things, go use them,” Liam scoffed.

“Slight offense taken,” Paul said as the transmission cut out and he was left with his Sav-enhanced mind running through the battle reports, which now increased in pace even as he watched the status of the orbital pursuits that were dwindling down. The lizard ships were slower than theirs, but they also knew that and were taking the scattering technique to heart. Paul was going to have to poke them somewhere they were willing to fight, which meant either the main planet or back at the star.

To that end he finished up reviewing the reports and then began to pick out his best hunting grounds, intent on starting to rack up his own kill count in this massive campaign, hoping that a lot more Star Force ships were on their way and trusting the other trailblazers to scrounge up what was needed, even if it meant abandoning other war fronts. This was a must-win system for the lizards, meaning they weren’t going to pack up and run. They were going to hold to the last, and with their industrial capability that ‘last’ might never come. If Paul couldn’t eventually gain control over stellar orbit he had no doubt the reinforcements would continue to pour in indefinitely.

8

January 2, 2936

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Inner Zone

Sen Legat Remmington-A002-92 watched from the command deck onboard the King Kong-class seda RTL as the massive battle station made its slow deceleration into the Gvaris System. Slow because the gravity drives were ill-equipped to move something so large at jumpship speeds, made only worse by the ponderously slow transit required into this particular system in order to avoid the lower stellar orbits. As it was they were going to arrive perilously close to the lizard fleets guarding the star, but he’d been promised support upon arrival if he could time it close enough.

And the Canderians had not failed in that regard. They were arriving within 20 seconds of the allotted time, a few early in fact, with the RTL being first in line of a long convoy of sedas and drone warships. If the lizards were waiting for them, so be it. He could fight his way through them if needed. This system had becoming the largest campaign in Star Force history, and now that they’d received permission to come Canderous was going to do their part.

The hyper-accelerated light coming into the seda’s sensors was being toned down by the defense shields, but a piece of it was allowed through to give them a visual regardless. That image of the central star grew steadily larger as Remmington watched, then when its size began to stabilize the color returned to it along with a host of tactical data as the seda’s speed matched that of the system and the battlemap signals became recognizable…as did the signatures of the hundreds of thousands of lizard ships waiting directly ahead of them and currently engaged with a much smaller Star Force fleet that had cleared the path for their arrival.

“Helm, move us off the jumpline but drift towards that engagement. We’ll be the fulcrum with the rest of the fleet redirecting. Bring warships into escort formation as they arrive, but keep them behind us,” he ordered even as the big spherical station began to reposition and the visual displayed across the entire forward wall of the chamber showed the ongoing firefight. “Initiate battle spin and give me safe targeting lines. We’re going to clip a few enemy ships if we can.”

The RTL wasn’t the largest Seda in Canderous, but it was the second largest by class and the biggest being brought into this system. At 72 miles in diameter it was far larger than a Sentinel, though somewhat less powerful weapon wise. What it made up for in combat was its bulk and its ability to act as an instantaneous placement of an orbital colony, complete with all facets of industry, bioharvest, military, population, and everything condensed down into a nearly self-sufficient system that could anchor a campaign like this.

But Remmington wasn’t here just to feed supplies to the rest of the combined fleet. He was here to fight as well.

“We have navigational orders from trailblazer Paul,” one of the command deck staffers said aloud. “Outbound vector to one of the smaller rim planets.”

“Get the fleet moving there immediately, but we lag behind as rear guard,” he said as another seda, this one Donkey Kong-class, emerged from just behind a fleet of some 24 warships. Each was bigger than the drones Mainline and the Clans used, though small for a jumpship. They were all unmanned, like a Sentinel, and flown by remote pilots within the seda. “Do we have a targeting lock?”

“All the attacking ships are cruisers. It seems their larger vessels are not engaged in this battle and beyond weapons range. However, the smaller ships are coming to us around the flanks of the Mainline fleet.”

“Target the densest clusters and fire at range. Launch all starfighters and give me some initial kills. Orders to pilots to not go deep into their lines. Just engage the periphery as it pushes towards us. Warships to interspace between them and us leaving beneficial firing lines for our main batteries. Fire at will.”

Remmington remained silent for the next few minutes, watching more sedas and warship fleets coming out of their deceleration jumps and pivoting around to move off the jumpline, then back out to the edge of the system that seemed to nominally be Star Force territory, but in addition to the hundreds of thousands of enemy ships engaged ahead, there were literally millions indicated on the battlemap spread across the system…along with over 300,000 Star force ship icons ranging from the tiny Cutter-class drones to full blown jumpships.

There was not a Sentinel in play yet, and the reasons for that had been explained to him by trailblazer Greg when he’d accepted the Canderians’ request to participate. At present there was not a safe location to set up a Sentinel, and they feared that any attempt to do so, even on the system’s edge, would draw an immediate attack to deny the segments from being assembled. In the past that wouldn’t have been an issue because the lizards had lacked binary gravity drives. Now Star Force no longer possessed that advantage and the enemy could get to wherever they went, albeit a bit slower.

His sedas, however, were fully operational upon arriving, evidenced by the super-heavy Keema batteries sending slightly distorted, yet clear beams of raw destructive energy into the lizard cruiser swarms and piercing ships at distance, sometimes two or three at a time. Even the misses destroyed ships when the beams lost cohesion and fanned out, for their power was so intense that even the ‘spit’ was dangerous for a distance afterwards.

This seda carried the largest Keema built for space, equivalent in yield to what a Sentinel had, though less of them. Only planetary defense batteries were larger, one of which was said to have been under construction. Not on the main planet, but one of the smaller uncontested ones without an atmosphere, though by ‘uncontested’ he knew that meant on the ground, for he could see even now that there was considerable naval activity around the planet where he was sending his fleet.

But there was a Star Force arrival committee there as well to insure they didn’t get ambushed, though they’d make any attackers pay if they did.

Remmington was one of only 72 Sen Legats in Canderous, which equated to their leadership cadre of regional commanders. In some ways they were structured like the Archons’ trailblazers, without a single head position and made up of peers, but it was beyond rare when 2 Sen Legats were in the same system at the same time, and today was no exception. He did have 6 Kit Legats with him, each of which was accustomed to leading the affairs of an entire star system worth of sedas. This campaign was deemed essential enough to bring them all with him, and there had been a waiting line a mile long full of volunteers.

He was going to need them, though, for the Canderians were not just here to defend orbital slots. They’d brought their armies of infantry, aircraft, and mechs along with them, intending to take the fight to the lizards on the ground when and where the trailblazers allowed. Remmington fully expected Canderous to be fighting in half a dozen different locations simultaneously going forward, and he couldn’t oversee all of it at once…at least not to the degree of detail his men needed, hence the Kit Legats had been brought in to enhance the leadership effect when the already chaotic scene escalated further.

Right now the Kit Legats were transitioning with their sedas and the convoy away from this battle, but after several minutes of holding position and lightly engaging the enemy cruisers that stupidly dove towards them, an unusual prompt flashed on the main screen…one that the Sen Legat had only seen twice before.

“Paul is requesting control of this seda,” a staffer informed him unnecessarily, for the trailblazer’s icon was emblazoned on the link-in request. Canderous warships and sedas had their own sovereign control system and shared data with the larger Star Force battlemap network, but remote control could not be taken externally without internal overrides being enacted, which the trailblazer was now requesting.

“Give him control,” Remmington ordered. “Pilots, do us proud.”

A few seconds later the wall-sized screen changed, gaining a golden trim that was instantaneously followed by commands being issued to the Canderian pilots, with their warships being ordered forward into the space brawl…then the Sen Legat realized that the seda was also moving forward.

“That’s not me,” the helmsman said, raising his hands in the air for emphasis. “He’s assumed navigational control directly.”

“Main batteries too,” another Canderian said, sitting back in his chair now without a task to deal with.

“My friends, stay at your posts and await the moment he relinquishes control, for it may come at any time,” Remmington said wistfully. “But make no mistake, we are to be used here and now, not as a space station, but to kill as many of the enemy as we can. Paul has sensed an opening and is taking it. Mark my words.”

The trio of command ships before them grew steadily larger as the seda accelerated forward, then suddenly Remmington saw the Keema batteries go offline. He frowned for a moment, ignoring similar glances from others as he sought to find a method to the madness…with the answer coming as the shield generators received the additional power and the invisible shell around the seda grew steadily stronger as they approached the trio of donut-shaped ships, each the size of a small seda themselves.

The three realigned their positions into a triangle, with his seda heading for the center and the Canderian warships being flown into the shadow of the artificial moon. Remmington ground his teeth together in anticipation, thinking he understood what the trailblazer was doing.

All assets forward, close formation. Deny the swarm its area of effect and punch a hole straight into it. There weren’t any assault pillars, invokers, or jumpships nearby to go after, so he wasn’t sure where Paul was taking them exactly, but the movement had drawn all the lizards off their pursuit of the still incoming convoy…with them all heading towards the seda and closing in around it like a giant beehive hand with dozens of fingers comprised of the tiny yellow/tan warships.

To his chagrin he saw the starfighters being recalled into the seda, approaching from the back side and told to park inside rather than take the fight to the enemy. The Archons never did like using starfighters, even unmanned ones, but this battle was Paul’s to command and Remmington wasn’t going to second guess him, though he had never fully understood their dislike for the tiny, agile ships that could fly rings around a lizard cruiser.

He checked their kill stats, seeing that they’d already knocked down 13 enemy ships during the ‘light’ skirmishes, though a few of those were probably cleanup runs after the warships knocked them down a peg. Didn’t matter now, he’d have plenty to review later if/when he got the chance, for he could already see from the system-wide battlemap displayed in holo beside his command chair that this system was active and he didn’t expect it to ever settle down, given the size and scope of the conflict happening here.

A secondary warning flashed on one of his personal displays, indicating that seda OEG had been engaged at the head of the convoy as it entered planetary orbit. Remmington pulled up another holo of that location and set it to his left so he could keep a wandering eye on it, seeing that the Mainline fleet was there with them, so he assumed they’d get into position without delay, though maybe taking a few scratches in the process.

Just then all the secondary weapons on his seda opened up, firing directly ahead along with the command ships as a tendril of cruisers flew right at them. Many of them were shredded, with the debris continuing to move forward on a ballistic trajectory, but the intact cruisers didn’t alter or slow their approach. Instead they stayed on the same course as the debris and suddenly the shields were being rammed by both at considerable speed.

Not a few collisions, but a deliberate pounding by the enemy fleet. The sheer audacity at seeing hundreds of warships flying suicide missions directly at his seda shocked him, but then he understood the need for additional shield power. Paul had known this was coming, and even now Remmington could see their defensive power lessening under each hit. The debris was forced aside, with the giant sphere acting as a snowplow against it and clearing the path for the warships to follow…and not just the Canderian ones, but the Mainline drones as well.

“Evacuate outer hull, collision protocols,” he ordered, not knowing how much of this pounding was going to occur. “Lock down the Keema batteries, full shell mode, but leave the other guns operational. If we take hits I want them to be bee stings only. He’s using our mass as a shield, so let’s turtle up as much as we can. Shunt all outer ring systems to automatic and cancel any damage repair teams until I order otherwise,” he said, finally rising up out of his chair and choosing to stand as they dove into the enemy horde. “Expect a pounding.”

And a pounding they got. Like bugs to a bug zapper the lizard cruisers came, feeling they had an opportunity to damage or destroy the massive station…and they did, had the crew been inept, but his people weren’t anything but skilled combat veterans and they had a trailblazer personally leading this battle, meaning the lizards weren’t going to do squat. That said, Remmington conceded the fact that his seda might be significantly damaged in the process, but if that was the case so be it, for it would take that damage away from the drone fleets that were much more vulnerable.

Paul had them plow directly into the center of the hundreds of thousands of cruisers ahead of them…something that he didn’t think the lizards expected. They poured in on them like sand collapsing into a sink hole, with his seda and the 3 command ships taking the heaviest of the pounding, most of which came from collisions. But the genius of it all was the fact that the incoming lizard ships were moving slower than even his seda, and they couldn’t ram it en mass without making tiny microjumps. Those jumps couldn’t happen through their own fleet, so they had to ram it at slower speeds in groups that also had to adjust to the forward momentum that somehow Paul was succeeding to randomize with constant gravity drive adjustments to not only the seda but the entire fleet simultaneously.

They moved left, then up, then down and through a variety of small, yet mathematically significant alterations that did not allow the lizards to anticipate where they were going to be in order to set up more damaging assault runs. He was lessening their damage potential with navigation and forcing the lizards to act more spontaneously…which with their limited life expectancy kept them from having any veteran commanders, Remmington suspected. Such newbs, no matter how much genetic knowledge they were gifted with, would react with less efficiency than commanders who had been in tense combat multiple times before, not to mention relentless training simulations that honestly made this level of insane combat feel…familiar.

Once the seda and the command ships made it through the entire lizard fleet, punching a hole clear through to the other side, the seda’s shields were down to 12% and still taking additional hits, but rather than run Paul had them come to a dead stop and the command ships move out like extending flower petals as they turned back on the chasing enemy that the drones, that had been taking shelter in the mass shadow of the bigger ships, were now attacking in a frenzy like a bottle of soda that had been shaken up and held in check up until now. Those tightly packed fleet formations were explodingoutward into the the lizard fleet and began to eat away at it from the inside as more and more cruisers continued to pour into the seda’s shields.

The enemy had a choice to make, with it seeming to want the big station dead. Remmington held his teeth firmly together, knowing what this would mean. They were the anvil on which the lizard hammer was going to fall…all the while the smaller fleet of warships were going to devour that hammer from the handle on up. The only question was how much of his seda would remain once the shields fell, and how well had Paul calculated the potential damage.

A quick check of the larger battlemap indicated that there was no immediate lizard reinforcements coming. This massive fleet they were engaging was to be their only opponent so long as this didn’t drag on hours…which it very well could. Right now though the lizards had either been caught off guard or they were confident that they could do what was necessary on their own without additional ships.

Remmington didn’t know if they could or not, the numbers involved were so large he didn’t have the ability to glance and assess the dangers involved. He hoped the trailblazer could, but regardless of the outcome Canderous served the Archons and would follow them into any battle anytime, anywhere. If they did die here, which he thought would be unlikely given how much mass this seda held and the bunkers at the center that would preserve them against almost any pounding, then so be it. It wouldn’t be a waste. He trusted the trailblazers enough to insure that, but found it much more likely that Paul’s cunning would win out today as it had numerous times throughout Star Force’s history.

And the bastard was probably going to do it with the starfighters parked in the hangar bays.

9

January 4, 2936

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Planet 13

Jasmine-CT294-17 ran into the hangar bay along with a few other crewmembers and up the ramp onto the Pantheon III-class dropship and took her seat, allowing the others to get situated in quick fashion and clear the narrow hallways allowing the copilot to come forward after securing the rear hatch and insuring that all were onboard. They lifted off from the RTL’s hangar deck and flew out the containment shield and into space accelerating heavily. Though born and raised in space, Jasmine still took a long, deep breath, knowing how vulnerable they’d just become.

But then again the pantheons had been designed for just this type of hazardous duty, carrying more armor and engines than Mainline dropships to get crews and cargo up and down from a planetoid faster and more reliable under combat situations. The tradeoff was that they carried less cargo, but as Jasmine agreed that wouldn’t matter if they didn’t make the trip in one piece.

Planet 13 had never been inhabited, by the lizards or anyone else known, hence it didn’t even have a name and in the two days since she’d got here she hadn’t been informed that anyone had given it one yet. That seemed rude, for both Star Force and the lizards were paying the world a lot of attention right now with the sedas ringing the small planet like a necklace and orbiting over the construction site constantly with the lizards trying to send cruisers down into the gap to catch some of the thousands of dropships transiting to and from the surface.

Both the Canderous and Mainline fleets were repelling them, but she’d previously seen one or two make it through and the dropships had to go evasive to avoid it. They were smaller and more maneuverable, but even with their armor and shielding they couldn’t stand up to much pounding from a cruiser. That danger wasn’t deterring the flow of supplies and personnel, though the lizards had made much more of a fuss about it yesterday, the debris from which was still visible in orbit.

The monitors in the passenger area showed the RTL as a wall of green metal at first, slowly expanding to encompass the curves of the giant sphere. The damage on the surface was obvious, with huge chunks having been torn out by ship impacts. Jasmine knew that repairing such damage would take years, and as long as they were in this system the wounds would simply be patched over and contained while all available materials were being sent down to the construction site that she had been assigned to along with a host of other Canderian techs.

All of them were also trained soldiers, but they wouldn’t be needed in that role in the coming days. Still, it felt comforting to know that she would be working with other Canderians and not just the Mainline techs. They had some combat training in their maturias, but it wasn’t anything compared to what Canderians had to endure. Jasmine was a solider, but one who had chosen to focus on tech duties in order to fight the enemy by other means…means that were being relied upon heavily here to gain Star Force the true foothold it needed to conquer this system.

Her pantheon zipped down from their fairly high orbital position to the airless planet’s surface where some 18 Mainline drones were sitting on the rocky ground acting as temporary defense batteries around the construction site, which on the surface stretched about 2 miles in diameter, but she knew it was much more sizeable underneath where there was already well over 50,000 crew working on harvesting resources from the planet, as well as to construct the makeshift colony that was centered around the planetary defense battery that was still under construction.

When the pantheon got to ground it floated down into a rocky, rectangular hole until a lateral bay became visible with two other Canderian dropships coming back out. They gently passed each other by as more came down behind Jasmine’s ride, then hers set down on a crowded deck and the passengers jogged out much like they had coming in, saving a few seconds here and there that would amount to a full round trip eventually. A little prudence now could have an effect down the line, and all Canderians had been taught from birth not to waste time or resources, for both could be critical in combat and survival operations.

She hadn’t brought any gear with her, not even a datapad, but everything she needed to work was already on station, sent ahead by other Canderians, and Jasmine immediately joined the work crews that were helping the Mainline techs construct the massive weapon. It was housed well below ground with the corovon-laced armored doors being the first items that were constructed. Those covered what would be the surface of the battery, though even they were encased beneath dozens of meters of rock so the lizards wouldn’t be able to see what they were building and strike it before it was completed. Shield generators were already up to protect the site against kamikaze strikes, but the enemy had more than enough ships to overwhelm them if they so chose.

Anonymity was the defense here, and it was her job to help get the battery operational before they realized it existed. The technology was the same as the smaller models within the seda she had been living the past 52 years on, though it wasn’t her origin. That seda was CT and located back in Sol, one of the permanent stations that could only be moved around by cradle, for it didn’t have its own interstellar-capable gravity drives. It was also a lot smaller than RTL, but it was where she had been born and gone through her maturia training, hence it was a part of her name and her memories.

She hadn’t helped build RTL, but she had assisted in the maintenance of the Keema batteries and was familiar enough with the tech to be assigned to one of the teams working directly on it while most of the others were going to the mining or construction sites that were expanding on the war colony. Living space was nil, with the Canderians having to be shuttled back up to the seda after a few days of long hours and brief naps to recharge and refuel. Other than bottles of water and snack rations, Jasmine was going to have to make do with her current energy reserves, for until ample living quarters could be established they were all going to be migrating to and from the sedas on a regular basis along with the supplies, for there was almost no industry present down here either…at least not compared to what they now had in orbit.

Already the amount of raw produce coming back down from the seda had exponentially increased the construction rate of the battery, and the more raw materials that could be harvested from this planet and others throughout the system would only snowball it further. The sedas were the Canderians’ homes, and with them came everything they needed to survive and flourish in the harshness of space, including the industry to produce every bit of technology that weapons and ships required.

Some duplicate facilities had already been built underground by the Mainline techs prior to their arrival, but they had little to work with. Jasmine was mildly impressed with how much they’d been able to build without even an MCV-class jumpship to work from, but when she got to the battery itself her feelings plummeted. There was a massive chamber dug out of the planet’s bedrock, inside of which there was very little weapon constructed. There was, however, a flow of Canderians moving about the place in nothing but their black/green uniforms that appeared to be getting a more robust effort into motion.

Jasmine had no construction armor either, for there wasn’t enough for all of them. This chamber was pressurized and heated, but they all wore a small armband that held an emergency shield generator that would encapsulate them should the pressure drastically fall off, giving them a few minutes of life and oxygen recycling during which they could hopefully find their way to safety…though if a warship came crashing through the armored doors above she knew there would be little point in that.

The skeleton of the weapon was partially complete, and she was directed to head to the ever growing barrel to join an all Canderian crew that was receiving structural segments and attaching them Lego-style into place and forming what looked like a crane ladder. It would stretch nearly the full length of the spherical battery when completed, but barely looked like a stub protruding up from the floor at this point.

When Jasmine got down to there, being flown over on a small, four-man anti-grav sled, she realized that they were going to be working in natural gravity. The hangar where they’d landed and the facility they’d walked through had been AG equipped, but in this chamber there was none, nor an IDF field to give them a 0G environment for construction. It felt like .3 or under to her legs, and while that would make lifting things easier than normal, it was going to slow things down. An IDF was preferable and she wasn’t sure why one hadn’t been built here yet.

Maybe it was also on the work schedule, or maybe they were prioritizing resources to the battery itself. If that was the case she could agree, for getting this thing built as soon as possible was key to this campaign, and if that meant some awkward construction environment then so be it. She and the other Canderians were up to the task, and she didn’t doubt the Mainline crews would be either.

Jasmine climbed off the sled and onto a catwalk network that had been built up around the growing barrel, found a tool set and was given a post waiting for another segment to come down on the western side. A much beefier sled carried it overhead and lowered it into position while more than a dozen Canderians climbed up onto it and guided it in, setting it into exact alignment using some calibration brackets while the sled continued to hoist the majority of the weight.

When she got the word, Jasmine found one of the seams and began sealing it with an injection filament, which looked like a straw the length of her arm. She slid it into a hole on the new segment, with it inserting at an angle that brought it down into the base piece. Once in place she activated it with another device and the rod melted, with the liquid disappearing down the hole. Had this been a 0G environment the tool would have pushed it in, but in this case gravity was helping as the temporarily liquid material filtered down through smaller and smaller passages and settled into the microscopic gaps between segments.

The top segment had a hole in the base that the plug on the bottom fit into, and that would hold the majority of the sheering stresses, but this Syfonate would allow the minor positioning that the size differential from plug and socket allowed. With everything in place she used her datapad and sensor to confirm adequate levels across all bonding points, then realized she needed to insert another half rod.

That was odd, so she did another scan and realized that the segments were cut wrong. The plug was too small by a fraction, then she realized it was probably due to an unanticipated difference between Canderian and Mainline molds. The new piece was probably one of the first built by the sedas over the past day and a half, with the one she was standing above having been built on site by the makeshift factories.

But it would still work. She inserted another rod and used a different tool to cut it off before liquefying it. She had to add a touch more before getting full saturation, then Jasmine inserted a prompt into the hole that made contact with the liquid there. She hit a button and sent a triggering burst of energy that traveled the length of all the liquid filaments that she had inserted, initiating a 6 second solidifying process that firmly bonded the two frame segments together.

Another scan confirmed it, then she waited in place a few minutes until another segment was brought down and she got the base of it as well while the other techs were working on the lateral connections. The barrel was in grid form at the moment, with more holes than casing, but it was interlocked with secondary structural supports and even smaller tertiaries. By the time Jasmine got through with the second one she and the other techs had established a rhythm that kept them motoring through some 36 more segments until they ran out of parts.

Beefy as the sedas’ industry base was, they could only produce so many so fast, so Jasmine and the others were shunted to another work project, then another, and another. Each was building a piece of the mile-wide weapon, some on site while others were being assembling in nearby caverns only to be moved into the main when they were finished. Had Jasmine not worked maintenance on the Keema batteries before she would have been thoroughly lost, but as it was she knew what everything was and how it had to come together even as it was lying in bits and pieces across a labyrinth of tunnels and rock-carved chambers that hadn’t even had walls and framework built into them yet.

This was definitely a makeshift site, but it was an orderly one that allowed her and the others to get to work immediately and stick out an 80 hour shift before heading back up to her seda for a 20 hour rest/training block, then she was shipped back down to work another shift and would continue to do so indefinitely. Time blurred away and she knew to simply delve into the work else she’d get distracted. When she returned to the seda she didn’t check the status of the battles, focusing instead on her needs and compartmentalizing herself to the task at hand.

The work had to be done and done right the first time, as quickly as possible. She could get caught up on current events later. Right now all that mattered was this Keema battery, and if others were able to find or ship in the necessary raw materials to allow the sedas to fashion all the necessary components…which she considered the truly hard part in all of this…then she was going to be damn sure the assembly went off without a hitch. They didn’t have a schedule to follow, working with what pieces were brought to them when available and adapting as they went, but the skill and speed of both the Mainline and Canderian crews was admirable and she doubted the lizards could have done the same.

It took them another 11 months after she arrived to get the battery constructed, which was breakneck pace considering the situation. When it was completed that wasn’t the end of her stay, for there was even more work to do on the surrounding structures. Star Force needed to expand their base and construct a legitimate war colony underground, which meant getting rid of temporary structures and building proper ones.

The Canderian construction crews were given priority over most of that while the Mainliners were shipped off to secondary sites retrieving raw materials or expanding upon those temporary bases elsewhere in the system. That suited Jasmine just fine, and though the architecture wasn’t Canderian specs she found it reasonably familiar as all Star Force tech was, and more than one of the other workers had noted that this construction effort was less building a base on the planet rather than turning the planet into a makeshift seda of its own.

That wasn’t even near to accurate given the size of the planet, but something about it rang true regardless and from that day on she started to think the same, with the Canderians building another home in the rock rather than in the void of space.

And once the Keema battery was built she allowed herself the luxury of watching the battle updates, for scuttlebutt said that the finished construction was going to usher in the next phase of the invasion. She didn’t know what that would be, but was interested in finding out. Protecting this planet with the big gun made sense, but not when the sedas in orbit were already accomplishing the same task. She also felt something was in the works, and was working in one of the residential facilities installing a door when word was passed from worker to worker.

A relief fleet had just arrived, which wasn’t uncommon given the size of this campaign, but with this one had come something unexpected…in the form of Sentinel segments.

Lots of Sentinel segments.

10

February 12, 2937

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Inner Zone

Paul stood in the Excalibur’s nexus as he watched the clock ticking down. The lizards still controlled low stellar orbit despite his many attempts to root them out of it, due in no small part to their ever flowing river of reinforcements. No matter how many ships he destroyed more would come to replace them, and without controlling the inner zone he couldn’t ambush them on the way in. Furthermore, there were cruisers being built on the two inhabited planets round the clock, adding to the number of orbital fleets that kept growing and growing despite the rising number of Star Force vessels in the system.

Every time a convoy arrived it had to do so on a predetermined schedule so Paul could get to its jumppoint and screen for them. A few ships could arrive easily enough and avoid the lizard swarm near the star, but a long convoy was an invitation for them to come further out and jump it before they could all safely arrive…and this one coming in was going to be the largest and most important to date.

With a thought he sent the warning signal out from the Excalibur detailing the exact jumppoint he wanted the convoy to arrive at. The lizards had been pushing their fleets further and further out, forcing incoming convoys to brake hard and exit early in the weaker outer system gravity and come to a stop before they reached deep into the inner zone. It was a fuel heavy maneuver, but doable so long as the convoy wasn’t traveling at too great a speed.

With less than a minute remaining Paul sent his drones on ahead in a small microjump to get into position, heading almost directly down the jumpline the convoy would be arriving on and attacking the lizard ships already drifting out in their direction. He kept the signal transmitting a bit longer, then jumped the Excalibur itself up into position and plowed into the growing lizard fleet, destroying many of the cruisers and pushing the others back for fear of being destroyed prior to gaining sufficient numbers to do the damage they knew was necessary to take down the drones, let alone a command ship.

It had been a long time since one of the donuts had gone down, but the lizards had never forgotten. Paul hadn’t been there, but he’d reviewed the mission reports in detail. Most of the crew had survived, thanks to the rest of the fleet surrounding the dying ship to cover for an evacuation, but the Evanescence had been so badly damaged it could no longer move. System purges had been enacted to erase data from the ship’s computers, but that had been a moot point. As soon as the weakened fleet pulled back with the evacuees the lizards chipped away at the ship until it became a debris field.

Paul thought that was more out of vengeance than prudence, but ever since then the lizards had been more coy about attacking the command ships. They knew how much it would take to damage one, and even with the tech enhancements that both sides were escalating through they could still guess at the changes. The sedas were another story, for they weren’t used to fighting constructs of that size. The assault pillars and invokers were still sitting quietly in the stands watching this campaign unfold, but Paul had a feeling that today that would change as soon as they saw this convoy arrive.

The first ship to enter was a Warship-class jumpship, followed soon by two more only seconds behind that immediately linked into the battlemap system and Paul incorporated them into his fleet. He had them launch drones immediately after moving forward off the jumppoint and began to spread his umbrella of protection out further to the sides as more and more ships came in.

In response the lizard fleet came out in even greater numbers than before, knowing they’d have to up their game to get to the convoy this time, but Paul thought they had another agenda in play. For these holds meant he had to fight them straight up, and he thought the lizards were just trying to take out Star Force ships whenever and wherever they could, then rely on their industrial might to replace whatever they lost. So far it was working, save for the fact that Star Force was also sending in replacement ships, but the lizards seemed to be gaining the advantage as time passed…which is what he hoped they would think.

When the first cradle came through carrying a 12-kilometer long piece of Sentinel everything changed. The other lizard fleets throughout the system began to move, knowing that they had to destroy it before it became operational. The sedas were already giving them considerable trouble, able to take such a beating and keep on fighting, and they knew the Sentinels were worse. They had no crew, no living structures, not even a single hallway. They were simply a mass of weapons, armor, shields, and power generation…and Star Force was bringing six of their biggest ones in today, each in four piece segments.

Those segments were a pain in the ass for the jumpship cradles to carry, for unlike the new sedas the Sentinels couldn’t travel on their own. Their gravity drives were small, enough for maneuvers around orbit or a slow hike from planet to planet insystem. They could not travel from one system to another, nor were they meant to. They were defensive strongholds, typically meant to be built on site, though Star Force had gotten in the habit of designing them to break down into ‘travel carry’ size. It would only take a matter of minutes for them to be assembled, not days, and once they were they would put out more firepower than even the largest of the sedas…and they were expendable, so Star Force wasn’t shy about having them eat up as many lizard ships as they could before being destroyed.

The lizards knew that about Star Force tactics, which is why after a delay even the assault pillars and invokers started moving. It was going to be too late though, for as soon as the first piece arrived Paul had it move off the line and make a microjump out deep into the system. It’d have to run its engines hard to slow down again in that limited gravity, but it would take it well away from the lizard fleets that would have a harder time of chasing it…yet chase they did.

Numerous cruisers disappeared from the battlemap as they made their own microjumps to go after it and the escorts Paul had already traveling there from elsewhere in the system. There would be a massive fight out there, with the second Sentinel piece arriving a minute and a half later and moving out to join them. The two pieces were meant to fit together, but the third one that came in was not. It was a duplicate of the bottom segment that had already gone out to the edge of the system, with Paul sending it on microjump in another direction towards a rendezvous with a second escort fleet even as his neighborhood was filling up with ships rapidly, including the first assault pillar to arrive from its parking position deep in near the star.

The cruisers in front of it split, opening up a corridor through which objects were hurled at controlled speeds. When they hit the Excalibur, if they ever got that close, they’d do some damage to the shields but not nearly as much as a kamikaze cruiser. No, these were meant to relay the firepower from stone to stone and hit his command ship outside of the Excalibur’s range to return fire.

But as soon as the assault pillar launched the first object he knew something was wrong, for it wasn’t shaped the same way they typically were. Six of them were released and traveling towards his ship, about to get picked off by his defensive guns and picket ships, whichever got to them first, when they exploded on their own. Not in any damaging way, but fragmenting into a halo of pieces that did not scatter. Rather they held their ring-like shape up the line all the way back to the assault pillar, which then emitted a blinding aqua-colored light that passed through each of the still moving rings and hit his command ship’s shields.

The blast didn’t abate, but kept grinding off shield energy like a firehose. Paul knew from his connection to the computer exactly how much shield damage it was doing and the fact that if the Excalibur just sat here it was going to penetrate within 42 seconds. After less than 2 seconds he already had his drones moving to a position to target the first of the rings, but when they destroyed it with ease the beam only scattered a bit, enlarging its footprint on the shields and lessening the overall damage a chunk, but it was still draining them.

Paul had the command ship move to the left, but somehow the rings also moved laterally. They must have had gravity drives of their own for they brought the focusing power of the beam back onto the Excalibur, catching a corvette in the process. It blocked the beam for a few seconds, then was burnt through in a popping explosion that let the rest of the beam get back to draining the Excalibur’s shields.

Paul raised an eyebrow, noting the design upgrade and the fact that this energy was not their invoker style arcs nor their phaser tech. This was something new, but it wasn’t going to be enough. The trailblazer moved his escort ships out of the way then executed a short microjump out of the firing line and drifted back in towards the lizard cruiser swarms while the assault pillar moved forward towards the now exposed jumppoint as drones were headed towards it and cruisers were forming up in defensive screens.

Paul sent another signal up the line, telling the incoming convoy to break harder and move the jumppoint out while he slugged his way through lizard ships and used the fleet of drones to go towards the assault pillar…not to shoot it, but to shoot the focusing rings it was launching towards the next incoming Sentinel segment. Simultaneously he had another command ship move in to block the firing line for when the huge chunk of relatively unprotected tech appeared insystem, long enough anyway for it to make a microjump out to head to site number 2.

But despite the lizards’ cunning, and the fact that two more assault pillars and an invoker were heading to the jumppoint, this was all a diversion. The Sentinel segments that were being pursued were not going to stop and try to assemble. They were merely drawing large chunks of the lizard fleet out of position. The next Sentinel segment to arrive jumped to a third site, but the following one, which based on the pattern would follow it to mate up, did not. It jumped to Planet 13, then three more segments came in with very little spacing in the deceleration jumps, all of which followed it as Paul took the Excalibur directly for the invoker, intending to fight it head on while the rest of his fleet was going to delay the assault pillars as best they could.

The four Sentinel segments that headed for the planet were met up in orbit with a defense fleet there that was screening against the entire orbital fleet the lizards had. A massive battle was already underway, but the Sentinel segments were maneuvered down into low orbit and into a holding position that required a lot of tugging by the cradles to keep them from falling down onto the planet. Until their own gravity drives segments got powered up they were going to have to hold them in a mutual IDF field, which was difficult but not impossible to manage while their own gravity drives held the whole assembly aloft.

Trick of it was they had no power left for shields, so it was up to the fleet to defend them while they hastily assembled the four pieces into the thick Sentinel ‘rod’ that the lizards had come to fear.

The ships that had left to pursue the other pieces were now too far away to get back to Planet 13 to stop this Sentinel from being assembled, but many of the others weren’t. All across the system ships with decent jumplines took off towards the outer planet and began spamming orbit, first with cruisers, then four invokers arrived ahead of six assault pillars just as the first two pieces were assembled.

The numbers, however thinned by the subterfuge and the Sentinel pieces continuing to arrive that were moving off to yet other rendezvous points within the system, were not in Star Force’s favor. Thanks to Paul’s update, Liam was able to get drones into position to snipe at the first of the ring targeting relays and take them out as the assault pillars launched them, but soon those ships were overwhelmed by cruisers and destroyed with Liam keeping them there as long as possible to delay the big enemy ships from firing on the helpless Sentinel segments or the cradles keeping them from crashing down onto the planetary base directly below them.

Except it wasn’t exactly underneath, with a small chunk of the planet’s surface cracking apart and being shoved aside like a mole moving dirt to expose thick armored doors set just below ground. Those doors then parted, revealing the aperture of the planetary defense battery. It rotated in its spherical socket and took aim under Liam’s personal control. He altered the beam width into a very narrow cone then targeted a group of cruisers where there were no Star Force ships engaging them.

The almost totally clear beam leapt up from the surface and disintegrated 27 cruisers in a matter of 4 seconds, with the excess energy that missed them moving off into space past the engaging fleets. The big gun suffered a recharge period while its capacitors filled to the brim, then Liam fired again taking out another swath of cruisers before lining up a shot at one of the invokers that was coming in to engage a fleet of drones. He had the drones part ever so slightly as they danced around the energy arcs that were covering the big ship in a bush-like shroud of rainbow light, then he dialed back the conical spread to as fine a beam as he could manage and put a shot straight through his fleet formation with it passing unseen into the maelstrom.

Instantly that tumble of energy reduced, with visible gaps forming in the cascading arcs. It didn’t stop its forward progress though, heading directly for the Sentinel pieces and intent on either ramming them or burning them if it had any weaponry left. Liam accounted for the first possibility by sending ships to push the invoker out of alignment, but first he had to get it disabled or any ships getting close enough to yank it away with an IDF field would be shredded by what looked to be standard invoker weaponry, though perhaps beefed up in intensity a bit based on how some cruiser debris literally puffed into dust upon impact with it.

Liam fired another shot, then two more before the energy arcs all but went out and the invoker was clearly aiming to ram either the Sentinels or the base below, but a swarm of drones rushed to it like pilot fish and pushed it aside using both IDF and their own hulls that gently rammed the sides then pushed into it, often imbedding themselves in the craft as their gravity drives shoved the invoker off its path.

The now dark ship passed by the Sentinel segments with 7 kilometers to spare…a near miss considering how big these constructs were, but more than adequate. Now all Liam had to do was repeat the process and use his fleet of drones to harass the assault pillars a bit longer, for the third Sentinel piece was now locked into place with only one more to go.

The lizards knew they were out of time, but Liam’s fleet was too well arrayed and the planetary battery was delivering too much firepower to let the big ships ram it. One assault pillar tried though, positioning far out for a jump that Liam knew was coming. He forced a group of drones through the lizard lines, losing more than half of them in the reckless charge, but the others he had break through the shields at two points with concentrated attacks enough to slip a few drones through and onto the hull where they became engines that he could use to steer the assault pillar a bit.

It still made its jump, but sailed past the Sentinel and hit the planet a few hundred miles away from the base. The impact was massive and sent tremors across most of the planet, not to mention debris all the way back up into orbit that would be raining down on the planet in the days to come, but it had failed to take out the Sentinel before the fourth segment was attached.

When that happened the internal components realigned and the power cores came online…along with the shield generators and all the weapon systems. Its Keema batteries weren’t as large as the planetary one, but this Sentinel had 24 of them…not to mention other short range weapons and a few tricks to avert collisions.

Liam linked to it with his Sav-enhanced mind and added its firepower to the ground battery and began tearing through the lizard fleet that was surrounding it as the cradles fled. The Sentinel floated over the planet, now suspended by its own gravity drives, and Liam nudged it further up towards the bulk of the lizard fleet killing cruisers with single hits and often taking out two with one penetrating shot.

When he got the short range weapons into play the lizard fleet did not turn and run like it should have, rather the assault pillars and invokers both attacked along with the cruisers, intent on taking it out no matter what the cost.

Liam admitted this one might be lost, but even as he pushed it further out into orbit more Sentinel pieces jumped down into the gap with the planetary battery covering them while the Sentinel fought the lizard fleet. It wasn’t exactly a ‘safe’ zone for assembly, but it was far more resistance than the lizards had expected and Liam knew they’d get the others online, for all the pieces that had fled to other parts of the star system and were being continually chased eventually headed to Planet 13 and began assembling side by side.

There was no way to stop them all now, and by the end of the day three of the massive defense platforms would be destroyed, along with a fourth being heavily damaged, but two would remain intact protecting the planet, and from that point on Star Force had its foothold, as well as a temporarily weakened lizard fleet to contend with.

And both Liam and Paul knew it was only going to snowball in their favor from that point on.

Divide

1

May 3, 2938

Epsilon Eridani System

Corneria

Hightower stood in his office, surrounded by nothing but blackness into which a number of holograms were situated. There were no windows or doors visible, and not even the floor registered to his eyes. All that existed was the pertinent data, and he’d found that this configuration helped him to think more clearly. He’d gotten the idea from Paul long ago, but hadn’t ever truly considered it until the past century. What had been artwork in the original was replaced with maps for Hightower, along with statistics that he was currently viewing directly ahead of him while a close-in map to his right showed a Sentinel defense station disconnecting one of its five segments.

He was watching the disassembly occur, having made the choice earlier and wanting to keep appraised of their progress, though not because he was concerned about its implementation. The Sentinels were designed to be taken apart and moved if needed, but he knew taking away pieces of the defense network he’d been layering on the system for centuries was not something to be taken lightly. There hadn’t been an attack here since the earliest days of colonization, but one shouldn’t assume that it couldn’t happen. That was an invitation for the bad luck monkey to punch you in the face.

Keeping himself wary of that fact, he made a point of watching this Sentinel be disassembled as most of his focus was on the economic statistics for the entire Star Force core region excluding Epsilon Eridani and Sol. The industrial powerhouse of those two fed the rest of the empire, with the core systems being the closest neighbors and almost exclusively Human-occupied. Epsilon Eridani was one of the few exceptions, given that they also housed a Hycre world, and if/when the V’kit’no’sat ever came back it was this region that they would hit first.

Hightower didn’t know how exactly they’d respond, but he figured the Human worlds would be the first targets. They might then go on to eradicate anyone who had had contact with them or their tech, or some version falling in between those two nightmares. While the lizards were the current concern they were not the major one, nor the only one. Star Force had many enemies out there, and even within their own borders. While Hightower was definitely aware of the lizards and the pushback the Archons were making into their territory, he had the responsibility for seeing all the puzzle pieces in motion.

With most people focusing on the lizards he felt it was needed that he pour more focus into the ‘other’ threats, along with an eye towards the V’kit’no’sat. Hopefully they stayed in the galactic core for a very long time, but if they did return to Earth then they’d be at Corneria in the blink of an eye, for right now it took less than a day for Star Force ships to make the jump between the two neighboring systems. They were also the most heavily defended systems in the empire, but Epsilon Eridani was Hightower’s to command.

Though by ‘command’ many people could misinterpret his role. He was in charge of the system and shaping it to his designs, but the Archons were always in charge. They didn’t outrank one another, for that’s not how Star Force’s leadership worked, nor did its lower levels for the most part. Everyone was loyal to the mission, and took responsibility on themselves to see that it got done. Hightower’s role was to sit here, build, and prepare. The Archons were the ones who took action, always on the move, and they needed people like Hightower who had the luxury of staying put…just as he needed people who could bounce around from place to place as needed, for an interstellar empire didn’t function like most people assumed. It wasn’t a single entity, but rather a conglomeration of little kingdoms.

Even with the relay network and the proximity of Sol to Epsilon Eridani, the two systems might have been on the other side of the galaxy from one another. They were totally disconnected, with only a limited flow of ships moving between them. That ‘flow’ was huge in number, but small in percentage to the commerce and activities taking place within each system. Most things were accomplished locally, making Hightower’s system a private fiefdom that he controlled, not for his own sake, but to facilitate others.

Likewise Davis ran Sol, but even if he’d wanted to he couldn’t micromanage Epsilon Eridani, let alone the rest of the systems spread across the empire, not to mention the factions. The very definition of an ‘empire’ was that it had different layers and sections, not that it was controlled by one ‘emperor.’ In fact that was laughable, for while Davis was definitely in the lead, he didn’t control much at all. It was a team effort, and without that team functioning in unity an organization this large would quickly collapse on itself.

Structure, wisdom, and trust kept it all together and functioning efficiently, and Davis had been totally responsible for designing and implementing it all. Others had added to it, like the trailblazers who had designed their entire military from scratch, but it was Davis’ genius that had made it all possible from the outset, not to mention him continually tinkering to guide them forward into uncharted territory. The larger Star Force got the more it could do, but it was also more of a challenge to manage. Things could be happening in another star system without Davis’s knowledge, even entire wars if the relay network went down or someone chose to withhold information. The disconnected nature of interstellar empires was one that prevented the kind of oversight that many less inspired cultures relied upon.

Trust was the only way an empire could function across star systems, and while Star Force’s internal structure was layered into tiers, there were always some pieces that operated independently of the others…because their trust was absolute. The trailblazers were one example, but Hightower was another. Davis watched what happened in Epsilon Eridani, as he did in all systems, but he was not involved with it unless there was a special situation that arose. He ran Sol, that was his personal kingdom, while he’d entrusted Epsilon Eridani to Hightower.

That was out of necessity, but it also was a bold statement to the rest of the galaxy. Whereas others would have competed with each other internally in power grabs, Star Force laughed at such notions. They were united, and behaved as such, with Hightower ‘ruling’ here adding to the power of Davis in Sol rather than challenging him. The same was true of the other ‘Monarchs’ as they’d come to be called.

Davis had started the program back with the Clans when he’d assigned Hightower as Marquis of Clan Saber so he could learn to operate independently. And it was still true that no Duke achieved that rank without first being a Marquis and running a Clan that spanned multiple star systems. Though Hightower only controlled one now, that one was so big it eclipsed what any dozen Clans could amount to combined.

That’s how big Epsilon Eridani was, and how important it was. Sol was even bigger, with the two of them being the crown jewels in the empire that just happened to sit next to one another.

But because Epsilon Eridani had gotten so large and important it exerted an influence over the rest of Star Force territory, almost as much as Sol did, with the two systems ruling the rest through materiel and personnel. All Star Force systems were built to be self-sufficient, but when problems arose it was the two big systems that were turned to for help, so not only did Hightower have to consider his star system and those nearby, he was partly responsible for the entire empire, along with Davis, and required a slightly different mindset from the Duke that he had been for many, many years.

Davis maintained the title of ‘Director’ but had promoted Hightower and Vectir to the position of Arch Duke. While Sol and Epsilon Eridani were the big boys within the empire, Rotunna was their aspiring little brother. It wasn’t located within the core region, but down in Beta and Randy’s personal stomping grounds ever since the Skarron war. But as an Archon, Randy had to move around when needed and spend a lot of his time training. Arch Dukes trained, as did all Star Force personnel, but Hightower’s workouts took him less than 2 hours a day when Archons were known to sometimes spend all their waking hours in a sanctum pressing their skills to new levels.

Randy couldn’t run the system, and as needed a Duke had been assigned to oversee and grow it. Rotunna, with 7 habitable planets and two habitable moons, was geographically more valuable than either Sol or Epsilon Eridani, though it hadn’t been built up nearly as much. That wasn’t due to resources, but time. It was a newer system, but one that was coming into prominence as another ‘watchtower’ for the empire, and as such it required an equivalent to Davis and Hightower, in the form of only the second Arch Duke appointed to date.

The trio of Davis, Hightower, and Vectir were supplemented with well over 100 Dukes, all of which had cycled through the Clans at one point. Those Dukes either ran systems or oversaw less developed regions, but common to all was the lack of oversight. Each was entrusted to make things work in their personal kingdoms, and due to that fact there was no overlap of monarchs.

There were a few currently in Epsilon Eridani, but only Hightower was assigned here. The others were passing through, doing research, or taking various forms of vacations. Now that Star Force had a large pool of personnel to pull from, Davis had implemented the new policy of using high level Administrators to oversee planets within a system such as this rather than assigning Barons or others that would be somewhat conflicting with the Arch Duke. Davis wanted each monarch to be in sole control of their assignment, and going along with that motif Davis had made them all trans-tier positions.

At present Star Force had 9 tiers within their hierarchy, and as the empire grew they were adding new ones. Davis had originally held the highest tier along with the trailblazers and a few others, but he’d changed that to make the leadership cadre above the tiers. There were many level 9 Administrators working for Hightower and helping him run Epsilon Eridani, but while they oversaw planets that were far larger and a greater challenge to manage, a Baron assigned to a frontier startup colony still outranked them.

It wasn’t the type of ranking that allowed one to travel into someone’s backyard and supersede their authority, but then again it kind of was. The trick of it, though, was in understanding that someone completely new to a planet or system wasn’t going to have the knowledge needed to just jump in and start reworking things, so there was an almost default level of deference in such matters. But all Administrators knew why the Barons outranked them, despite their posting…and that was because they had no one telling them what to do, with the outcome of their assignment entirely riding on their judgement and decisions.

Hightower’s Administrators operated off of his playbook and it allowed them to compartmentalize. Monarchs did not have that luxury. Some Administrators would end up advancing into the Monarch ranks down the road, many would not. Though they appeared to be similar, if not identical roles, there was a chilling difference between the two that not all people were well suited for, and some did not want to be Monarchs for just that reason. They were comfortable in their leadership roles, but wanted to be assigned a mission with parameters. Monarchs operated without parameters, setting them for others to follow.

That was why Davis had made the change to not have Monarchs operating in the same system at the same time, unless two planets were completely unconnected from one another. On the frontier that was possible, but with well-established systems like Epsilon Eridani Hightower had oversight on everything, including some other regional systems that were being run by Administrator and not by a Monarch.

Those were usually locations that were not tasked for major development, mining sites and such, and Hightower had oversight on four of those, including the Merovingian System that held the Prometheus star forge. But the data he was looking through now was not limited to just his command offshoots, but the systems controlled by Barons, Counts, and Dukes. The Marquises were exempt, because their mandate kept their economies separate from the rest of the empire, but the influence that Hightower exerted from Epsilon Eridani could reach every other system in the empire, and as such he had to monitor their activities in order to know where to use his influence…and to do so without stepping on Davis’s or Vectir’s toes.

The latter part was difficult with communication lag, but they coordinated with each other well enough. Most of Hightower’s efforts were monitoring and anticipating problems before they occurred, with him currently spotting a potential corovon shortage on the outer edge of Delta Region. There was no issue yet, but move the economic chess pieces around and he could see it occurring soon. Given shipping delays and the need to get ahead of problems, he pulled up another holographic panel that glowed blue in the pitch black room and input a transit order to ship 30 cubic meters of raw corovon from his Epsilon Eridani’s surplus stores to Duke Methis, with a note telling her to sit on it for potential shortages and a posting to Davis and Vectir so they were aware of the transfer in case they were watching the numbers and thinking of doing the same.

A few seconds after he finished a flashing orb appeared to his left and he tapped on it, accepting the incoming comm with the orb flashing into the upper torso of one of his personal staff that handled the majority of the regular Administratorial duties for him so he could be left to mentally roam and put out fires before they even began. That said, some things needed to be directed to him to handle personally, so it wasn’t uncommon for him being interrupted. The orb was there so he could choose whether or not to accept the comm without it becoming a full interruption, but nothing he was doing now was so important that he couldn’t take a short break.

“Yes?”

“A request from the Hycre for a direct line.”

“Put them through.”

His staffer nodded, then the Human’s hologram disappeared and the floating gas bag that was a Hycre replaced him, filling most of Hightower’s view. Below the hologram was an ID tag, allowing the Arch Duke to identify who the caller was, for his skills in picking out differences in Hycre physiology were still lacking, though this one he was familiar with.

“Hello, Nephanie.”

WE HAVE A REQUEST TO MAKE, the Hycre said via computer translator.

“Make it.”

OUR FLEET IS DEPARTING SOON TO THE HECHMA SYSTEM. WE ANTICIPATE AN EVEN BATTLE AND HAVE DECIDED TO AUGMENT OUR INVASION FLEET WITH OUR DEFENSIVE FLEET. OUR WORLD WILL BE WITHOUT PATROL. WE DO NOT EXPECT AN ATTACK HERE BUT WE DO NOT WISH TO CHANCE. WE ASK THAT YOU COVER OUR WEAKNESS SO THAT WE MAY PRESENT A GREATER THREAT TO THE CAJDITAL.

Hightower smiled. “You should know by now that I’ve always got your back. If the lizards poke their nose anywhere in this system we’re going after them.”

THE CAJDITAL ARE NOT THE ONLY THREATS IN THIS GALAXY.

“True,” Hightower granted.

IT IS BETTER TO ASK BEFORE SUCH REINFORCEMENTS ARE NEEDED. WE DO NOT WISH A RAIDER TO MAKE ITS WAY INTO ORBIT AND STRIKE A SHIP FOR LACK OF A PATROL.

“I’ll cycle some drones out to Threshold to replace your patrols. Hechma isn’t one of your former systems, is it?”

IT IS NOT. IT IS THE HOMEWORLD OF AN ALLY THE CAJDITAL ERADICATED. WE INTEND TO AVENGE THEM AND TAKE SOME SMALL BURDEN OFF YOUR FORCES AT THE SAME TIME. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE GROWN BEYOND US, BUT THE CAJDITAL HAVE ALSO BECOME NEARLY OUR EQUALS. WE CANNOT EXERT THE INFLUENCE WE ONCE HAD. WE CAN TAKE THIS SYSTEM FROM THEM. I HAVE INFORMED THE ARCHONS. I NOW INFORM YOU AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR COVERING OUR PATROLS HERE.

“Happy hunting,” Hightower offered, then the Hycre cut the transmission. He didn’t take offense at that, for the Hycre social interactions were always a bit stiff, though practical. The Arch Duke pulled up another prompt and sent the order to cover the gas giant Threshold with a drone patrol to replace the considerable amount of Hycre warships that were always present there. The planet and the orbit around it was filled with both ships and stations, and if someone want to make a mess of things they could with a sneak attack…but the odds of that happening here were nil. Though like Nephanie had said, you could never know for sure.

Even though the drones were military, Hightower could still send them where he wanted. If the Archons needed them they could always reposition them where they liked, but they had a workable relationship that didn’t involve any sort of tug of war over ships. Even the Sentinels hadn’t been ordered away, rather the trailblazers had informed him of their need and he’d decided to start compromising this system’s security in order to give them what they needed to defeat the lizards in Gvaris. He’d been monitoring that conflict with keen interest, for it was the largest Star Force had ever fought to date and the sort of scale that he’d been preparing to defend Epsilon Eridani against should the lizards ever feel like hitting Star Force at its heart.

Paul had told him the lizards were holding back, and now he was seeing in detail just how much naval muscle they had with so many ships continuing to pour into the system that the Sentinels were needed just to stem the tide. A few dozen had already been set up but there weren’t enough new ones available coming out of the shipyards to give them what they needed, so Hightower was sending them some of his. He didn’t like lessening his defenses here, but he did have over 700 of them spread out across the system.

He glanced back at the hologram of the one Sentinel as a jump cradle moved in and slowly wrapped its long, spindly arms around it, encasing it in an IDF field so it could carry it away to the distant battlefield. Paul needed them right now, but Hightower knew better than to ever grow complacent. Epsilon Eridani was a fortress system, but even fortresses could fall…and it was often that they would get hit when they were temporarily weakened.

This wasn’t the first time Star Force had to pull reinforcements from defensive fleets to the front, but it was the first in recent memory. Star Force hadn’t been pressed this hard since the Skarron invasion, but Epsilon Eridani existed for just this reason…to send support to other systems and the front when needed, and he had no doubt Sol would be doing the same. They both had Sentinels to spare, and if Paul needed to spam them against the lizards then that was one tactic Hightower was going to give him.

He might not be his Marquis anymore in title, but the relationship between the two had never ceased. His trailblazer needed backup, and the Arch Duke was going to send some of his own big guns into the fight rather than sitting on them here. He could build enough to replace them eventually, and it was better than Epsilon Eridani suffer that time lag than Paul did. They could afford it, barring something catastrophic, and if the lizard core worlds were going to throw their industrial muscle into this fight it seemed only fitting that Epsilon Eridani and Sol do the same.

2

December 12, 2938

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Inner Zone

Captain Moffis watched from his bridge command chair onboard Cradle 183 as they made the long, hard deceleration jump into the Gvaris System. It’d taken them long enough to get here from Epsilon Eridani, but this last leg had to be taken so slow it was almost painful. He blamed the lizards for that, because they were blockading the preferable jump points around the system’s star. With those out of the option bucket his cradle had to exit further out in a more difficult to reach location.

His ship had no choice, for it was a speck attached to a huge Sentinel segment that was a dead weight until it was reactivated. Why they hadn’t been designed to at least help in the transit he didn’t know, but right now it sat within the cradle’s huge IDF field riding along without incident while the tiny ship did all the pushing necessary.

Right now that pushing was a long braking maneuver against the star that had the glowing orb in front of him on the viewscreen growing rapidly in size. The closer they got the greater the star’s gravity affected them, offering them more pushing potential. Hit the lower altitudes and it was like slamming into a brick wall, but this far out they were only sniffing at the weak gravity and applying a lot of engine power to begin whittling off speed before they ran out of room.

The math was predictable enough, but it had necessitated a slower than normal departure jump that led to a long coast phase that was just now coming to an end. Moffis watched as the star enlarged and changed color, then tiny dots appeared before it, zipping towards him like a swath of bugs that slowed down rapidly. They resolved themselves into warships, Star Force warships, that were blocking for their arrival as planned…but beyond that there was a sea of lizard ship icons just beginning to register on the cradle’s sensors as a priority move order was emblazoned on the tactical hologram beside the Captain’s chair.

“Helm, make it quick,” he ordered his 9 person bridge crew. The entire ship only boasted a complement of 56, all of which were naval Regulars. That made it seem like a small time posting, but Moffis had had to spend some 236 years in the fleet to obtain a Captain’s slot, then another 54 before ranking up enough in experience points to get a cradle command. Likewise his crew were not rookies, but experienced vets. Some had combat records, but most were involved in the cargo shipping wing of the Star Force fleet.

They all knew how to fight, both hand to hand and navally, but that was really backup training. The cradle only had one weapon, a compact cleansing beam that was more of a tool than anything else. It had been powered down since he had taken command of the craft, tucked away beneath decently armored hull plates for the rare occasion when it might be needed. If this ship had to fight then something was very wrong, for its sole purpose was to carry pieces of equipment too large to mount in a jumpship’s external docking slots.

He’d carried small sedas around, cargo clusters, space stations, and picked up a few stranded ships from other races. The missions were varied, but they were always accompanied by a military escort to protect the cradle. It wasn’t a warship, nor a cargo ship, though it was a jumpship…and one that was all engines and IDF generators with a few shield generators thrown on for good measure. Right now they were protecting the cradle itself, but if necessary they could extend a very thin protective barrier around the entire Sentinel segment. Enough to protect against dust and debris, or as of a few seconds ago interstellar radiation, but in combat they were next to useless.

Right now they were being constricted to the thick body of the cradle and its tendril-like arms that were the emitter pylons for the IDF holding the Sentinel attached without there being a physical lock. Small tractor beams within the arms bumped the mass around as needed, but were usually powered down. Once settled, the mass stayed put as if the cradle wasn't moving…which was the beauty of IDF.

The downside was it was a power hog for something of this size, especially during the braking maneuver, which had drained the cradle’s capacitors down to 7% with them only now beginning to refill. 7% was enough to execute a microjump, which they had to do in order to get off the jumpline. To set up for it the cradle drifted a bit to the left as the helmsman ‘turned’ them away from the insane number of ships ahead that were lit up with a myriad of tiny blazes that were weaponsfire.

But that wasn’t why they had a priority warning…a group of lizard cruisers were flanking the defenders and heading towards them. There were Star Force ships in pursuit, but they weren’t going to get to them in time.

“Shit,” he whispered. “We’ve got incoming. “Make the jump now, I don’t care how slow it is.”

“Almost in position,” the helmsman differed. “12 seconds.”

Moffis grabbed the armrests with his hands, squeezing them tight as he watched the cruisers approaching. There were over a hundred of them, lessening by the second as the naval drones were picking at them from the flank with long ranged Keema strikes, but they were nearly up to the cradle when...

There was a flash and several of them disappeared into hazy lines…then the Sentinel segment within the cradle’s grasp began to move out of alignment.

“Lock it down. We have to jump now!”

“Working on it,” another crewmember said as she used the tractor beams to get the huge mass settled inside the IDF. If even a piece of it drifted outside the field while they were accelerating it would tear the segment free of the cradle and take several of the arms with it.

Just then another cruiser kamikaze rammed the Sentinel segment, propelling it a bit more to the left…but the crew were anticipating it and had cut the IDF completely, repositioning the cradle off center and catching the Sentinel chunk in its sweet spot again. As soon as the IDF snapped into place the approaching ships disappeared into streaks as the cradle made a slow microjump and out of harm’s way for the moment.

“Damage?”

“Looks like some armor breaches. We’re fine, but the Sentinel got gut punched.”

“Is it operational?”

“The armor took the hits with minor interior damage. I think it’ll be alright, and I’m crossing my fingers with regards to the interlocking components. One of the craters is practically on top of a swapping channel.”

“Bring up the system tactical data,” he said, knowing that it was now dated and would remain that way until they slowed down. Their jump wasn’t fast, but it was still messing with the Doppler effect and that practically nixed any chance they had of deciphering the intricate comms security that Star Force used, though if they needed to transmit in the clear they could still do so for those targets ahead, which would then unravel the compression upon reception and get the data being sent.

He’d only gotten a glance at it before, namely the far too many ships at their arrival point. This was his second trip here and the last one had been congested, but this was far more than he had expected. The lizards had been said to be ramping up their numbers, but unless they’d been laying in wait they should not have had that many ships that close to the jumppoint.

But they did…and it wasn’t just at the jumppoint. There were lizards everywhere across the system in huge fleets, including another jumppoint a third of the way around the star where there was an active incoming convoy of their reinforcements. Moffis pulled up the time compression on that, seeing that they’d gotten data on the past two hours or so before making the jump, and the enemy convoy had been spilling more jumpships into the system that entire time with no Star Force response.

The fleet waiting to protect it was so thick with ships it would have been suicide challenging that, especially if they were willing to go kamikaze at the drop of a hat.

Looking ahead to where they were going he realized it wasn’t to any of the planets, but rather a null point in the system that was going to require them to brake hard again. At least there were ample Star Force signals there and no lizards at present.

“Do we have enough juice to pull a null burn?”

“Yes,” the helmsman said. “Jumping out again will be dicey if we can’t stall a bit. We can do it, but it’ll put us into the danger zone.”

“Understood,” he said, knowing that the ‘danger zone’ was a margin of error that ships were meant to avoid. Draining capacitors all the way would leave a ship unable to make all but the smallest of jumps if they ran into a situation where they needed to immediately move again, and he didn’t mean trolling around orbit. If the enemy was at your braking point you’d have to face them while waiting for a partial recharge, and in an all but defenseless ship like a cradle that meant you were as good as dead.

Right now though he and his crew were in fleet hands, with multiple trailblazers in system to see that they got to where they needed to go. That gave Moffis some comfort, but pulling a null jump didn’t put him at ease. Little gravity on decel also meant little gravity on acceleration. The star was close enough to use in both directions, but unless your destination was on straight line trajectory you were going to have to heavily push/pull on laterals to compensate and that largely depended on the current location of the planets in their orbits.

Looking at the map he saw that there weren’t any nearby. That made navigation difficult to get to that location, but then again that was probably the point, for the lizards would be hard pressed to get there in any ample numbers using the same techniques. The might be clogging the jumplanes insystem, but the null points would offer some temporary safety.

When the cradle did finally decelerate to the rendezvous point it was met with a few hundred drones and one warship overseeing them, with Moffis getting back on the comm grid and his ship downloading more data directly from that warship in addition to picking up the active signals from around the system. He also got a navigational prompt from the warship indicating where they were supposed to go next once their capacitors were sufficiently recharged. Apparently this little fleet was meant to buy them some respite before sending them through the gauntlet again, for their destination was Planet 13, which was showing a massive lizard fleet holding its distance around a chunk of orbit outlined by some 18 Sentinels with overlapping fields of fire and a few other cradles and cargo ships sitting inside while the rest of the orbit tracks were essentially blockaded where there weren’t sedas.

“Assembly area,” he said to himself. If they could get in there they’d be ok…but the lizards probably knew that as well, which was why they were physically blocking any direct jumps into the area. He was going to have to take them to a nearby jumppoint and run the cradle through with the help of an escort fleet and hope they didn’t get hit again.

“We’ll go when we hit 16%,” he announced. “If we can make it here,” he said to his bridge crew, highlighting the position in orbit of the small planet, “we should be safe. I want enough juice to pull some bad-angled stops. If we take it slow we’re asking to get hit, and it’ll put our escorts in greater risk the longer we stay out there.”

“So many,” the IDF operator said, seeing the half million cruisers around the one planet alone.

“Space is big,” Moffis reminded her. “If you’re going to try and build a wall across it, you need a lot.”

“Don’t suppose there’s a backdoor?”

“If there was the other cradles probably took it and now it’s being watched. Looks like we’re going in the hard way. Inform the warship when we hit sufficient charge. Until then just hold position and wait, but put all shields on us. If we go down the Sentinel piece is ballistic and probably lost. It can take hits better than we can.”

“We can’t take a ram,” the helmsman reminded him.

“No, we can’t,” he agreed. “But we’re not the big fat target. Actually, spin us ventral side forward. Don’t let them get a shot at us from the front and request a ship or two to block us over top.”

“Gladly,” the comms officer said, relaying the request. After that everyone just waited quietly until it was time to go…though by that time another cradle had jumped in near to them and was waiting through its own recharge period.

“Alright people, cross your fingers and hold your butts. They know we’re coming,” he said, looking at the helmsman. “Jump.”

A few seconds later they accelerated slowly for a microjump, but the ships outside disappeared within a second regardless and the tracking signals disappeared in the acceleration wash. Some 23 minutes later they decelerated into a wedge of drones that immediately fell back to surround the Sentinel segment while an even bigger wedge collapsed around them and pushed forward, getting some considerable distance on the cradle so they could engaged and take the hits plowing the path before the Captain’s ship and cargo came within weapons or ramming range.

The lizard cruisers were far enough ahead that they looked like gnats, so many in number they formed waterfalls of ships that descended on the drones with a few tendrils getting through and heading for the cradle. The second line of defense ships intercepted them and took them out all the while the big mass was moved deeper into orbit headed for the ‘safe’ zone and having to pull heavily on a distant planet and one of the bigger sedas to get the necessary lateral tug to creep them into position. It was far too slow for Moffis’ liking, but with their cargo onboard the cradle always moved at a creep.

He watched while his crew flew the cradle, seeing numerous drones destroyed to buy them their ticket into orbit. Dozens were taken out acting as blockers and stopping ramming cruisers with their deployed dampening shields intercepting them by the dozens. Then those ships engaged them at close range and the drones tore them apart, but more and more came in and a few got hit by kamikazes themselves. Star Force tech was superior, by far, but throw enough ships at you and eventually they’d hit your limit break and take you out.

The lizards were spending an awful lot of ships trying to get at them, but the route they’d taken put most of their blockading fleet out of position. Moffis had probably been given a different route than the previous cradle had come through and that was the only reason they were making headway, for the lizard fleet was adjusting and pouring ships towards them with the second wave sending some behind the cradle to block for it as he’d requested when the chasers began to catch up with the slower mass of Sentinel that was about to make all this worth the effort if it could find its sister segments and link up.

Their trip in wasn’t a clean one though. Two kamikazes got through from the rear, ramming the Sentinel chunk but hitting in places that hadn’t seen damage before, thankfully. They tore into the armor but didn’t do much internal damage, but then another three ships decelerated just shy of collision, dropping them inside the escorts.

The three cruisers shot the Sentinel component with their phaser beams but did not hold position, for they were flying up and around it heading directly for the cradle. Fortunately the group of drones overhead reacted instantly and met up with them before they had a chance to pull a slow speed ram into the wispy ship, though three phaser bursts did his the cradle’s shields before the lizards were destroyed.

“No damage,” his crew reported.

Moffis nodded, blowing out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. This wasn’t over yet, but they’d just dodged a bullet…literally.

The carnage continued all around them with the lizards losing so many ships they were laying down a trail of debris behind them that would block any further transits through this area, so it was a good idea to have the cradles take different routes into the perimeter. Unfortunately a small, but hefty percentage of that debris was coming from Star Force drones. They were being thrown at the numerically stifling enemy to block for the cradle, with there being next to no chance of them all surviving. Thankfully Star Force didn’t have crews in the drones, otherwise this would have been a bloodbath.

It certainly was for the lizards, but for Star Force it was just weapons being lost. Costly, but acceptable to get this precious cargo into the safe zone…which the cradle began to approach with the first Keema batteries from the Sentinel perimeter reaching out to swat cruisers from the black sky. Only a few at first, but the closer they got more Sentinels came within range and the lizards began losing the initiative. A few more made runs in and got some weaponsfire off at the Moffis’ cargo, but no more kamikazes made it through.

Two were stopped just kilometers away, with the escorts that were left ahead of the cradle cycling back to the rear to catch any more coming in with their sail-wide invisible dampening shields. Like bugs getting stuck to a window, the kamikaze cruisers were prevented from getting to either the cradle or the Sentinel segment as the weaponsfire was getting so intense from the perimeter that he lizards were forced to break off their now pointless attack.

The swarm of cruisers moved back as the Sentinels swatted more of them down, leaving the broken escort fleet to follow the cradle in past the perimeter where it then dispersed to other assignments with a few recovery ships coming out to pick up and deal with the damaged drones while Moffis carried his cargo into a point near the center where he was directed via waypoint.

There the cradle settled, then finally released the Sentinel segment to a group of specialized construction tugs that were better suited to putting the segments together than the cradles. Glad to be free of the dead weight, he took his ship over to where the other cradles were waiting for an exodus convoy to be formed, for they couldn’t leave the system on their own without escort. It wouldn’t be as massive of an affair as their entry, for they could use a much more distant jumppoint, but they weren’t going anywhere in this mess of a system alone.

“Mission accomplished,” he announced to the crew. “One more puzzle piece added to our side,” he said as he saw their segment immediately being pulled towards a half completed Sentinel alongside two others that were also under assembly from the same convoy, with the fully operational Sentinels sitting in a distant sphere around them keeping the enemy at bay.

Just then a plethora of lights lit up a region nearby as dampening shields were stressed to the point of becoming visible as a dozen lizard cruisers made kamikaze jumps into the interior and were caught by a shield being generated from seemingly nowhere. Once stopped, the Sentinels took them out within 3 seconds, but the long range kamikaze attack shook Moffis. The ‘safe’ zone was still dangerous.

“What caught them?” he demanded to know.

The sensor officer shook his head for a moment, then smiled cruelly. “I think some of the drones in here are decoys. They’re shield boats, but the lizards can’t tell them apart from the warships.”

Moffis sighed, feeling a bit better. “People, that’s why we have Archons leading this fight. Never underestimate the cleverness of a trailblazer…or the audacity of the lizards.”

“Thankfully one seems to cancel out the other,” the helmsman replied.

“In our favor,” Moffis added. “For now, anyway.”

3

April 2, 2940

Gvaris System (lizard territory)

Nephasil

Iden-202747 stood shoulder to shoulder with his padawan behind the twin pilots chairs in the cockpit of a Michelangelo-class heavy walker as they led a convoy of 32 similar and smaller mechs across the wastelands in between cities. It was rocky, barren terrain covered in pale pink ‘dirt clods’ that crunched beneath the wide feet of the hexped walker, but it also gave the lizards easier bedrock to tunnel through.

He wasn’t concerned with those right now, though his walker and the other 6 heavies were scanning the ground beneath them just in case they came close enough to pick up on one. The rest of the mechs were bipedal escorts and not outfitted with the heavy sensors, built more for combat than being mobile chess pieces in the ground combat that was about to be escalated to the extreme.

As it was Star Force had taken down a few more surrounding cities since the first of the Sentinels arrived. While that drama was taking place further out in the system a defense fleet had fought hard to hold onto the orbital slot directly overhead, shielding the few gains Star Force had made on the ground and preserving their foothold which had been creeping out gradually over the past few years without any serious push. There had been numerous behind the lines sabotage missions, but until they could get a stronger presence in orbit they couldn’t push too far else they’d lose their protective umbrella.

In the past week 3 Sentinels had made their way across the system and parked overhead. Ever since there had been an ongoing effort by the lizards to displace them before any more could be added. One had been destroyed and the fighting continued, all the while the trailblazers were mounting other attacks across the system so the lizards couldn’t focus all their attention on one area. Iden and the other ground commanders had been ordered long ago to reinforce their defenses in case the orbital fleet was dislodged, for the lizards had so many ships in the system that if they all chose to come and push this point there would be no way to hold out against them.

The trailblazers had made it clear through their strategic placements that this ground op wasn’t their only point of contention, so if the lizards wanted to devote enough resources to wipe them off the map they’d be critically wounding their ability to defend the rest of their assets in the system. That threat was what Iden believed was keeping their kamikaze tendencies reigned into a waiting game, for every week that passed had more lizard reinforcements arriving. If they let them pool up too much he knew it’d start raining ships down on top of them, hence it was better to give them a wider swath of ground to target.

But for as many ships that arrived the trailblazers were doing a decent job of thinning their numbers. The tallies were still rising, on both sides, but the lizard count would have been much higher if Paul and Liam hadn’t been pushing for naval conflicts. The one in orbit now was not of their making, but Paul was up there defending the two remaining Sentinels and taking the opportunity to kill as many ships as he could prior to the incoming convoy of ground troops.

Iden had been told they’d waited long enough, and that there was not going to be a naval victory in this system prior to a ground invasion. They were going to have to take this planet out from under the lizards while they still held stellar orbit and a lot of other naval turf. That was an entirely new scenario for Star Force, but not one that they hadn’t conceived of long ago. The threat of lizard ships coming down and ramming the walkers he was in or pulling a microjump into one of their bases was always a risk, but going overland on foot or in small numbers would make them all but immune to that tactic.

At the moment these walkers were protected by the ships above, which would divert to intercept any lizard cruisers coming down from orbit or overland to attack them. If they were coming over land that would be a fair fight, for the michelangelo he was riding in had a big Keema battery onboard that could hit a cruiser at range and they couldn’t ram them from afar due to the curve of the planet. The heavy walkers could engage the cruisers well enough in firepower and armor, but not from overhead ramming. Their shield generators weren’t dampening-equipped for anything that large, but they did have a setting to knock down missiles before they could hit the hull.

That was a sweet upgrade he wished they’d had back in the Skarron war, and although the lizards did use missiles on occasion, most of their weaponry was phaser-based and there wasn’t a straight up counter to it. It had made them considerably more lethal, but compared to the Keema the phasers were little more than bee stings.

“We’re coming into spit range on the nearest turrets,” the mechwarrior informed him.

“Hold fire and keep walking,” Iden cautioned. “We’re going to get busy pretty soon.”

“They’re not sending out any tanks after us,” Ciatra-295333 noted as they watched both the forward visuals and the battlemap display in the cramped cockpit that sat nearly dead center in the giant machine.

“They’re not going to. Not after us, at least. We’re the hunters here.”

“Can’t hunt them if they don’t come out.”

“They’ll come. If not we’ll start knocking down their perimeter turrets just for fun.”

“Fun?”

“Bonus damage. We’re not going to have to wait that long, I think.”

“You know something I don’t?” his padawan asked.

“Just got a comm from Paul. They’re jumping in within the minute.”

“Hello…” Ciatra said appreciably. “How long do you think it’ll take before they wise up?”

“Not sure,” Iden admitted. “Take us to here, and hold,” he ordered, pointing to a spot nearby on the battlemap a couple kilometers away.

“What happened to sniping turrets?” she asked.

“The tanks are faster than us. We need optimum position to intercept.”

“We running from here?”

“No…maybe,” he said, unsure. “We’re gonna play this by ear after the fireworks start.”

“Bring it,” Ciatra said eagerly as they waited and watched both the surrounding area and orbit above as numerous jump streaks appeared on the battlemap as the start of an incoming convoy from Planet 13 began to arrive in the midst of the ongoing naval battle. The cargo jumpships slid into the engagement behind drone screens and were escorted beneath the umbrellas provided by the two Sentinels at the lower edge of the defense fleet. There the jumpships began dispersing dropships and the larger transports down to the surface carrying far more troops than Star Force currently had on the ground.

It was the beginning of the main invasion, with the descending troops being entirely made up of Bsidd. Calavari, Scionate, and Canderous would soon follow, but the initial breakout would be fought with the Humans already on the ground and the numerically superior Bsidd that the lizards did not want to let through. As difficult as the Human infantry was to fight, the Bsidd were even worse when not counting Archons. They were larger and had so many appendages that there was literally no way to get the jump on them…plus the fact that they had no center of mass and some of the lizards’ phaser fire would often miss through one of their torso gaps.

Iden watched as the first wave of dropships came down behind them in the distance like a tendril from the sky, then he looked back at the other battlemap that was centered on the city ahead of them.

“Come on…you’re not just going to sit there and let us unload. Send them already,” he said impatiently, for his and Ciatra’s mission wasn’t going down unless the lizards counterattacked.

“Patience,” his apprentice mocked. “It’s not like we can unload everyone in an hour. Give them time to think it through.”

“They don’t usually do much waiting. More of a reflexive…ah, there. See?” he said as a plume of wisps began to emerge from the city’s hangars and pool in the sky just below the defense shield that had been rebuilt over the past 7 months, though the anti-orbital battery wasn’t yet back in working order. If it was then the fleet above was going to get picked at and forced to take it out again, wasting drones in a redundant surface attack that Iden and Ciatra intended for them not to have to make anytime soon.

They were going after the battery before it could be totally rebuilt, knowing that the in-city defenses surrounding it would not be operational before it was. The lizards had rushed the shield before even beginning work on the battery so they had a way to cover it, and it looked like they weren’t wasting resources on side projects when the big gun was the one that mattered…then there was the fact that when they did get it operational Star Force was just going to blow it up again and anything nearby it, so what point was there in building anti-tank and anti-infantry turrets around its perimeter without an immediate use?

“You think they’re heading for us?” the mech copilot asked.

“Not with two armadillos,” Iden scoffed. “At least not until they can get sufficient numbers, anyway. They’ll avoid us and go straight for the dropships when they feel confident, but they can’t mount a decent attack with just wisps. They know we’ve beefed up our anti-air defenses. They’ll have to bring in their ground troops.”

“You mean flood in,” Ciatra corrected.

“That’ll take a bit of time to organize, but they’re all there. They’ve been saturating the cities with them prior to our next attack. No way they’ll just sit there and wait to be overrun with Bsidd.”

“I heard they hate them more than Humans,” the pilot said.

“I can confirm that,” Iden answered.

“Why exactly?”

“Because there’s so many of them. When we deploy Bsidd we usually send them in numbers. The lizards’ swarm tactics are diminished when they’re having to fight a smaller swarm themselves. They know by now that when the Bsidd show up, a lot more are on the way. That’s why I think they’re not going to wait too long to go after those dropships. No matter how many troops they’ve got waiting to fight us, they can’t let the Bsidd unload and get grouped up. They’ve got to hit us now, and if naval can keep their cruisers away the only option they have is to start their primary ground push immediately, before we start to get too numerous to overwhelm.”

“So you’re bringing them down first as a goad?”

“Wasn’t my call, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was considered. Primary reason is that they counter the lizards best. Calavari might be able to take them better hand to hand, but the Bsidd have so many variants they can field a much better ground team across the board.”

“Slight offense taken there,” the copilot said. “We’re the ones that have been holding out down here, without the insane numbers.”

“And there’s a reason why the Bsidd weren’t sent in first,” Iden added. “If you have a ‘have to hold’ scenario, you send the Clans. Bar none.”

“That’s more like it.”

“Even if you are Clan Caitlyn.”

The pilot coughed. “Archon or not, do you want kicked off this ride?”

Ciatra snickered. “We’re getting off anyway,” she said, seeing that they were almost to the holding point.

“Yep,” Iden agreed, seeing the first of the lizard tanks appearing along the edge of the city. “Coordinate with command and delay them from getting within firing range as long as possible.”

“I thought you wanted to get closer?” the copilot asked.

“I do, but my gut says to get off now.”

“Good luck then,” the pilot offered, then added, “Jinx scum.”

“Come on, Ciatra. Let’s go cause some mayhem,” Iden said as he backtracked a step then turned and walked out of the cockpit into the narrow hallway that connected it to the rest of the mech’s interior. Most of it was mechanism, not a troop carrier, but it held a small hangar with a few auxiliary chambers, including a medical station. The michelangelos could be used as a mobile outpost in a pinch, but they were primarily designed to soak up damage while simultaneously dishing it out.

There were no other crew onboard besides the two pilots, so Iden walked over and hit one of the three door releases, exposing a circular hatch two meters wide near the starboard wall. There was a retractable ladder that would reach down to the ground but he left it alone, sitting down on the rim and putting his legs into the hole. He steadied himself for a moment then glanced up at Ciatra.

“You up to this?”

“Always.”

“Don’t get stepped on,” he said, pushing off and falling through the hole.

Ciatra sat down and put her legs through, giving him a moment to clear then pushing herself off and letting gravity pull her down into clean air. She fell several stories down to the ground, cushioning her landing with a pulse from her jump pack, and landed a few meters past Iden. She followed him as he ran backwards between the rearmost two legs as the huge walker moved on, then he diverted slightly to the right and got into a shallow wash, sprinted a few seconds then ducked behind a neo before running off sideways for a good 200 meters or so where there was a 15 meter cliffside with a shallow V in it.

He and Ciatra both stopped there, pressing up against the wall and crouching down while they watched the rest of the mechs stroll past.

“We’re on our own from this point,” Iden reminded her.

“If you can make it, so can I.”

“That’s the thing,” he admitted. “I never know if I will until it actually happens.”

“We’re a team,” she reminded him. “And you’re better off with me than without.”

“No argument there,” he said as he glanced skyward, seeing the orbital tendril of ships coming down and now starting to go back up as well, with empty cargo holds that would be refilled as soon as they got back into space. “I get the feeling this is going to be the biggest ground campaign in Star Force history. We should be able to lose ourselves in the mess and slip through, but if we don’t make it I hate to take you down with me.”

Ciatra glared at him through her helmet. “You’re not the only one in the empire that gets to be reckless, Iden.”

He smirked, though she couldn’t see it behind his solid blue faceplate. “Spoken like a true Jinx. Alright then, reckless it is. Let’s do this.”

The two Archons fist bumped then waited, knowing this was the last place the lizards were going to hit. They would be going around the mechs and trying to get at the landing zone, but until they started to move they had to sit tight and wait for an opportunity.

And in the meantime they were going to get a grandiose view of the fireworks about to break out.

4

A mild visual distortion crossed from far right to directly ahead of Iden as he was running a zigzag course across the rocky ground trying to keep to the lower spots. Even over the small ridges he could see the source, that being the michelangelo that he and Ciatra had been riding in. It had wheeled off to the right in a wide arc that brought it closer to the city and within Keema range as it and part of the mechs were heading towards a line of thousands of tanks that were pressing out of the city towards the distant landing zone where the first of the Bsidd troops were coming down and swarms of wisps were already picking at the edges of Star Force’s defenses.

All the heavy walkers were firing at the tanks as they tried to race past kilometers away and out of their own return weapons range. Some of the neos were racing on ahead to get to them, running across the ground in similar stride to what Iden was sporting on foot. The mechs had come a long way over the centuries and were now more a mobile battle suit with agility that no other mech design allowed. It didn’t make them the fastest on foot, but in close range fights they could literally dance around an enemy and if they got up to the tank columns they’d do heavy damage there so long as they didn’t run face first into a mass salvo…which they probably were about to do if the heavy walkers couldn’t bust up the lizard lines prior to their arrival.

So there were nearly invisible Keema lances shooting out regularly, but this one had fired the opposite direction and hit an anti-infantry turret on the city’s edge. Just the one shot as the walker wheeled around to head towards the tanks to the north while a few of the mechs headed towards another column coming up from another city to the south. Those were being followed by infantry transports and widely spaced troops on foot bringing up the rear, with the spacing being a result of Star Force punishing them previously for getting their units so closely packed together and making sweet aerial targets. Typically the skeets didn’t carry bombs, but in response to the infantry carpets that the lizards had been deploying they’d refitted slightly, loosing apple-sized bombs that would annihilate a few hundred lizards per hit.

That meant to the south, barely visible when Iden’s head popped up over a ridgeline, were dispersed carpets of lizards spread across miles of terrain following finger-like tendrils of tanks heading out at speed to catch up with the wisps, and included in them were anti-air platforms. They looked like thick, flatbed trucks and Iden knew they were fire and forget packages that would turn the air above them into a very dangerous place to be. If the skeets weren’t careful to avoid them they’d go down with a single hit from the cluster fire, but fortunately that massive army was staying south and making a direct line for the Bsidd landing zone…or zones, for there were several placed in close proximity within the center of the bit of Star Force territory on the planet.

The forces to the north were just building, with infantry to follow soon. The area in between where his mechs had been stationed was now barren, for they’d all peeled off and the lizards weren’t trying to push anything in their direction. They were trying to flank them and avoid a confrontation with as many troops as possible, knowing that any delay would mean more Bsidd getting down and organized on the ground.

The lizards were in a frenzy and Iden could see some of their tanks bobbing over the uneven terrain as they pressed their speed hard. Floating on anti-grav could give you some impressive speeds, but the tanks weren’t built for aerodynamics and that limited them. Still, they could move faster than the mechs at full speed, especially the heavy walkers. It was the aerial craft they couldn’t outrun, but at the moment those were busy with the wisps, leaving the tanks with a clear sprint forward so long as they could avoid the mechs.

That single Keema shot was easily missed in the maelstrom, probably put down to the heavy walker just shooting at a target in range as it turned, but it had been deliberate. That infantry turret was located where Iden and Ciatra were going in and would have had an easy shot at them on approach. As it was there were two anti-mech turrets that were going to be within range of them but they didn’t have the tracking speed needed to hit really mobile targets…which the two Archons currently were.

They were still several kilometers out, but were running at 27 miles an hour over the rough ground. Iden could go faster, so could Ciatra, but he didn’t want to risk pushing too hard and leaving her behind. Likewise he didn’t want them winded when they got to the city’s edge and have their reflexes dulled as a side effect. They weren’t moving at a jog, to be sure, but most races couldn’t achieve this speed on foot and the two of them were crossing ground at the speed of slow vehicles as they both watched the city edge ahead while the fighting continued to escalate behind them.

Iden felt a battlemeld prompt from his padawan and accepted it, suddenly getting her senses added to his situational awareness…in addition to his Ikrid range. Their combined strength and skills now let them feel ahead to the remaining turrets and sense the pinprick of minds inside. Iden had wondered if they were manned constantly or not, but at the moment at least they were. Rather than risk getting shot by the anti-mech versions getting lucky, he kept the pair zigzagging on approach to reduce their silhouette and stretched out their combined ability as far as they could and began to blanket the lizard minds with a simple sense of sleepiness.

They couldn’t knock them out from this far, but they could incentivize them to stop paying attention. There was no guarantee here, and even if they didn’t shoot the Archons on approach there was a good chance that they were still going to be noticed entering the city with a subsequent alert being sent out. What Iden was counting on was the confusion of the mounting battle and getting lost in the frenzy, for once they got inside they were not going to lay low and wait to be found. They were running and gunning as much as necessary to get to their target and back before the lizards realized there was a serious threat in their midst.

He still didn’t know how well that would work, but one never knew for sure before you tried and now was the time. With their combined Ikrid getting stronger with each step closer they abandoned their weave and headed on a more or less straight line towards the city edge, bobbing up and down over the little undulations in the ground that would have made them easy targets for the now smoking remains of the anti-infantry battery the michelangelo had so easily taken out from range.

Live dangerously, Iden said mentally.

And kick ass, Ciatra finished a moment before they both accelerated up into a low sprint and covered the remaining distance as quick as they reasonably could while still maintaining their psionic blanket on the turrets. The pair wasn’t headed towards a gap in the buildings, but rather to the blunt side of one that doubled as a thick wall outlining a tiny piece of the city’s edge. When Iden got to it he activated his jump pack and leapt up some 7 stories to where he stuck on the side spiderman style with Ciatra arriving on his right a second later. Both held there, crouching down into launch positions, then jumping up after their packs had a moment to recharge.

The second leap got them to the top and the pair of Jinxes took off running across the rooftop not bothering to look back at the war breaking out behind them. Their focus was ahead and keeping away from the army formations within the city that had yet to leave their corrals. Knowing that going rooftop to rooftop was a good way to get spotted in daylight from above, they were counting on the fact that the lizard wisps were all out engaging the landing zone defense forces. If that held true then this was better than going down to street level or subterranean and dealing with run-ins that would undoubtedly raise an alarm.

Iden didn’t expect to go unnoticed, but he wanted to stretch their window as far as they could. If a lizard looked out a window and saw them, well, there was nothing they could do about that, but by the time they reported them the Archons will have moved off another kilometer or two, which would make tracking them difficult if you didn’t have craft in the air following the pair.

To her credit Ciatra stayed with him smoothly, to which he did not attribute his own training. Padawans were not students, but rather fellow Archons that needed to add advanced psionics to their personal arsenal. Each of them came with a plethora of skills already, as Iden had when he’d been taken on by a mage. Now the roles were reversed and while he was the stronger of the two she was not holding him up. So long as he didn’t go full out she stuck with him, and with their battlemeld still active there was no chance of her accidentally falling behind, for he knew where she was constantly, as well as how hard she was pushing herself.

Ciatra had maintained a bit of a cushion in the effort department, but not much. He’d done the same when he was an apprentice or just paired with a higher ranking Archon on missions. Sometimes the slower one would go first and the faster would follow, but the quickest way to cover ground was for the faster to lead and navigate, with the slower just keeping up and not worrying about anything other than their footsteps and effort. That was how Iden preferred to move with his padawan and Ciatra understood the inherent advantage, with the responsibility on her to keep moving at such a high rate indefinitely, taking what small breaks they had when possible.

Not many of those occurred on their leaping course across the city, but when they got near to the construction site they did slow and drop down to street level a few times to take advantage of the cover as they approached the partially built battery that looked like a thick cylinder reaching up into the sky. The weapon itself was encased inside of thick armor that wasn’t fully applied yet, nor was it full height. Construction crews were everywhere, meaning that the pair had to pick their mode of attack before heading in, for there was no way this was going to go unnoticed.

With the two staying in battlemeld they knew what each other was thinking so no discussion was necessary, but they did keep looking at new angles of attack and weighting their effectiveness. They didn’t have any explosives of their own to use, so they were going to have to improvise…and it was going to mean they had to split up.

Without hesitation the pair broke, with Ciatra heading up to a nearby rooftop and Iden going down to street level. They released their battlemeld before the connection broke and Iden dropped down on top of several lizards that didn’t expect him to be there. He knocked them back with a telekinetic burst then took them down to the ground with his Fornax but didn’t waste the time to kill them as he sprinted off into the construction zone that was still a crater around the anti-orbital gun where the surrounding buildings hadn’t yet been rebuilt, though the debris had been cleared away.

In its place was a myriad of equipment and supply stacks, giving him ample cover to disappear within once he got off the street. He couldn’t hide from the lizards, for they were all over the site, but he could get out of view of all but a few of them as he darted from one crate stack to another heading to an onsite fabrication machine that was spitting out fresh structural beams that were then being carried up to the top of the tower by anti-grav chutes.

Iden ran up and into one of them, passing through the clear containment shield and jumping upward, with his momentum carrying him up into the sky thanks to the 0 G inside. He lightly bounced off one side of the shield as he careened into it, then began an agile bouncing fest as he passed several haulers coming back down and even overtook a few going up. They were little more than a lizard with a thick backpack tugging the now weightless pieces up the shaft, but there were so many of them that it felt like a vertical highway at rush hour.

They saw him go by, but there was nothing they could do other than report in if they had comms. He didn’t stick around to check, getting to the top and bouncing his way out the side of the shield where egress was intended. There he did let loose with his pair of pistols, killing some two dozen lizards on the wide top platform and continuing to shoot all those he could find as he made his way across the football field-sized parking lot where the components were being stacked for use just below by the assembly crews.

Iden found one of the ramps down and jumped over the edge, coming down on top of a tram and shooting the lizard driving it in the head. Without its pilot the stubby flatbed continued to move up to the top of the ramp then motored on in a straight line to the edge, bouncing up and over the small retaining wall there and careening over the edge. It fell the full height down to the ground where it landed like a bomb into a stack of metal rods, spilling them off their clusters and sweeping away a few lizards who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Iden ran across the catwalks that were underneath and stretching down to the actual construction points on top of the growing structure. They were rising up in one place a few meters as that assembly was complete and ready for the next structural beam up, but the Archon just bypassed them all and jumped over the edge, falling down through the beams and into the empty heart of the tower where the actual weapon was being built several stories down.

When he landed there he didn’t shoot the work crews, instead grabbing hold of one of their minds and ordering it to turn the big machine it was piloting against the delicate machinery it had been carefully assembling by cutting into the panel that had just been freshly placed over a completed segment of the firing matrix.

Iden just stood there and watched until one of the other lizards tried to stop his puppet. He shot that one with a single, high intensity plasma lance and the lizard collapsed onto the walkway and rolled off it, falling deeper inside what was the base of the firing barrel. The Archon guarded his post and his helpless assistant until the casing had been cut free, then he jumped across the barrel gap with some help from his jump pack and landed next to it, rendering the lizard inside the machine cockpit unconscious with a strong Ikrid push before firing multiple pistol blasts into the innards and beginning to telepathically pull the pieces out as if he was shoveling snow.

Save for this snow was charred and metallic, and he was sinking deeper and deeper into it as he dug his way through the freshly built mechanism until he disappeared from view entirely, with only the spray of debris coming out and falling off the edge to the barrel’s bottom marking his position.

5

Ciatra watched as Iden made his way up the anti-grav lift as she launched herself off the nearest rooftop at a sprint. Using her jump pack she got halfway across the barrens around the tower, coming down atop a crate stack that was itself as large as a building. She ran across it for a few seconds then dropped down to the ground and began shooting every lizard that she came across as she zigzagged the ground traffic enroute to the base of the tower where there normally would have been anti-infantry defenses.

Given that it wasn’t finished there were none whatsoever, just a lot of construction crews that obligingly tried to throw themselves at her in the hopes of a mass tackle. If they did get her pinned down it could be trouble if there were armed troops on the way, but right now she was in dominance over the construction site and chose to make use of it by blasting herself a path in to the tower base through the throngs of workers now dropping what they were doing and coming at her.

She hoped that meant Iden was being mostly ignored, but that wasn’t the point. Ciatra needed to get inside and aside from jumping over some clumps of lizards there was nothing in her way to prevent it. Cutting around the side of a massive hover truck, she darted through a pack of 6 lizards that were in the way, shooting the first and knocking the others down as she moved through the doorless entryway and into the incomplete structure.

Some walls were in place, others were just ribs allowing her to move through areas that normally one couldn’t. Her objective was either the main power feed or the backup reactor, not knowing which was complete at this point. To get to one she had to cross laterally to a vertical line, to get to the other she had to climb six levels…which with her jump pack was a piece of cake.

The inside of the structure was full of lizards as well, but situated in specific sections that were under work. They weren’t so numerous as to give her trouble while on the move, but once she jumped/climbed up through the open structural lattice that made up the base of the tower she got to a middle bit of floor around the reactor that had several work crews on it. Ciatra dispatched those with her plasma rifle, taking a minute to go on a killing spree and give herself some room to work on the reactor.

Glancing up she saw that connective lines were already in place all the way to the actual weapon base. Iden was up there somewhere trashing it from the inside out, and she knew as well as he did that whatever damage done the lizards could just rebuild. The trick was to do it in such a way that would keep them busy the longest, which in this case meant forcing them to disassemble what they already had constructed before rebuilding.

Her familiarity with lizard tech wasn’t great, but with everything stripped down as it was and bits of sunlight coming in through pieces of the far wall that were missing to facilitate parts inflow she was able to find the reactor access hatch. It and the rest of the reactor core were already complete, but the question was did they have the fuel rods inside yet?

And by fuel rods she meant the lizard form of a battery that would physically store potential energy tapped from the main line, then be able to cannibalize the molecular structures in a form of fission that would run for a very long time if main power was cut. When it was reapplied the rods would begin the reverse, turning from their base slurry back into a thick, solid rods. It was one of the lizards’ newer engineering feats and gave the anti-orbital guns the ability to keep firing even if the city’s main power supply went offline.

When Ciatra pulled open the panel there was a short crawlspace that she dove into, eventually coming to another panel that she removed and found that the fuel rods, all six of them, had not been put in place yet. That was just fine, as far as she was concerned, because this whole reactor assembly was something that you couldn’t just replace with spare parts…and if she did her job right they wouldn’t even know about the damage until much later.

Using her Pefbar and Lachka, she reached into the walls of the small fuel rod chamber and started to bend and twist things where no one could see, snapping connections and crossing others. Ciatra allowed herself a few Ikrid scans of the exterior to monitor the construction crews and pushed her timetable a bit, wanting more small scale damage so that they wouldn’t be able to fix this thing and be forced to replace it entirely.

“How you doing?” Iden’s voice said in her helmet.

“Redecorating. You?”

“About to scatter.”

“I need a couple more minutes. Make a ruckus on the way out will ya?”

“Hurry,” he emphasized, leaving her to work in quiet.

Not knowing the situation outside she took heed to that warning and forced herself to three more bits of sabotage before pulling out and shutting the chamber. When she climbed back through the crawlway there were lizards on the outside very angry and unable to do anything with her inside. They all dropped to the ground wriggling with muscle spasms as she crawled out, then she went around and shot each and every one of them, hoping that her sabotage might go unnoticed. She shut the outer hatch and tossed the bodies over the edge of the platform, dropping them like bombs down to the lower levels where others were scurrying around.

She followed them down, but only a few levels. There, in plain view, she moved to the central power line that was rising up from ground level to the base of the reactor and began firing into it with her rifle and then a pistol when she ran out of ammo. She burned enough of a hole into it that the internal mechanisms were junked, effectively cutting the power transfer possibilities and forcing the lizards to replace the line.

Ciatra tucked her pistol back onto her weapon rack and flipped her middle finger at the lizard construction crews below before jumping/crawling her way through the rib cage of the tower to one of the slits of light on the armored exterior. There she went out a hole meant for supplies to come in and got onto a small temporary catwalk on the outside with a good view over the construction site to the east.

“I’m done,” she reported.

A waypoint popped up off into the city, different from Iden’s current location, and Ciatra knew that was to be their rendezvous. A quick scan of the sky showed no fighters coming in to harass them, but there was a number of civilian craft up there just hovering in place, probably to give eyes to the site and allow them to figure out what was going on. They couldn’t shoot at them, but it was clear that their surprise attack advantage was coming to a close and they needed to get out of here ASAP.

Ciatra backed up into the gap, then pushed off with her right hand to help accelerate herself into as much of a sprint as possible over the few meters she had to work with and jumped off the catwalk in a huge arch that dropped her to the ground with a gentle landing and into a zigzagging run through the cargo stacks. She knocked aside a few lizards with her Lachka or Fornax but refrained from shooting them as she kept her pistol on her back and her arms pumping for maximum speed.

Just before she got to the edge of the construction site one of the vehicles above nearly rammed the Archon, with her Pefbar just catching it coming in time for her to jump to the left. The car-sized craft hit and scraped into the ground digging a long furrow in the hard packed dirt, missing her by a couple of meters. Angry, Ciatra ran up to it, hopped on top and kicked the lizard driver in the head as she passed, then hopped off back to the ground and disappeared into a narrow gap between buildings.

She telekinetically knocked down the first of several lizards there, with more behind them arriving to either see what was going on or do something about it. None of these had weapons, yet, so she decided not to play with them and grabbed a bit of wall and started climbing. The adhesive sections on her fingers and toe-tips worked well enough, but you had to take your time and Ciatra was getting impatient. She had her jump pack as a backup so she pushed the limits of traction and raced her way up and away from the lizards below her, stopping when she did finally slip and taking the moment to gather her legs in a crouch before launching herself straight up with a boost from her pack.

The padawan grabbed for traction again much further up and continued to climb until she got to the rooftop. There were several aerial vehicles waiting for her, with a single lizard phaser rifle greeting her. Her shields took a hit, then both the lizard and the weapon were pulled off the floating vehicle and fell to the rooftop below courtesy of Iden who was approaching from another direction and just now hopping the gap between buildings.

“I got the reactor in a way that shouldn’t be easy to find,” she reported.

“I was less subtle with the firing array,” he said as she hesitated a few seconds for him to catch up, then the two of them raced off side by side across the rooftops. “We’re going to have to ditch these watchers.”

“I know,” she said as they came to the edge and ran straight off it, hopping the gap to the next building and falling several stories in the process to the much lower rooftop. Iden caught the landing in stride, but Ciatra had to do a dive roll to keep moving…which wasn’t all that easy with a pack on your back. She fell behind a couple of steps then sprinted to catch up just in time to follow Iden over the next gap as he slid on his hip and dipped over the edge, dropping down to street level.

When she came over Ciatra saw him partway down and clinging to the wall as a window blew out just in time for her to duck inside. Iden followed her into the building and the two of them started a hasty descent through the structure not even bothering to waste ammo on the lizards they encountered, but Ciatra thought she killed at least one with a punch to the neck on the way by.

Iden led the pair down below ground level then traveled a bit of distance in the undercity before coming back up in a different building. Reversing their course, they busted out another window and climbed up to the rooftop, careful to not get spotted. The watchers were several buildings over, still above the building they had disappeared into, and the pair of Archons snuck off across this one and began their journey across the city again, for the moment undetected, as they headed back to the far perimeter with a lot of buildings and lizards between them and clear ground…

Ciatra hit the rocky surface at the base of the perimeter building first, landing hard to avoid the single wisp that had been chasing them the past 3 minutes. She knew better than to stand still, so even before Iden came down the padawan sprinted out into the open away from the city, making a plain target for the lizard aerial craft, but one that was not going to be super easy to hit moving at the speeds she was capable of and able to turn at a moment’s notice.

Iden came down with the wisp whipping over the building a split second behind him and blowing out a chunk of roof with a near miss of pink phaser fire. He let gravity pull him as fast as he dared, then decelerated sharply with his jump pack at the last moment, landing so hard he lost his balance and fell to the side, cracking his head on a rock. Fortunately his helmet protected him, but it still rung his bell as the wisp circled around sharply and dove down at Ciatra as she heeded Iden’s advice to not wait up on him.

He got on his feet and ran after her, shaking off his disorientation and getting up to a sprint faster than his padawan was capable of as he began closing the distance with several phaser blasts stitching the ground near Ciatra. He saw her go into a weave even before the wisp opened fire, ducking to the left, then the right before reversing course entirely and backtracking. That allowed Iden to catch up a lot, enough for the two of them to link up in battlemeld and reach out to the wisp on its next pass.

It got off one shot that hit near Ciatra and blew apart a rock into a spray of shrapnel that penetrated her already weakened shields. It pinged off her corovon-laced armor as the two Archons hacked into the lizard’s mind and took control, forcing it to pick up speed and ram into the ground.

It didn’t explode, for it wasn’t that high up in the air to begin with, but it did drag across the ground through a couple of boulders, flipping over twice and getting thoroughly dented. Iden wasn’t sure if that was enough, but it was on the ground so they let it go and just ran straight out from the city towards a small dot on the horizon, behind which there was a storm of activity in the form of wisps and dropships. They were so far away Iden and Ciatra couldn’t make out what was going on, save for the larger transports involved that looked like mere specks against the smoky haze that he knew were ships and not clouds.

The wisp stayed on the ground for more than a minute, then the battered craft got airborne again and circled around a tight spiral as it gained altitude. Seemingly disoriented, it just hovered there for a moment before accelerating towards them as another three wisps were just becoming visible to the north, apparently coming back from duty elsewhere to chase after the Archons, for they were not coming from within the city, nor from the maelstrom straight ahead.

“Do we try all three?”

“No,” Iden said as they both slowed ever so slightly to ready themselves. “Just disorient them and make them miss.”

Ciatra jumped over a boulder, getting a bit of hangtime in the process, then came down and stepped on a much smaller rock causing her to stumble and lose a step as the ground in front of her lit up with badly aimed phaser strikes that were intended to cause the Archons to turn back rather than hit them. Both knew they couldn’t do that so they got a little more spacing between each other and ran on, forcing the wisps to come in at them.

They came together, three wide, and the Archons reached out telepathically to cloud their minds. It didn’t work well enough to keep them from firing, but the shots missed so badly it was apparent that the pilots couldn’t concentrate. As they passed overhead the Archons released two of them and grabbed hold of the third, forcing it to fly its fighter down into the ground.

Off to their right it took a steep nosedive and planted itself into the terrain with a brief pop of smoke as it hit, with the other two wisps circling around to come in for another pass just as a phaser blast hit between the two Archons from behind.

A second one hit Ciatra in the back, knocking her face first into the ground before the damaged wisp came down itself ahead of them as Iden grabbed hold of the pilot’s mind and forced it into a shallow hillside where it didn’t have the luxury of skidding. It compacted in a mild spray of yellow/tan fragments as long range pink spit began to vaporize dust clouds around the two Archons.

The remaining wisps were too far away for Iden to affect, but they were getting closer and looked to want to keep firing the entire way in. With an effort, he telekinetically helped Ciatra get to her feet and start running again, albeit much slower. Their battlemeld had snapped when she fell, but he extended the prompt to her again and felt the light burns on her back when they connected. Both her shields and her armor had taken the hit, but he didn’t have the luxury of inspecting the damage. They had to keep running towards the dot that was getting much bigger ahead of them, and the wisps knew it too.

Which was why they made one last kamikaze run, coming within range of the Archons’ psionics and firing as quickly as they could. Both their minds got a wash of disorientation again, as if their vision suddenly got cloudy, and one of the wisps stopped firing. The other did not, with the phaser blasts hitting near both of them with such regularity that Iden knew a hit was coming. Running ahead of Ciatra he suddenly turned back and wrapped her up in a bear hug, with both of them dropping to the ground behind the closest rock they could find…which unfortunately was only half a meter tall.

They linked up their bioshields and wrapped themselves up in as much of a cocoon as they could, then the pale pink rocks around them got a lot more vivid as phaser blasts rained down. Most of them missed, but two hit and sucked their bioshields into nothingness. Iden’s shields took part of what remained, then it was their armor that had to do the rest up until they got hold of that pilot’s mind and forced him to fly away.

When they did they realized the truth…he’d set his firing controls to auto, expecting to lose physical control. The wisp had honed in on their position and fired on its own.

Clever bastard, Iden commented. He has to die next.

“Run,” Ciatra insisted. “Don’t let them hit both of us again.”

Iden realized through the battlemeld that Ciatra was losing blood, not from a new hit but the old one, and her head was starting to get foggy.

“Move it or lose it, Jinx,” he said, pulling her to her feet and pushing her ahead of him.

“Good idea,” she said, slowing a bit and reaching back to release what was left of her jump pack and supplies. The tattered frame dropped off onto the ground, making her a bit lighter as well as letting Iden see the crater in her upper back where the phaser shot had burnt through in a few tiny spots, leaving a thin shell elsewhere through which tiny streaks of blood were pouring. The cauterization was cracking apart with every movement of her body.

Iden released his pack as well, suddenly getting a boost of agility from the lack of mass he’d gotten used to being there. He ran off to the left and got some distance in between them as she’d suggested just as the pair of wisps was coming back at them. He spotted a larger boulder ahead and mentally told Ciatra to get to it while he kept running, so from the lizards point of view the two targets suddenly turned into one as she dove down and disappeared behind it with a head-first slide.

That left them Iden to target, so he ran back towards Ciatra ensuring good battlemeld range, and the both reached out to the ‘smart’ pilot as he came closer. Iden knew the phaser blasts were coming so he went as evasive as he could, causing several to miss before they got hold of the pilot’s mind and forced him to turn to the right. The two wisps nearly collided, but the second pilot adjusted in the nick of time.

Both flew out of psionic range within a few seconds, though for the moment the phaser fire had stopped.

“Go!” Iden shouted, verbally and telepathically, with Ciatra coming up from her cover and sprinting along with him towards the now very large silhouette on the horizon. They knew they weren’t going to get another chance at this pair of wisps, for they were circling around to come back at them in a wide spacing, meaning there was no chance of getting them to collide again. If they took control of one the other would have a free shot, and if they tried to dampen both the auto-controlled one would get at least a couple lucky shots in that would end them.

Fortunately they had another option, if the timing was going to be right. Squeezing as much speed out of their legs as they could, now lightened without their packs, both Archons sprinted across the ground in as straight of a line as they could manage towards the approaching mech that was also running towards them. It was their ride out of here, as well as their aerial umbrella, with its anti-air batteries already sprouted from its shoulder mounts and ready to fire when they came in range.

The wisps were determined though and didn’t break off, making it a race for distance and Iden not sure who would win out. When one of the wisps ducked down to the ground he knew it intended to ram them, mental interference or not. A moment later he got a warning prompt on his battlemap and the two Archons split, veering left and right with that wisp having to choose who to follow as yellow sammy spurts started to fill the air above them.

The topside wisp took a few hits and veered off smoking, but the lower one was committed and went after Iden. The Archon sensed it was trying to use him to keep the mech from firing at the wisp, so the Archon slammed on the brakes and reversed course…with a slew of sammy shots passing within 3 meters of his head and streaking right into the wisp.

It fell a meter to the ground, caught on some rocks and began a tumble with debris spraying out with each bump. The wisp tore past Iden and came to a halt some 200 meters ahead as he and Ciatra ran back towards each other and the mech likewise sprinted up near them like a giant intent on scaring off any further pursuit. At the moment there was none, so when it came to a standstill the two Archons climbed up its thick metallic legs using their adhesive armor points in lieu of the jump packs they no longer had and worked their way up the mech’s back onto the shoulders next to the slight bump it had instead of a head.

Both of them latched onto it with as much leverage as they could and caused their adhesive points to lock to maximum. Once stuck in place they informed the mechwarrior and he slowly turned the neo around, accelerating smoothly into a jog and carried the Archons back into the ‘safety’ of the warzone beyond the city.

6

July 17, 2946

Shaleth System (Voku territory)

Inova

Cal-com stood in his private oracle studying the recent data update the Preema had sent him. With it his galactic map, or rather only a tiny portion of the mind bogglingly large swirl, updated with another swath of yellow lizard dots being eliminated and tagged neutral grey that the Voku and their pact were tasked with monitoring and keeping clear of reinhabitation. The lizards were constantly trying to expand, even to the worlds they had lost less than 5 years ago. Cal-com had to keep everything under surveillance and his sweeper teams moving around constantly, else the hard fought gains that the Preema were racking up would ultimately be a loss.

Right now the damage they were doing, regardless of how many worlds the lizards colonized, was adding up. The Preema had the lizards beat badly and they knew it, but their empire wasn’t something that could be toppled swiftly. It had to be corralled and shrunken with care, which was a task beyond their current capabilities. While many fronts were being challenged and pushed back there were still regions where the lizards could expand freely. Right now the race to destroy worlds looked like it was winning out, but neither the Voku nor the Preema had eyes on every lizard system and there was no way to be certain where they all were.

If even one jumpship ran away from their territory, heading off into the galaxy in an unknown direction and traveling for 100 years before finding a quiet world to settle down on, they could regrow their entire empire from scratch. That was a threat that Cal-com was beginning to realize would never end. Like weeds growing in a field, all you could do was eradicate the ones you found and stay on the lookout for others. He had no hopes of eliminating the lizards entirely, though the Preema seemed to think it was possible.

The Dafchor felt that was naivety on their part, but the trick in the lizards gaining dominance wasn’t in hiding, it was in putting their territory in plain view and growing it. They might be nearly impossible to destroy completely but they couldn’t wield power without consolidating themselves, and when they did they made themselves a target for the Voku and others. If they could knock them down now, undo the centuries of mistakes that others had made that allowed them to grow this large and widespread, then he could count this mission a success.

To that end they were nearing an important milestone. Star Force’s push into lizard territory was functioning like a blunt knife blade that had reached to the centerline, not far off from the system Cal-com was currently situated in. There were several systems along that border under attack, but most of Star Force’s efforts were focused on breaking the link in the lizards’ primary supply chain while Cal-com’s fleet was hunting down their efforts to establish other ones and smuggle ships through unprotected systems.

In addition to that his forces were razing worlds and protecting others, spread out so far that he didn’t have any one single fleet capable of delivering the hammer blow to the lizards around Paul’s neck, and the Human had told him not to try with the few conglomerates he could spare. His friend had assured him that Star Force could handle this, long as it may be, and that he should use the distraction to his advantage and pluck as many other worlds from the lizards’ grasp as he could.

And that was happening, but more so with the Preema. Cal-com didn’t have accurate numbers of lizard movements in their coreward half but he could guestimate what was happening based off of observed movements through the bottleneck territory that the Voku and Star Force were now contesting. There were just as many reinforcements coming from there as they were from the lizard core systems and Cal-com knew that was why the Preema were rolling along as quickly as they were. Paul’s target system was a hotbed that was sucking in lizard fleets from other theatres and making it even easier for the Preema to advance…and as long as the lizards were committed to holding that system the flow would continue.

If Paul could keep chewing them up then that was an advantage, to be sure, but the sporadic reports he was getting from the Humans were showing a very costly battle for the system. As usually casualties were remarkably light, but Star Force was losing so much equipment that they had to keep their own reinforcements flowing in nonstop. That reduced their ability to expand their territory deeper towards the lizard core, giving the enemy a respite in their weaker systems save for the invasion corridor that the H’kar were pushing with light Star Force assistance. Their ally was next to useless without the Humans giving them directions, but when combined they were very effective at purging worlds.

Unfortunately the Skarrons were not. Cal-com did not understand the inner workings of the Skarron empire, but for one so large they were doing a very bad job of defending their borders…and he believed that they weren’t truly trying. Did they have a greater enemy elsewhere to fight? Or were they simply apathetic and not willing to reinforce the ‘border’ regions? Their territory was so huge, and their command structure so isolated, that Cal-com had never gotten good intelligence from the captured worlds his people were actively taking from them back around their home territory.

The Elders had told them to expand there and they were, but he hadn’t learned much about the Skarrons that he didn’t already know. From the snippets that he did have, and the reports coming in from the Preema, he surmised that the Skarrons were only interested in winning and were willing to lose systems that couldn’t defend themselves. How far would the lizards have to press before that changed he didn’t know, but had he been in control of their military he would have acted strongly far before now, if to only deny the enemy the additional resources it was gaining from the conquests.

The Preema fleets that had been dispatched to the Skarron border were helping to slow the advance, but only in pockets. They couldn’t devote enough ships there while purging from the opposite side at the needed rate, so they were assisting the Skarrons who were fighting hard, just with no support from the rest of their empire…at least not in the numbers that Cal-com suspected they could summon up if wanted.

He couldn’t fault the Preema for trying, but the Skarrons were just as much an enemy of the Voku as they were Star Force and he was glad that the Humans had refused any sort of an Alliance with them. The Preema might be able to ignore the past actions of The Nexus, but the Voku were not so forgiving. Fortunately Star Force wasn’t either, for when one waged war lightly it had no meaning and the definition between friend and enemy got blurred so much that they lost all distinction.

The trust between Cal-com and Paul was different. Their allegiances were firm, and they would not waver in them one iota. Those races that did were without honor and could not be trusted, with the Preema counted amongst them. Cal-com had no firm data to work with, but he knew they were involved in this fight for internal reasons rather than because it needed to happen. If circumstances changed they’d abandon the Voku and the Dafchor knew it. They were a temporary ‘ally,’ and not truly deserving of that title. Star Force was different, and would have the Voku’s back in times of need whether it was to their advantage or not. That was their nature, and it surprised him that they could be so focused without a driving superior.

Everything that Cal-com did was to serve the Elders. They were the stabilizing rod to the Voku, and Star Force had none. Yet they were adamant about their self-appointed mandates, not in words but in deeds. Cal-com was glad that the Elders had instructed him to save them long ago, for they were more valuable than a hundred different races like the Preema. They could be counted on, whereas most others could not be.

A flashing orb caught the Dafchor’s attention and brought his mind out of contemplation. He pulled up the warning prompt and immediately transitioned his oracle over to a command prompt. The floors opened up and the ‘furniture’ rearranged, giving him a control station that he stepped into that allowed him to interface with his subordinates elsewhere on the planet without having to physically relocate to the planet’s main oracle.

“They came into the system only a moment ago,” Nem-tre reported as his hologram and others appeared around Cal-com, making it appear as if he were actually on the primary oracle. “Unidentified jumpships 34 in count and growing, the first of which has made a microjump out from the star heading in our direction.”

“Defensive formation,” Cal-com ordered. “Assume hostile, but do not fire until fired upon or my order. Get a comm prompt open immediately, all known languages.”

“Only the one ship made the microjump,” another Voku staffer noted. “The rest are holding position in stellar orbit.”

“Either a scout or an emissary,” Cal-com deduced calmly. “Either way they know we’re here. After this is over I want the system reswept for probes.”

The orbital map of Inova marked a new icon decelerating to a stop just outside the range of the six conglomerates stationed nearby that were busily breaking apart into more mobile attack ships, drawing a head twitch from Cal-com. Whoever this was had powerful gravity drives to get from the star to here that fast.

“We’re being contacted, generic comm prompt. Languages cycling.”

Cal-com waited a moment while his staff and their automated computer systems used the puzzle pieces of the incoming transmission to match up hopefully one means of communication that both races were fluent in and after only a few seconds one was identified, with it being the old trade language that had predominated this area prior to the lizard invasion. The Voku had acquired it from Star Force, and with it the computer systems were able to translate incoming messages into Cal-com’s native language in the form of text.

He didn’t see it until one of his staffers transferred it to his attention, then the simple message asking for him by name floated in holo before him…along with a holographic request.

“Are we set to translate?”

“Yes.”

“Put it through to me,” he said, hitting a few buttons that eclipsed the view behind him with an opaque energy shield so the newly arrived ships couldn’t see where he was. After a few moments an image appeared of a triangular helmet set over what looked similar to Voku shoulders. All were armored with a glossy blue material that shone with highlights and made a very intimidating appearance.

“Identify yourselves and state your business here,” Cal-com demanded, looking back at the alien from behind his single artificial crystalline eyepiece.

The translation procedure was a bit delayed, as well as configured to answer in the approximate tone of the speaker if applicable, for some races communicated with all but unintelligible squawks and screeches. This one did not, and the voice seemed metallic but almost Voku, with the helmet obviously affecting the individual’s natural voice.

“We are the Shanplenix. You requested allies in your war against the Cajdital. Until recently we did not think you capable of defeating them. Now that we know you have a viable chance, we are offering our assistance.”

“How did you know of this system?” Cal-com demanded.

“We may keep to our own systems, but we watch others closely. This system’s location is not known to many, but we were able to discover it none the less.”

An information terminal to Cal-com’s left lit up with a message from his staff and he gave a displeased look at the alien. “By invading their computer systems as you just tried to do with ours?”

“Yes,” it answered unapologetically. “Most are unable to detect our presence. The fact that you can is encouraging.”

“Cease your efforts to do so or leave this system under my fleet’s guns.”

The alien made a ‘tisk, tisk, tisk’ sound that didn’t translate. “No need for hostilities between us, Voku. We find it easier to learn from computer tap than by conquering worlds. Most are unaware and therefore do not take issue with it. Now that we know you can, we will not attempt to do so further. Rather I will simply ask you to provide us with information.”

“You first. Explain yourselves and what aid you think you can give us against the Li’vorkrachnika.”

“Li’vorkrachnika? So you use their proper name? Most refer to them in a more insulting manner.”

“Answer me,” Cal-com demanded evenly.

“If we wished to destroy you here and now we could, but we cannot contend with the rest of your forces. Our technology and methodology may be more advanced, but our numbers are not. We possess only 3 systems, none of which have fallen to the Li’vorkrachnika, but they are too widespread for us to defeat, hence we have not tried. You seem to stand a chance of doing so and we’d like them gone.”

“Why exactly?”

“Aside from attacking us, futilely, they are exterminating other races. That mindset is unforgiveable. One conquers a race, they do not remove them from existence. A waste of potential and the height of arrogance. The Li’vorkrachnika are a plague in this portion of the galaxy that is only growing larger…until recently. You have made great gains, but victory is not certain. Even now the largest battle to date wages nearby, one which you are conspicuously absent from while your ally fights alone. May I ask why?”

“You have reconnaissance there, or obtained data from outside?”

“Your ally’s computer systems are more robust than your own. We could obtain nothing from them, but we do have a few assets on location to observe and transmit. The Li’vorkrachnika were kind enough to transport them there for us. You are finally engaged in a critical battle, one that the enemy cannot retreat from, so why are the Voku and others not there?”

“Our ally has assured me that they can handle it. How exactly do you propose to assist?”

“Oh we have no want to involve ourselves with anything of that scale. The Li’vorkrachnika are dangerous in such numbers. We wish to coordinate some local resistance, as well as lay claim to a few worlds in the process.”

“Why have you not done so already?”

“The Li’vorkrachnika are stifling trade and transit in the region. If they are gone we will be able to adopt a more public persona…though with the native inhabitants gone, there will be barren worlds up for grabs. We’d like to acquire a few specific ones and not get into a squabble with you over them, if possible. We are willing to help pacify the surrounding regions in a coordinated assault when the time comes, both out of mutual concern for the region and in compensation for the allowance. We seriously doubt your ability to maintain your hold over so much unoccupied territory in the aftermath…beneficial forthcomings assumed…and wish to cement our placement now, as well as to have a hand in guiding whatever colonization efforts you and your allies choose to allow others to make.”

“That will depend on the specifics of your ability to ‘pacify’ and your intentions going forward. You are unknown to us, and any firm agreement will have to be sculpted over time, though your stated intent is not incompatible with our plans, as far as colonization is concerned. The issue of ‘influence’ is one that could be taken many ways.”

“Consider us interested in who becomes our neighbors. We’re not hermits, but we do like a bit of space between us and undesirables.”

“Define undesirables.”

“Those which we do not get along with.”

“With such nonspecific demands I can give you no answer.”

“Nor should you, for we have done nothing yet. When you reach our region of space we can get more specific, but for the moment we are here to declare our intent and offer the service of the fleet you see before you in hitting a few targets alongside you. Without seeing our combat prowess there is little to discuss.”

“I take it you have already seen ours?”

“We have.”

“How do you compare?”

“Adequately.”

“You had better not be boasting. I do not care for liars.”

“We are not, and I will say that there are many more races out there that have been swallowed up by Li’vorkrachnika territory, yet not consumed by it. They merely wait for the opportunity to strike back. If you are savvy, you will have more allies joining you as you progress. We are a bit more forethinking than the others, hence we are here and they are not.”

“And you wish to stake your claim first.”

“Perhaps.”

“Where are you located?”

The alien made a gesture at someone off screen and a burst of data was transmitted. A long moment later, after the Voku computers sorted it out, three highlights appeared on the map within the lizards’ core region.

7

March 27, 2958

Gvaris System (contested territory)

Nephasil

“The Archon team has successfully neutralized the planetary defense gun. Stand by for attack runs following orbital bombardment.”

“Shit. How did they pull that off?” Jared asked the rest of his squadron who’d heard the blanket broadcast as they were holding position some 160 kilometers away from the last intact lizard city on the planet.

“They had a trailblazer with them,” Sharon answered as she eased her heavily laden skeet up to a higher altitude along with the other 9 in her squadron and the 80 others that were joining them for this strike mission. “They can do a lot of things.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t know, but there are 8 here last I knew.”

“Battlemap says Kiran,” Dohoriti clarified.

“Son of a bitch,” Jared said in dismay. “I didn’t think they could go in on special teams to get those anymore. The lizards had to know this one was coming.”

“Whatever the case,” Sharon said, easing to point in their loose formation, “they got it done. Now it’s our turn and don’t get cocky. Their northern LZ isn’t that far off and don’t expect the orbital bombardment to get all the anti-air guns.”

“Relax, sis,” Kressy said from her port wing. “We’ve been doing this for two decades.”

“And I don’t want you screwing up at the end because you got sloppy,” she reminded her fellow skeet pilot, whom she’d grown up with in the same Axius maturia class before requesting identical assignments and eventually making their way into Clan Mantle.

“Well said,” Merty echoed, “but I highly doubt this is going to be the last engagement.”

“Unless we royally screw up, it’ll be the last city attack on this planet.”

“They have another, you know.”

“One at a time,” she insisted as her battlemap began to register explosions within the distant, but visible city. Frowning, she zoomed in on her map and saw the signals from the Archon team still well within the perimeter…but the bombardment was coming down on the opposite half of the city.

“Are they firing with them still in there?” Jared asked.

“It’s a trailblazer,” Sharon reminded him. “Looks like they’re calling down the rain on the opposite half of the city.”

“Reckless,” Ethan pronounced.

“Kiran probably knows the accuracy of those naval guns better than any of us,” she defended. “If he thinks it’s safe enough I’m not going to argue.”

“Look at the lizard LZs,” Pren said with a chuckle.

Sharon switched her battlemap over to the nearest of the three on planet and saw the grounded ships taking off in a hurry with a few of them getting skewered by invisible Keema beams. Without that last anti-orbital battery providing them cover the naval fleet now had firing positions on them from above…so long as the lizard fleet let them get there.

Given that the skeets were lazily easing towards the city, Sharon switched her battlemap up to orbit and saw that things were not so calm there. Six Sentinels had been drifted into position high enough that the now dead planetary defense gun couldn’t reach them but close enough to protect the ground troops as they invaded this last city. They’d been doing the same thing for years, roaming the planet with a few patches of protection in orbit guarding their ground operations. Right now there were a total of 26 Sentinels in orbit of Nephasil, clustered in 2 other locations to protect surface sites that had Star Force infrastructure.

The rest of the planet was wreckage, with dead cities all across the planet. When one region was cleansed it was left alone, vulnerable to lizards returning from orbital drops that the limited fleet in orbit could not stop, and even now there were probably hundreds of lizard units in hiding within the rubble on the planet and being fed by the LZs that had moved sporadically around the surface trying to stay ahead and away from the Star Force advance on the ground and the orbital strike capability of the ‘umbrella’ formations above.

Now with all of the planetary defense guns down there was nothing keeping the Star Force fleets from roaming, save for the massive lizard fleet currently engaging them in orbit. The Sentinels were involved as well, which meant the lizards were serious about this fight and willing to lose a lot of ships to achieve their objective…though what it was Sharon didn’t know. Maybe they had been trying to protect their last city, but at this point there was no way for them to save it short of eliminating the Star Force formation in orbit.

So long as they didn’t do that and this assault continued Star Force would defaultly own the planet, but they couldn’t keep it. They didn’t have nearly enough ships and Sentinels to blockade the entire surface, so most of Nephasil would be perpetually up for grabs and she had no doubt the lizards would keep running ships and troops down to ground. The thing was, now they couldn’t congregate in the open and pour in reinforcements. It would have to be a piecemeal insertion, making the lizard occupation more of a resistance than an army. They’d try to build colonies underground and regrow their infrastructure in hidden places, but Star Force knew how to deal with that and to not let them get a head start, so odds were this wouldn’t be their last aerial assault on the planet, but it would be the last big one.

The skeet squadrons continued to drift their way towards the city as the bombardment continued, then they accelerated heavily into single squadron formations when they got the all clear. Sharon’s squadron was second in line, but when they got near the city edge they all spread out laterally heading to different locations and watching for turrets that the orbital bombardment had missed. Most of the big buildings showed damage, but they weren’t wrecked. Rather than flatten the entire thing and give the lizards more places to hide, the bombardment had been selective.

Now was the second phase of the attack, with the skeets flying in low and diving between the buildings where they released their payloads on different streets, dropping thousands of ping pong-sized balls out of the canisters they detached from the temporary racks underneath. The sheathing disintegrated after a few seconds of falling, allowing the tiny probe droids to scatter and bounce off the ground, walls, and bits of rubble. Once their speeds slowed the tiny anti-grav units in them took over and they began floating around the city searching for lizards on their own or following remote signals from the fleet above as they mapped out and cataloged every street, hallway, and room they came across.

The skeets weren’t going to wait for targets though, with them darting off through the city and shooting whatever became visible. The worthless surrender offer had been given prior to the bombardment and the lizards, as always, hadn’t replied back, so the pilots were here to soften up whatever troops were on the ground before the mech and infantry columns arrived to clean out the city properly.

Sharon took another glance at the orbital battle, seeing it not having abated yet. The fleet was in the thick of it providing them cover, else a swarm of cruisers could be descending to give the ground troops a mess of trouble. The skeets could always run away, but the others couldn’t and they were currently about 20 minutes out and approaching from the east. Once they secured a portion of the city dropships would bring in more reinforcements, which meant naval had to hold this orbital position until they were finished…and that was going to take days, if not weeks.

Maybe the lizards knew that and wanted this fight. Maybe they were just shooting at anything within sight, but she knew they had a much larger fleet guarding the star and ensuring that their convoys could still pass through the system at will. That seemed to be their primary objective, with maintaining possession of the planet a secondary concern, though one they had fought tooth and nail to achieve. This was by far the hardest won world Star Force had ever taken…assuming they finished here…and she didn’t expect the other inhabited world in this system, Thannep, to be much different. It was less populated, but she doubted the lizards would let it go any easier than this one.

As if on cue, a group of wisps were highlighted with a warning beacon approaching from the north and the remains of what had been their LZ.  The orbital bombardment wasn’t going to be a threat to the tiny aerial craft, and though they weren’t in the insane numbers that had been seen on this planet previously, they were going to be tough to take down given the 90 skeets that were on station only had a couple of nearby squadrons pacing the ground troops to call in for help.

“Guys, looks like we’ve got some business to take care of first,” she said to the rest of the Regulars in her squadron as she sent a request ping to the Calavari Valeries. In fact all of the skeets were piloted by Regulars save for two, with Archons being scarce nowadays given how many army units there were to spread them out between. “Let’s meet them over open ground so we don’t get blindsided by a missed turret.”

The ten skeets pulled up from the city streets and accelerated to the north with the other squadrons doing likewise in the face of the approaching cloud of wisps. Rough estimates tagged them at about 8,000 and that was manageable if they could split them up and whittle them down over time. The lizard craft were lightly shielded now, but against Star Force weapons it made little difference. What it did change was their top speed, for the shield geometries allowed them to smooth out their air resistance. The skeets were still faster, and the Valeries more so, but the speed gap between them and the lizards was not as great as it had once been.

That said, they were still able to meet the wisps far outside the city perimeter and give the approaching ground troops time enough to get into the city, for the wisps weren’t bypassing the fighters and heading for them…rather they seemed only to be interested in killing the skeets.

Sharon kicked the top of her cockpit, barely moving it a quarter of an inch but that didn’t deter her. She kicked it again and again, more out of frustration than in an effort to dislodge the pinned canopy. Her instrumentation was out, including the powered release function, but she was pretty sure that she was upside down on the ground in what was left of her ruined skeet. The IDF and artificial gravity within the cockpit was still working so she couldn’t feel her orientation, but when she’d hit the release the opaque armored barrier hadn’t budged.

“Fuck this,” she said, kicking it again and getting the same result. Sharon hadn’t gotten sloppy up there, but the wisps had shot her down just the same…and all because of a lucky collision that tore through what was left of her shields while she was flying an evasive turn after killing two wisps. She’d known better than to go for the third, with others falling in on her tail, and had done the right thing in breaking off and taking her time with her shields already diminishing from multiple phaser hits.

Then a stupid wisp diving away from another skeet had turned right into her turn and they clipped each other. For the wisp it was a fatal hit as it crunched in the entire right side, but for Sharon it had merely wounded her skeet…while in the middle of the furball. She’d tried to make it to the edge and fly off to let her shields recharge but hadn’t made it. The phaser fire added up and the last thing she knew her tail disconnected just aft of her armored cocoon. Power to her forward engines went out and she’d fallen like a rock, with the impact knocking out the rest of her systems.

Inside everything had gone black, for she didn’t feel the impact, but now she was pinned with no way of knowing what was going on outside, for her comm system was also dead. There were supposed to be backup generators in the nose to prevent a total collapse if the main power cell was hit, but maybe those had gone out first, for her skeet had been chewed up thoroughly even before the tail came off. Star Force had built then to take a lot of punishment but there were still limits, and the lizards had pushed her craft past them.

Sharon slid off her back and sat down on the pommel, wanting to punch something else but nothing useful was available. There were still a lot of wisps up there and at least one less skeet to knock them down with, and she hated being on the sidelines watching a fight…even if she couldn’t even watch it right now.

“Things could be worse,” she reminded herself. The lizards didn’t own this planet anymore, nor did they have ground troops anywhere near her position. The wisps were too busy to shoot her downed skeet, though if she had gotten outside they might have made an exception. No, she just needed to sit tight and wait. Help would come or she’d be able to find a way to wiggle out of this predicament eventually.

With a battle going on over her head, playing dead was probably a good idea right now.

Sharon blew out a slow breath, sucked in another and repeated. Calming her battle frenzy nerves and anger, she took the ample free time and tried to meditate to clear her mind. The cockpit was silent and still, but she was not internally. She focused on that to waste time, embracing it as a small challenge rather than just sitting here and going stir crazy. It took a few minutes to hack down her combat state, but eventually she entered the calm, motionless trance that she’d practiced many times before. Clamping down on her thoughts to silence them, then releasing the pressure and allowing the stillness in her mind to exist without force, she became as still as her worthless wreck of a skeet and waited, breathing slow, steady, shallow breaths.

She lost track of the time and embraced the disconnection. Her squadron could take care of itself, and even if some of them got shot down there was nothing she could do about it so she put it out of mind and got a bit of rest, blinking her eyes open for no apparent reason some time later and looking around, finding her anger gone but her resolve burning bright as ever.

Moving around in the cramped cockpit she slid off the pommel then opened up it, finding a stash of emergency supplies underneath the seat. She dug around until she found the emergency comm unit, flicking it on with a small holographic display showing channel options. Sharon hit the ‘retrieve’ icon and let it begin automatically transmitting with an added ‘safe’ addendum. There wasn’t anything else to say so she didn’t try to find someone to talk to, knowing that if her squadron was still fighting then talking to her would be a distraction and she didn’t want that.

Someone would come for her eventually, and if they didn’t she try her luck again with the canopy.

She didn’t have to wait long, for only minutes later her canopy cracked open and daylight shown in. Sharon looked up and saw the ground above her. She climbed ‘up’ with her hands pulling her out of the canopy and her head dipping to the left as gravity pulled on it. Suddenly her entire body betrayed her and she lost all grip points, floating out of the IDF field and having her mind reorient itself to the planet’s center as she was telekinetically spun around and set down a few meters away next to a golden-armored Archon.

“You alright?”

“Uninjured,” she said, looking up and seeing wisps, Valeries, and skeets still battling overhead to the west.

“Good. Let’s get out of here before they decide to take a few more shots at us.”

“More?” she asked as the Archon turned and began to run away. She followed after him, running hard to stay close by and feeling her legs a bit wobbly after so much time spent in that cockpit.

An armored finger pointed to the right and Sharon saw the wreckage of a wisp that had apparently taken a nosedive into the ground.

“I’ll cover you, but we have to move.”

“Where to?”

“A bit further away from here.”

“How many others are down?”

“Six. We haven’t gotten to them yet, but I was close by so I thought you’d appreciate a lift.”

“Thank you.”

“Keep running that direction,” the Archon said, pointing ahead before he veered off and turned around. “Your ride is coming.”

Sharon didn’t argue, but didn’t fully understand. A few minutes later a speeder came across ground from the south and stopped beside her just long enough for her to get on, then it turned and raced away before the remaining wisps could take notice.

“You alright?” the Commando asked as she held on behind him.

“Yes. Who was that?”

“The Archon?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Kiran.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. When we pulled out his team he insisted on going after you. Probably going to play with the fighters now.”

“He’s that powerful?”

“He’s a trailblazer,” the Commando said rhetorically.

“That he is,” she agreed, realizing he must have rolled her dead skeet over by himself.

8

December 19, 2963

Gvaris System (contested territory)

Nephasil

Paul returned to his quarters after a short run in the sanctum, showered quickly then sat down at his computer terminal to pull up recent news and events to look through before bed. Without a grid relay in this system there was no news with the outside world besides that brought by courier, but there were still local updates that didn’t always warrant an immediate notification to him when he was in the nexus…which was where he had been spending far too many hours over the recent years.

He was still training but his progression had slowed considerably, as had the other trailblazers here. Paul imagined the same was true of the rest of the troops and had instituted a cycling program amongst them a while back. This invasion had begun three decades ago, and while a lot of people had spent most of that time here they’d always had rotations back to the ADZ, save for the trailblazers. Once they arrived here they did not leave until the job was done, and Paul was seeing the payment for that in his training scores.

But he didn’t have a choice. If he and the others weren’t here leading this invasion, especially Liam, then the lizards would have won by now. The trailblazers had Star Force hanging on by a thread most of the time and were actually eeking out a win over the long haul…but they couldn’t have a single lapse else it’d all vanish. That meant Paul needed to be in the nexus or near to it at all times, with him taking less sleep than normal. Inas had already reduced that amount, so with the restricted workouts that amounted to little breaks from seat time in the nexus his sleep cycle of 4 hours was occurring every 36 hours.

He needed to hurry now, but he couldn’t let himself get so stuck in a routine that he lost track of current events. And while he could, and often did access whatever information he had while in the nexus during slow times, checking in before bed was more of a reminder to focus on the big picture rather than the realtime feeds that he sucked off constantly while mentally connected to the system.

Being disconnected for a few hours of workouts, he found a few updates from the outer colonies that were of interest, along with reports from Nephasil’s surface detailing hunting raids for lizard upstart colonies that they were constantly trying to plant. Orbital insertions could be tracked, but with so many subsurface tunnels still existing on the planet the scaly bastards had a habit of disappearing soon after landing. They couldn’t take much in the way of technology with them but it was clear that they hadn’t given up on the planet yet, even as their other foothold in the system was under assault.

Star Force was slowly eating away at Thannep much as they had here and fighting against a never ending flow of reinforcements coming down from orbit. A few Sentinels held position above the planet, but blocking all orbital movement was impossible. The lizards could get down to the surface if they wanted to, and they were flooding more ground troops into the system at alarming numbers. Though Star Force was winning this long battle for the system, it wasn’t over. Not even close, and a misstep could see it all come undone very, very fast.

The lizards were making them earn this the hard way, or perhaps they were convinced that they’d eventually succeed. The number of ships in the system was the true problem, and even after all these years Paul still hadn’t been able to secure stellar orbit. The fleet there never fully left to engage either planet, though if it had Star Force would have been forced to evacuate. Trick of it was, they would have killed enough lizard ships in the process to leave stellar orbit vulnerable. The lizards didn’t know how many reinforcements Star Force had coming any more than Paul knew what they had in transit, so they’d played it safe and held onto what he figured was their primary prize, that being a secure route between the two now stretched hemispheres of their empire.

Cal-com had been widening the divide between the two while this battle dragged on, taking out weaker systems by the dozens all around them and constricting the lizards down to this one bottleneck…meaning that if they could cut it then the lizards would have to try and establish a new one far from here rather than just going next door, but for the moment the link was intact so long as those millions of cruisers held stellar orbit.

Star Force had its Sentinels insystem as a strongpoint and the lizards had their stellar fleet as a counterpart, with the planets being lesser prizes that the majority of the fighting was playing out on. As far as naval battles went, both sides were limited. Paul couldn’t assault the roaming fleets much other than to cover the ground campaign, and whenever he got another sizeable shipment of drones in they didn’t last long. He needed to fight offensively to whittle down the lizards but was being forced to cover targets and conserve his ships, allowing the enemy to determine engagements.

Every convoy that came in was challenged and he lost drones covering them, leaving him in a perpetual shortage of warships to make use of, otherwise he would have conquered this system long ago. More often than not he was having to come up with victories with far too few ships, as was Liam, and there was only so many times they could strategically pull that kind of magic before the lizards adapted to their tactics. Paul had to keep adapting as well and stalling while the ground troops slowly made progress, with him constantly cursing the lizards’ industrial might, for they were continually amping up their imports of cruisers to the point where if he didn’t make some assaults they’d pool to too large of numbers and the end would come quite quickly for his defense fleets, Sentinels or not.

But more Sentinels were coming in as well, which was helping to offset the numbers game. The cruisers that Nephasil had been actively producing were gone now, and he was glad of that, but the imports had more than made up for them. Both sides were escalating this battle in order to win, making it almost a microwar of its own with the end still in doubt.

Right now the Excalibur was sinking into the upper atmosphere of Nephasil to bombard a few surface locations where lizards were suspected, but that was something the Admiral he’d left in command could handle. Right now he needed sleep, then he could begin the next cycle of this never ending battle and find a way to scrimp up another bit of progress before the entire lizard fleet decided to show up on their doorstep and end this by choking them to death with cruiser spam.

The lizard chess pieces were all gone now, destroyed in previous years and not replaced. Though dangerous in certain situations they had proved mostly useless here and the lizards had opted not to send any more in, relying instead on cruiser swarms that they knew were effective when they reached certain numbers. They had huge supply ships parked around the star feeding them all food and fuel, and though Paul had tried to hit some of those in the past he couldn’t get to them now. The lizards had literally parked walls of cruisers all around them that made it impossible to get through to target them, no matter how inspired of microjumps one made.

And the trouble was, there were more Star Force ships in this system than even in Sol, warship wise anyway. Even with all that naval might the lizards were the stronger. Only the Sentinels kept them from attacking directly and overwhelming them with swarm tactics. This was a must hold system for them and they were not backing down, with the centuries of other races choosing to run and hide rather than fight now being Star Force’s problem, for the lizards were pulling ships from across their vast territory and Paul could only guess at how many more were coming.

But right now time was more on Star Force’s side. The lizards had more ships coming in, but Star Force was claiming the planets and had their tech advantage increasing with every year. There was no way to know if it’d be enough in time, and the part of him that relished the challenge of the situation was thoroughly sick of it. He just wanted to win this and move on, and made sure to rotate his personnel when he could to avoid them from getting burnt out as he was on the verge of doing.

But Paul knew how to refresh himself, so after pulling up a few old reports from the ADZ that he’d never gotten around to looking at he went to bed, detaching his mind from everything and just embracing the moment of rest. When he woke up in the ‘morning’ things would be better with his mindset and he’d get to work again. The lizards were not going to outlast him with suicide tactics. His people were far better because they didn’t die and had time to grow stronger and wiser over the years. Spending lives was a cheap tactic and he was damn sure not going to let it win out here.

Halfway through his sleep he slipped into a dream, a familiar dream once he was in it, but he couldn’t recall any specifics from the last time. It was a hunt of some kind, but he didn’t get very far before a hand on his shoulder woke him up and the dream disappeared from his mind and his memory.

“Sorry, Paul,” Evan-993645 said from beside his bed. “We’ve picked up an incoming signal. Big convoy arriving. 32 minutes.”

Paul sat up, looking at the acolyte. “Why isn’t it on schedule?”

Evan shook his head. “I don’t know. Liam told me to get you up and into a nexus.”

Paul frowned and climbed out of bed, slipping on a pair of casual shoes and heading for the door. When he got outside he accelerated into a jog, heading for the bridge as he left the acolyte behind. Wearing nothing but casual clothes that amounted to a loose pair of pants and a T-shirt, he sprinted across the bridge ignoring the Admiral and crew and went directly into the mind link inside his private nook that they could contact him through with any needed information.

As soon as he was inside he found that the Excalibur was already moving, as well as a message waiting for him from Liam.

He read through it quickly, his adrenaline rising as he sensed the same potential that Liam did. Apparently Davis had been holding out on them and was sending a huge relief fleet that was due to be here within minutes. It had to have its jumppoint protected, and because no scout ship had come through giving away their position, only a super-accelerated signal had been sent ahead to the system while the fleet was in transit.

That was risky, but the nature of this fleet was different and could handle warships waiting to engage them…what they couldn’t handle was running into cruisers before they fully decelerated, so they needed the Star Force fleets to signal them what the proper jumppoint would be, in addition to any help upon arrival, for it would take hours for the entire convoy to arrive.

There were fresh ground troops from multiple factions on the way, scores of naval drones, but more importantly there was a fleet of the newest ravagers, not produced by Clan Saber, but from somewhere else that Paul wasn’t aware of. Mainline had been building them for some time and sending them what they had. Davis must have changed something around somewhere to produce more of them without telling him, saving them up for Christmas day.

Technically it was a few days early, but close enough.

When the Excalibur came out of its microjump there was already a small fleet of drones and four command ships, with Liam’s eye sore of a flagship amongst them. It was painted neon green rather than the standard Star Force grey, and was aptly named the Poisoned Donut, though the green was Clan Neon Squirrel’s signature color. There were layers to sarcasm, but Paul had to admit that the odd color did make his ship look a bit meaner than the others.

More ships were jumping in nearby, coming out of nowhere into short streaks as they decelerated then coasted into formation as the leading elements of the lizard fleet raced towards them, knowing this meant another convoy was about to arrive.

Paul contacted the Poisoned Donut and appeared next to Liam in holo.

“You woke me up.”

“My bad. Figured you’d want in on this…and to be frank, I need you in on this.”

“Trying for a counterpunch?”

“Think we shouldn’t?”

“Oh we’re definitely going to try,” Paul said, eagerness evident in his voice. “I’d just like to know how Davis hid these ravagers from us.”

“He is a sneaky one,” Liam agreed. “Probably pulled some civilian shipyards off order and rushed these. He can read the numbers as well as we can, which is probably why he didn’t wait for us to ask.”

“We’ll know more later. That signal wasn’t very dense with information, but I suggest we stow the questions until afterwards. This is going to get intense.”

“I still want to know what he was thinking. Holding out on us is…something we’d do to him.”

“He is an Archon. Perhaps he’s been taking notes,” he said as the first super-accelerated beacon signal registered on both their nexus readouts, indicating the convoy was less than a minute out. “Let’s get to this.”

“You want rover?”

“Your turn,” Paul said with a smirk.

“Thank you,” Liam said kindly as he cut the transmission and took the Poisoned Donut into a tiny microjump forward. It blinked back into existence beside the lizard cruiser tendril that was racing towards the jumppoint, then turned hard right and dove into the enemy ships weapons firing. Some of them tried to ram the big ship, but a wall of dampening shields blocked them like bugs while the weaponry on the other side of the command ship tore into the aft of the ships moving ahead, allowing Liam to slice through the tendril and disrupt their forward momentum.

That left the first piece of a tendril isolated as the trailblazer began a very short-lived battle with the coming cruisers before pulling out the far side and running laterally, dragging another chunk of cruisers with it and further disrupting their cohesion.

Paul used that thinning of the cruisers to utterly devour them, surging the now 7 command ships and 3000+ drones forward and taking advantage of the disruption before tightening their formation and bracing to hold back the onslaught as the first of the jumpships arrived.

With his mind segmented between various tasks, Paul still raised an eyebrow at seeing the first three ships jump in side by side. That maneuver was tricky, but doable, and he was glad that they were trying to clump up as much as possible, but it was the design that surprised him, for it was something he’d never seen before, not to mention far larger than any Star Force jumpship ever produced.

Liam? he said via mind/voice rather than holo.

I don’t know, he answered, seeing that the jumpships were each more than 30 miles long and carrying huge drones that began to disperse. Paul recognized those, though they were also of an updated design. They were ravagers, and each about 40% smaller than previous models.

Paul linked into them and instantly had them under his control, finding that the weaponry hadn’t been reduced, but actually increased a bit. He pulled the huge drones away from the jumpships and gave them a rendezvous point to move to as another trio jumped in behind them. A few seconds later as the behemoths began to pull off and the lizards were beginning to overrun the containment ‘wall’ and spill a few cruisers around the flanks as more Star Force fleets from across the system were arriving on odd jumplines to assist, a message was relayed to Paul and Liam from the jumpships.

The ID signature was that of Davis, and it was text only.

Payback for Sol’s outer zone colonization. You’re not the only ones who can keep secrets. Now go kick the lizards’ ass please…and Merry Christmas.

A simple flat screen vid followed as an attachment, and a clip from the movie Diehard popped up in the nexus beside the trailblazers with Hans Gruber reading aloud the writing on a dead man’s shirt.

“Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.”

9

July 1, 2964

Gvaris System (contested territory)

Inner Zone

The Excalibur visibly rocked from an impact that Paul felt all the way into the bridge where he stood in the command nexus. A pair of lizard cruisers had managed a short range microjump into the hull where the dampening shields were down and had penetrated the outer armor layer within half a second. Material had compressed as the two enemy ships were pancaked into flattened bullets now buried inside the hull but the ship was so big even that wound didn’t kill it, though a few weapon systems did go offline.

The rest kept on firing as the command ship was buried inside a swarm of lizard cruisers along with 38 of its twins. Interspersed among them were the Mk.7 ravagers that Davis had sent him, with the bigger command chips providing them physical cover to reduce the amount of weaponsfire hitting them. Allow them to be singled out and the cruiser swarms would take them down, advanced shields and armor not withstanding, but put them in the right place at the right time and they’d do far more damage than the command ships could.

That left Paul’s ship playing blocker while doing a lot of damage on its own, and he was glad that the Excalibur had taken the hit rather than one of the ravagers, for they were downing cruisers so fast it looked like the ships were passing through an asteroid field of debris rather than fighting their way inside the strongest bastion of lizard ships within the system.

Over the past few months Paul had taken the ravagers along with the rest of the Star Force warships and began aggressively engaging the lizards, first taking control of orbit around Thannep, then hitting up secondary positions like the various jumppoints and destroying the fleets there. The lizards had responded by pulling back and grouping up in what eventually became a single fleet in low stellar orbit that they were using to protect their incoming convoys and allow them safe passage through the system, some of which continued to deliver more cruisers to the battle, but most of which were headed elsewhere in their territory.

Right now Paul was engaging that fleet head on, knowing that he was going in over his head, but that was the plan…take the ravagers right into the densest part of the cruiser swarm where they couldn’t line up kamikaze strikes from range and use the ravagers as their namesake implied to remove this impediment and claim control of stellar orbit. He knew he was going to lose a lot of ships in the process, probably more than half his fleet of drones at the minimum, but now was the time to do it before the lizards could amp up their reinforcements and start to close their grip on this system again.

It was possible they were tapped out, but given how well the lizards adapted in the past he wasn’t going to assume that their industrial muscle couldn’t flex a bit more and knew he could take down the massive fleet they had here…all 2.3 million cruisers arrayed in a massive nebula that stretched around the star like a partial halo.

The longer this battle for the system dragged on, the more cargo flowed through what was now the choke point between the two halves of the lizard empire. If they could cut that link it would alter the way the lizards fought, and though Paul didn’t know entirely what that would mean for them the more they could disrupt and isolate the two halves the better, for the strength of one couldn’t back up the weaknesses of another…and maybe, just maybe, the Skarrons could find their footing without the lizard core systems spamming them with reinforcement fleets.

Then again, if they couldn’t send fleets to them they’d just use them more locally…which might make the upcoming battles more difficult than before, though Paul doubted any would reach this level until they actually tried to hit a core world. The H’kar had done that once and shared their data with Star Force, so he knew what to expect from them…which was pretty much what they were getting here. But cut off their link to their new conquests and their ability to send ships or resources back from them and it’d weaken the rimward half. If they could do that they could eventually starve them to death by whittling down their systems as they had been doing, but leave the link intact and you’d be giving the lizards an opportunity to do something innovative and change the game once again.

So this system had to fall, and Paul thought they could make it happen here and now, so he, Liam, Sara, Kiran, Dakota, Logan, Alden, and Riley had gathered all the command ships in the system together, leaving only a few small fleets of drones and a handful of warships to protect the planets, and brought them in towards the star and began engaging the lizards on a wide front before sending this dagger into their center.

It was a bold move, and hopefully one the lizards didn’t expect them to make, for it gave the lizards exactly what they wanted…ships surrounding the enemy in every direction, kilometers thick. The trick of it was, that’s exactly where Paul wanted the ravagers, they just had to keep them alive long enough for them to do their work and chew apart the enemy fleet from the inside out.

With his command ship crew safely in the center portion of the ship behind additional layers of armor, Paul accepted the massive damage to his flagship as necessary and kept moving the formation forward and deeper into the lizard fleet, both to hurt them more and to leave behind the debris field that was accumulating from the damage being done to the lizards. If they stayed put that debris would block for both sides and Paul wanted clean firing lines on the enemy.

Meanwhile the 229,000 drones were hitting the lizards from the outside along a wide front, forcing them to fight head on or retreat, and there was only so much maneuvering room inside the massive array of ships, so the cruisers didn’t have much running space unless it was away from the others. Fight or flee were their only options, for they couldn’t fall back to the safety of the other ships without running into them.

What Paul hoped the lizards also didn’t see was the removal of several Sentinels from orbit around Planet 13. Using their own small gravity drives and a lot of cradles stuck to them like ugly bugs, 8 of the defense platforms were moving in towards the star and would be here within minutes to add their firepower to this insane brawl. So much damage was being done to both sides already that this battle was pretty much going to take both sides out, and once that happened Star Force’s superior tech would win out, whether it be in the few number of surviving ships, the Sentinels that could be redeployed later to stellar orbit, or reinforcements coming in from the ADZ.

If they could remove this pool of lizard ships that had been building for decades it would be virtually impossible for the enemy to replenish it…or so the trailblazers hoped. Paul was banking on that being the case, meaning it was time to go all-in, and the approaching Sentinels were his ace in the hole.

The ravagers were the bait and the distraction, for they were also the primary threat. The Dre’mo’dons they carried were more powerful than the weaponry on the Sentinels, but they were meant for short to medium range combat while the Sentinels could reach out and clobber you from afar. Diving into the center of the lizard fleet was bringing them and their secondary weaponry right into their preferred ranges, so it would make all the sense in the world for the lizards to assume that they were the hammer in this fight rather than the anvil.

And if you looked at the numbers, the lizards had a chance to squash them here and now. It all came down to the details of combat and who adjusted better, for there were so many variables involved with two fleets of this size that chaos ensued…for the lizards. Star Force had never fought a battle of this size, not even close, but their control systems operated perfectly no matter how many ships were involved. Remote pilots had their assignments and higher level overseers, such as Captains and Admirals, would direct them where they needed to go in the immediate area while the trailblazers oversaw the entire battle and made adjustments as necessary to counter the lizards and the unpredictable fortunes of war.

The lizards couldn’t compete with that, fighting more like rabid dogs than the strategic masterminds they’d shown to be before. In this their numbers hurt them, for the more they had the less precise they could be. As soon as Paul had dove the command ships and ravagers into the center of the enemy fleet this had become a free-for-all for them, meaning they were being reckless and sloppy, attacking whatever targets came in range.

The Mk.7 ravagers were smaller than the command ships, but not by a lot. They were elongated like most jumpships while the Excalibur and others were circular and wide, with that width being able to block out portions of the cruiser filled sky around them, allowing the battlewagons to focus their firepower into more specific areas and literally chew apart whatever ships were there like the aforementioned ‘machine gun’ that Davis had humorously cited.

His command ship was at the front along with two others while the rest of the trailblazers were further back with their flagships in what amounted to a long arrow shaft rather than a wedge that was pushing forward like a freight train and leaving a protective shroud of debris around the ships at the back of the penetrating formation that eventually left the drones behind and was eclipsed with cruisers flowing in behind them and chasing them into the center of the lizard fleet.

Paul knew to keep them moving, but once they got to the approximate center and he saw that the lizards were not retreating, rather standing their ground and hoping to be able to take out the entire Star Force fleet in this one engagement, he pivoted their advance and brought the Excalibur to a stop allowing the other ships to pull a hard left as he covered for them, tipping his ship up on its side as it took weaponsfire directly to the hull in most places where the shields had gone down.

His gunners were continuing to destroy nearby cruisers, essentially creating a new debris field that would eventually become a wall blocking more phaser strikes from behind it, but rather than hold position there he fell into the back of the arrow shaft but ahead of a few other ships, taking a spot on the train that wasn’t seeing the most counter fire. So long as they kept moving the enemy couldn’t pick on the damaged Excalibur, with the ships ahead of them plowing the road and leaving the ‘shaft’ to fire laterally at targets of opportunity through the surrounding debris as they passed.

That didn’t mean his ship didn’t take more damage, including another ram that had half the cruiser sticking out the ventral side after it imbedded. A nearby ravager obligingly shot it off, allowing the Excalibur’s shields to reform over the wound as two more command ships came in and made a sandwich out of Paul’s ship and gave him time to recharge.

The same was happening for the other leading ships, including the ravagers, to buy them more battle time before becoming disabled or destroyed. When Paul finally signaled the two command ships to break off and give him room to maneuver he saw the first of the Sentinels arrive on the battlemap behind where the drones were engaging the cruisers in more carnage than the arrow shaft was inflicting, which was a testament to just how many drones Star Force had in play.

Knowing that he had to kill as many lizard ships as quickly as possible, Paul didn’t have the Sentinels join the drones in typical hold/stall/recharge tactics. Rather he had the Sentinels plow right into the lizard fleet and kill as many cruisers as they could before they were taken down, forcing the lizards to focus on destroying them or seal their own fate by letting them roam free and eat up so many ships at pointblank range, which allowed their Sentinels’ secondary weaponry to also get into the fight.

One might have expected the arrow shaft formation to punch out the far side of the lizard fleet and run to safety once the Sentinels arrived, but it did not. The trailblazers and their biggest ships stayed right in the middle, metaphorically punching the lizards in the gut and daring them to either kill them or run away, leaving Star Force with control of stellar orbit.

Typical of the lizards, they chose to stay and fight it out to the death, win or lose, leaving Paul and the others with an uncertain outcome before them, but one that was going to end this stalemate one way or another…

Paul ducked under a collapsed bulkhead and onto the makeshift hangar deck where three dropships were waiting for him and the last of the evacuees from his flagship. There were no proper hangar decks left, so this one had been cut out of a chunk of the ship that had been exposed to space and fitted with temporary atmospheric containment bubbles to allow the crew in the protected interior to walk their way out to the dropships without having to armor up.

Paul was wearing his armor though, having retrieved it from his quarters on the way out. He was the last person to walk onto the smashed rubble pile that the ‘hangar’ had been made of. Some strips of metal had been laid down for walkways out to where the gravity ended, with the crew floating their way to the open doors on the dropships the last few dozen meters.

Looking around at the junked interior of his ship, he said a silent goodbye. This wasn’t the original Excalibur from long ago, but he’d taken the name with him to all of his flagships and this one had been in his possession for several centuries, getting upgrades and repairs as time went along. It wasn’t going to be fixed this time, for there wasn’t much of the ship left. It was floating debris right now, no engine power whatsoever, only a couple of weapons batteries operational, and the TF at the center too damaged to disconnect.

And it wasn’t the only one. More than half of their command ships were now junk, but the crews had all been pulled off post battle. Only three ravagers were still combat capable, and all the Sentinels they’d sent into the battle were down, though one was still salvageable. They had 32,000 drones left in decent shape and another 78,000 in partial working order, which sounded like a lot, but given the numbers they’d stared with Paul’s fleet had lost almost everything…save for personnel.

73 people were lost, 71 of which had been on the command ships, and two others on the Warship-class jumpships that had been destroyed. The protected interiors had failed in a few spots from excessive weaponsfire and it ground on Paul to have even lost one person, but 99.9% of the crews had survived to be evaced out after the fleet had finished off the last of the cruisers…which had stuck around to the last in order to do as much damage as possible to the Star Force ships.

Paul lagged behind as the last of the crew pushed off the last platform and floated forward to the commandos waiting to grab them if they missed so they wouldn’t go floating off into space through the canyon-like trench they were sitting in. The trailblazer looked around at the massive wounds that had carved his giant donut up. This had been an interior section, with more than a half mile of ship overhead that was now missing. It’d been sheared clear off after more phaser hits than he could ever count, but the rest of the fleet had killed the cruiser swarm before it could get all the way to the protected interior.

Paul sighed, then shrugged at all the catastrophic damage. What was left of the ship would remain in stellar orbit along with the new asteroid belt of ship debris for some time. Until either a fleet of salvage ships got here to recycle it or they simply pushed it into a descending orbit and let the star clean up the mess. As it was a jumpline or two were blocked, but they weren’t ones that Star Force used and Paul wasn’t about to waste the valuable materials scattered across the battlefield if they could be recovered later, even if it was decades later. They’d set up a warning beacon for now, telling ships where a safe jumppoint on this line was while marking it off limits to their own vessels.

He doubted anyone would be coming in on those lines, long as they were, but you never knew. Everyone within Star Force, the ADZ, and their associates would have their maps updated eventually, but if someone else came passing through them…well, Paul couldn’t protect everyone, and even a warning beacon couldn’t necessarily be interpreted by incoming ships unless they knew how to read the signal. But still, it was a potential lifesaving measure in some wild circumstances, so he felt better about having it in place than not.

As for the Excalibur, he’d take the name with him to his next command ship, whenever he got a new one, for he wasn’t going to steal an existing one and plaster the name on it. Besides, he wanted a few new tweaks built in anyway.

Taking one glance at the wreckage he shook his head at how much it had taken to finally evict the lizards from stellar orbit. The fighting in the system wasn’t over yet, with another convoy of lizards already having jumped in and then out again before they could be destroyed, and there were no doubt more cruisers on their way, but for now the naval engagement had been won, with insane damage to both sides.

“Worth,” Paul whispered as he stepped out of the gravity and launched himself towards the last dropship as the others sealed up and headed out to space.

10

October 23, 2965

Gvaris System (Star Force territory)

Thannep

Paul stood atop one of the broken lizard buildings searching the area with his Ikrid just in case there were a few lizards hiding in the rubble as the Scionate unit he’d just finished fighting with gathered below for a badly needed rest and some food. Their assigned sector had several Bsidd units engaging and hunting down what was left of the lizard army and Paul’s roving team had come in to help them root out a determined knot of infantry that had dug in to several subsurface levels. He’d been the dislodger in that offensive, with the Bsidd being the hammer and the Scionate the skirmishers that ran down the lizards that attempted to flee so they could set up a few more ambushes before they were all destroyed.

There were other sectors in this city with fighting ongoing but this one was clear, more or less, though one could never be too sure where the lizards were, for they had a habit of spreading back into conquered sections and running a bomb or two up into your face. Paul wasn’t as tired, so he felt his time would be best spent doing a little psionic recon and making sure his team didn’t get hit by a suicide bomber or other nastiness. Fortunately the lizards hadn’t gotten around to creating drones to deliver the det packs, for so long as there was a living person carrying it their mind would stand out like a beacon to him as soon as they got into range.

It would take a few more days to conquer this city, at least, but without the influx of supplies and reinforcements the lizards on this planet had no hope of victory or stalling its conquest. As usual they were ignoring all offers of surrender, but within a year or two this planet would be in Star Force hands, same as the rest of the system. With stellar orbit finally buttoned up, albeit loosely with a small fleet and several Sentinels to provide support, Paul had reassigned himself to help with the remaining ground battles on Thannep and putting the finishing stamp on this long and costly victory.

So many ships had been lost that Star Force’s expansion efforts elsewhere were going to be scaled back for the next couple of decades, which unfortunately meant the lizards would have more time to rebuild and consolidate their forces in near their core worlds, but that couldn’t be helped. This win was far more important, Paul just hated having to go this deep into their reserves to accomplish it. Clan Saber alone had lost 43% of its overall fleet here and wouldn’t recover those numbers for a very long time, how long he didn’t know, for the production of ravagers was taking priority for his Clan…but they weren’t small enough yet to replace the standard drones, so he has going to have to skimp somewhere and he hated doing that.

The sedas that now orbited several planets in the system were likewise damaged and wouldn’t be repaired anytime soon. They were all still functioning, but wounded shy of being the second Death Star at Endor. The chunks bitten out of them were smaller, but still an awful eyesore attesting to the damage they’d soaked up that the rest of the fleet had badly needed to be spared from.

A few more Sentinels were on their way here, to help shore up the system, but now that the lizards had gotten wind that the link in their chain had been severed they hadn’t been back in numbers. Some fleets tried to break through but eventually Paul was able to lock that down and start killing most of them, save for a lucky few that managed to run his limited blockades. Without a lizard defense fleet here to safeguard them, this system was no more strategically viable than any of the others nearby for them to transit through, and the Voku were doing a very good job of being a nuisance and not letting them even start to set up another waypoint.

As of now the two halves of the lizard empire were severed, and once Star Force caught its logistical breath they were going to widen the currently narrow gap considerably.

A ping on his HUD brought Paul’s attention to a falling object overhead, but a quick look at the identification marker on it told him it wasn’t a threat…to him anyway. It was a Stranom mech coming down from orbit and he watched the Voku machine land nearby outside the city, though it came no closer.

“Frel’sa, I’m going to be gone a bit. Assign a couple of lookouts while you eat, just in case.”

“Yes, Archon,” the Scionate responded over the comm from below as Paul ran to the edge of the building and leapt off it, using his jump pack to move from one broken structure to another as he leapfrogged his way to the edge of the city then came down on the grassy fields beyond. He landed heavily, for the gravity on this world was 1.3g, but it was nothing that he couldn’t handle and his troops were better acclimated to it than the lizards were, movement wise.

Paul ran easily out to where the jackal-like biped stood in tier 3 form. That meant it was actually three Stranoms combined into a single unit, making it considerably bigger than one of their standard mech/suits, and dwarfing the two individuals standing near the right foot of it. One was a Voku, standing tall and proud in their armorless combat attire and dwarfing the fully armored individual beside him, with Paul running up to and stopping a couple steps short of Cal-com.

“You sneak in here or was I not informed of your arrival due to the combat?”

The big black shoulders on the Voku shrugged slightly. “We made no attempt to hide our arrival, but I did come straight here without delay. Why your people didn’t inform you I cannot say.”

“I’ve been busy,” Paul admitted. “There’s not much fighting left systemwide, but the lizards are tenacious bastards no matter what numbers they’re in. We’ve got some more work left for us here, but the outcome isn’t in doubt. We just can’t afford anyone getting sloppy.”

“If you will allow it, I can take one of the cities off the map for you,” Cal-com offered.

“Is that why you’re here?”

“No, but we always travel prepared. I have four conglomerates in orbit and see no reason why they should sit there while your troops fight.”

“They still have a good number of planetary defense guns in play.”

“We’ll work around them.”

“Help yourself then,” Paul said, glancing at the other person beside him.

“This is my liaison from the Shanplenix that I spoke to you earlier about.”

“Demmcha?” Paul asked.

“Correct,” the slightly synthesized voice answered.

“And why are you two here?” Paul asked.

“A decision is needed,” the Shanplenix said evenly as he glanced at Cal-com. “And I am told that it requires agreement between the both of you, so I am here to conduct negotiations personally to speed up the process. Time is of the essence.”

“Oh?” Paul said, curious as to why Cal-com would agree to this.

“The Preema have decided not to commit any troops to the future conquest of the lizard core worlds,” Cal-com said with a hint of disgust. “They are going to continue attacking and conquering the weaker systems along their border, but their primary focus is going to be on the other side of the divide. The Skarrons are still responding poorly and the Preema feel you and I have this theatre under control, so they are leaving the key worlds for us to conquer.”

“Since when?”

“16 days ago.”

Paul dug the toe of his armored boot into a tuft of grass, then began kicking it with more and more effort as his anger spiked, peeling back the clump at the roots until it finally dislodged and went airborne.

“Son of a bitch…” he said in frustration, knowing how much of an effort it was to take this system and expecting each of the 40 or so core worlds to be just as bad.

“Which is why I came in person,” Cal-com explained. “We need another course charted going forward.”

“And that involves the Shanplenix how?” Paul said, finding another nearby tuft of grass to beat up and removing it from its roots in three swift kicks. He couldn’t believe the Preema were dodging the hard fights after that long spiel they gave him about wanting to hit them where it would really hurt. Damn hypocrites.

“We cannot replace the Preema militarily, for we do not have their numbers. However, we have been in contact with a number of other races within Li’vorkrachnika territory that have been waiting for an opportunity to strike back. The more systems that fall the more of them will be willing to join the fight, as I have discussed with the Voku previously,” he said with an inclination towards the hulking Dafchor beside him. “If we can rally a fair number of them to our banner now, the Shanplenix can offer a weaker substitute to the Preema to help counter the loss when you eventually strike at the heart of the enemy.”

“And what part of that needs to be discussed?”

“Compensation after the war,” Demmcha said bluntly. “To be fair, if you are able to remove the Li’vorkrachnika from this region of the galaxy you will be in defacto control of a vast domain, of which I am told you plan to do nothing with.”

“Next to nothing,” Paul amended. “We’re keeping this one, by the way,” he said to Cal-com.

“I thought you might.”

“If we assist you in a much larger endeavor than at present,” the Shanplenix continued, “may we have some additional equivalent territorial gains to accompany it, and through which to entice others to do the same?”

“Considering how much we’ve already accomplished,” Paul said evenly, his anger at the Preema creeping over into his response to the greedy request, “what do you feel is fair compensation?”

“If we are able to assemble an alliance of those within the Li’vorkrachnika’s borders to fight against them, we ask that we be able to control an area of influence regardless of whether or not we choose to inhabit every system.”

Paul looked at Cal-com and shook his head. “Uh uh. I’m not giving domain to people that I don’t even know about, for we may have to end up fighting them if they turn out to be unscrupulous anyway.”

The Shanplenix raised his hands in a dismissive gesture. “We only ask this in good faith, and do not wish any ill will between us. If we do not earn our keep them we deserve none, and cemented accords are rarely honored after the fact. I have observed that the Voku value honesty, and so too is your reputation. We are satisfied with leaving the details in your hands, to be determined after the fact with regards to our allotments beyond what we have already been guaranteed. To gain the allegiance of others will require more than that, for as it is they can simply sit by and wait for you to win the war without their assistance…though that presumes much.”

Paul looked at Cal-com. “How have they been doing so far?” he asked, already knowing the answer from the mission briefs the Voku had passed along to him.

“They have sloppy tactics, but decent tech and are effective against small to mid-level targets. I would not make any claims beyond that. They have yet to engage in an even fight.”

“Nor do we wish to,” the Shanplenix admitted. “But we can take the burden of the smaller fights off your hands so you can concentrate on the larger ones…or perhaps elements of the larger ones in order to bolster your strength. We do not wish to lead this conquest, only to aid in it and have a hand in the aftermath if you deem us to have earned it.”

“How many of these others are there?”

“We have spoken with 19 others, though there are more known and rumored to be located in regions of space we have not had contact with before. I can vouch for 3 of them that are ready to fight now, if the occasion arrived, without compensation. Their hatred of the Li’vorkrachnika goes deep and they are eager to strike back. The others are more pragmatic and hesitant to latch onto claims of distant hope. We have fought beside the Voku and seen what they are capable of, as well as have seen through records the same of the Preema and you. The others do not have this knowledge yet, but when they do more will join. Others will require incentive.”

“And if we can do this without any of them?” Paul floated.

“There will still be a great deal of territory for you to patrol and secure, against Li’vorkrachnika incursion attempts and other threats. If you allow us, we can take a small portion of that burden off of you and further our own aspirations at the same time. I believe you have made a similar agreement with the H’kar already. We request something similar, on behalf of ourselves and this potential coalition.”

“Who are the strongest and how strong are they?”

“That we know of, the Neeyvir and the Trinx are the most technologically advanced and far beyond our means. The Neeyvir have far greater numbers than us, while the Trinx are isolationist and we have little data on them.”

“And the weakest?”

“Similar to your Hycre allies. They are called the Oosvah and maintain a naval advantage that keeps their systems secure, though only barely. They would assist merely out of self-preservation.”

Paul reached out to the Shanplenix’s mind to try and gage his sincerity, for the words he were speaking held some wisdom in them if a certain course of events took place, but by the same token they were also a setup for disaster and Paul did not want to relinquish territory to would be enemies or frenimies that he’d have to invade because they wouldn’t hold to a code of conduct.

That code of conduct was about to become the next discussion point when he realized the mind was too easily accessible for a race new to him. He looked at Cal-com and spoke directly to his mind.

Have you seen the Shanplenix without their armor?

I have not, he answered back, thinking the words as Paul had taught him in lieu of the telepathy he did not have. Their contributions thus far have been naval only and all their personnel have been fully covered in every interaction. We have no knowledge of their biology.

I do, Paul countered as he looked back at Demmcha. “I have a request to make.”

“State it.”

Paul mentally hit his own helmet release, with it pulling back from his face and transforming into a small lump behind his neck. “Let me see what you look like.”

“The translation software will not work without my helmet.”

“Just for a moment,” Paul insisted.

“Very well,” the Shanplenix said, reaching up and hitting the external releases on the triangular helmet. He pulled it straight up off the rods in the neck, revealing a narrow, round head that did not match the helmet’s dimensions.

Cal-com took a half step back in shock, only now realizing who it was he had been dealing with.

Demmcha stood there casually, looking at Paul with his glowing yellow eyes and likewise bioluminescent yellow/green skin.

Diehard Clip

Perquisition

1

May 12, 2966

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Demmcha walked through the hallways of the Star Force colony in full armor, drawing mild attention from those he passed but not nearly so fierce as his attention for them. Nearly every person in the colony was Shanplenix, yet they weren’t. Where he had yellow patches of skin and yellow eyes, these had red in exactly the same proportions against the base green and black exoskeletal patches. These people were the same race as him, yet in all his life he had never seen a Shanplenix of another color, nor knew that any existed outside of the three systems they controlled.

Sure, there were always rogue individuals roaming the spacelanes, but an entire civilization was more than he ever expected, let alone two. Archon Paul had explained much to him initially, but when he’d parted the Gvaris System it was with the escort of another lower ranking Archon. The two ships had come here, whereupon another peer of Paul’s had met him in orbit and they’d have a very long discussion concerning everything Shanplenix…to which Archon Brad had added a great deal of information about the ‘Protovic’ that left Demmcha with more questions than he had started with.

But it was only now, walking through their city on their planet did it all fully sink in…then he passed an oddball amongst the sea of red and green, with the first purple-skinned coming into sight. Again, the same patterns but a different color.

“What occurs when the two interbreed?” he asked Brad who was walking beside him, via the translation software in the Shanplenix’s triangular helmet.

“The female’s genetics take priority as far as bioluminescence is concerned. All other biological aspects are identical. You may look different, but you are in fact the same race.”

“Very curious…” Demmcha mewed as they walked through one of the main promenades until they got to a lift car that took them up into the higher reaches of one of the Star Force buildings. He’d been learning a great deal more about their empire as well, with it being more impressive than he’d heard. The ability for them to incorporate so many races together was virtually unheard of without a leadership matrix defining who had priority. The Humans were clearly in charge here, but the more he learned it seemed they viewed everyone as peers…to a degree.

This was the first Star Force world the Shanplenix had ever been on, so he was having to reference information on the others. These Protovic were a faction of their own as well as being part of another faction called Axius. That one was a conglomeration of dozens, if not hundreds of races split between two size categories, ostensibly so the larger ones wouldn’t be stepping on and killing the smaller ones when they cohabitated. The Protovic had been part of Axius for a very long time, the purple skins anyway, with the red skins being a new addition via conquest of a quite unsavory civilization…if Star Force’s information was accurate. One could never be sure of such things, but Cal-com had vouched for them and for Demmcha that increased the likelihood that the information was accurate.

The fact that Star Force had attacked and conquered a twin race to the Shanplenix was disturbing and immediately set them at odds within the delegation that had arrived here. They’d been told in loose terms what had happened by Paul, but it was Brad’s detailed account of the invasion that had almost put their accords into jeopardy…not that the Shanplenix were in a position to wage any kind of war against Star Force. Weapon-wise it was about an even fight, but size-wise Star Force was huge and had many client races to pull soldiers from. What would have occurred was an ‘icing’ diplomatically, though what stalled that was the accounts of what these Veliquesh were doing and the fact that Star Force had gone to the excessive trouble of using stun weaponry to take them all captive.

Typically when one conquered a race blood was shed, but this had apparently been a clean invasion and that was what softened Demmcha. Star Force hadn’t been interested in the Veliquesh’s territory, but rather its people. The fact that most of the 3 trillion population had died out in prison wasn’t a high note, but seeing those red skinned individuals in person here and now, walking these corridors casually, suggested that Star Force may have done them a favor if the rumors of their living sacrifices were even remotely true.

“How many are here?”

“This system holds the bulk of Star Force’s Protovic population, though a significant number still exist within Axius. There are 4.7 billion here with a scattering of other races, skilled individuals that have helped develop this civilization or those that have migrated here for similar reasons.”

“You allow intermixing outside of Axius?”

“When the occasion merits,” the Archon said as they stepped out of the lift car and began to walk through a large, elongated chamber with various holograms situated on both sides depicting what he wasn’t sure, but the individuals were not Protovic and mostly Human, involved in various types of combat. “Travel is permitted with few restrictions throughout Star Force, though this is one of a handful of regions where it is limited. Those that can travel here cannot live here permanently, and therein lies the distinction. The divisions do not exist for cultural reasons, but biological ones. We have learned from Axius that there are both advantages and disadvantages in living in close confines with varied races, and Star Force aims to have enough diversity to allow for both options. Hence this colony is a Protovic one.”

“Yet you, a Human, lead it?”

“That’s what Archons do for Star Force. All of Star Force.”

“And are there any Archons that are not Human?”

“No.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because you cannot do this,” the Archon said as he held his arm up and pointed his hand at Demmcha…then suddenly the Shanplenix’s feet left the ground and he lost control of his body, floating in midair.

“What are you doing?”

“No, this is not a form of anti-grav,” the Human assured him as the few Protovic passing by stopped to watch from a safe distance. “This is what we call psionics. Archons have special powers that not even all Humans possess. We are rare, and these powers are partly a reason why we are Archons.”

Demmcha returned to the ground and the constriction around his chest vanished.

“We are leaders and protectors,” he continued to explain as Demmcha tried to get a handle on what just happened, “because we have the ability. Those that do not cannot be Archons. I was tested a long time ago to learn if I had potential, and only a very few Humans did. No other race has the same abilities that we do, though a few outside of Star Force have been known to have one or two.”

“What exactly did you do?”

“I created an invisible energy field that allows me to manipulate matter. An invisible third arm, if you understand the metaphor.”

“Not completely,” Demmcha admitted. “What other races?”

“Are you familiar with The Nexus?”

“Somewhat.”

“We know of one, and rumors of others that have psionics. The Dsevmat have telepathy.”

“You mean they can read minds?”

“Yes.”

“I thought that was fiction.”

“I used to think so as well,” the Archon said as they reached the far side of the holograms and two small doors pulled open. They entered a lush indoor park that was lightly populated with only three Protovic in sight, though with the greenery there could have been dozens more hidden elsewhere. It was quiet though, save for the sound of running water, and the Archon pointed Demmcha on a path to the right.

“Do Archons have telepathy.”

“Our abilities are not widely known, and we prefer to keep it that way. But yes, we do.”

Demmcha took a half step, suddenly realizing how vulnerable he was if that was true.

“You can relax. We are not your enemies. And had Paul sensed any duplicity in you he would not have sent you here,” the Human assured as he turned around and looked at where Demmcha had stopped. This was all happening so fast and he wasn’t sure how to proceed.

“Let me fast track this for you,” the Archon offered. “I am far more powerful than you. No, you can’t insulate your mind from me. Yes, I can dig out memories if I wish. And no, you can’t keep secrets very well if we get curious about something, but do not assume we are constantly monitoring the minds around us, for we are not. The effort required is not a small one, so we only pry when needed.”

“But you still pry.”

“It helps us spot the liars,” Brad said evenly. “And allows us to build an honest empire.”

“And what happens to those that are not honest?”

“They are not trusted with responsibilities.”

“Yet you have prisons.”

“Mainly for those who insist on bothering others. Star Force feels that individuals should be allowed a bit of respect and space to live their lives as they wish. But if someone is insistent on interfering with and hurting others, being able to read minds helps us determine the truth and take action quickly. Which is why only those with these powers can become Archons, and only Humans within Star Force have the potential.”

“Some would say you have too much power to be trusted.”

“If one is trustworthy, the amount of power they have is irrelevant. If someone is untrustworthy, then they are a threat no matter how small their power is. Star Force doesn’t fear power. The more we have, the more people we can protect…and rescue.”

“So you say,” Demmcha said, though he made his mind obvious that he was not passing judgement on Star Force, merely not taking anything at face value.

“Which is why you’re here,” the Archon said as they passed through a bottleneck of bushes and came into a small courtyard with a wall-spanning window that looked out onto the city with 8 Protovic standing in front of it and apparently waiting for them to arrive. “To learn.”

Six of them were red skinned, with the other two being purple. All wore Star Force uniforms save for one of the purple ones.

“You and I have talked a great deal,” the Archon continued. “Now it’s time for you to get acquainted. Ask whatever you like, the more questions the better. You can lose the helmet now.”

Demmcha reached up and hit the external releases, then pulled the triangular helmet off revealing the green/yellow glow from his facial skin, then the pure yellow beams coming from his eyes. The other Shanplenix were visibly shocked when they saw him, but adjusted quickly enough. They stared at each other for many seconds, speaking a language he could not understand until he eventually put the helmet back on and the translation software kicked in.

“Seven of them are Star Force,” the Archon said, then pointed to the one in a different style uniform. “This one is not. She is from the independent Protovic and another observer here, much like you. I believe the two of you will want to have a separate conversation latter, but for now I will leave all of you alone. I will return when you are finished, or wish a break. There is much to discuss.”

“Yes there is,” Demmcha said as the Archon turned to walk away, with him wondering how far his telepathic range was. If he picked up on that thought he didn’t say anything, disappearing back through the path into the bushes and leaving him with his oddly colored kin.

“Hello brothers and sisters,” Demmcha greeted them with a shallow bow. “Do not be shy, and please tell me everything. Then I will reciprocate to your satisfaction.”

“What?” Clark-066 said when walking into the genetics lab behind Vortison and a handful of other high level medtechs.

“Sorry, did I interrupt your snack?” Star Force’s lead geneticist quipped as he turned around from his holographic displays and looked at the trailblazer.

Clark smirked. “What did you find?”

“Concerning that sample Paul sent back,” Vortison said, highlighting one hologram to the room’s central display. “I still don’t have nearly enough data to work with, but I have confirmed, to my satisfaction, that this is a genetic locking device.”

“Suppressing what, exactly?”

Vortison shook his head. “Not suppressing. Whatever this is, it does not exist in their genome. What each of these three races have is an incomplete book, not in chapters but in letters. The original Protovic have a full book but only every 3rd letter. Add in the Veliquesh variant and you get the 5th letter, now the 2nd with the Shanplenix. That’s not enough to read the words, metaphorically speaking. You’d need at least six or seven of the eight components to be able to guess at the contents, but whatever this is, it is huge, size-wise. I’m guestimating 13% of their overall genome is missing, or you could call this an addition. I have no way to know, yet.”

“Wait,” Clark said, holding up a finger. “You said 8. I thought there were 7 variants.”

“So the stories from the nutjobs said.”

“Right. What about the coloration? That’s not dormant.”

“No, it’s not. They have different genes there, rather than suppressed varieties inherent in all of them. We already knew this from the cross-breedings, for the offspring only had one genetic signature rather than carrying a latent second. It’s a guess, but I think the colorations are to mark which piece of the puzzle each variant has.”

“Natural or genetic engineering?”

“My credits say engineering. On a level that rivals the V’kit’no’sat.”

Clark’s eyes widened.

“No, it’s not their handiwork. The coding is significantly different, which is why it’s going to be next to impossible to guess at what it does without a nearly complete ‘book.’ I honestly have no idea what the genetic sequences are for.”

“Genetic memory?”

“Some of it, perhaps, but not all of it,” Vortison said, bringing up another hologram. “You probably aren’t going to recognize any of this, so I’ll point and you can pretend.”

“Thanks,” Clark said sarcastically.

“You’re welcome. Here is one place where the puzzle pieces will connect with their existing genome. We may not know what the pieces are, but we can make some assumptions about the connections because we have one side of them. Part of them are mental, as in software, while at least 60% are physical hardware. I can’t say which section of the body, but the idea that they just have a massive store of information woven into their genome is inaccurate. They might have it, but they have physical changes as well.”

“Upgrades?”

“I hardly think they’d be downgrades.”

“For what purpose?”

“It’s not breeding. I know that much. I have a suspicion that it will take all 8 variants located in the same place at the same time to put the puzzle pieces together.”

“Together how?”

“Humans create pheromones, viruses, and a few more exotic means of biological communication between individuals, and that’s not uncommon in about 85% of races. The Protovic have receptor slots for something they’re not producing, which is very odd. It’s possible that some other stimulus will cause the ‘messengers’ to be created, then when all 7 match up with an individual the magic happens…and I have no idea what it will be.”

“If it is genetic programming our Protovic could be at risk,” Clark said warily.

“The idea of a faction of Star Force going rogue and becoming an enemy is a nightmare that has kept me up many nights trying to make out what this coding is. Now that I have the third piece I should be closer to an answer, but I’m not. I need more tissue samples to compare, and presently we don’t know where the other 5 are, correct?”

“Until now I didn’t know there even were 5 others. The Shanplenix said they have no knowledge of Protovic beyond their own borders, past or present. They’re not exactly close to the Veliquesh homeworlds, but it’s odd that they never heard of them pre-lizards.”

“Actually it’s not,” Vortison said, adjusting the hologram to another set of genetic codes that Clark only vaguely understood. He wasn’t a newb as far as genetics were concerned, but Vortison was operating on a level far beyond him and they both knew it. Trouble was there had to be V’kit’no’sat even more knowledgeable than Star Force’s top staff, and they were constantly trying to close that gap given the outdated records they possessed, which were still more than they could fully grasp at their young age.

“Geographically speaking,” Clark clarified.

Vortison raised a finger. “Behaviorally speaking, there is an impulse to explore buried in their coding, similar to the sensation of thirst when you’re low on water, but much more subtle. It is, however, superseded by a stronger impulse to turtle up. A type of survival instinct, I believe.”

“No reckless expansion.”

“Such things affect individuals rather than control them. You’re evidence of that, for the sexuality programming in Humans is quite strong, yet you ignore it.”

“Such programming has a strong effect on the weak minded, and I can assure you that we are not weak minded,” Clark said firmly, though he knew the masses in Star Force, Humans and otherwise, unfortunately were. Maturia training helped with that, giving people an opportunity to grow stronger, but once they graduated they were on their own and if they didn’t have the will to improve they would stagnate and their strength would wane, making them more susceptible to genetic programming…a much weaker version than what guided/controlled the lizards.

“Obviously,” Vortison echoed. “But when you’re dealing with an entire race even the smallest nudge can have visible effects. I think these variants were tasted to survive first, seek each other out second, so that this genetic playbook could be assembled and implemented.”

“You think they did this themselves or someone did it to them?”

“Unknown.”

Clark rubbed his forehead, imagining the variations of disaster that this could turn into if it went south. “Is there a way to block the puzzle pieces from coming together?”

“Yes, but to do it properly and not some butcher job, I’d need to rewrite the Protovic genetic code to remove their section of the playbook entirely. A stopgap would be to rewrite a smaller portion to block the combination. Both would require skills that I am not confident in yet. The V’kit’no’sat could do it on their lunch break, but I haven’t had the experience needed and there’s no one with greater experience to ask for help. I’m confident I can do it eventually, but right now I’m wise enough to know not to try, else I’d risk messing them up, which I won’t do.”

“Let us know when you think you can. Make removal of their playbook a priority.”

“As an option or a goal? If the changes are beneficial we won’t want to strip them out…and putting them back in is far harder to do.”

“As our primary option. We’re going to find out what’s going on, and when we do get all 8 pieces we’re going to put them together and see what happens, either in a lab or with volunteers. If it goes badly, I want the ability to inoculate our population in short order.”

“I understand,” Vortison said gravely. “Do you know where to look for the others?”

“Not a clue. We’re going to have to go on a scavenger hunt.”

“I have no idea how you would even begin to do that on a galactic scale.”

“These three variants weren’t that far apart,” Clark pointed out.

“As far as genetic diversity and insuring that all puzzle pieces survive,” Vortison added, “I would assume there would be multiple civilizations of the same variant, else this entire project, whatever it is, could fail if one was wiped out. You might just find redundants nearby.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy.”

“What is?”

“We’ve both got our challenges then,” Clark cemented. “Keep us notified of your progress and we’ll see what we can do about getting you some more variant samples.”

2

July 19, 2969

Nexus Grid Point 146

Parking Orbit

Trey-555 sat in the command chair onboard his Ma’kri-class warship as he looked at the visual and tactical displays of the ship traffic around them. Most of the thousands of ships were parked as they were, but there was a steady flow of incoming and outgoing traffic on the single jumpline used to get to the neighboring star system from the grid point, for its gravity was too weak to make an interstellar jump from.

That said, it was the biggest space station Trey had ever seen by far. Looking like a pair of sunglasses with two huge discs connected by a thick stalk in the middle, the overall length of the construct was 4 times the width of Earth, but it was very flat and didn’t have half its mass. It was enough to make slow jumps off of if you knew where to look for it, with most non-Nexus traffic wandering about the galaxy never stumbling upon its location.

Which was odd, given the traffic involved. This was very much a public place, though one for only those in the know. There was nothing here for anyone who didn’t belong, no planets, moons, or even asteroids…just a massive construct and a flotilla of ships and other craft nearby it. Some of those craft were stations supplying fuel and other services to customers, some were defense stations, but most of the dots on the holographic map were ships waiting for their turn to ride the ferry to the other end of the line and deep into Nexus territory.

And to think this was only a ‘small’ grid point. Others had more than 1 station, for each link operated like stargates, save these were always activated. They made for one massive highway running in a straight line, with bigger hubs having multiple ones coming in and out requiring multiple constructs to generate the insanely large but stable magnetic fields that the specially designed Nexus jumpships could use to accelerate and decelerate far faster than gravity would ever allow. This was the first time Trey had ever been to this location, and only the 4th time Star Force had sent a ship. Typically involvement with The Nexus was facilitated by the H’kar, but Trey’s mission was going to take him far beyond their borders.

Information digging within The Nexus was dicey, but Star Force had made several inroads previously thanks to Director Davis’s efforts that had allowed them to do a racial search throughout their massive territory. The source admitted that The Nexus’s records were incomplete and that they had not fully cataloged every star system within their domain, but it had also noted that the database available to Star Force was not the full one that The Nexus used for internal matters. It was enough, however, to give Trey a location in which to seek out more wayward Protovic.

He wasn’t the only one on this chase, with Archons pursuing leads across the ADZ and beyond, rifling through historical records and stories trying to hunt down any mention of the Protovic and their variants. As it turned out there were many breadcrumbs to follow, with Trey being informed of 3 locations suspected of having Protovic. His was the furthest, being located in the Perseus galactic arm and far beyond where Star Force had eeked its own quiet Tether out to. It was now beyond the Orion arm in which the ADZ and lizards, Voku, and Preema domains existed, having passed through the less dense star clusters separating the galactic swirls and branched out quietly into systems within The Nexus dominion without making any waves.

Those Tether systems were not all a secret, for some had connections with the local star systems, but most were a private line of colonization that Star Force was not making public back in the ADZ, nor were most of the maps updated with their locations. If the V’kit’no’sat returned and blew apart the ADZ, then Star Force needed somewhere to fall back to and announcing the locations of your secret bases wasn’t a good idea, making the few maps that the higher level Archons and Monarchs had at their disposal closely guarded secrets.

Trey had access to one such monster map back in the ADZ, but there wasn’t one onboard this Ma’kri and he hadn’t felt the need to bring a personal copy with him. Still, he knew that where they were going on this mission was far beyond the current tip of the Tether on the order of 8,000 light years. The galaxy on the whole was approximately 100,000 light years in diameter, meaning this little field trip was taking Trey and his Ma’kri 1/6th of the distance from galactic core to outer rim, which was only possible thanks to The Nexus allowing them to use their grid point transit system…for a fee.

And it was no small price, but through the H’kar Star Force had acquired access to The Nexus’s currency in lieu of bartering precious resources and getting scammed in the process. The Nexus wasn’t totally insular, allowing commerce with outsiders on a regular basis, but they often price gouged them as a way of favoring member states rather than giving them a break. Everyone had to pay for their ride on the interstellar ferry, just some paid more than others.

Star Force had been given access to the grid point system a while back but rarely had cause to use it. It connected far flung regions of The Nexus and unless you had business assets there it was far too costly to use just for sightseeing. This mission had been given enough of a priority for Davis to fund it, with Trey being given enough currency to move about The Nexus at will rather than trying to huff it on gravity drives alone, which would have taken years to make the trip rather than a couple months.

Though that estimate might be stretched further if the waiting lines were this long. The Nexus had a lot of Tilars, their name for the magnetic driven jumpships, each of which was a spec compared to the construct but of whom some were so large they could have carried a Star Force command ship. The one that Trey’s Ma’kri was assigned was considerably smaller, and cheaper, with many of this model coming and going, barely sticking around long enough to refuel before heading back out again. They’d enter, braking against one giant disc, then launch off the other to avoid collisions, and as Trey watched there were routinely tilars easing into the center of the giant slingshot before disappearing with no fanfare.

He’d been told that their turn was next, but he’d been sitting on the bridge for the past 2 hours and was getting ready to say screw it and head back to training when they finally got their go ahead. He had helm follow the navigational prompts out of their parking orbit to avoid hitting the other waiting ships then watched as they approached the massive tilar. They weren’t all the same make, nor design, with this one being painted bright blue and shaped like a crustacean with huge pincers that wrapped around the region where the Ma’kri and other ships would be berthed.

Other tilars were fully enclosed, some looking like sails, and enough oddity of design to suggest that there was more than one race responsible for their construction. When the Ma’kri docked inside the assigned tilar it didn’t interconnect with the ship itself, rather settling into position within the IDF field and being gently nudged into a fixed state by several soft tractor beams. They couldn’t stop it from moving if they engaged their engines, which the Ma’kri had very little of aside from gravity drives that wouldn’t work in the IDF anyway, but it would stop them from drifting into each other or out of the docking perimeter through the gaps between the pinchers.

The loading took a remarkably short time, with Trey thinking that while they made all their customers wait in the parking orbits they weren’t going to delay the tilars one minute if they could avoid it, so before long the Archon was watching the view through the gaps in the tilar’s arms as they and the other 14 ships were carried out over the massive disc and into the directional magnetic field. As soon as they hit the center of it the construct blinked out, with blackness replacing the dull white hull plates.

“Easy peasy,” Trey commented, seeing nothing outside the ship now that it had accelerated up to such a speed that the tilar’s shields were blocking any radiation from hitting its precious cargo and melting through the hull plates.

“I guess the expense is the hardest part,” the Ma’kri Captain commented.

The Archon smiled. “Mind the store, buddy. I’m heading back to my workouts. Let me know if the neighbors get fussy.”

“Before or after I shoot them?” he said deadpan.

“Your call.”

29 days later…

When the Ma’kri arrived at their final destination point on the network they were in the rimward half of The Nexus and still had a few weeks of travel left to go, via the ‘slow’ gravity drives and bouncing from system to system. Using maps obtained from The Nexus early, Trey ordered them to get underway immediately after easing through the congestion around the grid point, though it wasn’t nearly as robust as two of their previous stops. This location only had 1 construct, but it was more congested with traffic than their starting point had been, underscoring how remote The Nexus territory was within the edge of the Orion arm that it creeped into…meaning Star Force and the ADZ were the sticks beyond the sticks as far as they were concerned.

But once they made a slow jump to a nearby star system it was back to solitary traveling. There was a bit of traffic around the system’s star, but there was no inhabitation within the system. Bouncing across new spacelanes and eating up fuel with every stop and acceleration, the Ma’kri made its way out into territory that was considered to be unimportant to The Nexus but technically within their domain. Some records of it were kept, but very little interaction was facilitated other than by a few ‘connected’ races. Most were simply denizens on The Nexus’s lawn and probably didn’t even know the huge conglomerate even existed.

The system they were headed for had no name, just an identification number. It had one populated planet, but nothing of interest for The Nexus or anyone else to bother with. The natives matched the description of the Protovic, and unlike the other two hits Star Force had gotten, these were not purple skinned variants. These were said to be orange skinned, set against the standard green streaks and black exoskeletal patches. Fortunately they weren’t working off of rumor alone, with a few images having been filed that seemed to confirm that they were Protovic.

The thing of it was, the pictures indicated that these Protovic were technologically primitive, making Trey wonder what their starting conditions were like. Did all the variants have access to the same tech and knowledge, then expanded on/lost it over the course of time? There were so many questions lingering that he agreed that this mission was worth the expenditure just to get a little more data to work with, for right now they didn’t have much to go on.

The Shanplenix had no records of their history prior to their homeworld, and the same was true for the original Protovic. The Veliquesh records, which Star Force obtained during the deconstruction of their worlds after their removal, did have mentions to grandiose origins in the form of myths and legends, but nothing concrete. It was said that they had been the devolved form of their predecessors, split up into 7 variants to avoid a horrific fate, only to one day in the future recombine and reclaim their dominance over the galaxy.

Originally that seemed farfetched, and the ‘galaxy’ reference was probably hyperbole, yet here Trey was looking for Protovic in another galactic arm, so he granted there might be a bit more to the legends than they originally thought. That said, the Veliquesh had been crazy, so their records had to be viewed with a skeptical eye.

All records were, in truth, for people had a tendency to lie. Star Force records were the anomaly in that they were accurate, as far as the recorder was concerned, though they might still have misunderstood or mischaracterized something unintentionally. That was why it was always better to view the subject matter first hand, and Trey didn’t know for sure what he was going to find when they arrived, if anything. If this had been a wild goose chase he was going to be ticked, then again these Protovic could also have been wiped out since the records had been made.

There was no way of knowing until they arrived, and when they did they found an empty system, as far as starship traffic was concerned. They transited to the planet in question easily enough, then sat in orbit taking scans of the entirety of the surface on multiple laps gathering data on what was a very primitive civilization.

Like mud huts primitive. There were no EM signatures whatsoever, meaning these guys hadn’t even developed radio or TV, scary as that thought was. Trey’s life would have been considerably different if he’d never been exposed to The Simpsons, and he felt for these poor bastards in ways that he couldn’t even comprehend.

Scanning a planet wasn’t a simple point and click procedure, so when they didn’t pick up any EM in the initial laps Trey ordered a more detailed scan, region by region, trying to pick up any signs of real technology, even if it just be a metal roof. As the bridge crew worked through those orders Trey familiarized himself with the population distribution patterns. There were settlements on several continents, with yellow seas separating them. They were toxic, as far as Humans were concerned, but the clouds in the atmosphere were water-based and raining pure down on several sites, making for what looked like a wet planet aside from a few ‘burnt’ patches that were filled with sand dunes.

Trey’s face blanked as he took a second look at those deserts…realizing they weren’t natural. The pattern was recognizable to someone who had seen the results of orbital bombardment on numerous occasions throughout the lizard war, and whatever had hit the planet here had been ordinance on a far greater magnitude than what Star Force used. So it wasn’t with too much surprise when the Ma’kri crew told him that there were subsurface traces of technology beneath those deserts.

Without any more evidence he could already guess what had happened. Someone had blasted the hell out of these Protovic and only a few managed to survive, with their civilization regrowing but in a very primitive fashion. When you lost your engineers, doctors, scientists, and fabricators all your ‘common’ tech suddenly became out of reach to the average person. Within a generation such things were lost from the common cultural awareness, and when the originals died off the eradication of the previous civilization was complete, leaving these roots to grow in whatever fashion they could, in this case being a collection of small villages spread across most of the planet but without even an attempt at a large city.

“Not what you were expecting?” the Captain asked.

“Another puzzle piece,” Trey commented. “And those blast zones add another dimension to this mystery.”

“You think this was original damage or something later on from the locals?”

“Good question. Whoever attacked here had one big boomstick at their disposal. Assemble a ground team and keep constant scans going. I don’t know how long we’ll stick around, but I want to give the analysts back home as much data to work with as we can.”

“I assume you’re going down as well?”

Trey gave him a dumb look, then pointed his thumb at his chest. “Archon…duh.”

“With the collection team,” he amended.

“I may end up roaming, but we’re starting out together.”

“How big of a team?”

“Three dropships, with everyone that’s not ship’s crew. I don’t think anyone wants to sit up here and twiddle their thumbs. They came here to work, so let’s get to it.”

“As you wish,” the Captain said, turning around and typing into a terminal attached to his own command chair.

Trey raised an eyebrow, not sure if that was random or a Princess Bride reference, then headed back to his quarters to grab his armor.

3

Trey knelt on the surface of the planet feeling the heavy gravity tugging on his muscles. 1.6g wasn’t something that was going to stress him much, given the high gravity training that he was used to putting an hour or two in at up to 5.5g, but his team he was worried about a bit. To that end he put a time limit on their excursion and kept the dropships close by so they could get a breather inside the regular gravity when needed.

Dipping a hand down into the sand, the Archon ran his fingers through it and got a feel for the magnitude of the weapons damage to the planet’s surface. This wasn’t ground up rock as much as it was vaporized material flash frozen into particulates. A few weapon systems he knew of had this result, and none of them were common within the galaxy. Hit a target with enough power and you essentially got a bowl of confetti as a result, and given the 160 miles of desert that he was kneeling in this place had been hit by either something massive or a lot of smaller things in repetition…which he assumed was the case given the lack of a single blast crater.

“Archon.”

“What is it, Captain?” Trey answered the comm call.

“We’ve currently got our sensors focused on your location and have discovered an anomaly. Approximately two miles to the northwest there are deep residue of what appears to be structures. Not much left, but they stretch for miles.”

“How deep?”

“A little over 4 miles.”

Trey frowned. “I didn’t pack a shovel that big.”

“No. We’d need a proper digging team to get down there. I just wanted to confirm that there was more than mud huts here in the past.”

“Thank you…is it all sand that deep?”

“One moment,” he said, followed by a long pause. “Difficult to tell, but our best guess is yes.”

“That’s a lot of city destroyed.”

“Adding in surface features.”

“You reading anything more than foundations?”

“Impossible to say without a closer scan.”

“I need to know. Bring her in low.”

“How low?”

“Close enough for me to toss pebbles at.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“The ship’s designed to do it.”

“But…”

“But what? Afraid the natives are going to shoot arrows at you?”

“They have arrows?”

“No clue yet, there are none around here.”

“If we squash you, don’t blame me.”

“No promises,” Trey said, cutting the comm and standing up. A lot of naval officers didn’t like bringing starships into atmosphere but Paul had proven long ago that it wasn’t a big deal. The gravity at the surface was almost identical to that in orbit, and unless you had hurricane-caliber winds or tried to descend too fast you weren’t going to have trouble as long as you had a veteran pilot. Atmosphere did cause random movements for a ship no matter how large where vacuum didn’t, but it was more a fear thing than a real danger. Technically a seda could come down and hover a meter off the ground if it wanted to, and a Ma’kri was much more nimble than that.

What it did do was burn fuel at a constant rate. Not a lot, but gravity drives were typically used in large bursts with lots of rest time in between. Hover rates weren’t bad, but not knowing how long they’d be in position left the crews unable to calculate fuel expenditure beforehand. The Ma’kri had more than enough to accomplish this little shore visit, and getting the sensors a bit closer to their target would enhance the accuracy, hopefully enough to know whether or not a return trip with a digging crew was warranted.

“Archon,” one of the analysis team said, stepping up beside him holding a satchel of equipment that was dragging on her shoulder heavily. “The sand is partially organic in origin, but there are significant traces of technological residue within it.”

“There also appears to be some foundations left buried deep under the sand, according to orbital sensors.”

“Salvageable?”

“Don’t know yet. I’m having them take a closer look. Anything on the weaponry used?”

“The damage is ancient, so we can only extrapolate, but it appears to be similar to a vertron inhibitor.”

“Based on?”

“The crystallization patterns. There are defects that time hasn’t completely washed away yet. This entire desert may have once been lush forest, given the organic traces still present, but the more recent ones concern me.”

“Oh?”

“There is non-crystalized organic traces, minute, but probably from lifeforms inhabiting here after the planetary damage.”

“What kind?”

“The burrowing kind,” she said with a cringe, looking up at his opaque golden faceplate.

He remained silent for a moment, then a head twitch brought his vision back on her. “There’s nothing in the immediate area.”

“The compaction rates are all wrong. This sand has been churned over the years, I’m almost sure of it.”

“So a lot of burrowers?”

“Or environment turbulence. We’ll have to compare to bedrock scans to be sure.”

“How much more time do you need here?”

“Another hour should do. We want to be thorough.”

“Alright. Take your time and I’ll watch out for worm sign.”

“What?”

“Never mind. How you doing with the gravity?”

“Getting my workout in for the day. That’s another thing, the gravity should be compacting the sand more than it is.”

“Add another mystery to the list.”

“We might be able to figure this one out,” she said, spinning a circle in the sand with her heel as she turned around and walked back towards one of the sample sites spread around a quarter mile perimeter from the dropships.

Trey held position, watching with both his eyes and his psionics to make sure his unarmored team came to no harm. They were literally in the middle of nowhere with only some short dunes on the horizon around them. The nearest village was over a hundred miles away on the outskirts of the desert, leaving them alone on a cloudy day that would probably keep the Ma’kri invisible despite its size.

Trey waited for it to come down, watching the battlemap and his team for the moment when the clouds pushed down above them like a wall of cotton candy headed for the ground. They never got there, with the hull plates of the dark grey Ma’kri forcing the white puffs aside as the 6 kilometer long warship appeared to pancake the ground nearby them to the immediate west with almost all of his team physically jerking as the sudden arrival spooked them.

When they were finished collecting their samples the Ma’kri had already returned to orbit, having confirmed at least a few levels of infrastructure buried deep beneath the sands. What condition it was in was unknown, but Trey hated to leave without finding out what it was. Coming back on a second trip just for this might be a huge waste of time or a vital discovery, he couldn’t be sure, but digging down to that level by hand wasn’t going to happen either.

The three dropships stayed together rather than splitting up so Trey could keep an eye on everyone, which amounted to a 63 man team of techs and a couple of commandos. They could have babysat the other dropships but right now the Archon didn’t want to let anyone out of his sight until he got a feel for the planet. Primitive civilizations weren’t the same as being safe, and he didn’t want to risk harm to any of his team from unknown factors just yet. Once they got a feel for what the planet had in store for them they’d split up, but right now they needed eyes on the locals and at least one tissue grab.

To that end he had the dropships skim the surface behind a ridgeline all the way up to a nearby village where they were going to land out of sight and head in on foot.

“Wait,” he said before they’d gotten to their landing zone, a couple of kilometers out. “Full stop,” he ordered the pilots. “There’s someone below us. Hover here until I say otherwise and open the rear hatch,” he said, leaving the cockpit in a rush. Trey pushed by the others in the ship’s corridors then ran out the hatch before it was even fully open, dropping a dozen meters down into the treetops and letting the supple branches slow his fall. He hit one not so supple one and tipped head over heels as he was crashing through the leaves, but he managed to create a telekinetic ‘crash bag’ beneath him that cushioned his landing and let him twist over to land a knee on the moist ground, sinking in a couple of inches before he was gone in a flash, running through the forest in pursuit of the mental signature he’d detected.

It was also running, probably scared out of its mind, but Trey figured the first meet and greet would go better with a single individual than with a crowd whose paranoia could feed off of each other’s. Running in the high gravity slowed Trey a bit, but he was surprised at how fast this individual was moving. Terror-inspired adrenaline aside, they weren’t letting the Archon catch up as rapidly as he hoped, with him having to eventually use his Ikrid to get the person to slow down before they made it all the way back to the village.

He’d hoped to just cause a sense of fatigue, but given the distance and his own physical effort apparently he doped the person up too much, for they fell down and didn’t get back up. That allowed him to catch up quickly, but it wasn’t what he intended.

When he did finally get to their position the person still wasn’t moving, and he began to sense pain before he got within Pefbar range and could see through the brush. The person was on the ground with their ankle wedged between two roots. Rather than burst through the leaves and freak them out even more, he put the person to sleep then walked up into view, pushing a branch aside and seeing a glowing orange/green Protovic female dressed in a short skirt and bandoleer top…with her ankle bent in an unnatural angle.

“Ah crap,” Trey said, walking over to her in his golden armor and using a combination of fingers and telekinesis to pull the roots apart and release her foot that was wrapped up in a sandal that was more straps than anything. Definitely not a running shoe, which made her speed even more impressive.

Trey disconnected his left glove, taking it off and making skin to skin contact with her ankle. Hacking into her nervous system he got a better feel for the injury and was able to confirm a broken bone. More of a crack than a clean break, but not good regardless. Feeling like a moron, he checked the perimeter and ensured that they were alone, then focused on a seldom used psionic that had been a pain in the butt to acquire called Haemra.

Kip had been the first one to achieve it, and it hadn’t been training related. The ascension prompt only triggered when one was trying to heal an injury, so whenever someone wanted to share the ability with another they had to give themselves at least a long, nasty knife blade cut on their arm or plasma burn. Then while healing it they had to get to the proper ascension prompt that would trigger the other person in the ‘share’ to ascend. And while that was bad enough, if you missed it the first time you had to repeat injuring yourself until they got it.

It was a Tier 2 ability and not that catastrophic with regards to cascade issues. Trey had got it on the first try and only missed a day of training. He made that choice rather than put Aaron through an extra injury to share it with him. Hurting yourself like that was basically against everything that Star Force operated off of, but since this was a cheat process they couldn’t blame the V’kit’no’sat for it. Sharing had never been intended, so the Archons made the gruesome choice to inflict the injuries in order to share the ability that was a much more powerful version of Sesspik.

Haemra could be used on yourself for rapid healing, as Aaron had done when he’d triggered Trey’s ascension, or it could be used on someone else to heal them in a lesser fashion. Skill work was huge with this one, and if you weren’t getting injured or helping with other people’s injuries you couldn’t train it. That said, it was extremely valuable to have and Trey was glad for it in this circumstance, otherwise he would have had to take this native all the way back up to the Ma’kri for several days to get this break healed up properly.

Using the physical contact, Trey took control of the Protovic’s body and essentially ordered it to start regrowing in the proper places. Since she wasn’t Human the control was less, because Trey was less familiar with their physiology, but they were among the closest to Humans out of all the races Star Force had and he was able to trigger the necessary grow process…which was incredibly painful at the rate he was pressing it. It was a form of flash tissue growth, like his own ascensions, though slower and in this case not much additional material was needed to reseal the break.

That said, it was preferable that she be unconscious during the process…else it’d feel like he was doing anything but fixing her ankle.

It took him and his feeble skills more than half an hour to fix her up, during which he ordered the dropships to set down nearby wherever they could find a gap in the trees. One of the medtechs came out and took a tissue sample from the woman, several actually and Trey healed the not so small one on her arm. He glared at the tech who’d taken it, but didn’t say anything as she retreated back to the dropship. Another 8 minutes and that bloody spot was healed up and he brought her back to a semi-conscious state, attempting to get some information from her mind before waking her up entirely.

The rest of the analysis team was restricted to the dropships for this meet and greet, but Trey did have one commando with him watching his back while he did his mind meld thing. He wasn’t surprised to find that these natives didn’t speak any language that he was familiar with, so he was going to have to try and piece together some form of communication starting with mental assurances that he wasn’t an enemy.

He kept his hand on her wrist as he woke her up, then felt her jerk physically and mentally when she saw his gold helmet beside her. She tried to run but he held her firm, all the while sending the telepathic calming urges that did little to quiet her paranoia. After a few seconds of her flailing around and finding her vocal chords weren’t working, he went ahead and froze her body in place too, only allowing her head to operate under her own power while he had a lock on the rest of her.

“Viron, take your helmet off. I can’t calm her down.”

The commando took a step forward and knelt before where she was sitting on the ground, then he hit the release on his helmet that had it pull back from his face to a knot on the back of his neck, revealing his purple/green glowing Protovic face.

“I doubt anything I say will matter,” the commando said, looking straight at her and smiling, but talking to Trey.

“Just let her hear your voice. I can use that.”

“Alright then. Relax sweetheart, we’re not going to hurt you.”

“I didn’t say hit on her.”

“Why not if it’ll calm her down?” he answered dryly. “I hope you’re watching the surrounding area. I’m surprised she hasn’t screamed yet.”

“I’m stopping her from talking, and only somewhat watching. This is taking a lot of brain power.”

“You holding her body too?”

“Have to.”

“Release a bit if you want her to calm down,” he said, holding steady and just looking at her scared face as he talked.

“I’ll try to keep her to a whisper, but I’m not sure how well this is going to work,” Trey said, loosening her speaking ability enough that she began babbling rapidly, but quietly. Viron talked to her, though neither understood the other, but Trey began to pick up on a few connections that allowed him to send thoughts into her mind that she recognized. Concepts, not words, and after more than an hour she relaxed enough that he was able to release his hold on her.

That was a mistake, for when he did she saw his hand and freaked out again when she realized he was an alien. Trey mentally froze her and glanced at the commando. “This is going to take forever.”

“Not my fault you’re ugly,” he said with a smirk. “Can she still see and hear me?”

“Not right now, I’ve got her in popsicle mode.”

“Let her see me again…after you do a quick check of the perimeter.”

Trey pushed out his Ikrid while maintaining his hold on her, looking for other nearby minds.

“No one has left the village yet. I think I better keep my helmet on though,” he said, with the woman suddenly back awake and babbling like she’d never stopped.

Viron waved a hand in front of her in a calming gesture, then stood up and took a step back. His armor peeled apart and he walked out of it, knelt down again, and took her other hand in his own, raised it to his lips and kissed it.

“Oh brother,” Trey commented.

“Work with me on this,” Viron insisted, lowering her hand but maintaining a grip on it as her eyes flicked from him to the alien and back again rapidly. “Do you need to hold onto her?”

“It increases my ability.”

“Can you let go for a few minutes? And just keep her voice in a whisper, let go of everything else.”

“Alright, we’ll try it your way. If I have to I can knock her out again remotely.”

“Do it,” Viron said, with the woman suddenly getting control of her body back as the alien released her. She scrambled away from him but Viron still had hold of her hand and pulled her over to him, dragging her onto her feet and away from the Human where he held her in a firm, but polite embrace.

“Relax little beauty, you’re among friends.”

Trey rolled his eyes but went along with it, for some reason it was working and starting to calm her down again.

4

November 11, 2969

System 39282

Planet 7 (Protovic Civilization)

Over the past month Viron had made quite the impression on the single village that the expedition team had made contact with. He couldn’t speak their language, and vice versa, but that didn’t diminish the effect his visage had on them. With the help of some linguists that Trey had brought with him, and a whole lot of psionic influence, they’d established some basic words but most communication occurred through the Archon in the form of thoughts and feelings. He was being used as a translator more than the translators as the villagers wondered who these magical visitors were and word spread to the nearby settlements, with pilgrimages being made by their neighbors to come see the rumored miracles.

The fear in the villagers was now gone, and that had taken some doing. It wasn’t brainwashing technically, but a lot of emotional correction on Trey’s part to get a few of these Protovic to the point of being comfortable around him and especially Viron. Like a snowball, once he got it rolling the sentiments spread and any new arrivals got an education from the others in that there was nothing to fear, especially when Trey was healing up a number of small injuries they had. Word of that was beginning to spread as well, with a few badly injured individuals being brought to him from surrounding villages in the hopes of him healing, or in some cases, saving their lives.

He didn’t try to work on all of them, deferring to his medtechs and letting them treat the Protovic with equipment from the dropships and eventually, once they were trusted enough, they’d landed one of them right in the middle of the village to use as a makeshift medbay. The cultural exchange continued from there with his team moving around freely taking samples and adding to their very limited linguistic database. Some of the villagers helped out, but most were just watching in awe. Trey was now able to remove his helmet without sparking fear in the Protovic, for now they saw him as a great healer and asset rather than a threat.

Fortunately they didn’t know how much of a badass he was, otherwise they never would have calmed down.

He’d dispatched other small teams across the planet taking samples from uninhabited regions and doing the boring legwork of digging up data for analysts to use later while he got to play Doctor Who with the villagers, with his psionics working as well or better than psychic paper. He just hated not being able to have a meaningful conversation with them…and the fact that they were living in horrid conditions.

He’d seen worse, by far, but they were so primitive and ignorant that it hurt, yet they were eager to learn despite the road bumps. Cultural clashes were occurring every day, but after Trey got to the root of the problem and literally jumped into their heads to wash away the resistance they began to learn and learn fast…so much so that new arrivals began to turn on the locals for violating their cultural protocol.

That was when Trey had to step in, pulling a Vader on the first beating he observed and telekinetically grabbing and holding aloft the outsider that was issuing the appropriate response based on their local culture…or whatever other excuse you liked. It was still unacceptable, no matter what the circumstances. When the locals saw the magic that the Archon was capable of, above and beyond the healing, the obvious protests stopped but he could still feel the searing looks of those that considered this whole village to be heresy.

“Where have you been?” Trey asked Viron when he came back up into the dropship where the Archon was sitting chewing on a snack bar while the crowd outside stayed a respectful 4 meters back beyond the line he had drawn in the sand as he had instructed them to do. They were not to come into the dropship or even touch it without permission, and so far there hadn’t been too many violations of that edict.

“Impregnating some locals,” the Commando said deadpan, walking in out of armor. Dangerous as that was it had become imperative that the villagers interact with him on a more personal level than the hardened battle plates allowed. “What’s up?”

“How do you feel about a camping trip?”

“Here or somewhere else on the planet?”

“Here. I want to bring down supplies and send the Ma’kri back for support. We need a digging team and…a lot of other things.”

“And you don’t want to leave?”

“I’m worried about what will happen if we do. Take away our protection and I get the feeling that some of the outsiders would torch this place and everyone in it.”

“I have been getting some strange looks from them, but I’m not in their heads like you are. You think a fight’s coming?”

“They’re too afraid with us here, me in particular. But if we leave I’m not sure what will happen, but I fear something bad.”

“You want more time to work on the other villages before we pack up for good?”

“Not exactly.”

“We can’t stay here forever. If a fight’s coming we can only protect them to a point…unless you want to take these villagers with us back to the ADZ.”

Trey tapped a finger on his own head. “Now you’re thinking…but too small.”

Viron looked at him for a moment, then his glowing purple eyes widened. “The whole planet?”

“Why not? We can’t fit them on the Ma’kri, but after processing 3 trillion Veliquesh the 428,000 on this planet will be a piece of cake.”

“Just like that? We take them away from their homes without even asking them if they want to go?”

“Annexing this planet is out of the question. Too far away and we’d be dependent on The Nexus grid point system.”

“Not what I meant.”

Trey sighed and gestured out the open dropship hatch to the villagers standing there watching them talk but unable to understand their words. “Look at their living conditions. They’re dying from injuries and illnesses that we can squash with a single medpack. Their huts are sturdy, I’ll give them that, but they’re little more than crude tents. Their food supply is partly meat, which is unacceptable, and pathetic beyond that. Leaving them here would be cruel.”

“I can’t argue with that, but it is their world. Shouldn’t we at least ask them?”

“Feel free to explain what Star Force and the ADZ are. And even if you convince some of them to go, what about the rest that are too scared or stubborn to come. More importantly, what of their children? Should they have to live like this because of their parents? And what of those yet to be born? We were lucky being born into Star Force. These people weren’t, but we can fix that problem right now…or in a handful of months anyway.”

Viron shook his head. “I don’t think stunning them is the way to go about it.”

“For the grumpy ones it will be, but yeah the rest will need to be handled differently. You’re their favorite, so…”

“I still can’t talk to them, so what do you want me to do?”

“I’d like you to volunteer for a follow up assignment…noncombat.”

“This isn’t exactly combat, you know. What do you have in mind?”

“A friendly face to walk them through indoctrination. Even if they want to go it’s going to be traumatic to them.”

“Do we have facilities to handle them?”

“If not they can be built quickly enough for this small a number. The travel lag will afford that. I’m putting together a report to be sent back with instructions. The return convoy won’t come until everything is set in motion, though the digging crews will come immediately. I want a look at those ruins before we pack up shop.”

“How do I babysit 400,000 people?”

“For those who want to come, personally. For all the rest via recordings. Better to have you speaking their language than a Human or even another Protovic. The more familiarity the better.”

“You’re right about this, but it’s still going to be a punch in the gut that I hate to give these people. They don’t deserve that…some of them anyway. A few I wouldn’t mind punching the old fashioned way.”

“Do you know a better way?”

“Other than claiming this planet and upgrading them here, no. How much would it cost to do it that way, as a transition, with us abandoning this world eventually after they adjusted?”

“Time.”

“Time?”

“No matter how we handle this there are going to be transitional pains. Do we let the newborns of the next month be raised in these conditions or do we send them straight back to the ADZ or a twin maturia built here? Either way their parents are going to throw a fit. If we camp out here and do it the slow way we’re holding back the next generation in favor of easing the transition of those that are already here. If someone has to take the hit, better it be the adults.”

“True, but something about this still sucks.”

“We didn’t put these people in this situation, and they’ve done well to just survive whoever attacked them here. If you get a thorn jammed into your foot it needs to come out, but pulling it out is more painful whereas leaving it in is less so.”

“Healing doesn’t always feel good,” Viron agreed, “but it has to happen regardless.”

“There are so few Protovic here that we can evacuate them all straight back to the ADZ. In this case, their primitive state is to their advantage, because we can’t do this with the Shanplenix or other more advanced Protovic civilizations.”

“Because they’d shoot us if we tried?”

“Pretty much. And on that point, when the day comes, I’d put your armor on. Those arrows they use aren’t plasma rifles, but they can still do damage.”

“Ok, bigger question…what about our workouts?”

Trey cringed. “Makeshift setup here. Lots of running, sparring, and making do until the Ma’kri gets back.”

“You’re willing to put up with that?”

“To bring these people back with us? Yes.”

“Alright then. Consider me volunteered.”

“I figured you would…if only to spend more time with your girlfriends.”

Viron glanced outside. “I will admit, I’ve never been this popular before.”

“And you’re going to get a whole lot more popular when the rest of the planet gets to know you.”

“Yeah, but then they’ll be integrated into Star Force and realize there are a lot more handsome Protovic out there.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Trey said, finishing his snack with a swig of water from a bottle.

“So ordered,” Viron said with a smirk as he headed back out of the dropship to mingle with the natives and continue adding to Star Force’s limited database of their language and culture. They were going to need all they could get if they were really going to try and create an indoctrination program for these people in a matter of months. He knew there were experts for that sort of thing, but mastering their language was going to take time no matter how many Archons they had to help them with their psionics. Telling someone to do something was totally different than explaining concepts, and to do that you needed to understand the finer details of the way these people communicated.

It was those finer details that were totally lost on Viron now, but he’d been teaching these Protovic some of his own words and gestures. That wouldn’t work for the entire planet’s population, so whoever Trey called for was going to have their work cut out for them. If they wanted him to be their mouthpiece so be it. He’d do what he could, if only to make the transition a little less traumatic on his new friends.

“Got a package for you,” a junior tech said, walking into Vortison’s research chamber. It was a private room with more displays than actual experiments, but there were numerous racks of canisters containing tissue samples from every race in Star Force, the ADZ, and as many outside it as they had collected to date, including the more recent ones from the Shanplenix.

“Oh?” the geneticist said, turning away from his holograms and looking at the box she was carrying with both hands.

“Number 4,” the medtech said with eagerness as she set it down on a nearby table and let him open it.

When Vortison pulled the lid open he saw dozens of smaller canisters that held tissue samples, along with data chips stacked in racks beside them.

“Where did this come from?”

“An expedition into The Nexus.”

“Which variant?” he asked as he pulled out several canisters and took them over to an empty rack on the wall.

“Protovic Orange, I’m told.”

“Orange? Do we have a map location?”

“I assume it’s on the chips.”

“Begin downloading them and find it for me. Have Jenson and Melly help you. I want it prepped to our purposes as soon as possible.”

“On it,” she said, scooping up the data chips and heading to another room in the lab.

“Alright, Orange,” Vortison said, holding up one of the tiny canisters in front of him and looking in through the clear cube at the spec in the center. “Let’s see what secrets you hold.”

“Wait, say that again?” Clark insisted, holding up a finger in front of him for emphasis.

Vortison cringed. “I…was…wrong.”

“See, that’s what I thought I heard. But that can’t be true, you guys never make mistakes.”

The medtech sighed. “Not so much as a mistake than I was looking in the wrong places and making unwarranted assumptions. Label it as you like, but I’ve learned that the 8 variants are not identical copies with different easter egg puzzle pieces. The physical attributes of the Orange variant are too high for gravity alone to account for. Once I realized that I began reassessing previous data on the others and found some minor, but significant differences.”

“Kind of counterintuitive there.”

“They’re ‘minor’ until they become ‘significant.’ I think, and be aware I could be wrong again, that they’re a timelock. The Orange variant samples that I was sent indicate that their lock has been opened, thus activating physical upgrades. The Purple and Red variants have not been so unlocked, but I have been able to identify that they are there and they are not strength upgrades. Purple has a latent sensory package and Red has a higher cognitive level akin to your Sav. Not anywhere in that magnitude, but similar in structure. It’s hard to say without actually having active samples to analyze, but the coding is similar enough to your psionics tissue that I’m fairly certain I’m interpreting it correctly.”

“You’re saying they’ve got a suppressed version of psionics?”

“On a much lesser level, yes. And each variant has something different. Orange has increased strength, speed, flexibility…not exactly a traditional psionic but somewhat similar to your Kex.”

“Not mine. You haven’t found the trigger for that one yet,” Clark pointed out.

“Your in the plural. They’re similar to V’kit’no’sat psionics in that they are enhancements, so you might want to refer to them as such going forward.”

“What about the Shanplenix?”

“They have one too, but it’s too unfamiliar for me to isolate…yet. It’s there and locked down, but I need more time to figure out what it is.”

“And you’re sure it’s different from the others?”

“Positive.”

“Are these ‘enhancements’ shared once all the puzzle pieces come together?”

Vortison shook his head with a rueful smile. “That’s the curious thing. I have a hunch that the transformative code will give an individual all of them in addition to other things, but as is they do not factor in to it. This is code that is complete and present in each variant as of now, and thanks to some of the medical scans made of the Orange variant I can conclude that the enhancement comes along with the activation key.”

“Activation key?”

“Remember when I said that even if all the variants came together there would have to be a means of sharing their code?”

Clark frowned. “Timelock or earned advancement?”

“An interesting point. Whatever the case, Orange has achieved it and is spreading a virus-like key that will transfer to all other Protovic that come in contact with them.”

“Do we need a quarantine?”

Vortison bit his lip as he thought. “No, I don’t think so. Even if we had all 8 variants the transformation can’t trigger without them all being active. Only Orange is so far, and we only have 4 of the 8 located.”

“Any problems with integrating Orange in with our Protovic faction?”

“Other than them being stronger and faster than average? No.”

“How much superior are they?”

“I don’t have enough data to say for sure, but I’d say they might have 50 or 100 years head start on other Commandos if they chose to train in that discipline...where base stats are concerned. Skills will be unaffected, unless they have a greater aptitude. I’ll need training data on them as soon as you have any.”

“You’ll get it. This mystery keeps getting deeper the further we dig.”

“We’ve got something big here, Clark. Maybe not V’kit’no’sat big, but in the ball park would be my bet.”

“Big good or big bad?”

Vortison shook his head. “There’s only one way to find out.”

5

July 19, 2970

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Brad-050 sat in his tower-top office with his feet up on his desk looking out the panoramic windows at the Protovic planet. It’d been 117 years since he’d taken on the task of building a Protovic faction within Star Force, and in all that time he’d never left them. It had been his job to get them started, but unlike the origin story of the other factions this one had seen him continue to guide the Protovic forward personally rather than from afar, such as Larissa had done with the Bsidd. They were pretty much independent now, though she kept tabs on them and helped them out from time to time.

The Protovic had developed quite far over the past century, but Brad still felt like they weren’t out of the woods yet, and not because of any lingering problems with the Veliquesh. That civilization and culture had been destroyed completely, but his Protovic were still young compared to the rest of Star Force and he never felt like he could leave them on their own. He’d grown more attached to them than he had his own Clan Beyond, which was about the same size to date. Unlike the Bsidd or Kiritas, the Protovic didn’t reproduce annoyingly fast and the vast majority of the 3 trillion Veliquesh that were rescued and imprisoned in the Broj System had never left there, dying out within the prisons when they refused to earn their freedom or attain their self-sufficiency.

Some that did had went to the ADZ, into Axius rather than to Aphat and the new Protovic faction. None that he knew of had gone to the independent Protovic, for they had wanted none of the Veliquesh to coexist in their society given the horrors that had occurred. A good number were still in Broj, on the Axius colony on Onyx where the prisons had been built and then slowly dismantled as they were no longer needed, leaving Brad with a far smaller population than most people thought given how many Veliquesh had been captured and brought back from that war.

Clan Beyond currently had a mixed population of 5 billion and was one of the midlevel Clans as far as numbers went. Clan Star Fox was the true juggernaut, with over half a trillion members at present and rising fast, made up mostly of Kiritas, while the overall Human population in Star Force had only risen to 23 trillion. They were still the minority within the empire, with the Kiritas outside the Clans numbering 189 trillion, the Kiritak at 237 trillion, Axius at 431 trillion and the Bsidd at 598 trillion, who were growing more rapidly than any other faction with resources from across the empire being funneled into creating the infrastructure to hold them all.

Growth within the ADZ had been moving at a furious pace the last 200 years for both Star Force and others, with a decent percentage of that still being made up by immigrants fleeing the lizards and other dangers. How Davis had managed to keep the cities building fast enough to hold them all was still a mystery to Brad, but he knew that the Kiritas/Kiritak populations, along with the Bsidd, were handled in a nonrandom fashion, meaning that all reproduction occurred under controlled situations and the number of eggs fertilized was the exact number that Star Force wanted, else those two races would have spread beyond the empire’s ability to feed and house.

Other populations like Humans, Calavari, and the Protovic reproduced randomly. All infants, or in the case of Protovic egg sacks, were taken into maturias but no population control was in effect. Sexual excursions and the choice of individuals wanting to reproduce dictated those numbers, meaning that Brad’s Protovic population 4.8 billion wasn’t going to be expanding rapidly. They weren’t a powerhouse in the empire and wouldn’t be in the foreseeable future, definitely not population wise, but Brad wanted to carve them out a niche of their own and still felt like the task was undone, hence his staying in direct control of them longer than even he had initially anticipated.

But today he was glad he was still here, for there was an issue on the horizon that required a trailblazer’s touch. Trey had reported back the situation the Protovic civilization he’d found in The Nexus was in and that he wanted them all moved into Star Force. 428,000 wasn’t a small number, but given the populations both he and Star Force were used to dealing with it was almost an afterthought. Fortunately not all of the facilities in Broj were dismantled, and he’d already ordered some of them to be prepped for the incoming ‘Oranges’ but with a different indoctrination program that he was still in the process of making.

These Protovic weren’t prisoners, but they did have a culture that needed eliminating…that being of the primitive mindset. Without a full linguistic write up that Trey had said would be forthcoming it was going to be difficult, if not impossible to fashion a full program, but he knew from his experience with the Veliquesh what the first few necessary steps would be.

Instead of isolation, these Protovic were going to be kept together in small groups for the duration of their indoctrination, save for those labeled troublesome. Brad was keeping some of the isolation wings as is in case they needed to be sent there, for he wouldn’t have one person holding up another’s progress if they proved disruptive. That said, if a group was committed to making the transition it would sometimes be preferable to have them move through the process together…in theory anyway. That was something he’d never been able to experiment with during the Veliquesh indoctrination, though in their case it was more about unlearning what they’d already learned.

For these Protovic primitives he figured it would mostly be a matter of teaching them what they’d never been exposed to and Trey said efforts to do that on site were already going well with a good portion of them, so he’d let them keep familiar faces around while they learned of Star Force and the way they lived, for that was what indoctrination was. Without it they’d be fish out of a barrel if they were just thrown into the Protovic society here on Nym.

Brad was willing and a bit eager to get his hands on another group of Protovic and to meet the challenge of bringing them into the fold, but it also opened up a larger question, and that was about their race in general. He’d been following the discoveries and questions flowing out of the research being done in Sol but the biggest question for him was whether or not they were going to start collection Protovic from across the galaxy and bringing them into Star Force?

Groups like the Shanplenix weren’t joining, though a small delegation had been sent to learn about Star Force via becoming residents in an Axius colony. More like obvious spies than anything, Star Force had welcome them in like many other refugees but Brad had no doubt they’d be filing reports about everything and everyone Star Force had access to and filling out more regions on the Shanplenix maps than they’d had to date.

That wasn’t a problem, for Star Force and the ADZ in general was an open society where information wasn’t withheld, but as of yet there were no actual migrations coming from the Shanplenix and he didn’t think there would be going forward, though he hadn’t written it off entirely. Immigrants from the independent Protovic had come over to join the Star Force faction in a continuous trickle of numbers, some coming through Axius first, but others specifically requesting to be allowed to join his people here on Nym.

They all had their own indoctrinations to come through, even those coming out of Axius that already were part of Star Force. What Brad had built here was unique, as was each faction, so he had a playbook already written as how to send people through their indoctrination cycle and get them up to speed so they could hit the ground running when they arrived here. All indoctrination facilities were in other systems, mainly Broj, and he intended that to remain a constant, meaning that only full Protovic citizens were allowed on Nym so there would be no ‘newbs’ around to slow things down.

He didn’t know how long it would take for these Oranges to get here, but he was certain they would and any stubborn ones would be accommodated elsewhere. They would not be confined to the prisons that most of the Veliquesh had lived out their lives in, but if there were some Oranges that didn’t want to become part of Star Force he’d make sure they lived better lives than they had back in their primitive villages. Brad would consider them a ward of the Protovic faction and leave the door open for them joining the rest of them on Nym at some point if they later made the choice, but he expected most of them to be eager to learn, based on Trey’s reports, and that meant a whole new avenue for population growth might be knocking on the trailblazer’s door.

As the search for more Protovic continued Brad was being fed the intel coming in even though he wasn’t handling any aspect of the searches and he knew that the Protovic colonies were starting to pop up like weeds on the map. There were at least rumors all the way from the home Voku territory out to beyond the Preema, and the deeper they dug, with currency rewards made public for any tips that resulted in a positive find, the more they were beginning to realize that there were Protovic spread all across this arm of the galaxy shotgun style.

Should they be inviting them to back to Star Force? They certainly couldn’t extend their borders out to them, at least not without creating supply problems. Yes, Star Force colonies were self-sufficient by design, but Davis kept them reigned in for a reason with the exception of the Tether. Star Force colonized regions rather than an individual system here and there, and Trey’s planet was a good example as of why. It was located within The Nexus’s domain, and Brad agreed they didn’t want to get into a potential conflict out there with no backing. Bringing these Oranges back was a good idea, but what about the others?

Should they offer it as an option? If they did he’d have to come up with a much more robust indoctrination program, for he couldn’t just let them move in here and make this into an Axius for the Protovic. That would undo a lot of what he had built, for they were a single unified faction with no exterior ties. Axius was a mix of more races and agendas than you could count, though after living there long enough they all tended to gel together, due in no small part to the enforced maturia system. Parents couldn’t raise their own offspring and pass on their bad habits, so long term problems tended to dissolve within Axius.

Brad didn’t want any of those problems coming here, but the more he learned about the Protovic the more he realized that they had been genetically engineered specifically to be reunited someday down the road. They still didn’t understand the particulars of that, but something big was going on here and he was sure that each of these long lost Protovic colonies were a seed put down to build or regenerate something very important sometime in the future.

Star Force was going to find out what that was, no matter how long the search took to find the other 4 variants. But even then, what he did with the Protovic faction was another matter, and it was days like today that he just sat in front of his office windows thinking for long blocks of time trying to figure out what the best way forward was, and what he wanted the Protovic to become within Star Force.

Right now they weren’t specialized. They had achieved economic self-sufficiency for the most part. Arc elements, Solari, Corovon, etc were still having to be shipped in, though he was in the process of locating a nearby system where he could put down a corovon mine. There were a few sites available, but he was still looking for the concentrations he wanted. There was none to be found on Nym, and only the barest of traces elsewhere in the system. Too small to be worth picking up, so he was going to need another source.

Right now he was importing it from the rest of Star Force and exporting very little. He’d wanted to go broadband and built up naval, aerial, mech, aquatic, and commando units of decent size from the get-go and had done the same with their industry. They were a ‘jack of all trades’ right now with nothing special about their faction, save for the robust commando tactics that their exoskeletons allowed. Other than that the rest of the factions did everything better than them, making the Protovic the backup band rather than a headliner.

Brad wanted to find them something to latch onto, but so far he hadn’t discovered it. Whatever these upgrades were could be their defining moment, but he wasn’t counting on that. It could also be something nasty that Star Force would need to wipe from their genome, so he was looking at it as a possible bonus rather than something he was planning on. Interesting to no end, but he still wanted to build up the Protovic in another way that he hadn’t quite put his finger on yet.

But regardless of what that path eventually became for them, he did need a higher population. He’d been tempted to offer incentives for reproduction, but didn’t want to reward such things. Getting laid and giving birth, even if it was to a fleshy egg sack, wasn’t exactly something of merit, just a function of biology. An important one for any civilization, granted, but with all of Star Force geared towards earning advancements the idea of giving rewards for reproduction didn’t feel right so he had never gone down that path. One needed to train to improve themselves in order to achieve and maintain self-sufficiency, not turn their body into a baby factory and wreck it by pumping out too many too fast and precluding any long training blocks.

Cloning was always an option, but one that Davis had warned against. He’d stated that Star Force was going to allow natural birthing procedures rather than trying to automate it, and they’d held to that with the development of each faction. For the Bsidd that didn’t mean much, for they laid eggs and that was the end of their natural procedure. In the case of Human and Calavari they carried their young internally until they were fully developed, then gave birth to functioning, albeit marginal, individuals.

The Protovic had the same procedure, only it was halved. They carried their young through the first phase of development, then gave birth to the egg sacks that operated independently through the final phase. Cloning, in this case, would involve bypassing that first stage and creating artificial wombs to grow the egg sacks in and, like Davis, he didn’t have a good feeling about that even if their biotech was to the point where that was possible.

But the more Protovic that he brought in from outside sources would mean more egg sacks that would then be fed into maturias, in addition to the individuals that had to go through indoctrination to enter. That would certainly help the Protovic’s population rate increase, but there was something appealing about the idea of gathering up the scattered remains of ‘lost’ colonies and rescuing them from their plights. Because, let’s face it, sending out or setting up colonies across space and letting them fend for themselves against who knows what was just plain cold.

Trey’s notes had said that these Oranges had once been a highly advanced civilization that had been blasted back into the stone ages. No one had come to help them, and the few that had survived had spawned the primitive people that he’d found and come to be friends with. In his gut Brad knew he wanted to bring in everyone like that they discovered, but what about the others?

He still wasn’t sure, and their independent Protovic ally wasn’t about to join Star Force. That had been established long ago and they were basically brothers sharing the same dorm room that was the ADZ. More than neighbors, but they weren’t going to be annexed into the empire. How many others out there should be, or would want to be? For that matter, how many of them were out there in the first place?

Brad had more questions than answers at this point, but the first Oranges should be reaching Broj within a month and he was curious to see how well they adapted and hoped he could learn enough from them to build a larger program to help reunite at least some of the scattered Protovic, regardless of whether or not they were able to collect a full-colored deck.

6

February 27, 3007

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Brad watched from the side of the sparring ring as one of his senior Protovic Commandos was taking on two of the Oranges in hand to hand combat and having a tough time at it, but moderately prevailing. He was the stronger of the three, but not by as much as he was used to. These Oranges were only a few years out of the maturia and yet the pair were giving him almost as much resistance as he could handle, with only his experience allowing him to take advantage of their coordination issues to let him get the best of them.

Undaunted, every time one of the Commandos in training were knocked down they’d spring back to their feet like a veteran, save for the fact they weren’t. Such reflexes and agility were typically reserved for those who had put in a century of solid training, but as Brad had seen for himself throughout their maturia development the Oranges were different from the rest of the Protovic and he was glad that he’d kept them all grouped together rather than mix the maturias, else there would have been problems.

All Protovic used the same standards, but he’d had to constantly revise the maturia program for the Oranges to take into account their physical superiority. Integrating them into the rest of his civilization was less of an issue, for there were other Protovic stronger than them but at the cost of years. A lot of the Oranges were leaping ahead in the Commando division because of their advantage, though the other segments of the military and society overall didn’t focus selectively on the physical skills were only moderately affected. More of a nice bonus to the skills they had to learn and develop, but with the Commandos there was an inequity involved that was resulting in the development of egos.

All of Star Force was predicated on earned advancement, which these Oranges were essentially skipping in the early stages. That gave them a false sense of superiority that Brad needed to quash while his Protovic civilization was still young. Give it enough time to develop some depth and this wouldn’t be an issue, but with very few veterans that could surpass the Oranges at present there was a lack of understanding on their part when they weren’t being given equal assignments and being treated like the younglings they were.

So Brad had brought the top 50 Oranges here for a lesson, beginning with his veterans showing them that they were still ahead of the newbs with orders from Brad to expose as many of the Oranges’ weaknesses as possible, both as a cure to their ego and as a way of making them solid enough that he could entrust them with some of the leadership positions. Right now Makron was doing a good job of proving that he could handle not one, but two of them at once, though what he was reading in the Oranges’ minds that were watching the sparring match and waiting their turn was not what he wanted.

They were finding excuses where they didn’t exist, lying to salve their egos…and those had to be removed, one way or another.

When Makron was finished with this pair he took a break and another veteran, this one a Red, went one on one with an Orange. Hadrick was younger than Makron, but still one of their top Commandos with more than 4 decades of combat experience against the lizards. He was part of a small unit that had fought in the Gvaris System alongside the Clans and was thoroughly ticked at the attitudes of some of the Oranges…which he was taking out on them now, though he couldn’t handle a 2v1 like Makron could.

He did take on three in a row, then one of the Oranges that hadn’t fought yet walked up to Brad and stared him down.

“If the point of this is to show that we’re not the best, you’re wasting your time, Archon. We already know that.”

“Do you?” Brad asked quizzically as the 50 Oranges, 12 Purples, and 6 Reds took notice and started taking a few steps closer as they listened.

The Orange, Benthral, nodded. “Yes we do. We’re close, but not there yet, though it’s only a matter of time.”

“Your advantage is a head start,” Brad corrected him. “Do not assume you will level up faster than the others.”

“But we already have,” Benthral countered.

“No, you passed through levels that you only had to work on a few skill areas to complete. Only now are you reaching levels where nearly everything requires an enhancement to achieve. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that you will level up through those any faster than the others, Protovic or other races alike.”

“We’re better than them,” the Orange insisted. “It’s just a matter of time until we hold all the top slots.”

Brad sighed and shook his head. “You think you know better than me?”

“I am wondering why you are missing the obvious,” he said respectfully.

“The Commando rankings, along with all others within the military, are designed to mark what you are capable of here and now. They are not determined by past actions, nor by future predictions. A level 10 Commando is the same as all other level 10s regardless of how many years it took them to get to that position. They measure the destination, not the length of the journey.”

“Our journeys are starting off on a more rapid pace that will continue past them,” Benthral said, pointing to the Protovic that had just finished defeating the other Oranges.

“You assume,” Brad insisted. “You may be right, you may be wrong. Do not count on anything or you will find yourselves in a world of trouble,” he said, addressing them all. “I have seen many Commandos, Archons even, advance rapidly through the levels to a point, then they plateau until they can find a way past it. Upgrading yourselves is not automatic, nor can you do the same things repetitively and get the same results. You constantly have to adapt and adjust to the challenges before you, and because of that you never know what tomorrow will bring.”

“But I can see words are mostly pointless right now. Your minds are made up. You are better than them, despite the fact that they just kicked your asses. Perhaps the level of ass kicking needs to be higher in order for you to absorb the lesson in it,” he said, pointing to the ring. “All of the Oranges, now. The veterans get to stand by and watch this one.”

There were several questioning glances on both sides as they moved, some away from the ring and others into it, packing it full of Oranges whose collective ego was stifling. Brad wanted to beat it out of them, but that wouldn’t work here. He had to embarrass them in order to get them self-analyzing.

The trailblazer walked to the side of the ring and stopped just outside it.

“Your mission is simple. Knock me to the ground and you win,” he said, then stepped inside and hesitated for a moment, raising his left hand and beckoning them forward with only his middle finger.

Before they could even register the insult he moved in a flash to his right and drove a palm into one of their chests, punching him backwards and into two others before playfully hopping back to his starting position.

“What? You don’t want to play? Or am I just too fast for your superior reflexes?”

One of the Oranges smirked, finding the sarcasm funny, and jogged towards Brad for a few steps…but the Archon didn’t respond to him. Instead he sidestepped him entirely, darting over to another Orange that was standing still and knocked his legs out from under him with a lightning quick leg sweep that came up into a stiffened knee that knocked another Orange onto his back with a blow to the chest.

“Come on guys, or are you just going to sit there and wait your turn. If you really think you have superior skills, then impress me.”

Egotistical as they were, these were still Star Force Protovic and they relished a challenge, suddenly reorganizing themselves into attack groups and communicating with hand signals to try and get a good angle on their opponent. It was rare when they had a chance to spar against a Human, let alone an Archon. The chance to go up against a trailblazer was rarer than rare, and he could sense they figured they had a chance if all 50 of them worked together.

He didn’t bother telling them in words that they didn’t, knowing that this was a lesson they had to learn directly through experience.

Making a conscious choice not to use his psionics, Brad gave a taunting laugh and hurled himself ahead and to the right, taking down three of the Oranges so fast the others barely had time to respond, then the Archon moved off and paused just long enough to laugh again, then he zipped to his left and knocked another down, ending with a slow, theatrical twirl that left him standing like a statue in partial bow.

“I’m getting bored, fellas,” he said as his face was down towards the ground, then he darted to his right and knocked down another pair, one with each hand as he drove palms into torso so fast and so hard they couldn’t have stayed on their feet even if they’d had time to prepare. “Any time now.”

That last taunt and his dance-like twirl with his hands spread wide spurred all 50 of them into a frenzy, coming at him from multiple directions. He responded with a yawn, covering his mouth with his left hand before whipping it around and grabbing the neck of one of the Oranges. He used the leverage there and tossed him across his body and into two others, knowing that his exoskeleton would keep his neck from snapping in the process. From there Brad made several sharp movements, dodging some of the incoming blows and landing a few of his own that spurted a body or two out above the crowd as the veterans looked on from out of bounds with varied expressions of humor and satisfaction.

The trailblazer would fight in a flash, then find a brief hole in their group and take a micropause long enough to throw another taunt before returning to fighting. He did it again and again, laughing while he was dodging and doing it literally right in their faces so much that the Oranges were starting to get mad. All 50 of them couldn’t even land a single blow to his body, let alone take him down to the ground or force him out of bounds. The spectacle continued for several gratifying minutes until he knocked several of them back long enough to give himself a bit of a podium to speak from.

“Enough,” he said, holding up a hand to keep the others back, then pointing to the spectators. “Let’s give you younglings some help, though I doubt it will do much good. All of you come at me, and remember this as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow,” Brad said before lunging back into the Oranges and bowling a dozen of them over before offering another taunting laugh as he danced over their bodies and back into a gap in the crowded ring.

“Oh great,” Makron said, heading for the ring. “We are so going to get our asses kicked.”

“Probably,” Laantrel agreed, “but there’s only one of him. Try and grab an arm or leg when he hits you and we might get lucky.”

“Worth a try,” Makron said as he ran into the ring along with the other 17 veterans, making it a 68 v 1 with Brad continuing to laugh and taunt even though there was virtually no room left in the ring for him to hide in, yet he still found a calm moment here and there to gesture in mocking fashion.

“Come on, you fight like Gnar,” he said between ducking and dodging several attacks without hitting back. “Are you guys fast or what?”

Two of the veterans ran towards him with their arms interlocked into a clothesline…the best attempt yet, but he ducked underneath it by dropping down to his knees in a short slide, then kicking back at one of them to launch himself into a handstand that he immediately flipped out of. Acrobatics aside, the longer one spent inverted the more vulnerable they were, especially when he wasn’t using Pefbar to augment his situation awareness.

Brad dropped back to the mat with his butt kissing his heels as three arms swung above him, missing his head and giving him a good counterpunch opportunity, but he passed on it. He didn’t need these guys disoriented from body blows, he wanted them thinking and hearing his insults clearly, so he rolled out between two of them and ran a couple steps, avoiding their tackle so quick and smooth he barely brushed against their bodies on the way out.

“You…guys…are so…damn…slow,” he said, weaving in and out of them despite there being no visible room to maneuver, then he got to the side of the ring and almost comically knocked two out of bounds. “Oops…sorry,” he said, ducking back in and maneuvering for moments to utter a word or two between whiffs, “did you…want…to stay in?”

The two Protovic that got knocked, one a Red and the other an Orange, glanced at each other as they sat on the floor, both perturbed by the mocking, and got back up and moving into the ring again this time focused on getting the Human. Their rivalry temporarily forgotten, they worked together with hand signals they all had learned in their identical training and began to organize what had quickly become a rabble.

The coordination and sentiments spread quickly, with the veterans implementing some strategies the Oranges hadn’t thought of…including sending several bodies down to the floor before the Archon knocked them down to act like land mines, trying to trip him up with kicks or grabs as he hopped over and through them. One got hold of his left leg for a split second, turning Brad around but he just spun out of it and danced over the roadblocks.

“Whoa…that one was…close. I’m…getting…worried now,” he mocked, and continued to do so for more than 20 minutes. Over and over he evaded them, never once using his psionics and relying only on his speed, agility, endurance, and strength, showing up all the Protovic no matter how hard they tried. During the sparring match he kept getting glimpses of their thoughts and emotions, letting him judge when and where to push his taunts. When he felt them finally coming around to the mindset of a proper beatdown he gave it another minute or two then switched tactics…going from evasion to offense and knocking them down with blows so strong that they literally took the wind out of the Protovic.

And he was hitting them on their exoskeletal patches every damn time, jarring them considerably without damaging them, but giving them the knowledge and fear of what would happen to their bodies should he miss and hit a ‘soft’ section. He never did, and before they realized what was happening they were looking at each other on the ground as the Human was prancing around the ring above them knocking down the last few so hard they had to catch their wind before getting back up again.

“I think you’ve had enough,” he declared with disdain, standing still and raising his arms above his head in an obvious stretch. “As for me, it’s time to get my workouts started. Thanks for the warmup.”

The Protovic…Orange, Red, and Purple…sat there gasping from the impacts and their fatigue as the trailblazer hop, skipped, and jumped his way out of the ring over their downed bodies and left them there, disappearing out a side door whistling as he went.

The Oranges sat there looking around at each other and the Reds and Purples, feeling a newfound kinship centered around anger at the Archon. The disrespect hadn’t been faked, nor had it been sarcastic. He had insulted all of them over and over again, with them being completely unable to lay more than a fleeting hand on him.

Eventually they all picked themselves up and went their separate ways, but even the veterans harbored a mild disdain for him following that day. Where they had been teammates before, now there was a bit of adversarialism present, and not from the sparring. That was just a part of being Star Force and one could get beat badly and just walk it off as a training exercise. This was different, because the taunts were personal and obviously meant to be that way. The Archon had shown a side of himself that the Protovic didn’t like, and though that didn’t mean they didn’t respect him anymore, it did mean they weren’t going to be so amicable going forward.

Before now he had been more of a wise mentor teaching them things they needed to know. Now he was that, but also a bit of a jerk, with that putting some iciness in their demeanor any time he was mentioned or they saw him in person.

But what they didn’t realize was that in the process of him becoming an adversary, all those that had gotten insulted and beat up were now on the same side rather than being rivals. The Human had become an overarching rival, so much so that the lesser divisions between them were gradually forgotten…which was exactly what Brad had intended. Makron understood that, having been around the trailblazer more than others, but some of those verbal stings didn’t fade away even for him

He put that down to the Archon’s skill in taunting, amongst other things. He had a knack for making the insults stick, and going forward a little wink or gesture here and there would bring that resentment back for all those who had been involved in that fight, like a healing wound that got a knife blade jammed back into it just as the pain was about to fade away.

Brad kept the wounds fresh, becoming the rival they needed in order for them to gel and stop focusing on besting each other. A few more sparring sessions with other Protovic and some ‘in your face’ spectacles of skill were enough to eventually solve the Orange’s ego problem. When being logical, honest, and friendly didn’t create common ground to bond people together, sometimes you need an enemy to rally around, with your common ground being your pain, insults, and inability to defeat them.

The trailblazers had learned that lesson well from the Black Knight, and Brad was more than happy to whip out that technique whenever necessary to help his Protovic…though the insults were more of an Archon flare that he’d added on. Vermaire was more the ‘silent and break your bones’ type.

7

January 31, 3011

Deeran System (Benoid)

Wexfa

Jarod-896331 slid to the right half a step to allow a Nevvan past him, for the lumbering quadruped could barely fit through the walkways on the Star Force station without bowling people over as it was. The waystation was on the interstellar link between the ADZ and Voku home territory that had become a huge economic boon, not only to the two empires but everyone else along the way. In fact there were far more non-Star Force races passing through than one would think with an occasional, but not too rare, Voku adding to the widespread mix of faces and limbs that the Archon cohabitated with on a daily basis.

Jarod was a level 96 acolyte assigned as security to this massive pancake-shaped commerce station in orbit of Wexfa, one of the member worlds in the Benoid, which was a miniaturized version of the ADZ situated between that huge bulk of worlds and the distant Voku territories. It was situated out in the middle of nowhere and the main watering hole on the trade route between the two and other branches heading off into the surrounding regions giving Star Force at least a small presence out among the mostly overlooked stretches of this galactic arm that had not yet encountered the lizards or the Skarrons.

There were no major powers out here, but a lot of lesser races that were using the Star Force infrastructure to strengthen themselves and their economies. This commerce station sat next to the original that had been built in this system and was now woefully inadequate. Dozens of others had also been built in orbit, but this was the largest and the primary, linked to a number of starports that would facilitate any travel down to the planet, but most people weren’t here to land on the surface, merely passing through or conducting business on the station.

It had become the economic watering hole for many nearby races and a stop off for travelers passing through, so it wasn’t unusual for Jarod to see new races popping up now and again. Whenever he did he made a note to check the database with his helmet cam recordings or, when he was without his armor, pulling up the hallway monitors so he could familiarize himself with everyone who was visiting his station. He was chief of security, in fact if not in name, and he wanted to be kept aware of what all their visitors were capable of just in case he had to take action.

Normally that wasn’t necessary, but now and then you’d get people here who weren’t familiar with Star Force and their protocols and he’d have to break up a fight or stop someone from killing someone else. That was one of the hazards of dealing with the masses coming in from the wilderness to get a taste of civilization and why this station was here…to screen out people who didn’t belong from accessing the planet or other orbital installations, making this the hotbed of activity and warranting a pair of Archons onboard in addition to Star Force security.

After letting the bulky quadruped pass, Jarod stepped back into the traffic and made his way out onto one of the main promenades that circled the station’s center like concentric rings. These were much wider and had hundreds of people passing each other every second, coming in and out of kiosks and making for a chaotic, yet mostly tranquil intermixing of races. Jarod was making a patrol, just out walking the grounds to let his armor be seen and to get a feel for what was going on while security manned all the checkpoints and monitoring stations. Jarod was backup, but could take the lead whenever he wanted while his partner was busy training, soon to switch positions in a few hours.

As he walked through the crowd scanning them visually and with his Ikrid, he sensed so many minds so fast that his first days here had given him headaches, though his skill had increased so much in response that his Ikrid levels were now well beyond the rest of his marks. He wanted to make ranger bad, though was one of the slower developing Archons. He prided himself on the fact that his Ikrid was all the way up to ranger level 77, for before coming here it had been one of his weaker areas.

Walking through the crowd he picked up a mind that was unusual, given that he didn’t see many of them out here. There was a Protovic somewhere in the crowd that he couldn’t see, and he made a point of heading in that direction and easing through the traffic to get a look and pull a tighter mental scan. He could just be a lone individual on private business, but Jarod wanted to know if he was Star Force or maybe from the independent Protovic nation, for so far they’d had no business correspondence this far out on the other side of the ADZ from their territory.

Seeing his mind before his clothing, Jarod soon realized that he didn’t think in English. That was a telltale sign that he wasn’t Star Force. Expecting to see an independent Protovic he was surprised when he spotted a robbed figure where the mind was coming from. Rather than a dark interior beneath the hood there was the glow of light typical of their race. Many preferred to wear fully body armor so as not to attract attention, and this one wearing robes made sense. It also wore gloves, leaving only a narrow slit between the dark red cloth to see through, but the light coming out made Jarod frown. The telltale green was there, but something wasn’t right.

Casually walking towards him but seeming to be going about his business, the Archon got in front of him and tried to look within the folds, having to use a little telekinetic tug to get them to part enough that he could see his face.

When he did an alarm bell immediately went off, for this Protovic was not from the independent nation nor any of the other colonies that Star Force had discovered in past years. He let the man pass him by as they walked separate directions, then he turned off into a kiosk where he paused, getting on his comm and contacting security so they could begin to set up a quiet trace on the individual.

They needed to know where he had come from and where he was going, preferably without stopping him and asking, though that was next on Jarod’s to-do list if they couldn’t scrounge the information via other means. He’d obviously arrived here by ship, so they just had to track down which one it was before he left and begin following the breadcrumb trail from there. If he didn’t speak English it might be difficult to interrogate him directly, though if he was here he probably spoke something that some of the locals did.

Jarod didn’t know many of the native languages out here aside from a few phrases and a decent amount of Vi’tol, but there were linguists he could recruit to the task if need be. Right now he just needed to get the ball rolling and not let this Protovic slip away, to which end he circled around after his comm call and began working his way through the crowd until he picked up the mind again with a little direction from the monitor watchers in the control room giving him directions.

He stuck with that mental signature and quietly tailed him, for he knew Star Force was looking for more Protovic out in the uncharted regions and he was pretty damn sure that none found to date had blue skin.

It took another three years for an expedition to be mounted and for the results to make their way back to Brad on Nym, for this Protovic civilization was located within Skarron territory. Fortunately they hadn’t been targeted for conquest, as a lot of systems within their domain were likewise spared/ignored, and this one had been riding out anonymously within a pocket of a massive nebula that only allowed two jumplanes in, one of which was too long for most starships to make accurately.

Their world was called Knalll, and while they had spacecraft they hadn’t spread beyond a pair of small colonies on the planet’s moons. These Protovic were essentially hermits, participating in trade with a few of their neighbors but otherwise remaining in place and doing…nothing. As Brad read through a summary of their history it seemed that there was a great catastrophe in the past that had essentially scared them into a status quo state where they were extremely reluctant to experiment or expand. He hadn’t dug into the ample material that had been sent back to him far enough to find out what it was yet, but the notes suggested that a minority on the planet did not take to the seclusion and chose to leave on their own merits to explore the galaxy.

Brad saw both genetic imperatives at work there, woven into the Protovic how long ago he wondered? And this was yet another example of what was probably a more advanced colony suffering a degrade. How many Protovic civilizations had been seeded out there? And how many had been wiped off the map over the years?

There had to be a lot if this long term plan had been thought through carefully. To date they’d found some 14 different Purple colonies out there, along with 2 Reds and 3 Yellows. Only one Orange so far, and this made the first Blue. He wondered what the distribution pattern had originally been and how much spreading had occurred after that point. Also, who had done the seeding? Were they still out there and the 8th variant that the Veliquesh hadn’t known about? There were a lot of questions popping into his mind that he still didn’t have answers for, but with this new find came something else of importance…another origin story.

This one didn’t specify how many variants there were, but it was said that the Protovic had been split apart long ago and destined to be reunited. The Knalllie had read that to mean all they had to do was wait and survive until they were found rather than trying to make it happen on their own. In fact, as Brad read through the notes further, that was the driving reason behind their world. To simply exist until that day, fearing that anything more would be wasted in that it might not match their destiny when it was revealed.

Tissue samples had been recovered, he saw, and were being brought back to Sol via a separate route than the…observers.

Brad read further in the notes, compiled by the second gen titan that had been dispatched to handle the first contact situation. It seemed the Blues were eager for the reunion to take place and had actually requested to send representatives to the communal Protovic world. Allysa-527 had agreed and was bringing/sending 72 of them here. Apparently that was a lucky number for them, and Brad should be expecting them within 3 or 4 months.

The Archon sat back in his chair and blew out a slow breath. This wasn’t the first tour he’d given to Protovic civilizations, but typically they only sent a handful, 6 or 7 at best. Sending 72 of them was overkill, not to mention it was a long journey for them to make. He expected they’d want to stay a while, though others had not. They’d been here to look and then go, but from the continued summary Allysa had sent it seemed they were not only interested, but hell bent on making this connection.

That could be a problem, because Brad wasn’t going to incorporate them into his faction as is. If they wanted to join up he’d take them, but they’d have to go through indoctrination and that wasn’t a friendly process from an outsider’s point of view, for it didn’t hold them to be equals until they earned that status. If these Protovic wanted to be included in the community it wasn’t going to happen their way, and the more he read through both her notes and the historical files he got the sense that they held a certain amount of disdain for non-Protovic and were planning on using Star Force as little more than a conference room while they negotiated with the other variants of their race here.

Allysa made a point to mention that they were referring to the Humans as ‘intermediaries’ and Brad could see the writing on the wall. Another reason for sending 72 of them was so they could maintain their pack mentality and not be absorbed into their new surroundings. Safety in numbers, so to speak, and it also suggested that they weren’t here just to look around but to make their presence known.

Going through their historical records over the next month, he also got the feeling that their ambition and dive hadn’t been eradicated by what had been a biological disaster on their world. They’d been experimenting with viral research and had accidentally wiped out 83% of their population. Since that day they’d instituted the ‘good enough’ protocol, keeping their civilization stable and intact without the risks inherent in attempted advancement. But that genetic imperative, in addition to any ambitions they had of their own, was lurking underneath and now had an avenue for release.

Brad got the feeling these 72 planned on doing a lot more than just observing, and he made a note to keep them away from the other long term observers here. There were 17 of them from 12 different civilizations, all of which had not wished a reunification at the drop of the hat. Some, Brad knew, were looking to develop closer ties with the Star Force Protovic without going so far to join them, while others were here to learn and report back, something that Brad allowed freely so long as they obeyed certain rules regarding their conduct. They basically couldn’t do anything other than look and listen, while having to put in at least a tiny workout each day to earn their right to remain here.

He’d argued that to understand Star Force, and this faction of Protovic, you had to understand training. So sampling it was a non-negotiable requirement for a long term observer post, which for some had already stretched into multiple decades with them becoming sort of ambassadors to the Protovic here rather than maintaining diplomatic connections with Star Force overall.

Brad was not going to allow the Blues access to them. He was going to have to come up with something unique to deal with them and size them up. Allysa’s notes aside, he wasn’t really going to get a feel for them until he could pick their minds, so he needed a chance to contain them for a while before settling on a final course…and he only had a matter of weeks to figure it out and make the necessary arrangements before they arrived.

Another little challenge in this overall mystery, and one that he was more than willing to take on. He’d freed other Protovic from cultural shackles and ignorance before, so this would just be a new variation on an old practice…but the trick was that no culture was identical to another, and by that measure new forms of stupidity could blindside you very easily.

Logic was predictable, for there was an inherent reason to it, but stupidity was quite random and almost impossible to predict unless you’d witnessed a particular version before. With new cultures you never knew what to expect, but with Allysa’s notes Brad hoped to be able to get at least one step ahead of them and then take it from there.

With the knowledge that the Blues also knew of the other variants and the reunification idea, Brad finally accepted that this Protovic recombination, whatever it was, was going to occur eventually somewhere, somehow. And if that was the case he wanted it to be on Star Force terms, meaning that there was going to be a cultural war taking place, and one that the Blues looked eager to start engaging in.

Whatever the hidden genetic material contained, Brad knew he needed Star Force to be in possession of it. If it was half as important as he guessed, let some other group attain it and you could end up with a very powerful enemy if the lesser physical enhancements of the Oranges were to be taken as a sign of things to come.

Whereas before he’d wanted to reunite the Protovic for sentimental reasons, now it was clear there was a greater reason to do it. He had to be the driving force behind it, utilizing Star Force as the medium and collection point, and not let the various civilizations call the shots. To that end his Protovic faction had to stay pure, without bringing in any fresh bodies without them first becoming part of Star Force.

Play ‘nice’ and just let them all co-mingle here and he’d be inviting a disaster. This had to happen on his terms or not at all, and to that end he realized he needed to keep the Blues isolated immediately upon arrival…and even before that.

He sent a message out to the rest of Star Force, wherever the Blues’ transit point may be, and instructed that they not be given access to any other Protovic under any conditions. They were to be isolated for the duration of their visit until he said otherwise.

Brad knew it was possible that they had already met some, but he doubted they had run into any non-Star Force Protovic yet and he wanted to keep it that way. If the Blues didn’t want to play ball with him then they’d remain anonymous as far as the rest of the galaxy was concerned, and they could sit quietly alone on their world for as long as they liked. They weren’t here to pass judgement on Star Force, but rather the other way around and he knew he had to make that point immediately upon arrival.

To that end he began drawing up program plans, allowing for multiple contingencies prior to his first meeting them and getting a sense of how much resistance they would put up to Star Force philosophy.

8

March 18, 3054

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

“You busy?”

Brad glanced up from his short holographic displays on his desk and locked eyes with the glowing red orbs of Jadren, his one and only naval Admiral. “Always. Need something?”

“Just wanted to report that the fleet is ready to leave.”

“Then you have permission to depart. Happy hunting.”

“Why aren’t you going?”

Brad sighed. “Someone has to stay back and mind the store.”

“The other trailblazers are out fighting the lizards, but you haven’t been since before I was born. I know your naval skills far surpass mine, so why aren’t you leading our fleet, or your Clan Beyond, or a Mainline fleet out to conquer more lizard worlds and push towards their homeworld like the others?”

Brad touched a button and made the holograms disappear. “Worried you’re not up to the task?”

“Perhaps a bit, but more confused as to your priorities. Is there something more important for you to be doing?”

“We each take on the missions we choose, and if I felt you weren’t up to the task I wouldn’t be sending you or our fleet. But the mission already has a mage commander and Aris is more than up to the task of picking off some small lizard systems with your help, so my presence is unnecessary.”

“But you could be going after some of the bigger ones like the others are.”

“I could be. Right now my work here is more important.”

Jadren pulled a chair over and spun it around, sitting down and resting his arms on the backrest. “That’s the part I don’t understand.”

“There was a great deal you didn’t understand when you first came out of the maturia. Now you do. But there are a great deal more things that you do not know, and are not privy to, that I have to deal with.”

“Anything we can do to help lighten the load?”

Brad snorted. “You are the load.”

Jadren frowned, but the Archon held up a hand to forestall any reply.

“By that I mean that the future of the Protovic is not as assured as you might imagine. There’s still a lot in flux that I have to manage.”

“We seem pretty solid. Is there a problem I don’t know about?”

“Challenges heading into the future rather than current problems.”

“Is this about that colony of Whites that were brought back?”

“Yes and no. How close have you been paying attention to our rosters?”

“I watch the active lists, but I don’t know who all you have tucked away going through indoctrination.”

“Let me share that with you then,” Brad said as he brought up a series of holographic lists and maps, not in the sense of geography, but in the designs of the Protovic faction. The 5 military divisions were listed, along with all the civilian branches, and then there was a section off to the side that was labeled ‘Indoctees’ that Jadren had never seen before.

“As you can see, there are quite a few Protovic that want to join us but aren’t ready yet.”

“That’s more than a few,” the young Admiral said, looking at the demographics. The Whites that they’d discovered on the very bottom of the galactic plane were there, all 8 billion of them that they’d transported back here leaving nothing behind but an empty pair of planets. Then there were a small number of Purples coming in from either Axius or one of the independent Protovic nations. The one that actually bore that name had been supplying them with a steady stream of volunteers, while the others saw bunches coming over at irregular times. Some wanted to join Star Force, others wanted to get away from their previous lives, but no one was allowed straight into Brad’s faction without proving themselves first.

Others were going into Axius, where there was no extensive indoctrination gauntlet to run. They were allowed to live there and adjust as needed, mixing in with the rest of the varied races and literally being overwhelmed by it all for Axius was so large that a million refugees could be lost within it easily and Star Force made a habit of splitting up large incoming populations between different planets and systems rather than to allow any group to stake out a bit of a colony as their own. If they were going to live in Axius then they were going to be part of Axius, not a rogue entity competing with the rest of the faction.

But the Protovic were different, and Brad had made them that way on purpose. They were unified in purpose and working together more like a Clan than a faction. There was a civilian aspect to them, but it was much more diminished than in other factions. Axius had the largest civilian wing, while the Protovic had the smallest. There was no mandatory work, as such was forbidden within Star Force, but most Protovic were interested in helping their faction grow rather than pursuing solely personal agendas.

And besting Canderous in that category was no small feat, as Brad had noted previously. No, the Protovic were the hardest working, most on task faction within Star Force despite their small size…which was why Jadren didn’t understand why their trailblazer was constantly watching over them rather than going out and fighting like the others were.

“I didn’t realize there were so many waiting in line to get in.”

“Not in line,” Brad clarified, “for each is on an individual program. Most of these groups are undergoing isolation protocols in order to speed up their indoctrination. Only a few are on the slower group plans. Mostly by choice, because they want to get here as soon as possible.”

“I didn’t realize we were that popular amongst the other Protovic colonies.”

“It depends on who you’re talking about. A lot of them just want to be left alone, officially, but when there’s a means for individuals to make a choice and travel here we get a steady flow of the curious. As for their governments, the Whites are the exception.”

“What made them all want to join?”

“Part of it was because they feel a kinship with the rest of you. The other part was because one of their worlds was dying. Their moon was in a descending orbit, and that rid them of their sentimentality.”

“So they came here because they had no other choice?”

“Actually we offered to give it a nudge, but they still requested to join us.”

“Did you give it a nudge?”

“No. That would have required building some considerable infrastructure on the surface.”

“Really? If it was a gradual deterioration wouldn’t a couple of command ships have been enough to push it?”

“Yes, but we would still need to build a device that would allow the necessary force to be transitioned to the planet rather than burying the ships into the surface. Big as they are, the command ships would punch right through the planet’s crush given enough sustained thrust.”

“Interesting…I hadn’t considered that.”

“Because we normally extend IDF around whatever we’re hauling.”

“And we can’t do that with a planetoid.”

“Not that big. Not yet, anyway.”

Jadren looked at him with a raised eye ridge. “Pet project?”

“Not that I know of. But I am familiar with the seda gravity drives and their planet-like dimensions.”

“Well then,” the Admiral said, sinking a finger into the holographic data. “What does this have to do with your staying here?”

“For your ears only.”

Jadren nodded.

“The variants are not just a curiosity that we’re pursuing. They’re deliberate.”

“How so?”

“I’m not going to tell you everything just yet. The time isn’t right. But there is a genetic impulse imbedded within all Protovic to seek each other out and bring the variants together from across the galaxy. This is why I think so many individuals and groups are coming to us and willing to go through the pain in the ass indoctrination to get here. There’s a subtle tug on their subconscious tipping the scales of their priorities, whether they realize it or not. We’ve been keeping the Protovic in Axius split up for the most part so this reunification can’t occur there, though we are seeing a few individuals seek each other out regardless of the geography. It’s not much right now, but I have observed that the more Protovic there are in one place the greater the drive becomes.”

“What kind of ‘drive’ are you talking about, exactly?”

“To seek each other out, or more specifically, to seek out other colors. Genetically something will occur when all 8 variants are gathered together and some special criteria are met. This is going to happen soon or later, and if it is going to happen I need to be the one guiding it so it happens on our timetable and on our turf.”

“Whoa, wait a second,” Jadren said, standing up from his chair. “What is going to happen?”

“We don’t know for sure.”

“You’re worried it might be something bad…or dangerous, that you don’t want falling into the wrong hands. Or something dangerous that could harm the Protovic themselves outside of Star Force?”

“All of the above and more.”

“Did you say 8 variants?”

Brad nodded. “We’re still missing one. The Whites were number 7.”

“I thought that makes 6,” Jadren corrected him.

“Check again,” he said, pointing at the indoctee lists. “There’s a small group of 600 or so Aquas that we discovered a while back, or actually the Voku did. They were all in a Menqwel prison. We brought them back here and I have them in a full prison isolation similar to what your ancestors were put in and few came out of. These Aquas have a small chance, if they work hard and long enough, of earning their freedom. I don’t know if any of them will make it, none have seemed too inclined as of yet to fully commit, but there were a handful of eggs collected from them and those 18 Protovic Aquas are currently nearing the end of their maturia days.”

“Why didn’t I know about this?”

“None of them are here yet. When the first one arrives I was going to let the rest of you know.”

“So we’re missing one puzzle piece…for what? What are you worried about happening? Are we in danger? You said genetic, does that mean our offspring or that we’ll actually, physically change?”

“Until we get genetic samples from all the variants we can’t be sure, but we think there will be a physical change in any Protovic affected, not just future offspring.”

“And you don’t know what this change will be?”

“Not yet, no.”

“So everything we’ve built could be in jeopardy?”

“Possibly.”

“And how does your staying here help solve that problem? I assume that’s the reason you’re not off kicking ass.”

“The problem is twofold,” Brad explained, choosing to trust one of his most loyal Protovic with more information than any of the others knew yet. “The genetic transformation is an unknown, but we know it will only happen when all 8 variants are assembled, along with some other things that have to take place. It seems each variant has to undergo an upgrade prior to them all combining. The Oranges have already underwent theirs, which is why they have a physical head start on the rest of you.”

Jadren stared at him for a moment, putting those two pieces together. “And you didn’t feel like telling us this before?”

“We’re going to figure this out before it can cause a problem,” Brad promised him. “We’ve got the appropriate people on the taskforce, so telling the rest of you would just give you cause to worry without the ability to help. Better to keep you all in the dark until there is actually something to do.”

“So why are you telling me now?”

“You accusing me of being a slacker. Can’t have that,” Brad said sarcastically.

“Seriously.”

The Archon glanced down at his desktop for a moment. “I don’t know how this is going to play out, but so long as the Protovic are following an impulse to gather I want them gathering here and adding to our strength. But it has to be as a part of Star Force. In some ways I see them all as family, in others I recognize the threat they pose. When the Blues first came here they wanted to call the shots and they were quite vocal about not being able to. They tried to turn some of you away from Star Force and begin assembling a different type of union before we sent them packing. Those that have come back are doing so on our terms now and as you can see there are a lot of them.”

“You’re worried that there’s more than just a genetic imperative to assemble,” Jadren surmised. “You think it might be something cultural as well. Something that would erode us from the inside out.”

“No matter how much genetic impulses one has, you always has a choice. Sometimes you just don’t realize it. A strong mind guides itself. A weak mind follows and is ruled by the genetic impulses. Star Force trains all of us to develop into strong minded individuals, so…”

“You’re trying to counter a potential threat by bringing as many of us into the fold as possible.”

“And at the same time further develop our little piece of the empire. The changes that this reunification will make may very well be beneficial. Time will tell, but if it is something undesirable we’re going to rewrite your genetic code to make you immune to it.”

Jadren straightened, sensing another layer to Brad’s reluctance to leave the Protovic. “You can do that?”

“Not yet, but we’re learning. And the more variants we find the more data our medtechs have to figure out what’s going on and how to deal with it.”

“You’re trying to save us from a potential doomsday on the horizon.”

“If there is one, I need to shield you from it before it happens.”

Jadren looked down at his glowing hand, striped in both green and red bioluminescent bands that were mostly uniform amongst all Protovic, but always slightly different per individual. “Is this a natural thing or engineered?”

“I can’t say for sure, but the going theory is engineered. There have also been bits of mythos collected from the various civilizations that refer to a reunification and the glory that will follow. Stories that they have had before they had contact with other variants.”

“As if someone had told them what was coming…and scattered them?”

“Something went down. Right now we have mostly guesses.”

Jadren was silent for a long moment, with Brad peeking in on his thoughts as he sorted through all this. “What’s the last variant color?”

“We don’t know, nor did we know any of the others prior to finding them, save for some rumors, some of which turned out not to be true.”

“And you don’t know how many civilizations were out there originally?”

“We’ve found evidence of some that have since been destroyed, so we assume there were many of each variant. We have also found a genetic imperative, stronger than the assembly, that urges you to turtle up and survive. We think this is why a reunification hasn’t occurred yet, prompting each civilization to err on the side of caution before reaching out to group with others.”

“By design?”

Brad nodded.

“So someone put our ancestors out there in danger and told them to survive, and you know that a lot of them didn’t make it?”

“That seems to be the case.”

“And it makes you worry that whoever started all this were dishonorable bastards?”

Brad looked him straight in his glowing red eyes. “That thought has occurred to me.”

9

November 1, 3056

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Brad stood waiting on the edge of the landing platform as a dropship came down through the overhead shield dome that was keeping bugs and birds out of the city’s interior while maintaining the open air approach. The higher mass of the ship easily punched through the weak shield that was designed to dent rather than lightly crunch anything hitting it and flew in to the otherwise empty pad reserved for special traffic. The Eagle-class dropship lowered its boarding ramp and a trio of medtechs walked out with a host of cargo pallets following them, each pushed by techs wearing dark green uniforms that had black stripes, indicating that they were handlers for precision and sensitive equipment. Computer hardware fell under that category, but Brad knew that’s not why these were here.

Of the three medtechs dressed in their aqua-colored uniforms, most prominent among them was someone he truly had never expected to see anywhere outside of Sol, with the other two being his support staff, he assumed.

“I’m surprised you came here yourself,” Brad said as he walked out to greet Vortison.

“If something goes wrong I can’t fix it from Earth,” the geneticist argued.

“Have you even been outside of Sol before?”

“Twice. This makes the third. You have some place for us to set up shop?”

“Are you sure you can do this without a pyramid trip?”

“Our tech is sufficient. It’s the manipulation that is the question mark…which is why I’m here in case onsite improvisation is needed.”

“Alright then, follow me. You have enough guys to move everything in one trip or you need some extra hands?”

Vortison glanced over his shoulder, with Brad’s glance being directed to one of the techs.

“There’s a lot more where this came from,” she said.

Brad reached out telekinetically to one of his people in a nearby control facility and requested assistance as he looked at the other two medtechs. “Should I know you two?”

“Only after today,” the man said. “Name’s Brenson.”

“Tahiri,” the other said, offering the Archon a nod.

“They’re here to relieve me of some of the mundane work,” Vortison explained, “and to catch any mistakes I make before they can be implemented.”

“Does that happen often?”

“Like never,” Tahiri muttered.

“This is too important to take chances with,” Vortison insisted.

“Agreed,” Brad said as a handful of Protovic emerged from a nearby door. “There’s your extra hands. I want everything moved together. It’s a bit of a hike to get to your lab.”

“I assume you have volunteers,” Vortison said plainly in the otherwise empty hangar bay, for they’d come down into what amounted to a private facility within the Protovic city and not one of the primary spaceports.

“I do.”

“Purples I assume?”

“Of course. You can do this, right?”

“I believe so. If I can, do you have a plan for how it will be implemented within this society?”

“Yep. That’s the easy part.”

“How so?”

“We already do it for Archons.”

“Hmmn. I expected a bit more widespread distribution.”

“We can always expand later.”

“True,” Vortison said as more crates on hover sleds came down out of the dropship hold. “I’ll leave that to your judgement then. Get me to my lab and we’ll make this happen.”

“How long are you staying?” Brad asked as he turned and walked side by side with the man towards the landing bay exit into the city’s interior corridors.

“As long as necessary. Perhaps longer if a few subsequent inquiries pan out.”

“You’re getting close?”

“Closer. I have been able to formulate some guesses though, which we’ll get into later. Right now we need to get this equipment set up.”

“How long?”

“Two hours tops,” the hardware tech answered when Vortison deferred to her.

“How soon do you want the volunteers?”

“About 15 minutes later.”

Prentha and four other Protovic stood next to Brad in a medical lab off limits to the rest of the colony as a handful of medtechs worked their various devices setting up for the first trial run…which was to be him. Previously he and the others had been recruited in a pool of some 500 that they had to earn their way out of. All of them were high level veterans within the Protovic faction of Star Force and the competition had been fierce. Prentha was surprised he’d been one of the five to make it through, then he’d been brought into the trailblazer’s office for a private conversation in which he was told what this program was about.

He’d been asked then if he wanted to continue, with Brad noting that four others had declined when asked. That meant Prentha may have been in the top 9 rather than top 5, but that ultimately didn’t matter. However the candidates shook out, he’d been selected for an experimental biological upgrade that was apparently only applicable to Purples. The other four with him were the same, and they’d been told what was actually happening was an unlocking of some dormant genetic code, so even the medtechs and the Archon didn’t know what would happen…hence the potential danger.

Knowing that this was the first time they’d ever tried this made him unbelievably proud, as was the presence of the Human medtechs that had come out here all the way from Earth. He’d never been to the Star Force capitol before, nor had anyone else he’d known. Travel there was highly restricted, more so than the other factions. Axius had open access, but like this world Earth was off limits to general tourist traffic, as was the entire star system. One had to get permission to go there or have a free pass ID that he did not have, so whenever someone that lived and worked in Sol came here he knew they were on a special mission.

How long Nym would be closed to outsiders he didn’t know but other factions, including the Humans, had some worlds where travelers could come and go, Star Force citizens or not. Thus far the Protovic had been shut off completely, with rumors that that was going to change in time, but all the factions kept some worlds exclusive to themselves and Earth had always been the most secluded of the Human worlds. He didn’t know what it was like there, but all the most important people in Star Force had ties to it. If there was a problem that couldn’t be solved, you sent it to Earth…or had people from Earth come out to solve it, including the Archons.

The fact that they had a trailblazer of their own on Nym running and growing their faction was impressive enough, but now that these medtechs had come out it meant something big was going on and he was glad to be a part of it. Star Force had taught him that no one, anywhere, at any time was ever completely safe, so if there was extra danger in this procedure he was ok with it. The experts from Earth were here and so was Archon Brad. If he couldn’t trust them, he couldn’t trust anyone.

“Prentha, you ready?” the Archon asked.

The Protovic nodded. “Still not sure what this is all about, but ready and willing to dive in head first.”

“We’re not sure either, hence you five are the prototypes. Step into the machine,” he said, pointing to the slightly altered copy of the V’kit’no’sat medical station that Star Force was now using in a few exclusive locations. It wasn’t quite as advanced software wise, but they’d finally been able to replicate the hardware and had fashioned a duplicate device built to Star Force design specs and using their own altered version of the advanced tech.

Prentha walked over to the booth-like chamber and stepped inside. One of the medtechs pulled a mechanical arm down across the entryway completing a thin ring around him waist. “What do I need to do?”

“Put your hands on the sphere in front of you and keep them there until I say otherwise,” one of the medtechs instructed.

“Alright,” Prentha said, placing both of his glowing green/purple hands onto the cool sphere.

“You may feel a slight numbing sensation. Do not be alarmed,” the medtech said a moment before he lost the feeling in his hands…or actually he could still feel them he just couldn’t move them. He wasn’t trying to, but it felt like he was firmly rooted in place.

“Connection made, now just hold still. You’re going to have tissue changes in your body occur at a rapid pace. There should be no pain involved, but your senses might get disoriented. Try to remain still and standing for the next few minutes.”

“Will do,” Prentha said as the slight numbing sensation began creeping up his arms and into his torso, spreading throughout his body.

“Why is this taking longer than us?” the trailblazer asked.

“Because we wrote this program and it hasn’t been polished over the millennia.”

“How much tissue?”

“A fair amount. Judging by the uptake rates he’s going to gain a couple pounds.”

“So he’s active now?”

“Yes. The timelock has been removed and the growth rate of the new tissue is being ramped up slowly. Without a base to work off of this is unexplored territory and I don’t want to force the rates as fast as the equipment is capable of doing. Right now the…”

The medtechs words blurred out from there as the outside world got foggy as far as Prentha was concerned. Soon he lost his concept of time and was awash in disorientation that passed without him knowing how long he had been incapacitated. The numbing retreated from his body faster than it had taken over and he found himself standing with his hands on the sphere like before, save his legs had repositioned into a wider stance.

“How you doing?” Brad asked, his voice sounding a bit odd.

“I’m fine…whoa.”

“What?”

“Everything sounds weird. I can…I don’t know how to explain this,” he said, looking down at his hands.

“Take your time,” the medtech urged. “Tell us what you can but please remain inside the machine. You can remove your hands from the sphere now.”

Prentha pulled them off and flexed his fingers, feeling a rush of adrenaline. “I can feel everything.”

“Try to be more specific.”

“I can feel what I’m looking at. Its dimensions. I can even feel what’s behind me. I can taste the air and smell…it’s like my nose just opened up. My hearing is like everything is super loud and distorted. Is this supposed to happen?”

“I believe so. The data we’re getting from you now is promising, but for the next few weeks you’ll need to wear one of these biomonitors.”

“Here, take this one,” Brad said, but didn’t move a muscle. A weird sensation prompted Prentha to turn around where he saw a tiny circular device floating in the air behind him.

“Proximity sense confirmed,” the medtech noted.

“It goes on your forehead,” Brad said, floating it over to him and attaching it with a telekinetic press. “It’ll transmit data back to our systems wherever you go within the city.”

“You can step out now,” the medtech said as the other stepped forward and raised the mechanical arm. “Number 2 please.”

“Ileen, you’re up.”

Prentha passed the female Protovic on the way out, brushing arms with her and getting a huge emotional surge.

“Whoa…you’re a lot hotter than before.”

The trailblazer and medtech exchanged glances, but it was the medtech that spoke, more to himself than anyone else. “You’ve received a sensory package upgrade. Biologically speaking, sexual attraction is tied into one’s senses as a software add-on. This could have an effect on that.”

“Do you mean we’re going to get more horny?” Ileen asked, stopping a step outside the machine.

“A small possibility,” the medtech admitted. “This is probably just a reaction to the new senses. Give it some time to sink in and I think your sexuality will adjust accordingly. You might have a period of heightened incentive during the transition though.”

“We’re not permitted to mate, right?”

“Not for the foreseeable future, no,” Brad confirmed. “Prentha, think you can control yourself for a while?”

The Protovic laughed. “I’m not that bad off, I’ve just never seen a girl look this way before. Use your Archon superpowers and see for yourself.”

Brad was silent for a moment and Prentha didn’t feel anything different while he was, but that wasn’t news to him. It was well known amongst the Protovic that the Archon could read their minds, and they often made weird or rude thoughts when passing him just to test whether or not he was taking a peek inside, some of which he responded to in hilarious ways. His level of sarcasm was not to be underestimated, and rather than feel violated the Protovic had come to welcome him looking over their shoulder, so to speak. They had nothing to hide from him and resented anyone who did.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “She is extremely hot.”

“For real or an illusion?” Ileen asked, accepting the compliment with skepticism.

“He’s got more information about you than before. As if you were looking at a colorless sensor feed and suddenly the color returned. You’re in ‘color’ now, as is everything else, so all the other chicks probably look just as hot.”

“Thanks.”

“When you’re finished with your transformation you two can stare at each other over in the corner,” the trailblazer offered, then glanced at the lead medtech. “I think we can confirm they’ve got spidey senses. How much so we’ll have to figure out through training, but Prentha can feel things in proximity. He didn’t react immediately though, so I don’t think this is on Pefbar level.”

“It’s not,” the medtech said, looking at a monitor. “But it’s also more than that. There are upgrades to all of their existing senses plus the addition of the ‘proximity’ tissue. I’m not detecting any anomalies in the flash growth, so let’s get the other four through and start with the testing.”

“You still up for this Ileen?” Brad asked.

“I was until the ‘horny’ part. Promise me you’ll restrain me if I get the urge to jump one of these guys?”

“I promise.”

“Then I’m good to go,” she said, stepping inside the machine and placing her hands on the sphere. “Zap me.”

“And?” Brad asked hours later in Vortison’s temporary office as he was pouring over the biomonitor data.

The geneticist shook his head slowly. “I thought I understood this before, but reading code and seeing it implemented is considerably more different than I allowed. This is the first time I’ve ever dealt with a complete unknown. Every other code sequence I knew what it would be in physical form from previous experience or from database entries. Individual aspects always crop up leading to unexpected variations, but this is far beyond that.”

“Is that your way of saying there’s a problem?”

“Not with these 5, as far as I can see. My predictions as to what the other upgrades are are now suspect, because I didn’t get these right. What the big score will be is now in even more doubt if I can’t interpret the smaller bits of code correctly.”

“How close are you to the other bits?”

“Reds will be soon. My staff back on Earth are still working on it and are close to finalizing. I thought about delaying until we had both, but decided it was best to run this trial before risking the Reds. I’m glad there were no anomalies and they’re all unharmed, but my faith in my abilities had taken a serious hit in the foresight department.”

“You’re still missing a variant anyway, so I never expected a complete picture.”

“But I’ve been able to come to some conclusions, and not all the ones I informed you about previously. Now I have cause to second guess them all.”

“Meaning the only way we’ll know for sure is to turn it on and see what happens?”

“Yes…though it won’t turn on without our say so. The biomonitors are confirming that these five are not transmitting activation material. We were able to turn it off successfully. Hopefully that’s permanent, but only time will tell.”

“Can we do the same for the Oranges?”

“In theory yes, but I’d like some more time to study this case before we start widespread implementation of the genetic blocks.”

“You’re blocking or removing the activation material?”

“At this point deactivating so they’re not produced, but the mechanisms to produce them are still in their genome. I’m not close to being confident in our ability to strip them away entirely without side effects.”

“Even more so now?”

“The more data we get the better I’ll be able to make predictions, but right now my confidence in that department is lacking. These sensory upgrades are different than I expected, in multiple ways, and I’m not sure why yet.”

“Different good or different bad?”

“Nothing is bad as far as I can tell, it just works differently than I assumed…in some places. Others did come through more or less as expected. That is even more annoying, because if my method of prediction was flawed it should render them all incorrect. A partial success is more problematic.”

“Ultimately I don’t need predictions, just results. And for the record, we don’t always predict lizard strategy correctly. They adapt well, and have caught us off guard on more than one occasion.”

“Thank you, but I doubt you’re very happy when that happens.”

“We don’t let it get to us. It’s a challenge and we just focus on working the problem in round 2…or 2,000 at this point.”

“But you don’t do the harm if you’re wrong, they do. Working with genetics is me risking other people’s bodies and lives on me being right.”

“Try attacking a city and only shooting the bad guys.”

“All the lizards are bad guys.”

“We don’t only fight the lizards, and I’m still waiting for the day where we find a lizard that doesn’t want to fight us. If and when that happens how do you think we’ll feel about all the cities we’ve razed from orbit?”

“Unknown strangers versus people I’m looking at face to face, though I suppose both situations hold unique perils. I just don’t want other people to pay for my mistakes.”

“Same here.”

10

April 30, 3058

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

“What are you going to do?” Kip asked Brad as they both stood in an observation post high above one of the larger advanced training centers on Nym where the ‘enhanced’ volunteers were going about a variety of training drills. It was little more than an elevated platform, but the windows were energy shields that only allowed light in and looked black to those on the outside. To the pair of trailblazers they had an open air perch to watch the calisthenics, sparring, and running drills across the park-like terrain, though the entire facility was indoors.

“The Oranges already have their enhancement unlocked,” Brad reminded him.

“Have any left this planet for Axius or elsewhere?”

“Not yet, but when they do the females will spread it. Possibly beyond Star Force boundaries. These aren’t psionics, but they’re abilities that the general populations of the galaxy do not possess. I have the feeling that if we let this get out we could be grooming more powerful enemies than we already have.”

“These timelocks are going to expire anyway.”

“Eventually yes, but Vortison said they’re more than just a countdown. Experience factors in, with whatever this group of Oranges went through advancing their timetable. He thinks it’s skill related. Those that prove themselves worthy by some internal gage are shoved ahead on the path…or it might be a safety mechanism designed to insure that those who are opened to the big prize aren’t pond scum.”

“The tests we did of the independent Protovic suggest it will be millennia before their timelocks expire, and they all seem to be on the same clock as far as we could tell.”

“Did you tell the Chancellor?”

Kip nodded. “He wants to know what’s going on as much as we do.”

“Does he want the upgrades?”

“He’s worried about unknowns, but the sensory package is very appealing to them. Fear of what they might unlock had kept him from making a direct request. Right now he just wants information.”

“I’m more worried about the Reds,” Brad admitted. “We handpicked the volunteers to make sure they were loyal, but their intelligence has spiked considerably. Give that to someone with less than adequate scruples and they could cause a lot of damage.”

“How close are you to the others?”

“Vortison is back on Earth working on it, though he’s complaining about the back and forth and even teased about setting up here permanently.”

“So not long then?”

“He’s close with the Aquas.”

“You only have a handful of them anyway?”

“Very few, and a lot of them are still in prison. We’ve got full maturia batches coming through the system now, thanks to some volunteer surrogates, so by the time Vortison figures it out we should be able to find at least a few viable candidates.”

“Why the tinkering? All you really needed was a tissue sample.”

“To chase the big prize, yeah, but I want uniformity in the maturia classes. The Oranges have had to have a different program and if we end up going that route with the others they’re all going to need to start out with peers.”

“So you are thinking about unlocking the general population?”

Brad cringed. “The Oranges aren’t so bad. They’re stronger than other Protovic but weaker than some of other races so it doesn’t stand out. Other than making them hard to sneak up on, having the sensory upgrades in the Purples doesn’t strike me as a bad idea across the board. It’s the others that worry me.”

“How are the Oranges blending with the others post maturia?”

“They have an advantage physically, but one that is matched with years of training in the others. Now that we’ve got sufficiently advanced veterans that supersede the Oranges coming out of the maturias it isn’t an issue, but before it was.”

“You’re thinking it might be better to keep all the variants on the same page and only upgrade individuals?”

“That or break them up into Clans.”

Kyr raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“There’s a reason we don’t have Humans and Calavari training together, save for some special situations. If the Protovic variants differentiate enough it could cause rifts to form out of necessity, in which case it would be better to restructure this faction into subunits that worked closely with one another rather than trying to force a single system on the whole.”

“And for that you’ll need a lot more aquas down the line?”

“Call me sentimental, but I want them back with the others. Not just a few stragglers that managed to survive.”

“I thought there was another reason,” Kip said, crossing his arms over his chest as he looked down on a group of oranges running on one of the dirt trails and making decent time. “Normally we leave reproduction alone.”

“I only got 612 to work with initially, all imprisoned for a lot of nastiness. To date two of them have reformed and joined the general population. The others came from their offspring and had to be mixed in with a Red maturia. That worked alright, but I hate the lack of color coordination.”

“Ha. There’s the real reason, you OCD freak.”

Brad smirked. “Haven’t heard that term in a long time. Glad we got rid of all those pseudomedical bitchings along with old Earth.”

“No problems with the surrogates, I assume?”

“Nah. Just a little egg swapping. When the Aquas’ numbers get high enough we won’t need it anymore and we’ll let the civilian population dictate the numbers.”

“How serious are you about this Clan idea?”

“I don’t know,” Brad admitted. “Part of me wants them to get the upgrades on the whole while another says to keep them restricted to an ‘earn only’ group. If the Oranges weren’t already unlocked I probably wouldn’t even be considering this, but right now I’m not sure which way to go.”

“If we encounter other Protovic that are unlocked, then the choice is simple, right?”

“Yeah it would be, but right now only the one group of Oranges is. Every other wayward colony is still timelocked.”

“Have we found other Oranges?”

“Just one, about a decade ago.”

“Are any of them here?”

Brad shook his head. “Nope. We did the meet and greet but they weren’t interested in sharing. If they were closer or in lesser numbers we’d take them by force, but right now it isn’t a good option.”

Kip looked at him quizzically. “Did I miss something?”

“They’re out on the far side of Preema space and none too nice, about 200 billion of them spread across 4 star systems with a big ‘to conquer’ sticker on their foreheads. They’re not quite up to Veliquesh depravity but they’re bad enough. So no, none of them are here.”

“Did we get a tissue sample from them?”

“Yes, and they’re still timelocked as well.”

“For how long?”

“I’d have to check the records, but no one that we’ve found is close to upgrading. Why our Oranges already made it is still a mystery.”

“How much of this have you told our allied Protovic?”

“Nothing that I haven’t sent through you, though some of their observers here might have picked up something from casual conversation. I don’t interact with them and they pretty much pretend to be furniture taking notes.”

“Do they have different colored data tags?” Kip joked.

“I haven’t paid that close attention. Should I be? I’ve pretty much let them run under the radar.”

“The Chancellor is trying to keep information away from the public as long as possible. He’s worried and uncertain about where all this is going. His mind is split between holing up and reaching out to the nearest colonies. The Shanplenix have offered a hand of friendship that he is cautious to accept. Right now they’re in wait and see mode.”

“Worried about what exactly?”

“Beyond the transformation? They don’t want to lose their cultural identity in a wash of newcomers, which is why their borders have been closed to Protovic immigration since we conquered the Veliquesh. They’ve got a good thing going with their empire right now and they don’t want to wreck it. If there is value to be gained from the others they know we’ll ferret it out, so they’re keying off of us even if they won’t admit it publically. I wouldn’t worry about their observers here, though I would keep an eye on the others you’ve let in.”

“I already do. A group of Blues is getting kicked out next week. Those idiots just don’t know when to stop playing politics.”

“Again? Why’d you let them back in?”

“If I can get them to just sit and take notes like your buddies then some good may come of it. We’re still getting a steady flow of immigrants from them that are willing to go through indoctrination to get here, so I’d prefer to keep the lines of communication open. Their government observers will be sent back and they’ll have to wait another 10 years before they get another chance. I’ll keep playing the game until they learn if only to keep information going back to their population, from which we may get more immigration.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because for some reason they all feel like family. We still don’t know how they got spread out or how many of their colonies were killed off, but I hate the idea of people being prisoners of their own society and if I can keep the doors open to allow them to move freely I prefer to do so. We do the same with other races, and have for a long time.”

“We’ve also told a lot of races where to shove it,” Kip added.

“Something else is going on with the Protovic, and until we figure out what it is I don’t like cutting any of them off. The more that are here learning from us the better.”

“Is that why you let the Chancellor’s observers camp out?”

“I know they’re not joining us, but they’re allies and just next door anyway. We can look after them if needed.”

“You’re going to need a second star system soon if you keep growing like this.”

“We’ve got plenty to choose from, but right now I want everyone here where I can monitor them. I’d rather not have to bring in Human Monarchs and right now I don’t have any Protovic Administrators that I feel are up to the promotion yet. They’re still keying off me and my staff and we need to keep it that way until we sort out all these changes. Once we get our identity stabilized we can branch out, but right now we’re still in a lot of flux.”

“Is that why you wanted me here?”

“I need a fresh set of eyes on the problem. I keep feeling like I’m missing something right in front of me.”

“Well, from what I can tell of your elite class they’ve got a decent skillset. They’re obviously still newbs, but they’re showing isolated strengths beyond what we typically see in Humans.”

“That lopsided nature has made creating training programs for them a bit tricky.”

“How similar are the Purples to Pefbar?”

“A poor comparison, but they do have a light perimeter sense in their cocktail. Low level energy field that varies from half a meter up to about 4 when they’re focusing on it. More like a spidey sense than Pefbar.”

“So your notes said. And the rest of the ‘cocktail?’”

“Ask a Knight.”

“Just an increase in the rest of their senses.”

“Yes, but there seems to be some tie-in. When combined they seem to accumulate into a very vivid image, based off the mind reads I’ve done.”

“Nightvision?”

“Better than us, not quite up to Knight level. Pitch black they can’t see any more than us…save for the fact that they glow.”

“A double-edged sword there. Apparently it can be very annoying, according to some of the stories I’ve heard. The full body garb our allies wear isn’t just a fashion trend, but a practical necessity that they developed after several problems they had.”

“Such as?”

“I was told a story of attacks where the civilians were hunted down even when they fled because they couldn’t hide their glow. Add in pursuit, and especially ambush, are all but impossible when your head is a lightbulb. Their glow became a cultural liability, so they just adopted the practice of hiding it completely when in public. That’s been relaxed some after seeing our Axius Protovic roam with free skin, but it’s still a sign of worry with them more than prudence. That pesky survival imperative again.”

“How did the Chancellor take that revelation?”

“That was one bit I did not share with him.”

“Any particular reason?”

“They’ve got enough to take in as is. Telling them they’re puppets that some ancient power is pulling the strings of isn’t going to help their mindset right now.”

“A bit harsh. We have genetic imperatives too.”

“Ours are natural…as far as I know.”

“I doubt the V’kit’no’sat would approve of tinkering in that aspect. If needed it would scream inferiority.”

“Yeah, well, the idea that we might have some Clone Wars era inhibitor chips woven into our DNA has crossed my mind more than once. Our medtechs haven’t found anything, but you never know.”

“Honestly, that thought had never occurred to me,” Brad admitted.

“I don’t think there’s anything there or we’d have found it by now, either in genetic analysis or in the database records. But sometimes you gotta wonder what’s all programmed into us. The Zak’de’ron hid coding from the rest of the V’kit’no’sat concerning Tier 4 psionics and battlemeld, so who knows what else they slid in there.”

“If they put in a kill code I’m going to be pissed,” Brad said half-jokingly.

“Fortunately our bad guy overlords have an ego, else they could very well have done so. If you ask Kara what they’d think of a rebellious Zen’zat she’d probably laugh.”

“Yeah, not looking forward to taking on one of them hand to hand. At least they’re not out to wipe us from existence.”

“Kara got on their good side,” Kip said, knowing well that there was more to it than that. “How are your guys’ reflexes?”

“Partial improvement with the Purples. Beyond that Protovic standard.”

“And the Oranges?”

“Their speed is faster, but reaction time is the same.”

“And the Reds?”

“They’re damn clever. Not up to Archon standards, but they’re definitely thinkers rather than followers.”

“We don’t want followers,” Kip reminded him. “We’re in the right, so why should we fear thinkers?”

“They’d make really good serial killers.”

“Their ancestors did well enough in that regard without the enhancement.”

“True,” Brad acknowledged. “Think I’m worrying too much?”

“The V’kit’no’sat don’t worry about such things because they can solve any problem that arises by beating the crap out of it. We’re Archons, we can do the same. You said you were short on Monarch candidates. How do these Reds stack up?”

“Too soon to tell, but Davis has one of his people here looking into it.”

Kip glanced at him. “Did you request that?”

“I should have. He saw the possibility before I did.”

“That guy has his fingers into everything.”

“Lucky us,” Brad said as his earpiece chirped. He mentally turned it on and heard the voice of one of his command staff giving him a priority update. He remained silent, listening for a long bit as Kip saw a twitch in him.

“Copy that,” Brad said, shutting off the earpiece with another thought.

“What?” Kip asked, sensing something important.

“We just got a message packet in from one of our scouting teams. They’ve found the 8th variant.”

Kip’s insides twisted up with a mix of excitement and trepidation. This was the last piece of the genetic puzzle they’d been searching 90 years for. “What color?”

“Pink.”

Kip snickered, but when Brad didn’t reciprocate he sensed something was wrong. “And?”

“And they’re unlocked. They have telepathy.”

Revision

1

March 5, 3059

System 10746 (Nexus Domain)

Yvartis

Brad’s Warship-class jumpship coasted lazily through the Jhar defense fleet, staring down the smaller vessels as they parted to allow it through their orbital blockade to a lower holding orbit over the volcanic world that Asnem-1119 had visited a year ago. It was another anomaly within The Nexus, in that it didn’t appear on any official records. The trailblazer got the feeling a lot of systems were like that, for unless they proved themselves to be threats or valuable it seemed the The Nexus simply ignored everyone else within their domain.

This planet had been well hidden, for the Jhar were isolationists out of necessity and only had a few weak links out into the surrounding star systems, but one of them had led Asnem here where he had made contact with the Pink Protovic that inhabited the barely habitable world. The atmosphere was partially toxic, able to sustain you with enough oxygen to let you live long enough for the hazardous chemicals to slowly poison you to death. There was no water on the planet save for in the clouds, but where there would be rivers and lakes on other worlds there were pools of magma on Yvartis dotting the landscape and visible from orbit.

“About as close to Mustafar as I’ve seen,” Kip commented, standing beside Brad in the command nexus as his peer was linked into the system and they were both viewing the orbital spectacle that was the sizeable defense fleet sitting overtop the unfriendly world.

“If you want to keep the neighbors out…” Brad reminded him.

“Have we got our invite yet?”

“Yeah, coordinates match where Asnem landed.”

“At least we have a map then. Any surprises out there?”

“They’ve got a second fleet hidden behind the third moon. I bet they think we can’t see it, but their signal bounces are giving it away.”

“Ambush?”

“I hope they’re not that stupid. Asnem said he gave them a good indication of what we were capable of. This is probably just a backup plan in case we give them trouble.”

“We’re getting a tissue sample, one way or another,” Kip insisted.

“Don’t do anything rash…not with that fleet sitting here and all the defense turrets down there. Easy enough to pick off a dropship.”

“I didn’t say we’d be obvious about it,” Kip said defensively.

Brad smiled. “Armor up. I’ll meet you in the hangar after I tie up a few loose ends here.”

“Why didn’t we ever build a lava proof suit?” the trailblazer muttered as he walked away and back out across the bridge.

“Fair question,” Brad acknowledged as he ordered two frigates to disengage from the jumpship. They slowly slid out of their berths then took up flanking positions while the Jhar fleet keep a respectful distance without letting them out of their weapons range. If something did go down he wanted a couple of quick response assets in place, not to mention that releasing drones under fire played havoc with the defense shields and the enemy could theoretically slide a shot or two inside if they knew when and where to aim.

But they hadn’t come here to fight, so when they’d reached their parking orbit Brad left the bridge and headed back to his quarters to pick up his golden titan armor and then headed to the equipment room to stack his pack with equipment. Even though they were going down without weapon racks he didn’t want to run the risk of getting trapped on the surface without water or food, not to mention a variety of other odds and ends.

When he met up with Kip in the hangar the pair walked up into a Sparrow-class dropship and rode the small craft down to the surface where it landed in one of six major cities on the volcanic world. Off to the east there was one such huge plume of ash billowing out of a conical mountain, but it was far enough away from the city to only coat the dome with precipitation a mix of black and white ash. A large panel opened prior to their arrival, allowing the dropship and the four aerial fighters that were flying escort for them inside.

They passed through an energy shield, then the heavy blast doors slowly resealed and shut them inside the Jhar city that was only slightly better lit than the dim surface environment. The escort fighters took them to a nearby landing pad where they set down in a circle cleared of other craft and with a welcoming committee waiting on the deck nearby.

“Play some cards fellas,” Kip told the pair of pilots. “I don’t know how long we’ll be.”

“And keep the door locked,” Brad added as he and Kip went aft, switching to a private comm channel as they lowered the rear hatch. “I can sense them, but the resistance that Asnem said is there. Let’s play this coy until we get a better feel for them. If we do any snooping let’s make sure they can’t detect it.”

“This is your party, I’ll follow your lead.”

“Just here for the popcorn?” Brad asked as he stepped down the ramp and through the dropship’s atmospheric containment shield.

“There’s popcorn?” Kip replied as he followed. The readout on his helmet’s HUD switched immediately when he passed into the city’s atmosphere, indicating the low level toxins present. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the planet’s natural atmosphere but it was still dirty. Kip had never understood that, for Asnem’s reports had indicated the same. Why, if you were going to create a fully concealed dome, did you not process out all the toxins? “Looks like the maid really did take the day off.”

“Dirty air confirmed. I still don’t get that,” Brad agreed as there were a group of fully armored Protovic headed towards them.

“Maybe they stay in their suits all the time and just don’t care?”

“It’s sloppy, whatever the reason is,” Brad said, switching on the translation computer in his helmet and setting the emitter for the Jhar’s native language.

“You are the promised emissaries?” one of the delegation of 5 thinly garbed individuals asked while they were flanked by columns of armed troopers with a combination of rifles and gear bandoleers, all of which held their pink/green glow contained behind opaque masks.

“We are,” Brad answered.

“Follow us please. The rest of your crew will be staying in the ship?” the Jhar asked as the boarding ramp closed.

“The pilots will stay with their ship. We are all that is necessary to carry out negotiations.”

“We will go inside,” the speaker said before spinning about and backtracking with the guards surrounding the pair of Archons and waiting for them to follow.

They’ve got mental blocks in place, Kip noted. All of them.

Wait for a slip. I have no doubt that we can force our way through, but let’s save that for after we hear them out.

You really think they have anything new to say?

They want something, else they wouldn’t have offered a second visit.

Why didn’t they ask Asnem for it?

Could be prudence or a strategy on their part.

I wish Asnem hadn’t been so polite, Kip complained.

We’re not used to dealing with other telepaths. He was just being careful.

Careful didn’t get us a tissue sample.

If they wore their suits the entire time he didn’t have much of a chance of procuring it through the normal means. We’ve got to play this another way.

And that being?

The Jedi angle.

Peacekeepers?

Yep. If they really are as feared as they suggest, they don’t have many friends. Anyone who is powerful and fair would be taken as an ally…of sorts. We’re going to play that up along with the Protovic link.

And hope one of them takes their helmet off?

I don’t think that’s an option with this many people. Even with rudimentary blocks I don’t think I can be clean enough with them all. Plus there might be camera recordings.

We’ve got to get one sometime or this trip is a bust.

That’s why I’m glad you agreed to come along. If we have to do this the hard way I’m going to need your help.

But you want to try the easy way first. Still hoping to entice some of them to come back with us?

Right now I’m keeping my options open. I’ll do the talking, you Ikrid snoop as much as you can without getting caught.

Only way to be sure where that line is is to get caught, Kip pointed out.

Impress me, Brad dared as they crossed from the exterior to the interior via an oddly shaped tunnel entrance that looked like a ‘W’ with a couple rows of ceiling protrusions that held small light globes that also provided less than usual illumination, as far as Star Force was concerned anyway. At the end of the tunnel was a set of blast doors, a full foot thick, that opened to allow them access then closed again behind them with the internal atmosphere registering better but still with trace amounts of toxins.

From there they were led on a curvy route to a distant chamber where a large circular table was set up with nooks for many people, but no chairs. The guards were met by more already inside the room and took up positions alongside their brethren on the perimeter while the delegates found slots in the table to place themselves next to two Jhar that were already present.

“We are pleased that you have returned,” one of the originals said, “though may we ask why your previous representative is not with you?”

“His mission was to make contact with you, and that is now complete,” Brad explained. “We are his superiors.”

“May I ask to whom you answer?”

“Did he inform you as to what a trailblazer was?”

“He did not.”

“We are the military commanders of Star Force. We answer to no one.”

“You honor us,” the Jhar said, but there was a quiver in his mind that both Kip and Brad noticed. Not enough for more than a peek, but they could both sense agitation within him. Far more than should have been present during a negotiation…unless there was something they needed very badly from them. “Might I inquire as to your business here? Your former representative said you might return, but he did not state for what purpose.”

“As you were told, within our empire there are many others like you. We wish to facilitate an exchange of information. Your race has been spread across the stars, and we are still trying to puzzle out the mystery behind this. Any information you have, even inconsequential on its own, could be useful to us. Likewise we can tell you a great deal about the others, if you wish, and we would also like to establish formal relations, the depth of which is ultimately up to you.”

“But there are none like us there, correct?”

“None with pink skin, no, not yet. You are the first colony of your kind that we have discovered, though we suspect there are many more out there yet to be found.”

“This is of interest to us, but be aware that we are not well liked in this region of the galaxy. Our telepathic abilities has made us an enemy of those that fear our ability to read their minds. We have hidden here, for the most part, and kept to ourselves when applicable. We maintain trade with a few partners who do not fear us, but we are not trusted by anyone. Our history has been one of persecution and violence, with our former homeworld having been destroyed out of such fear. We hope that you, who also have an impressive telepathic ability, will not view us with such fear.”

Again, there was a fluctuation, but Brad didn’t press into it.

“We do not fear you, but we also have no reason to trust you, given that you are new to us. In time, perhaps, but first must come learning.”

“Will you be staying with us long? Or perhaps you have other ships nearby to continue with this cultural exchange, if we so agree?”

“You have been given a map of our territory, yes?”

“We have. It is far from here, which is why I ask.”

“Though we may return later, for this mission we have brought only the one and we will stay as long as we deem necessary. We have no other business within this region.”

“You came out this far just to find us?”

“You are a missing puzzle piece in this mystery we wish to solve.”

Something is wrong, Kip warned.

“Your previous representative mentioned something concerning a reunion. This is not unknown in our legends, but to date we have had no contact, nor knowledge of, any more of our kind. We assumed they too had been destroyed as others attempted to destroy us.”

“Not all of your race are telepathic,” Brad explained as he stretched his Ikrid senses a bit. “In fact, we believe only the ones with your Pink skin are.”

Another fluctuation in his mind, as well as a few others, though none so large. Something was building to a climax, and this Jhar was conflicted about it.

“Then they have not been feared by their neighbors?”

“Each colony is in its own unique position, but those we have gathered within our empire are not feared.”

“They serve you?”

“They are a member faction, and Star Force is also allied with an independent faction of Protovic, who also bear that name. They are equals, not servants.”

“But not mind readers?”

“No.”

“And what of your race? Have you not been persecuted for your abilities, which are apparently far greater than ours? We cannot touch your minds in even the faintest sense.”

Spidey senses tingling, Kip reported.

I felt it too, Brad said. Something sinister was lurking within this Jhar. “We have not made our abilities public knowledge, nor have we abused them. We are hated for other reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Doing the right thing.”

“The right thing?”

“We’re peacekeepers, warriors who fight those who prey on others. Those with good intentions come to favor our presence. Those with bad intentions despise our presence.”

“You are currently engaged in a war of great conquest?”

“We are retaking what has been taken from others.”

“And are you returning it to them or keeping it for yourself?”

“Many of those it was taken from have been annihilated. There is no one to give it back to.”

“Such is the way of the galaxy. Mere survival is something you must fight for, barter for. Hiding away only works to a point, for your enemies eventually find you out.”

“I noticed your warfleet on the way in,” Brad commented.

“It is pitiful compared to others out there, but sufficient to keep the smaller threats at bay.”

“And the larger ones?” Brad pressed, sensing something right beneath the surface of his mind but not daring to push into it for fear of being discovered.

“We cannot stand up to them…not without help.”

“What kind of help do you require?”

I don’t think he means us, Kip said. I’m picking up non-Protovic minds moving our way. A lot of them.

“Protection. While we are feared for what we can do, mind to mind, it cannot save us against enemy fleets and orbital bombardment. We have survived through the benevolence of those that see more wisdom in keeping us alive than destroying us.”

“With you returning the favor through using your telepathy to aid them?” Brad asked suspiciously, sensing the other minds heading their way in the corridors outside.

“Yes we have. We do their bidding in order to preserve ourselves, and at a cost to others, I’m sorry to say.”

“Including us?” Brad asked directly.

The fluctuation in the Jhar’s mind widened and this time Brad didn’t hesitate, diving in and out quickly.

They sold us out, Kip said, beating him to it.

The dropship, Brad reminded him, with Kip getting on the comm to them immediately.

“It was not our choice, though I am sorry that you have come yourselves rather than sending an intermediary again. Your ability to block telepathic prying is quite rare. In fact, it has never been heard of before, and is valuable to those who do not have telepathy.”

“Including your masters?”

“We did not inform them of your presence, but they learned of it upon your first arrival. Some of them remain on this world at all times, and they arranged for your capture should you come back a second time,” the Jhar said a moment before the doors opened and a group of hulking ape-like bipeds burst through standing nearly twice as tall as the Protovic and massing some 10x their thin bodies. They pushed through the Jhar guards, who in sync raised their own weapons along with the forearm mounted pistols the newcomers bore.

“Well, they’re new,” Brad said casually as the two Archons were quickly surrounded with mountains of hairy flesh and the armored suits of the Jhar.

“Remove your armor please,” the delegate asked politely. “Or they will blast through it. You are now their prisoners.”

“Do they speak your language?”

“No, but we have been instructed to speak theirs. Sadly, you will not be able to negotiate with them, and while they prefer to take you alive your corpses will also be of value to them, so I urge you to capitulate.”

“Like you have?” Brad said, stepping away from the table and back to back with Kip as he sensed a battlemeld prompt from him, which he accepted.

“If you try to use your telepathy on them our men will gun you down, so please do not try. Even if you could incapacitate these, there are many more outside. You cannot run, so submit before they grow tired of waiting. Their patience is not large.”

“Can you translate a message for me?” Brad asked irreverently, though that bit didn’t survive the mechanical translation.

“I will grant you that. What would you like me to say to them?” the Jhar asked as one of the hulking apes huffed and stepped forward, coming within a few meters of the Archons and pointing to the ground.

“Tell them to fuck off,” Brad said a second before he and Kip telekinetically picked up Donkey Kong and threw him back through the air into the others.

2

Brad and Kip followed up with a pair of Fornax fields that dropped everyone around them to the ground, giving the pair a moment to charge their Jini. When it reached saturation levels they released the battlemeld ability into the nearest minds, with the Ikrid ‘bomb’ transmitting from one to another like lightning strikes and rendering each of them unconscious. The effect spread like a virus among all those close enough together, sending everyone in the chamber to the ground, including the Protovic with their rudimentary telepathic blocks.

The trailblazers didn’t stay put, running across the downed bodies and out the open door heading back to the dropship that they knew would be in danger. Before they even got halfway there they got a report about ground troops attempting to fight their way past its shields, with both Brad and Kip slipping past the addition ‘Brutes’ in the hallways with ease. They were big and heavily armed, but their minds were weak as hell and they couldn’t touch the Archons save for a stray weapon blast, but their blue orbs were absorbed by the Archon’s energy shields and did nothing to slow them.

Evading the huge arms of the Brutes was easy when all you had to do was mess with their minds, but when the pair came back to the entrance tunnel they ran into the sealed blast doors which were more of a problem.

“They’re targeting us with fighters,” one of the pilots reported over the comm. “Our shields aren’t going to hold up for long and the roof dome is still sealed, so there’s nowhere to run.”

“Adjust shields 90% top and hold on, we’re coming to you,” Kip said as he used his Pefbar to look inside the walls and the door to find the mechanisms holding them in place while Brad covered for him, rendering anyone who came close to them unconscious, usually before they made it around the nearest corner. The big brutes made for good roadblocks, and Brad pushed a couple of them further back with a Jumat blast to hinder the approach angles of the Protovic that were coming. Apparently the number of brutes was limited, for there were many more lightly cloaked minds headed their direction than the open, crude ones that were shining like beacons in the night and easy to spot at distance.

Kip telekinetically leveraged the internal components, unlocking the clamps and forcing the door mechanism to turn. The heavy doors split apart slowly, with him needing to borrow Brad’s strength in order to move them faster. With their combined Nemsa making their Lachka far stronger, they pried open the doors about a meter wide then slipped through, knowing that any brute following wouldn’t be able to get through the gap.

“Taking hits.”

“Almost there. Find something to hide under and ride it out,” Kip said as they ran down the tunnel and up to another blast door. There was no one in their way, so both Archons used their combined strength to pry this one open faster, letting the sounds of weaponsfire drift in as they pushed as hard as they could. When the gap widened they slipped through and into the free air within the dome as six Jhar aerial fighters were hovering near the dropship and unloading their red energy weapons into it…with the shields already down and explosions ripping across its upper surface while a ring of troops keeping their distance were firing on the underside.

The mix of brutes and Protovic saw them coming and suddenly began to ignore the disintegrating dropship, turning their attention to the two Archons and rushing to reform their lines and offer a salvo of weaponsfire while the fighters continued to pound the dropship…then one of the craft ceased shooting and turned to the right, only to open fire on one of its twins a moment later.

Not seeing the attack coming, the other Jhar fighter didn’t respond immediately and was taken down as the Archons flew their remote-controlled fighter over to the next one and repeated the process. That one, along with the others, stopped firing on what was left of the dropship and engaged briefly, only to flee when they realized what was happening. Two of them didn’t make it, with their craft suddenly taking a nose dive and lightly crunching into the landing pad, followed by the damaged puppet that the Archons angrily drove into the surface.

They blew through the infantry next, using a combination of Jumat and Ikrid suppression to dislodge and then render them unconscious with Brad cleaning up the stragglers as Kip ran to the wreckage of their ride…that was now missing the wings and its upper half.

“Captain, we’re under attack,” Brad said as he stood guard and contacted his warship, having to use a higher powered pulse to get through the dome and whatever other countermeasures the Jhar were throwing up, for his normal signal strength wasn’t getting through. “Our dropship has been destroyed and we’re sealed inside the dome. The locals have friends that look like Donkey Kong and I wouldn’t be surprised if they have ships in the area. Lock down orbit and clear the airspace over this city, then arrange for a pickup. We’ll try to find a way to open the dome, if not you’ll have to blast through.”

“Copy that, though there’s no activity up here yet.”

“Make some,” Brad said angrily as he took control of the minds of two armored suits with Protovic inside as they came through the tunnel and out onto the landing pad. Punching through their blocks, even without Kip’s help, wasn’t difficult now that he didn’t care if they noticed or not. They were definitely telepaths, but nowhere on the level of the Archons, let alone the trailblazers. Obviously they didn’t understand the power of their would be victims or they never would have been this stupid, but there was no going back now and they knew it, with many more minds approaching.

The fighters had backed off because they realized that Brad and Kip could take control of them. He’d sensed that just before they’d retreated to the far side of the huge dome and out of his range, which their limited blocks reduced. Why then were they sending more infantry?

Brad searched their minds as he caught and knocked unconscious several more coming through. They thought that if they got enough people in place at the same time they’d overstretch the Humans’ powers…but that didn’t feel right. More like a placebo to tell the ground troops they were sending in, while Brad suspected this was just a cover for something else.

Captain Mendez watched from the bridge as his warship dispersed its full complement of drones and moved them out into defensive positions while the Jhar fleet did the same, sensing a fight was coming. He wasn’t going to give the order to attack until all his ships were off the racks, but either the Jhar were going to retreat from this orbital slot or be destroyed. If they had attacked the trailblazers on the surface he didn’t care about their reasons…they were going to pay for it, one way or another.

As the two sides squared off the fleet behind the moon finally showed itself, but to his mild surprise it wasn’t Jhar ships, rather a different variety altogether and probably belonging to the other player involved that Brad had mentioned. He thought they’d be coming to his current location to aid the Jhar, but as soon as he saw their movement tracks alter towards a surface endpoint he realized that his warship wasn’t the target.

“Damn them,” he said, punching buttons and setting waypoints on his control panels. “They’re going to ground. We have to secure the airspace over that city all the way up to this ship before we can launch dropships. No holding back people, blow us all the cover we need. Comm, get me a translation program and tie it into the message I’m about to send broadband.”

“Copy that…done. You’re live.”

The Captain hit the transmit button, activating the mic on his command chair. “Attention enemy ships. We will not allow you to capture or kill our ground team. Withdraw immediately or you will be destroyed. The firepower we possess is beyond anything you can imagine, and we’re not holding back while our people are in jeopardy. This is fair warning. If you value your lives, get clear now.”

Kip dug through what was left of the dropship’s door using both his hands and his Lachka to pry apart burnt and still hot sections of the hull. Putting his shoulder into a gap he pushed hard and shot his torso through, then pulled himself into the messed up interior that had numerous gaps in the shredded ceiling and divots everywhere in the floor where the weaponsfire had passed through and exploded/melted whatever it had hit.

Given the two minds in the ship, he could sense that both pilots were still alive but he couldn’t see them. There was too much debris in the way that he had to dig through until he got to what had been the cockpit. Armored as it was, the control boards were gone, as were the chairs that were now stumps protruding up from the floor…but the minds were in fact beneath it, and he realized the pilots were in the emergency storage hatches below.

He kicked away debris from the appropriate section of floor then yanked on the handle that broke off in his grasp, having been damaged itself. Using his Lachka he pulled up on the mount, only to realize that the nearly invisible seam had been melted together. He reached out a battlemeld prompt and quickly got Brad’s help from outside, then using their combined strength he tore off the concealed hatch to reveal the pair of tightly packed bodies beneath what had been the floor of the cockpit in a ‘smugglers’ compartment that usually held survival supplies.

“Smart move,” Kip said, then saw that their uniforms were covered in blood. “Damn.”

“We’re alive, but filled with shrapnel,” one of them said, reaching a hand up that Kip took, dragging him out and having to clear off more debris to give him a place to stand. “Most of it’s superficial, but Harry has a deep gash in his leg.”

“You’ve lost a lot of blood as is,” Kip said, telekinetically lifting out the other pilot and looking at the wound with his Pefbar. “This is going to hurt, so I’m going to knock you out first.”

“Please do,” the copilot said as his eyes rolled shut.

Holding him aloft over a stack of debris where there was no available foot space, Kip reached inside his leg and gently pried apart his flesh, sending another river of blood out on which the metallic fragment followed. He pinched the flesh back together temporarily, then did his best to remotely start the healing process…failing miserably.

“Hold him up,” Kip said, floating him over to the other pilot and standing him practically on his feet. Reserving all of his mental power to the task, the trailblazer pulled off a golden glove and made flesh to flesh contact with his fingers, triggering the man’s body to start healing rapidly, enough at least to stop the bleeding on the major wound as well as the others. He had more shrapnel, tiny bits, across his left side, but there was no time to work on those. Kip had to get both of them stabilized and that meant stopping them from losing any more blood, so he sealed up all the wounds with temporary heals knowing that he could get the bits of sand and metal chips out later.

When Kip stood up the pilot cringed, having to adjust the copilot’s weight, then it suddenly disappeared as both of the pilots were taken in Kip’s invisible grip and moved back through the remains of the ship.

“I can walk.”

“You’re bleeding out too, so I can’t waste time,” he said, setting the unconscious man down in a little nook and being careful to blunt or reposition any nearby debris so he didn’t get another injury. “Sit down,” Kip ordered, then he took the man’s bloody wrist in his own hand and began to heal over his shrapnel wounds without pulling anything out, for unlike the other he had no large pieces in him.

Incoming, Brad warned with a telepathic flash that indicating falling objects overhead. Kip reflexively emitted his own bioshield into an umbrella that covered both pilots as an explosion occurred…but not overhead. Several more sounded, with Kip’s Pefbar stretching out to see the incoming grenades or mortars being redirected midair, hopefully back towards those shooting at them.

They’re learning to stay out of range.

We can’t go anywhere with that dome closed, Kip replied. And we can’t go after it with these two here.

I know. One of us has to go, but not until we get them some better cover.

Got any ideas?

Take one of their ships and turn it into a fort. One of the big ones they can’t blow up easily.

How far?

Far…and out in the open.

I can carry these two if you can provide cover.

Not yet. Something is up. Get them out of the ship though, I have a feeling they’re going to bring in something bigger than mortars.

Wonderful, Kip said, dropping his bioshields and using his Lachka to redecorate, clearing a path to the twisted door that he’d entered through. “We’ve got to move. I can carry you both if needed, but if he does more than stand he’s going to rip open the patches I made.”

“Just tell me where to go.”

“Over there, squeeze through that hole and just hang out underneath the ship. Don’t go more than a meter away or I’ll have trouble shielding you once I’m out.”

“And before you’re out?”

“I’m coming down right after you. Just stay in line of sight.”

“Alright,” the pilot said, trusting him despite the worry spiking within him at the thought of leaving the somewhat protective confines of their dropship. He walked/crawled over to the opening and held position there as Kip brought the still unconscious copilot through midair, setting a knee to the ground beside the hole and giving the man a nod with his helmeted head.

The unarmored pilot slid through feet first, catching his uniform top on a barb and tearing a new gash in it and his chest but otherwise coming through cleanly into the ‘fresh’ air. Kip heard him cough, but there was nothing he could do about the toxins at the moment. That was another reason they needed to get them into one of the intact ships on the deck.

As promised the Archon came down a split second later, nearly stepping on the pilot who scooted to the right and partly behind one of the landing gear as he saw Brad busy doing his invisible magic casting. There were sporadic explosions nearby but nothing directly overhead, and the pilot was fine with staying right under the ship for now rather than going out there into the direct firing lines.

Kip maneuvering the copilot’s body through the gap, having to widen it at a few spots to avoid cutting him, then he had them both within arm’s reach where he could cover them with bioshields if needed, though is focus was pressed outward to see where the incoming threats were.

Brad extended a battlemeld link and he accepted, suddenly getting his situational awareness and vision added to his own so he could see what was going on around what was left of the dropship while still squatting underneath it.

You picked one yet?

Yeah, but hold on. We’ve got company.

Shit, Kip said, seeing the approach through Brad’s eyes of several mechanized exoskeletons with their pilot’s seats empty. Apparently they could be operated remotely and thus avoid the Human’s psionics.

Combat models by the look.

I can’t help you with them while I’m babysitting.

I know, Brad said. But I can’t block the mortars for you and fight them at the same time.

We’ve still got some ship left. Go full offensive and we’ll turtle up here.

You sure?

Only way we stand a chance.

Alright, Brad said, disconnecting from the battlemeld as a chunk of ship broke free and dropped down over one side of the light coming in from all angles beneath the dropship…a last second addition to the plan.

“Move over there,” Kip said, pointing to the now blocking debris. “We’ve gotta wait this out while Brad kicks ass.”

“Happy to,” the pilot said as he scooted around the landing gear and put it behind his back, giving him a bit of cover in two directions. Kip moved himself and the unconscious copilot on past him, using the bit of cover but not relying on it, knowing it could blow apart with an explosive impact and turn into shrapnel itself…but it would at least block rifle fire if it started up again when Brad left. “Thanks for sticking with us.”

“I get bonus points if I keep you alive,” Kip joked as he stretched out his senses and tried to pick off some of the mortars before they fell on the ship, though a lot were now angling towards where Brad was headed…which was straight to the Jhar combat exoskeletons.

3

Brad didn’t waste time and sprinted towards the empty exoskeletons as they fired at him with what looked like high scale lachars, based on the glow and the pop they made when they hit the ground behind him. He juked and dodged on approach, making it very difficult for either the onboard targeting systems or the manual controllers to hit, then came up in front of the first one and dove into its empty pilot’s chest cavity and impacted the protective dome there, knocking the machine back a step but failing to take it down.

He dropped to the ground in front of it, inside its firing arcs as his shields dropped and a distortion appeared around his arms. A moment later he released an invisible Jumat blast that threw the entire exoskeleton back into two others walking up behind it, bowling them all to the ground and leaving the tiny Human standing in its place.

The rest of the mech-sized exoskeletons continued to converge on his position, stitching the ground with red streaks that blew up bits of the hangar deck on impact as Brad sprinted to his left and jumped into the chest of another one…but this time when he hit he threw it back with a simultaneous Jumat blast, essentially turning himself into an energy-enhanced wrecking ball and slamming it back into a nearby parked transport ship. As it bounced off the immovable rim of the ship, he dropped to the ground and used his Lachka to yank one of the arms of another exoskeleton away from him, causing it to shoot the one beside it with the rocket launcher it was bringing to bear just before he dashed to the side to avoid a rocket from another one that came streaking in next to him.

The smoke cloud momentarily covered him, but he shot out from it and took down another exoskeleton, temporarily, and began bouncing around from one to another and bringing them down to the ground and out of firing range on the remains of the Star Force dropship, making as much of a ruckus as he could to get their attention on him and away from the others.

Once he accomplished that he started taking them apart…literally. He dove beneath the arms of a standing one, with its weaponsfire passing just behind his back as he got near its leg and avoided the crude attempt to stomp him into the ground. Avoiding the foot, he jumped up into the armpit of the machine and lodged himself there. He grabbed onto a structural rib of that arm and balled up, generating as much Jumat as he could above him before releasing it into the joint.

He fell after the blast along with the arm that he was still clutching as he spotted Kip and the two pilots in his peripheral vision shooting across from the dropship to a somewhat distant Jhar ship now that he’d gotten the exoskeletons’ attention on him. Brad didn’t have time to cover them, or even watch their progress, having to dodge another rocket coming in and using a bit of Lachka to deflect it a couple more meters to his left as he juked right. Getting his footing he slowed his speed, trying to bait another rocket attack while avoiding the energy streaks that he now put his shields back up to deflect, for he couldn’t keep using his maximum Jumat at this rate or he’d tap out.

Brad was rewarded with three rockets coming his way. He jerked to the left and ignored two of them, but mentally grabbed hold of the third and swung it around in a very tight turn that redirected it into another exoskeleton’s chest.

It blew apart on impact, gutting what would have been the pilot’s compartment, but the rest of the machine was still intact and walking towards him. After another rocket attack with a similar result, the Jhar stopped sending the projectiles at him and stuck to the energy attacks, forcing him to take them down himself rather than using their own weapons against them.

And that was a problem, for there were dozens of the exoskeletons with more on the way across the wide landing pad. He could sense infantry pooling behind them, but they weren’t getting close for fear of his telepathic abilities. They’d probably thought the exoskeletons would be enough to fix that problem, but they didn’t know of his other psionics and these machines weren’t going to take him down even if they got a few lucky hits in.

Going evasive and just buying time, he ran between the legs of one then jerked to the right as an energy blast hit near that exoskeleton but just missed. He wasn’t sure if they were stupid enough to shoot each other, but he was going to give them the chance by getting in close and wasn’t concerned about the crude machines actually stepping on him, for they were slow as hell.

A few more jukes later and he got a battlemeld prompt from Kip, which he gladly accepted.

About time.

Let’s make this quick, Kip said as Brad telekinetically lifted and threw him onto the back of one of the exoskeletons then ran up to and Jumat-knocked another one down that had a good shot at him as he held on.

Buying him a few precious seconds, Brad engaged and distracted the others while the one Kip was on tried to buck him off, but it was no good. His armor’s adhesive patches stuck him on well enough to let him focus his Pefbar inside the machine, looking for the sweet spots and sharing that information with Brad via the battlemeld.

When a rocket flew in at him Brad deflected it but was unable to hit any of the other exoskeletons…then a red streak hit Kip’s armor, followed by two more before the Archon jumped off and joined Brad on the ground, skittering about with only shield damage and no armor impacts, though that wouldn’t have lasted much longer if he’d continued to hold on.

Knowing more or less what they needed, the two Archons split and ran around the legs of the nearest exoskeleton as they used their Pefbar to look inside and find the delicate machinery that was encased beneath the central armor plates. Using their combined power they pried and ripped apart as much of it as they could on that pass, but the machine continued to function. They had to go separate ways after that, dodging a rain of red blasts coming down from above and all around their perimeter, but they eventually circled back and yanked some more internal components apart, enough to cause the thing to seize up and become a metallic tree on the landing deck.

Now knowing what to do they got much more efficient with the process over the next three, then it was just a matter of time and evasion as they eviscerated the remaining exoskeletons without doing so much as putting a dent in their exteriors. They finished up with the one-armed machine and that left them standing in the middle of the metal forest with no more close range targets to contend with, though there were a few sniper shots floating in at them.

Kip let one hit his shields to register the output and saw it wasn’t much. The Jhar tech wasn’t nearly as advanced as theirs, making their sniper shot nothing more than a regular pistol hit. Dangerous in number but not as a one-shot kill.

“Captain, status report?”

“We’ve got an even fight here,” he replied, a bit of surprise in his voice. “The Jhar ships are confetti, but this other fleet has some teeth. I think we can win out, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to slip a dropship down in this. Any chance of you riding on the hull of a drone?”

“We could, but our pilots have no armor. Kick their ass them come for us. We’ll hold out here until then.”

“I’ll try and make this as quick as I can. Good luck.”

“Likewise,” Kip said as he took off running to follow Brad, who was already headed towards one of the infantry clumps. Through their battlemeld he knew he wasn’t going straight there, but to one of the snipers nearby…but he wanted the sniper to think they hadn’t spotted him. Kip went along with the ruse, then when they got close enough they stretched out with their combined Lachka and plucked the Jhar out of his concealed position on top of a parked ship and pulled him across the gap out to them in the middle of the empty section of the bay near to where the destroyed dropship was.

His weapon flew out of his grip a moment before he landed and into Brad’s hands, with Kip pulling the armored figure over to him and taking his helmet off. The pink/green skin glowed intensely even as the expression on the individual’s face was one of sheer panic. The trailblazers didn’t bother speaking to him, rather Kip just pushed through his pathetic mental barriers and dug around his mind for information…specifically where the control room was to open the doors in the dome above them.

Go, Kip said, rendering the sniper unconscious and beginning to peel his armor off as Brad took off running to the somewhat distant control room. After stripping down the man to his clothing, he telekinetically carried him over to the transport where the two pilots were holed up. He dumped his unconscious body inside, making sure he was going to be out for a while, then he climbed up on top of the ship and stood guard with a good line of sight across the empty region of the landing pad where the smoking remains of the dropship were next to the still exoskeletons, as well as a view of the surrounding ships and the infrastructure on the perimeter where the infantry was waiting.

He could sense them, but they were too far away to affect. There were a few more snipers/scouts closer and two of them were actively moving around, but none were getting too close and the aerial fighters were hovering in the distance, not daring to come back within telepathic range.

“That’s right, stay back,” Kip muttered. “Give us the time we need.”

The control room for the dome wasn’t on the edge of the landing pad, for there were several within the dome and only one control tower. Brad had to work his way through more than 2 miles of city to get to the location, but between his running speed and psionics that wasn’t a problem. Those Jhar that didn’t get out of the way he either knocked aside or disoriented, knowing not to waste time when they had two armorless pilots to evac.

When he got to the base of the tower he forced the doors and entered, clearing out the personnel inside as he made his way to the top of the tower. A few floors from getting there he heard explosions above him and extended his Pefbar just in time to see the top half of the tower get blown apart. Reaching out with his Ikrid he found several fighters nearby firing into the structure, ostensibly to keep him from accessing the controls.

He focused on one of them, stretching his limits and grabbing the pilot’s mind through his mental block. When he did he continued the attack on the tower to not draw suspicion for a few seconds, then he had the pilot turn and fire on the ships around him, knocking two out of the sky before the others turned and ran rather than fight it out and let themselves get caught in the Human’s telepathy.

Bringing the fighter closer he headed up to the top level and pushed his way through the debris, seeing that the equipment and transmitters were trashed, meaning he couldn’t signal the dome to open. He had no idea what these Protovic morons were doing, for they weren’t going to be able to take him prisoner. Trapping them here was going to be a big problem…for them, but Brad didn’t intend to stick around to make them pay for it, so he brought the fighter in closer and jumped up onto the side of it, adhesive finger and toe tips holding him in place, and telepathically ordered his puppet to fly them up to the top of the dome itself.

The Jhar saw what we was doing and immediately sent the rest of their fighters after him, perhaps sensing an opportunity to shoot him out of the sky now that he was vulnerable…but he wasn’t. Rather than taking control of their minds he shot Fornax blasts into each fighter as it approached, making it momentarily lose control and unable to fire back as Brad’s fighter did. With a few Ikrid tricks thrown in he held control of his fighter and slowly took down theirs, chipping away with return shots and largely stalling them out as the numbers gradually shifted to his advantage.

Then several rockets leapt up from the ground and he had to shift his power to turning them back. His puppet regained momentary control in the lapse, but Brad reasserted it quickly enough and had the pilot fly closer to the other fighters as more rockets came up. One last maneuver had it flipping him over so he was directly in the path of the attack, with him generating a bioshield to cover that half of the fighter.

He took one hell of a hit, ripping away most of his bioshield, but when the dust quickly cleared he saw three other fighters falling down to the buildings below, victims of the friendly fire that Brad had just drawn towards them. Rolling the fighter back over he focused on deflecting or capturing the remaining rockets coming up at him and managed to swing one into another fighter as his puppet continued to pump shots into the others.

Brad had to juggle between numerous psionics simultaneously, but it quickly became clear that the more attacks the Jhar threw at him the more of their own troops were going down. When their fighter count dropped to less than 15 they withdrew, leaving only the rockets from the surface coming up at him. Those gradually increased in number, but Brad was staying on top of it as he snuck a few peeks here and there into the dome above to see the inner workings of the dome doors.

It wasn’t enough and he needed more time, so to trick the Jhar he grabbed a few of the incoming rockets and slammed them into the door itself. The material it was made of was too thick to get through easily, but the rocket launchers quickly figured out that their ordinance was going to help him break through them so they almost simultaneously stopped their attacks, giving Brad a moment of peace as he and his puppet pilot reigned as king of the mountain over the city below them.

That gave him the time he needed to see into the dome and find the mechanical sweet spots, which in this case he didn’t need to try and wrench apart, for he realized there were walkways built inside the curve of the dome itself. Locating one of them near the interior, he had the pilot fire into the wall material until he had blown a hole into it, then he flew up next to it and Brad crawled inside, getting away from the fighter and the combat in the dome entirely.

Shoo, Brad said as he released control of the pilot and made sure he understood the sentiment. The Jhar took the warning at face value and flew away, leaving Brad alone in the cramped walkways that led to a manual release for the dome doors. When he got there he found that all that was required was to disengage the remote control, which was locking them in place, and hit the release button that took energy from a backup power cell built into the dome itself. It was a safety mechanism that would allow the doors to be closed or opened in the event of a citywide power loss, and that meant it couldn’t be countermanded save for onsite…and there was no way any of their infantry were getting close to him without getting knocked out.

With a grinding groan, the doors parted and slowly began to retract, with him widening them up to their full width, which was far larger than they had been retracted to allow the dropship inside.

“Captain, we’ve got the dome doors open. How soon before you can get us a ride?”

“Plowing the rode now. We should have a drone in place within minutes to secure the evac site. When the conduit will be clear is anyone’s guess.”

“How rough do you have it up there?”

“Having to play defense to keep from losing ships. Attrition is in our favor at present. Should I expedite the process?”

“Are there any planetary defense cannons I missed?”

“Nothing beyond the medium grade batteries. It’s their aerial fighters that are the main concern.”

“Pull six drones off and box escort one down. We’ve got a handle on the situation at the moment, but these guys are insistent that we don’t leave. We need to be gone before they get more inventive.”

“What about the fighters inside the dome?”

“I’ll handle those. Just get that dropship down to the entrance.”

“Sending now.”

Brad knew he was on the clock, so he went back to the hole the fighter had blown into the inside of the dome and crawled outside it, wishing he still had that fighter under his control. He didn’t have a jump pack, so if he slipped he was in for a long fall that he didn’t think he could cushion himself out of with his Lachka ‘crash bag’ technique. He might survive it, but he figured he’d be busted up by the impact regardless, so he crawled across the wall upside down very slowly, making sure his adhesive holds were secure and that he wasn’t grabbing onto anything that would pry loose.

A single rocket leapt up at him, but he deflected it in time and no more came. More of a trial balloon than anything, he guessed, but it meant they saw him and were just waiting for an opportunity to kill him. Apparently taking them alive wasn’t on the table anymore, or maybe even recovering his body. Right now it just seemed that they didn’t want to let them get away.

When Brad got to the opening he transitioned to vertical climbing that ended with him standing up on top of the dome in the really toxic air. His helmet filter took care of it, but the longer the dome doors were open the more of it was pouring into the city, though the ash was being kept out by the energy shield stretching across the gap. Their pilots were inside one of the ships so they shouldn’t be affected, but the lesser toxins they’d been breathing ever since leaving the dropship weren’t doing them any good. They’d live, but it would be messing with their lungs never the less.

Brad didn’t have to wait long before a Borg-like cube burst through the ash clouds and came to a hover over the dome. The six drones that made up the cube held position save for the bottom one. It pulled away, revealing the hollow interior that a dropship was cradled within. Once it had a free run down into the city Brad commed the pilot and had it fly close enough for him to jump on top, clinging to it and giving the dropship the psionic defense it needed.

Brad had to swat away multiple rockets as the dropship flew down to the pad, but he had Kip’s help when they got close to the surface. Between the two of them and the shields on the dropship they didn’t have any hull hits and they didn’t have to stay around long, with Kip getting the two pilots onboard as Brad slid off the top and dropped to the deck to find four Jhar prisoners in his friend’s tow as well.

“A little help?” Kip asked, with Brad telekinetically grabbing two of them and hauling them inside the dropship as he also swatted away another rocket, accidentally dropping one of them in the process. He picked him back up and threw the glowing pink/green sleeper into the back of the Falcon-class dropship. He stayed outside for a moment, knocking down some more rockets and steering a couple into the parked Jhar ships as he became the last man standing. When the others were aboard he hopped inside but kept his psionics active, reaching through the ship to add to its protection as they quickly flew back up through the dome’s opening and into the gap between the drones as they were busy firing at targets beyond that he couldn’t see.

When the bottom drone slipped back over, it eclipsed most of the exterior light and the whole mass accelerated, with one of the drone’s IDF fields reaching out to grab the much smaller ship and keep it from having to make the joint navigational calculations that the drones were to maintain the cube.

“Souvenirs?” Brad asked as he knelt next to one of the pilots and pulled off his armored glove as Kip was doing the same with the unconscious one.

“We needed a tissue sample, and these ventured a bit too close.”

“Why four?”

“One of these was helping us, and I want to know why.”

“Helping?”

“Shooting at the other Jhar.”

“That makes two then, why four?”

“More minds to interrogate later. Besides, we’re probably doing them a favor.”

“I’m not feeling all that generous at the moment.”

“I’m more interested in those brutes.”

“Their fleet in orbit is giving Captain Mendez a handful.”

“Even more reason to get information.”

“Alright, guests accepted. How’s your guy doing?”

“Messed up but he’ll live. How about him?”

“I’m alright,” the pilot answered. “The numbing helps.”

“Thought it would,” Brad said as he tapped into the battlemap with the orbital data highlighted. “Just sit this out until we get you to a med bay. I think we’re in the clear now.”

4

December 25, 3059

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Brad was running through population figures for his Protovic faction in his office when he sensed a familiar presence a few steps before he entered the open doorway opposite his desk. He looked up from the holograms as Greg walked in, raising an eyebrow in his direction.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m here to put you back on schedule,” the trailblazer said, crossing his arms over his chest with a stern look on his face.

“Schedule?”

“Your men are not working as fast as they can. Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them.”

Brad finally realized he was speaking in quotes and decided to respond in kind. “I promise you, this station will be operational as planned.”

“The Emperor does not share your optimistic appraisal of the situation.”

“But he asks the impossible. I need more men,” Brad said, belatedly realizing the truth in his own statement. His Protovic faction did need more population.

“Then perhaps you can tell him when he arrives.”

“The Emperor is coming here?” Brad answered, continuing to play along.

“No,” a voice said from outside as another person walked up to his office entryway. “He’s already here,” Davis said as he came into view.

Brad leaned back in his chair, glancing at Greg who had a slight smile on his face. “You bastard.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to execute you,” the Star Force Director said as he pulled up a chair and sat down as Kip followed him into the room.

“How the hell did you get here without my knowing?”

“Caught you on a training cycle,” Davis said as the other two Archons sat down and looked out the windows at the Protovic city behind Brad.

“I arranged the rest after that,” Kip admitted.

“Oh really?” Brad said in protest, glaring at him.

“I like to make an entrance when I can,” Davis admitted.

“You succeeded,” Brad said, turning his attention back to the matter at hand. “What’s so important that it brings you out from Sol?”

“I didn’t want to have this conversation in bits and pieces via relays, plus Vortison is already here and I have some additional questions for him.”

“Go on.”

“Let’s start with where your head is at,” Greg deflected. “Then we’ll start picking it apart.”

“On which subject?”

“Your recent field trip.”

“Two possible discussions there. I’m guessing that you’ve found something on the brutes?”

“I have,” Davis answered. “The Nexus finally admitted their existence once I directly inquired. They’re called the Urunneg, and are one of their dirty little secrets they like to keep swept under the carpet.”

“Wait, there hasn’t been enough time to get a courier out to them and back again.”

“No, there hasn’t. I got this information from The Nexus ambassador.”

“We have an ambassador?”

“Given our alliance with the Preema they feel we merit that small contact now. We’ve had one for the past 6 years.”

“We’ve been fighting with the Preema far longer than that,” Kip pointed out.

“I’ve been making some further inroads with the H’kar and other members of The Nexus, enough that we’re starting to get popular and exert a bit of influence. By recognizing us they legitimize the contacts rather than having us working as an outside force.”

“Face saving gesture?” Brad asked.

“I think they’re worried about the H’kar leaving and inspiring a few others to do likewise. Their recent efforts against the lizards have done little more than stall their advance into Nexus territory and the H’kar have noticed. They’re not interested in winning the war or reclaiming the H’kar’s lost worlds, but we are and we’re getting it done, slowly, but we’re eventually going to end up on The Nexus’s doorstep. A very undervalued doorstep, but our good will with the H’kar is at such a high level that if I asked them to join Star Force they’d probably accept and that would cause all kinds of havoc within The Nexus.”

“They’re not used to people leaving?” Brad guessed.

“No one has. Ever. Not without having all the advancements given to them stripped from their civilization, which would essentially destroy them. That fear has kept them all together, but the H’kar are small enough that they could get away with it and come directly over to us. This means The Nexus has some competition now, and other member states are in a position to start analyzing the advantages and disadvantages in their membership, as well as the threats of destruction if they’d left. It was never on the table before, but there are discussions happening now. A diplomatic push is on, and in order to start using politics to squash the seeds of rebellion they have established a line of contact with us. Their ambassador supplied the information on the Urunneg.”

“Why if it’s a secret?”

“The Urunneg are one of the many enemies The Nexus has, and they’ve been fighting them in one form or another for nearly a millennia. They could win a proper war against them, but they’re so spread out fighting multiple opponents that they can’t devote the resources to one area without crippling another. Their ambassador wasn’t so forthcoming in that regard, but I’ve acquired enough data from other sources to put the pieces together. The Urunneg control chunks of The Nexus’s domain, unofficially, and are left to roam and plunder so long as they don’t hit a high valued world or cause too much of a ruckus.”

“And that brings you out here why?”

“What do you plan to do with the Pinks?”

“The four here or the others?”

“Both.”

“We,” Brad said, looking at Kip, “hadn’t decided yet.”

“What have you decided?”

“I get the feeling that everything is up in the air now. Why don’t you just save some time and tell me what you want done.”

Davis smirked. “We need to figure out what to do and move forward on this quickly. This is not just a Protovic issue, but one for the entire empire. Starting with their telepathy.”

“Ah,” Brad said, sensing the underlying issue…or at least one of them that had brought Davis out here. “Well, you should know that as of a few days ago Vortison assured me that they don’t have the hardware to do motor control hacks, no matter what their skill level. They can influence, distract, and distort, but they can’t play puppets with anyone.”

Davis inclined his head slightly. “As of now?”

“As of now,” Brad confirmed. “What the special package contains is still up in the air. Vortison has his hands full there, even with all 8 variant samples to work with.”

“You’re keeping them separate, correct?”

“Just in case, yes. Only 2 are unlocked, but on the offhand chance that proximity might change that we’re not letting them comingle. Our Pink guests are in isolation and still undergoing light interrogation. The rebel is talking freely, while the others require mind melds to get useful information out of them.”

“Do you plan on keeping them here?”

“I don’t have a problem with it. You want them sent back?”

“Are you planning on going back?”

“That’s something we’ve been discussing,” Brad said, referring to Kip. “But the larger question of the telepathy needs to be answered first.”

“Now that I have it I can understand the implications of the trouble it could cause in an otherwise vulnerable civilian population, beyond the mere hysteria of ignorance,” Davis commented warily. “The trouble is there are a few races out there that already have telepathy, so we’re going to have to deal with it one way or another at some point. Do we exclude those that have it or…well, I don’t see a good ‘or’ at the moment.”

“Fearing power isn’t something Star Force does,” Greg pointed out. “No matter how weak someone is, they can always hurt others if they’re committed to doing it. Bringing telepaths into Star Force would change our internal dynamic, but I don’t see it being overly dangerous. Just something new.”

“Them not having remote control capability changes things,” Kip added. “But for the sake of argument, what if another race out there does?”

“We have the helmet inhibitors,” Greg reminded them. “So our security forces will be unaffected if it comes to that, but we don’t want to let that tech get out into the open or we’ll lose our primary advantage.”

“Agreed,” Davis said quickly. “Immunizing the population against Ikrid, technologically or biologically isn’t on the table, though I’ve been told before that the biological route isn’t available to us, and that’s one thing I want to take up with Vortison again. And it appears that’s also why the Urunneg tried to capture you.”

“Making yourself immune to telepaths is a far more powerful thing than people realize,” Greg added. “And that only escalates where the V’kit’no’sat are involved. Them giving it to Zen’zat and no one else is beyond huge, for it strips them of most of their power over us. Giving it to everyone out there would even the playing field, but I agree that’s not a good solution even if we were able to do it.”

“So what’s the worst case scenario if we brought the Pinks back and plugged them into Axius?” Davis asked.

“They start messing with others,” Kip answered. “Pulling tricks, cons, invading memories and stealing secrets. Convincing someone to jump off a balcony.”

“All of which can be done through other means,” Greg pointed out.

“But we have no way to trace where the influence comes from,” Brad argued. “If a Calavari picks someone up and tosses them over a balcony to their death we see him do it on surveillance vids. We can’t trace the telepathic signals.”

“But we still have range issues to consider, as well as the ability to mentally check all individuals seen within that radius at the time. So long as a telepath doesn’t get so strong they can block us out, we can still theoretically track down the assailant, correct?”

“Unless they figure out how to wipe each other’s memories,” Kip theorized. “One guy does the deed, then someone else wipes the memory of it from him before we can search his mind. Evidence gone bye bye.”

“What are we going to do now if a telepath from another races enters the ADZ and starts living among us?” Davis floated. “Kick them out because of their potential?”

“Like I said, we don’t fear power,” Greg reminded them. “We can’t take that route.”

“There are so many opportunities to misbehave when you have it,” Brad reminded them.

“Can we rule out mixed maturias then?” Greg asked. “If we do have telepaths from birth and not earned skills, we keep them segregated while they’re younglings so everyone is on an even playing field while they develop. That’s when people tend to be the most mischievous simply because they’re feeling out their capabilities.”

Davis glanced at each of the three trailblazers in turn. “I think we’re in agreement there.”

“We can’t make a rule saying no mental invasion,” Kip continued. “One, because we can’t enforce it, and two, because we do it all the time and it isn’t something wrong. Prying yes, but sometimes you need to pry.”

“Can we train people to defend themselves against it?” Greg wondered.

“Not well,” Brad answered. “Short of having telepathy yourself, there’s no way to stop someone skilled enough from getting in without an active blocking mechanism. You can’t teach people to develop one without the ability to sense when someone is pushing in.”

“So what, we’re just going to have a segment of the population that can play mental havoc with the others and there’s nothing they can do to defend themselves?” Kip floated. “I don’t like that scenario when I put myself in their shoes.”

“Yet this is the reality of the galaxy,” Davis pointed out. “We’ve been immune to it for a while due to geography, but that won’t last forever, regardless of what we do with the Pinks. We need to establish a policy now before we need it rather than scrambling to try and assemble one later.”

“As an addendum to the maturia,” Kip offered, “let’s only train the civilian telepathic population to defend themselves and leave the ‘offensive’ capabilities to special advanced programs. That won’t prevent people from learning on their own, but it’ll keep the strongest telepaths in the ‘earned’ group.”

Brad sighed, coming to a conclusion that he’d been nibbling at but now seemed obvious hearing a couple new voices state angles rather than him just running them through his head. “I guess it all comes down to where do you want to bite the bullet? Have possible telepathic trouble in our civilian population that will be hard to crack down on, or turn a blind eye to telepaths and exclude them from Star Force like they were a plague.”

“As I said,” Greg reminded him, “we don’t fear power.”

“So,” Davis continued after a brief moment of silence, “the issue isn’t whether or not to have telepaths in the civilian population, but in how to manage them in order to avoid major problems. We’ve already got two points on the board, let’s see how many more we can add and what the picture looks like then.”

“Agreed,” Brad said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his desk as he looked at Davis. “Now will you tell me what you want done with the Pinks?”

“These rebels you found. They are not in league with the Urunneg, and the others are only doing so because they are forced to under threat of death. That by no means excuses their actions, but if you remove the threat you remove most of the problem. I say we go in and evacuate them all back here, and if they don’t like that idea we take them anyway similar to the methods used to conquer the Veliquesh.”

Brad’s eyes widened slightly. “Really?”

“Orders of the Urunneg or not, they attacked Star Force. They don’t get to have an opinion anymore.”

“That’s going to be very expensive utilizing the Nexus grid point system.”

“Especially when we have to defend against a counterattack by the Urunneg,” Kip added. “Their tech level is formidable, so we’ll have to have a lot of warships on hand in addition to the transports.”

“These are Protovic being used as slaves by the Urunneg. Freeing them and adding them to our empire is worth the cost, though under prisoner protocols for most of them. We can make some more amenable arrangements for the rebels, but they all have to go through your indoctrination programs. We’re not uprooting their civilization and replanting it here. They’re joining us on our terms.”

“If that’s the way you want it…”

“You disagree?” he asked Brad.

“We’re still a little pissed at getting ambushed,” Kip answered for him.

Davis smiled. “I didn’t say you had to go about it gently.”

5

July 19, 3061

System 10746 (Nexus Domain)

Yvartis

Kip rode the dropship down to the planet seeing the smoke plumes rising from the surface targets that the Star Force fleet in orbit had just got finished destroying. They were all outside or on the dome covering the city, but they were not going to be giving the dropships any trouble on their way down or back up like they had the last time he’d left this place. Scores of Star Force skeets controlled the local airspace ensuring that the Jhar fighters couldn’t get to them while a number of Starscream-class mechs were standing on the dome and busy cutting through the entry doors.

The way would be opened soon enough, with Kip’s dropship being one of the first to move through along with the leading elements of the invasion force. The Urunneg fleet that had been here before had been reduced down to a handful of ships and those fled when they saw the Star Force convoy begin arriving at the planet. They knew they couldn’t handle this fight, so they’d ran clean out of the system save for a single ship that was snooping around the outer planets, perhaps waiting to see what happened or hoping to pick up some of their surface personnel later. Either way, right now Star Force controlled orbit with a mass of warships and drones deployed in intercept positions ensuring that it wouldn’t be able to attack or recuse anyone on the planet without coming under fire.

The same went for the Jhar ships, which had wisely backed down in the face of such overwhelming military might…though most of the Star Force ships were actually personnel transports and not well suited for combat. The Jhar didn’t know that and their bulk was terrifying on its own, but even without that added effect one warship would have been enough to make them cower down into the lower orbits after having seen their threat level displayed in grandiose fashion on the last visit here.

The remaining Jhar warships were now clustered up and being held at gunpoint with orders not to move. Kip intended to keep them there until the recovery efforts began, hoping that they wouldn’t have to board and stun each individual to get them into Star Force custody. He’d come prepared for that while leaving Brad back in Star Force territory to make preparations for the Pinks’ arrival, but he hadn’t come alone.

Beside him in the dropship was Octaviak, one of the four captured Jhar that they’d taken back with them and interrogated. She’d been the one rebel among them, actually firing on the other Pinks to try and help them escape when she’d been taken captive as well. Since then the other three had been remanded to the prison facilities and set on their isolated indoctrination programs, giving them a chance to earn their eventual freedom but being treated as full prisoners given the fact that they’d been shooting at Kip and Brad when they’d been captured.

Octaviak was wearing her fully body armor, showing no sign of her bioluminescence as she waited with the Archon in the rear bay along with a contingent of Commandos and a couple of Knights. All were seasoned veterans who had taken part in the conquest of the Veliquesh so they knew the score and how to handle a population recovery effort like this if things went south, but Kip was hoping Octaviak could help them convince at least part of the Jhar population to come with them willingly.

She was part of a rebel faction that abhorred the indentured servitude placed upon them by the Urunneg and the corrupt Jhar leaders that allowed it. They’d rather fight and die than live with the dishonor, but had no chance of beating the technologically and physiologically superior Urunneg. Their only advantage was their telepathy, and that was of no use against warships in orbit that could obliterate a city at will…which had happened in the past when the Jhar had failed them or showed resistance.

For that reason the rebels were hunted by the Jhar themselves, forcing them to go into hiding and become mostly sleeper agents. Octaviak had revealed herself trying to help the Humans escape the dishonorable kidnapping/murder attempt, and from her Kip had learned that there were many more of them out there, scattered throughout this city and others in small numbers. How many more were sympathetic but unwilling to even talk about dissention was unknown, but it was suspected that a sizeable chunk of the population was unhappy with the arrangement with the Urunneg, just too fearful to even think about doing anything about it.

That was why Kip was bringing Octaviak with him, hoping she could make contact with the other rebels so they could get them off planet first…but right now he had to throw his weight around and essentially take the place of the Urunneg and hopefully bully the Jhar into submission. If they resisted they were back to the Veliquesh again, though he very much hoped living sacrifices wouldn’t be in their battle plans.

With their orbital defenses meekly complying with Kip’s demands, he was hopeful that the surface would comply as well. Despite their sealing of the dome, once the mechs broke through there was no resistance as they landed in the open spots on the pads beneath. Kip had theirs set down on one nearest to the Tajak’s renplex, which translated into ‘governor’s office,’ or whatever the equivalent was within Jhar society. Kip hadn’t spent much time on that himself, knowing that if they were successful their culture and society were going to be wiped out anyway, so there was no use in him getting that well acquainted with it.

When the rear hatch opened there was no incoming weaponsfire and Kip walked out freely with Octaviak beside him, making it clear she was with him rather than a prisoner. His team stayed with the dropship and the others nearby while he moved off with her alone and into the city…a gesture of trust, they might assume, save for those that had fought against him the last time he was here. They knew he wasn’t making a gesture of trust, but one of contempt, for he most definitely didn’t need an escort with the powers he possessed.

His golden armor stood out, for it was the only one amongst the invasion force, and he assumed the Jhar would recognize it as well. Kip didn’t know how long their restraint would last, but they were allowed all the way up to the renplex before they met up with a wall of guards. Kip raised a hand and an invisible wall formed between two of them, spreading out and pushing them aside to give him and Octaviak room to move through.

Not knowing what was happening and being thwarted with such a casual gesture broke the confrontational mood, with the pair moving through the dozens of armed guards without so much as a look behind them. The guards followed, keeping close but out of arms reach, as the Human and his Jhar companion worked their way through the building and up to the Tajak’s edict room rather than his abode.

That seemed to make the guards even more confused, up until Octaviak walked up to the podium and began messing with the controls. An invisible wall from Kip kept the guards back from her as the rebel accessed the city-wide broadcast system and set it to address every terminal on emergency protocols. Halfway through her prep the Tajak himself burst into the room through the guards, yelling more at Octaviak than the Human.

“What do you think you’re doing!”

“This planet is now in their possession,” she explained without looking at him or delaying her setup work. “They have supplanted the Urunneg and are now our masters…or at least that’s all your primitive brain needs to comprehend. The truth is more complex and I’m about to instruct the city on the details.”

“You are forbidden.”

“I don’t take orders from you.”

“You cannot do this! Step aside,” he said, rushing past the guards. Kip let him get within half a meter of her before physically stepping up and grabbing him by the armored arm.

“You tried to kill me the last time I was here. Don’t give me a reason now to return the gesture,” the trailblazer threatened, with the translation software handling the language barrier adequately.

“How dare you,” the Jhar said in such twisted tones that it sounded like hissing after processing. “You have no idea what you have done. What you’re doing. You’ve doomed us all.”

“Actually, we’re here to save you. So shut up and stand back,” he said, tossing the Protovic into the guards with a flick of his arm. He nearly knocked two of them over, and it was clear that that the Archon’s physical power was just as impressive as his mental ones. “I’ll give you instructions later. Obey and I won’t have to render you unconscious.”

“Ready,” Octaviak said, righting herself behind the podium.

“Begin. I’ll make sure they stay quiet,” Kip said, making a mental link with them all that forcefully broke through their mental blocks and suppressed their ability to utter so much as a word of complaint.

“I am Octaviak, member of the Ishta. For too long we have been slaves of both the Urunneg and those of our own that used that excuse to further their own dishonor. As of today we have been conquered again, by those that came here as friends from far away seeking to unite us with our wayward kin. They took me back with them by mistake, thinking I was one who was trying to kill them. Those that did are still there, imprisoned, but I am here now because they searched my mind and discovered the truth. I am not their enemy. The Ishta are not their enemy. Any loyal Jhar are not their enemy. The true enemy is the Urunneg and those that serve them, telling us that we will be destroyed if we do not fully submit.”

“That may have been true, but for the Ishta and myself I can say that we do not care. Better to die honorably than live as a scoundrel. For this we have been hunted by our own people and forced to hide among them simply to survive. We meet in secret, when we’re able and bold enough, taking some small actions of defiance that ultimately have amounted to nothing more than preserving our sanity. Today we have another option. Our new conquerors are not here to use us for their own agenda, they are here to free us and bring us into their empire so that we will be free of the Urunneg and all those who would kill us for our telepathic abilities.”

“Their abilities far surpass ours, so they do not fear us. The other Jhar with them, whom they call Protovic, do not have our abilities. Nor do most of the many races that are part of their empire, but their leaders, their Archons, are far more powerful than you can imagine. Some of you saw what happened here, when two of them were ambushed by both the Urunneg and our dishonorable security forces. They were not even armed and they tore through them all. They did not need my help, rather they helped me by showing me a better way, an honorable path, and a chance for true freedom.”

“That freedom must be earned, however. We must leave this planet behind entirely. The ships in orbit are both warships and transports brought here to carry us, all of us, away from this retched existence to a world with our kin. We will have to learn their ways, their language, and prove ourselves worthy, but if we do so we will join them as equals…not outcasts.”

“That is why I am calling on all Ishta to come forward, now, boldly identifying yourselves and moving to the locations where there are Star Force landing zones. You need bring nothing with you but yourselves. I will meet you there and we will discuss things further. For everyone else, both those too cowardly to act and those who have acted dishonorably, I bid you farewell. You will not see me again, nor the rest of us. Your path will be a different one laid out by Star Force. And I can honestly say I hope you resist them, and that they let me watch as they put you into submission.”

“Brothers and sisters come with me now, and let us be done with this world,” Octaviak said, backing away from the podium and walking out of view rather than turning it off directly. The Human put a hand on her shoulder, mentally telling her that she had done well, then took her place in front of the podium as he held his captured audience both still and quiet before him.

Meanwhile, true to her word, Octaviak moved off, heading back to the landing zone to meet up with the other Ishta that were bold enough to reveal themselves. She expected that many would not, fearing this was a trap, but Kip had wanted her to try so they could be spared the prison sentence awaiting the others. The Ishta would still have to go through indoctrination, as would she, but they could do so without the penalty phase that was necessitated by the attack on the Archons previously.

She wondered if she was going to be jumped on her way back to the dropship, keeping a sharp lookout for nearby minds but none approached, singly or in groups. In fact, she was given a wide berth the entire walk back, then saw two other Jhar standing with the white armor of the Humans. As she approached she saw their ID tags on her HUD, but knew one of them by his mental signature alone.

“Havrel,” she said, running up behind him and giving him a big hug when he turned around.

“This had better not be a trap,” he warned.

“It isn’t, and if you suspected it was you wouldn’t have come.”

“I came trusting in you. Your words were…clean,” he said, referencing her lack of code words that would have suggested coercion.

“I have been to their empire and seen the other Jhar there. We will be welcome once we earn our place.”

“How so?”

“Training. I have begun mine already. There is so much they can offer us. This is what we have long dreamed of.”

“We dreamt of independence,” another Jhar said, walking up to them.

“This is better. Search my memories,” she offered, lowering her barrier to them. “I am not lying.”

“But are they?” Havrel asked, beginning to pluck images from her mind.

“We are coming with them one way or another,” Octaviak confided. “They are allowing the Ishta an easier transition. The attack on them is not being forgiven. The dishonorable and the apathetic will have a more difficult path to travel to earn their place. Those of the Ishta bold enough to come forward now will be rewarded. Those who do not believe me will be lumped in with the others.”

“So they punish all who do not reveal themselves?” he asked, glancing at one of the dull white helmets a couple meters to his right.

“We betrayed their trust and tried to kill them. If the situation was reversed would we be so accommodating?”

Havrel huffed. “I hope you’re right about this.”

“You will see,” she said, closing her mind again as a few more individuals made their way out of the shadows and onto the pad, with all others staying far away from the alien soldiers but looking on from what they felt was a safe distance.

“How long will they wait?”

“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly, seeing far fewer faces than she’d hoped. This wasn’t the only landing site, but she knew for a fact that there were more Ishta in the city than the few here, and suspected many more that she had no contact with in order to preserve their anonymity. The true number of Ishta was unknown to everyone, for they were united by scruples and literature, not an organizational structure. When several hours had passed and there was only 9 others that had appeared at their location the soldiers instructed them to board the dropship, with the others they’d brought down now being unnecessary.

Octaviak went onboard with the others, knowing that she’d be given no further special treatment and sent into indoctrination along with the other Ishta. She had a head start on them, but would endure the isolation process as well after a transitional group period, earning her way into the Protovic like the others hopefully would.

As she boarded the dropship and the ramp began to close she knew she was looking at this world for the last time, then a firm hand directed her away from the hatch and into the personnel section beyond. There she watched on camera as the dropship took off and passed many more coming in. What exactly was going to happen she didn’t know, but she was glad she and at least some of the Ishta were getting out ahead of it. She’d been told of the Veliquesh and how they’d been rescued, and hoped it didn’t come to that, but she knew that one way or another the others would be taken from this world as well and put into the prison facilities in Star Force territory.

And unless they changed their ways and completed their own training they would stay there, away from the Protovic, for the rest of their lives…meaning she was now done with the dishonorable bastards permanently, and that mere thought was a breath of fresh air to a mind burdened by years of persecution.

6

April 2, 3065

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Octaviak walked into the chamber not knowing what to expect. Over the past year since she’d breezed her way through indoctrination she’d been spending her time training in an advanced maturia and living with the rest of the Protovic on the planet. She’d been the first to make it through, and even now there were only three ‘Pink skins,’ as they were nicknamed, within the free population. They’d been welcomed in with the rest of the Protovic, despite the fact that they had telepathy and the others didn’t.

She tried not to cause any disruptions by using her abilities save for select circumstances, but the more she talked and became one with the other Protovic she realized they were all used to the idea of having a telepath in their minds because their Archon leaders routinely interacted with them that way…and they were far more powerful than Octaviak would ever be. She wasn’t an Archon, so there was a little bit of animosity there, but the mere idea of having someone poking around inside your head wasn’t seen as offensive, because these Protovic had already adjusted to the idea of not having secrets.

That made for a very open community, and as the days passed she allowed herself the luxury of sampling others’ thoughts. They had no blocks to prevent it, save for the Humans which were a total stone to her abilities, and for the first time in her life she didn’t feel that being telepathic came with a curse. It was a great asset and allowed her freedom that she was only now able to explore.

Octaviak didn’t mess with anyone and just kept her forays in the observation category, but by doing so she learned so much more about the Protovic and Star Force than she had during her indoctrination. Not data wise, but the feel of it and what it meant to be a part of the empire. She’d come to think of this as home and had gotten used to her daily training routines when she’d gotten a summons to a special training program. It wasn’t a command, but rather a request and an opportunity she wasn’t going to pass up because it came directly from an Archon, but as she walked through the doorway into the huge chamber in a part of another city that she’d never even set foot in before, Octaviak had no clue what to expect.

“Welcome,” a purple skinned Protovic said in English, which she could now speak well enough without translator equipment. She wasn’t wearing armor anyways, and rarely did now. That was another thing about this planet that was vastly different from her former home, because she could see everyone and their multi-colored glows.

“Hello,” she answered back, looking across a courtyard that had trees blocking her view of what lay beyond.

“You’re Octaviak, I presume?”

“I am.”

“My name is Prentha. Please follow me,” he said, turning to walk away and waiting for her to match his stride.

“No one has told me what I’m doing here yet.”

“Training…experimental training. You’re the first Protovic telepath we’ve had, but everyone here has special abilities. Mine are sensory, like all the other Purples. The Oranges have a strength and speed advantage, which you probably already knew.”

“I heard that. What do you mean by ‘sensor?’”

“Sensory means I can sense things you can, or rather I can sense them in better ways. It means I’m very hard to sneak up on and it is the special skill that Purples have in our genome, but only a few of us have been unlocked. All the Oranges came here or were born here unlocked, but the rest of us are not, save for, now, the Pinks, of which you’re the first,” he explained as they walked a dirt path into and through the trees. “We’re learning to unlock the others, or rather the Human geneticists are, and this program is for us to train and to be studied as both we and the medtechs explore what we’re capable of. Do you understand?”

“I don’t understand what you mean by ‘unlocked.’”

“Hidden skills that will develop or turn on eventually on their own, maybe thousands of years from now. The geneticists are finding ways to advance that and turn them on directly, one individual at a time.”

“And each Protovic color has a different skill?”

“Yes. We’re learning here how to develop them and incorporate them into our civilization, hopefully to advance our faction and give us more power to work with. Do you know how small we are compared to the rest of Star Force?”

“Yes, I learned that. Not the smallest, but far from the largest.”

“And many of the best people eventually leave to join a Clan. Right now most Protovic are choosing to stay here and help us advance, but some have already left. The Clans are an honor, for they are the best of the best, but until we figure out these abilities and how to use them even the Clans want to know what we’re capable of, hence they have sent representatives here to help us experiment and train.”

“The Clans are here?”

“Many are, and not just Protovic members. We are being tested heavily, with the experts telling us what to do. It’s hard work, but we don’t have to think too much. They figure out new drills and weapons for us to use while we work on developing our individual skills. It’s a very exclusive program, and one that you’re not to discuss with others.”

“I understand. I am here because I am the only available Pink?”

“No. We would wait until someone of sufficient skill arrived before taking an inferior. Your records indicate you are fit to join us, so yours is not a lesser membership.”

Octaviak smiled, for that was just what she was wondering. “Are there Human telepaths here?”

“Yes, and they will be working with you more than the others,” Prentha said as they came out of the trees and the full size of the dome became visible across grassy fields and short mountains.

Octaviak’s jaw dropped. “This is all inside?”

“Pretty sweet, isn’t it? Other training programs go outside, but for this one they wanted everyone in a contained environment. There’s even living quarters in here,” he said, pointing off beyond a low hill to the right. “You won’t need to go back into the city for anything, save for some down time if you need it.”

“So this is a training colony?”

“You can think of it that way, yes.”

An apt description, a voice said in Octaviak’s mind.

She physically jerked, which made Prentha smile. “It takes some getting used to,” he said, then frowned. “Is it different than normal?” he asked as an armored figured came strolling down one of the nearby grass-covered hills.

“Their voice is so loud,” she said, staring at the Archon but only being able to see him with her eyes. His mind was totally hidden from her.

Not totally, he corrected her. My aura is visible, you are simply not skilled enough to detect it. I will teach you how.

“This is mage Pel-9833, a member of Clan Samus who has been teaching us how to partially shield our minds, even without telepathy…as well as schooling us in a number of combat disciplines. As an Archon he is an expert in all forms of warfare and a commander in all 5 divisions of the military.”

“I’ll take her from here,” Pel said as he caught up to the pair.

“I thought she needed a tour?”

“I’ll handle that. Go ahead and get back to your unit.”

Prentha turned to face Octaviak. “I’ll talk to you later. Have fun,” he said before taking off at a jog up and over the hill and off to who knew where.

“Now, tell me how my voice is ‘loud?’”

“I…I mean it’s loud. I don’t know a better word,” she said, unsure how to respond.

“What kind of training did you do on your old world?”

“We had some practice sessions when we were young.”

“And when you were mature?”

Octaviak shrugged. “We trained our bodies, but just learned to use our telepathy naturally.”

“Then you are in for a surprise, for you can train your telepathy, just like your body. I’m here to teach you how and to devise a program for other Protovic to follow in your place. We will have to experiment a bit, for your telepathy is a less powerful version than ours, but most of my experience will transfer over to you, I imagine.”

“You’re going to give me knowledge?”

Pel raised an eyebrow, with his helmet currently tucked into storage mode behind his neck. “I suppose I could, but that wasn’t my meaning. The training drills and challenges we use should work for you in most cases, though I imagine some adjustments will have to be made.”

“What can you do?”

“You’re wondering how Kip and Brad took down those fighters?”

“How do you read my mind so easily? I did not even feel you enter it.”

“I haven’t left it since you’ve arrived.”

“How can you do that?”

“By being subtle…and by you not being very skilled. We’re going to fix that though, and to answer your question we have the ability to not only read minds, but to influence. You can do the same, but our ‘influence’ goes beyond what you can do. We can take direct control over a person’s body if they don’t know how to defend themselves.”

“What do you mean…” Octaviak said, her words getting cut off as a sledgehammer hit her mind and her entire body froze up, with her becoming a living statue on the grass.

“This is not pleasant for you, and I apologize, but take a moment to study your situation then I will release you. What I have done is taken priority control away from you, blocking your mental impulses from getting to their target and supplementing my own. This is difficult to do, more so at range, and is enhanced by making flesh to flesh contact. The fighters you saw taken down were defeated because the pilots’ minds were invaded and they were forced to crash them into the ground.”

Octaviak gulped when she was released and her hand came up reflexively to cover her throat. She was beyond shocked, and a bit scared, with her mental blocks going up as strong as they possibly could.

“You could do…anything.”

“Scary, huh?”

“Why have you not been killed?”

“Most people, even within Star Force, don’t know we can do this. We prefer to keep it that way, though we’re not going to hide our skills if they’re needed. It took me a long time to learn how to do this, and then even longer to get good at it. Your brain doesn’t have the necessary tissue to be able to do the same thing, and in that way your telepathy is different from mine. A few other ways too, but this is the big one. And yes, we could do all sorts of nasty things with it, but not all Humans have it. Only those trusted to do the right thing. All Archons acolyte level and above, and a scattering of other individuals who have proved themselves. The rest of the Humans have no telepathy whatsoever, but you will not be able to read them, for they do have an unconscious block, as I do.”

“How does an unconscious block work?”

“It prevents transmission feedback. When I enter your mind, my telepathic link is two way. I send manipulations to you through it, and I receive information back. The block doesn’t allow the information to come back, so I can telepathically transmit to other Humans but I can’t read their thoughts or delve into their memories.”

“And you can’t take control of them?”

“Not without touching them. That gets around the block, but it has to be flesh to flesh to make a physical connection. Clothing or armor prevents it. Does your ability increase with touch?”

“Rumor has that it does, but I haven’t had much opportunity to try.”

“It won’t work on me, because of the nature of my mental structure and yours, but we’re going to have to practice on other Protovic so we can measure the difference. I’m guessing that you can’t read minds directly through contact, but it may enhance it by channeling your energy tethers directly through the body to gain more signal strength.”

“Your words are confusing to me.”

“In time they will not be, but for now let’s walk and talk. I’ll show you around and you can ask questions.”

“What are the other skills the other colors have?”

“Right now 5 of the 8 are unlocked. The Oranges have enhanced strength and speed, though that isn’t obvious because others can catch up to them with time and training. All of the Oranges on this world have it unlocked, but other colonies outside of Star Force do not. We didn’t unlock it, but found them that way and brought them all back here.”

“Did they attack you?”

“No, they were living on a very primitive planet and were welcoming after they got past the shock of seeing new people. They had no knowledge of life beyond their planet. All you Pinks have telepathy, and so far we’ve only found one colony. We brought you all back here, so there’s nothing to unlock with you. The Reds, Purples, and Aquas we did genetically unlock. Prentha back there has sensory enhancements, which mean he can see better, hear better, and sometimes feel things behind him that he can’t see. The Reds have a mental upgrade that makes them smarter, while the Aquas can absorb energy and release it back as low levels of electricity. Not enough to kill, at this point, but try to tackle one that is charged and you’re going to get shocked enough that you can’t hold onto them.”

“They absorb electricity…without damaging themselves?”

“More light and heat, but they can pull directly from some very low power lines. Too much and they are damaged. Right now we’ve only got a few with the ability unlocked and we’re still learning what they can and can’t do.”

“Do you know what the others will have, once you unlock them?”

“We have an idea, but it’s better not to guess until we know for sure.”

“Why do we have these abilities?”

“A very good question that I do not have a full answer for, but we believe they were genetically engineered into you rather than being natural. Why and by whom we do not know. You are here to help us learn how to use them for our benefit. Others will track down what history they can.”

“Do other races have similar things?”

“We know of a few, but most do not.”

“Are they afraid of you?”

“I don’t really care. This is who we are, and they’d better get used to it.”

“I mean no disrespect…”

“But you don’t like losing control of your body.”

“No, I do not.”

“If I was in your position I would feel the same. Which is why I’m going to teach you how to resist it. It may not stop someone from doing it to you, but it will increase their difficulty, shorten their range, etc. The more powerful your telepathy becomes the greater you will be able to shield yourself…so long as you do not allow us to make physical contact. There is little defense to that other than having a stronger mind.”

“And Humans’ are always stronger.”

“Not always, but structurally we’re more advanced. Our greatest strength is our block, though it is something I cannot lower, otherwise I would give you access to my mind so you could see and learn.”

“So you can’t share your thoughts with others?”

“I can send them to you, what I choose, but I can’t give you access to look where you will.”

“Do you have other abilities, besides your telepathy?”

“Yes we do, and many of them we do not share with others. Sometimes it is better when your enemies do not know what you are capable of, and if we share that knowledge with friends it can work its way to them.”

“Is there anything you can tell me?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

Octaviak cringed. “I’ll risk it,” she said, and before the words were even out of her mouth her chest felt constricted and her feet suddenly left the ground, with her losing control of her body for the second time today…though this time she could still move around, just she wasn’t going anywhere as she floated out of legs reach of the grass.

“Telekinesis, which we call ‘Lachka.’ We can only lift a small pebble when we first gain it, but over time we can strengthen it to move larger objects. Did you see Brad or Kip use this on Yvartis?”

“I saw a person floating. Please put me down.”

“You’re uncomfortable losing control,” Pel said as he lowered her till her feet touched, then he released his grip on her torso. “That is something you will need to work on. Not with everyone, for you should want to remain in control, as I do, but for those you trust you need to be able to actually trust them and let them into your head and body. In time hopefully I can earn that trust, for we will need it in the more advanced training to come. If you are twitchy now that is understandable, but please try to stop subconsciously seeing me as a potential enemy over the days to come.”

“Just you?”

“Me first, then perhaps a few others. It doesn’t work if it’s forced, so it’ll take you some time to check me out. I just wish I could speed it up by giving you access to my mind. Your suspicion runs deep from the former company you kept.”

“Being hunted doesn’t help in the trust department.”

“No, it doesn’t. But you’re not hunted here, so try to relax that part of your mind as time goes on.”

“Do or do not, there is no try.”

Pel raised an eyebrow at her. “I see you’ve discovered Star Wars?”

“A friend showed them to me, and I have watched them many times. The Jedi had your Lachka too. Can you see the future?”

“Nope. Guessing like the rest of you,” he said as they came over a hilltop and a large lake came into view with people swimming in it. “How are you in the water?”

“We didn’t have water like this on Yvartis.”

“You’ve never tried?”

“I don’t like not being able to breathe.”

“It does take some getting used to, but you need to learn to swim just in case you fall into water at some time. In fact, there are ways to use your telepathy to help you navigate underwater when your eyes are no help. It’s on my list of things to teach you, but I guess swimming will have to come first.”

“If it’s that important why wasn’t it part of the indoctrination?”

“Probably because you had to go through that in isolation and swimming is too dangerous for you to learn on your own. Need someone standing by in case you start to drown…and no, that’s not going to happen with you. We’ll start you with a breath mask…after we get through several weeks of other training. It’ll be a minor thing, your telepathy is what we want to focus on.”

“So you’re to be my Jedi Master then?”

“Yes, my young padawan.”

Octaviak smiled widely. “I think I’m going to like this.”

7

July 5, 3066

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

“Back again?” Brad asked as he met Vortison’s dropship in the hangar bay.

“I’ve completed the work on the last three variants,” the medtech said as he walked down the ramp alone.

“Oh?”

“And you’re not going to like it.”

Brad frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“For starters,” Vortison said, stopping in front of him as they had the wide hangar deck to themselves, “the Yellows’ ability is poison injection.”

“Poison?”

The geneticist help up his palm and pointed just below the wrist. “A reservoir will grow beneath the skin here, unseen, and will be connected to a visible port here,” he said, tapping just below the center of his hand. “Retractable needle. Whatever they grab onto they can inject within a second.”

“That’s not good,” Brad agreed. “What type of poison?”

“A very potent kind that will kill most Human-sized organisms with a single drop. There’s a built-in immunity within their genome so they can’t kill each other with it…or themselves.”

Brad shook his head firmly. “We’re not giving them that.”

“Unless you want to wait another 50 years on a maybe, we have to with at least 1 person to get the Yellow activation key.”

“Can you reverse the process afterwards?”

“I’m still working on doing that with the Purples and I think we’ll be able to reverse their development soon, but it will require treatment in a medical station. There is no reverse process to access, so it’ll have to be a forceful rebuild.”

“How risky is that?”

“With a physical reversal…not very if I know what I’m doing. Taking the Reds back is something I’m not ready to tackle. Messing with the mind is infinitely harder.”

“What about the other two?”

“As we discussed earlier, the Whites have a significantly enhanced resistance to disease, infection, and an overall healing rate above standard, but the Blues have a hardening of the skin similar to their exoskeletal patches…save that it happens everywhere.”

“They lose their soft tissue?”

“It will transform into a much harder version, as well as losing its bioluminescence. The eyes will remain the same, but they’ll basically be a hard carapace that I doubt will have the type of agility you want.”

“So scratch that one too. Is it safe to assume you can reverse it as well for a volunteer?”

“I should be able to, but this is far more tissue changes than any of the other upgrades.”

“So we should hold off on that one for a while?”

“And the Yellows. I’m here to upgrade the Whites and will stay until we get the Yellows and Blues squared away. At which point we can start tackling the big problem.”

“Problem? What else did you find?”

“Just a metaphor, but you’re right. I did discover a massive amount of genetic memory modules in the coding…and I have a feeling they might be overrides.”

“Put the existing individual’s dormant or overwriting them?”

“I don’t know, but the more I look into the coding I’m seeing that someone wanted to not just upgrade the Protovic, but create an entirely different race. They’ll still be bipedal, two arms and a head, but beyond that they’re going to be something different, and I think the memory modules will allow them to become this new race in mind and culture immediately. I would not recommend having anyone go through with this.”

“A new race?”

“Or an old one. I only have bits and pieces of coding worked out but they’ll be unlike anything the Protovic are now, and my bet will be they’ll be far more advanced. This might be pandora’s box we’re opening here.”

“How close are you to blocking it?”

“Blocking I can do now. Removal of the coding entirely is iffy. We’re getting closer to doing that and it’ll solve the problem entirely, but with so many other Protovic colonies out there the reunification is bound to happen at some point.”

“Which is why we need to know what this new race is. Can you send the coding into a computer simulation?”

Vortison shook his head. “That only works with genetics we’re familiar with, and is basically structured guessing. There are too many unknowns with this, not the least of which is the compressed nature of the coding. I can tell you there will be an unspooling that happens when it is activated, and we’re not going to fully understand what this is until we see it and I can get some active genetic samples. Again, I don’t recommend doing this, but it’s the only way we’re going to get the answers we need.”

“Can you combine the activation keys in samples?”

“Yes and I intend to, but I already know they’re designed for a full organism. They won’t unspool in a few isolated cells. Whoever designed this is brilliant…perhaps a bit twisted, for that poison is not a good sign, but the coding is so complicated and dense I think it’d give the V’kit’no’sat some trouble analyzing.”

“Will this new race have the poison?”

Vortison sighed. “Guess work at this point, but I think each ability is a stepping stone to the new race. How each one is modified is a bit more readily readable, and I have confirmed that the poison glands will continue to exist after transformation, but their form will alter. I can’t give specifics, but I can tell you they won’t go away and they won’t stay the same. As for gaining the other 7 abilities I would guess so, but I am not sure how. I can tell you that the final version is identical for all of them. They will all become the same, exact race. Clones actually, for they’ll all have the same genetic code until they start breeding offspring.”

“Still egg sacks?”

“No clue. That hasn’t been high on my digging priority list.”

Brad put his hands on his hips, looking at the floor for the moment. “Alright, let’s get the White volunteers upgraded first and worry about the rest later. And an antidote to that poison would be nice to come by.”

“Already on my to-do list.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Kip said, kicking another chair away from the one he was sitting on in Brad’s office. “So we either get some poor bastard to try it or we never know what the hell is going on.”

“We’re not trying it, even if someone does volunteer,” Brad said firmly. “At least not until we have a way of undoing it.”

“And if we can’t find one?”

“We’re not sacrificing anyone to chance on this.”

“There’s got to be another way. Vortison has the full code now, can’t he read it given enough time?”

“He says yes, but there are some things we’ll only learn by watching it happen and studying the results…on a person. He says tissue samples won’t cut it.”

“By any chance is this ‘new’ race in the database?”

Brad stiffened slightly. “We don’t have their genetic code, unpacked anyway, to run a search for, but that’s a good question. What if this is an old race that wanted to hide itself?”

“So they created another as carriers of their true genetic code?”

“Plausible, though very grandiose.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Kip muttered.

“Or it could be some Frankenstein creation never before seen.”

“Going by the rumors, the first seems more likely.”

“Ok, let’s work the piece of this that we can. We’d already decided that we weren’t going to suppress the variant upgrades, and find a way to work them into this faction…”

“And out the window that goes.”

“Do we even know of any race…check that, any talking race that has poison?”

“Not that we’ve encountered, but I think there’s probably a few in the database.”

“Say we find some of them, or a Yellow that’s unlocked…what do we do?”

“We can relock the Yellow, right?”

“Undo it, yes. But what about another race? You and I can kill just about anyone within two seconds if we chose, so saying the ability to poison someone is more lethal isn’t accurate. Do we ban it? And if we do how is that fair?”

“Compartmentalize,” Kip said, referencing the problem at hand. “Focus Star Force only.”

“Well that’s easy enough. No one in Star Force gets poison.”

“And if there’s a race we take as a ward, or one that wants to join that has it?”

“We engineer it out of them.”

“Good. That part’s settled anyway. Now, do we let non-Star Force races roam our territory with that ability?”

“Ugh,” Brad said, leaning back in his chair and looking at the ceiling. “I guess we have to.”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

“Kill someone with a lachar or with a poison needle…you’re in trouble with us either way, it’s just the type of weapon used that differs.”

“We don’t let a lot of weapons into our colonies,” Kip reminded him.

“Ok, here’s a scenario. Say we got a weak race whose only defense is a poison bite. Now, one of them is getting beat up and security isn’t there. Does he have to take the beating and potentially die, or can he defend himself with the poison, knowing that one bite will kill his attackers?”

“Ouch.”

“Exactly.”

“If it’s Star Force we can deal with that. If it’s an outsider…he’s got to be able to defend himself.”

“Agreed, but killing someone for punching you in the face isn’t acceptable.”

“Telling someone they have to take the abuse to protect their attacker is also unacceptable.”

“If this is inside Star Force territory…ah hell, that doesn’t matter. When you’re under the gun you use whatever you have to survive. No holds barred. That’s not the way we fight, but I’m not going to begrudge someone else for doing what they had to do when they weren’t in the wrong.”

“So,” Kip said, throwing another wrinkle at him, “if you’ve got some dumb Calavari picking on Mr. Poison and he doesn’t know the guy has poison and he tries to beat him up anyway, it’s fair to kill him in self-defense when he was just ruffing Mr. Poison up and not going to take it any further? He’s in the wrong, but should he have to die for that?”

“No, but he did bring it on himself.”

“What if Mr. Poison deserved an ass kicking?”

“Wear armor when you’re doing it,” Brad quipped.

Kip smiled. “Good point.”

“Alright, alright. We’ve been down this road with the telepathy. The galaxy isn’t a safe place and we’re just going to have to face the threats as they materialize. Just because someone has the ability to do bad things doesn’t mean they will, nor should they be punished or confined because of it. We’re not going to use poison because we don’t fight that way and none of the rest of Star Force will either, but if someone else has it then we’re just going to have to deal with them as is.”

“So the dumb brute just gets killed for picking the wrong sucker to bully?”

“Life is a mine field. We can’t safe them all.”

“And if Mr. Poison decides to pick a fight?”

“If his only weapon is the poison, then that’s an automatic no. If he can only fight by killing, then he doesn’t get to fight unless he is under attack.”

“Ok, so no mandatory genetic alterations unless someone wants to join Star Force?”

“Agreed.”

“But travelers can still come and go with it?”

“That’s something we’re just going to have to deal with, like the telepaths.”

“Fine. So then we don’t need a separate maturia for the Yellows?”

“Crap. Blues too.”

“Well, we can either have advanced groups and non-advanced groups, or we can find a way to give those that don’t have any some copies.”

“Colors still won’t matter.”

“Is that important?”

“Aesthetically, kind of,” Brad admitted. “Everything needs to fit a master plan, and right now we’re just tearing more holes in the one we thought we’d worked out.”

“Ok, let’s work this from the other direction. Do we need Protovic subdivision? Really? Or are we just trying to make what we have fit?”

“They’re already different, once unlocked.”

“So what if we just relock them all, then they’re on the same playing field no matter what their color.”

“For future offspring, sure. But we’re not forcing changes on the people already here.”

“You miss my point. Do we need 8 different types of Protovic?”

“I’m worried that if we tried to give them all the abilities that would be too much for civies.”

“I’m kind of curious to see what would happen there, but you’re probably right. The upgrades need to be earned, but for the Oranges and Pinks it’s default right now.”

“I sense you have a suggestion. Make it. That’s why I brought you here.”

“Why can’t we alter their colors?”

“To do what…oh.”

“Exactly.”

“We’ll still have a couple left over…or one, if we keep one as mundane.”

“Maybe we’ll find something in the master code to keep later…although, we might want to keep the Orange enhancement default to give them a head start. Maybe even the Red.”

“No, not the Red. Keep that as earned. Orange…you might be right. That leaves us with 2 extras again.”

“It can be a skill mark, or we might just not use them at all. It’s just window dressing.”

“But cool window dressing, and I feel like it needs to matter…aside from its original purpose.”

“Jedi apprentice bands were different colors,” Kip offered. “This can be a transitional process getting to full ‘adult’ status and make it whatever we choose. Those who want to go civie will just be stuck with whatever color they ditched the path at.”

“Whoa…wait a second. I think you just had a good idea.”

“Oh? What was it?”

“Non-traditional maturia. A very long one. If you leave you go civie. If you stay you advance up the ranks until you hit ‘Final Form.’”

“Bingo,” Kip said, throwing his hands up in the air like goalposts. “Final Form, that’s genius.”

“And just what we need. We just need to know if and when Vortison can make it happen.”

“So anything we learn from the coding packet will be extra?”

Brad nodded. “We need to get the Protovic squared away sooner rather than later. We can’t wait to see if we find a way of accessing that data.”

“And if we do we can always incorporate it into the later Ultra Maturia levels?”

“‘Ultra’ it is, and yes. I think we’ve got our base now, we just need to get it established and build on it.”

“That means relocking the Pinks’ offspring, for starters.”

“Until we get the ability to shut them all off and share them, we’re going to be in learning mode. We have a plan now, but I think we’ll learn a lot once the Pink younglings start working their way through the standard maturia. None of us were telepathic at birth.”

“So we take it slow, but we do have a direction to head towards?”

“I think we do, and I don’t think Davis will argue.”

“No, I don’t think he will. This is actually better, if Vortison can work his magic on it. But that still leaves the big question in play, and how do we go about dealing with it.”

“We’ll sit on that one for now. Hopefully something Vortison digs up will give us another option to play with.”

“My money still says someone has to go through with it.”

“My gut says the same thing, but we’ve got to have contingency plans in place if it eventually comes to that, and right now we’ve got no hold on that genie once we let it out of the bottle.”

8

July 5, 3069

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

“You ready?”

Memma nodded. “All I have to do is stand still, right?”

“And let the machine do the work, yes, but it’ll be your body that’s being altered. No clue what that will feel like after it’s done.”

“How long will I need to stay that way?”

Brad glanced at Vortison, who was standing behind the controls of the medical station. “If something bad happens we can reverse it immediately, but a few hours of study would be preferable. I’ll have you back into your current form inside of 3 hours, though there will be a loss of strength. I suspect it will be negligible, but there will be some restructuring of the muscle tissue and new growths are always weaker than seasoned tissue.”

“Sure you want to take the hit?” Brad asked.

“If it’s what you need, then yes,” the blue-skinned Protovic answered.

“And given this is the first time we’ve tried this, there are no guarantees about anything.”

“I understand. Let’s do this before I change my mind.”

Brad shook his head. “Not good enough.”

Memma blew out a slow breath. “Sorry, just a phrase. I’m good to go, I just don’t like gambling. But if you think you can do this and it’ll give you what you need, then I’m willing to take the chance.”

“Better,” Brad said with a nod. “Step inside.”

Memma turned around and walked inside the chamber as another medtech sealed him in with a single bar across the entryway. “Put your hands on the sphere please and keep them there,” he said as he took a single step back from the device.

“How much is this going to hurt? I may not maintain contact if I flinch.”

“You will feel nothing during the transition,” Vortison assured him. “You’ll be numbed up.”

“Won’t I fall over?”

“No, you won’t. The machine will keep you more or less as you are now. All you need to do is maintain contact until you lose the feeling in your hands. After that just stand still and wait it out. There will be a considerable amount of tissue changes happening, so try not to freak out…but do tell us of any problems once you regain the ability to speak.”

“Ok,” he said, not fully understand how he was going to stay standing but he placed his glowing blue/green hands on the sphere as directed and looked ahead and slightly to the left at his patron trailblazer. “Do it.”

“You heard the man,” Brad echoed as Vortison began to press buttons. He saw Memma go a bit stiff, then his eyes rolled shut. “Is he unconscious?”

“Yes, I don’t want him awake for this.”

“You could have told him that.”

“Better to be on the safe side,” Vortison said as the glowing skin on the Protovic suddenly went dark. “This process is designed to take weeks and we’re speeding it up to a few minutes. Developing poison glands is one thing, but this is far different,” he said as the smooth parts of Memma’s skin began to pucker and split open, but without any blood loss, for they were growing callous-like patches to fill in the gaps.

“How much mass is he gaining?”

“Quite a bit, but his skeletal system isn’t altering. He’ll have an extra layer to his normal dimensions, but otherwise he should remain about the same volume.”

“His shoes?”

Vortison frowned. “Damn it, I forgot.”

“Will my Lachka bother the machine?”

“Shouldn’t.”

“I’ll get them then,” Brad said, loosening then pulling them off him one foot at a time as he lifted a leg up off the floor. His feet were already expanding, and as he removed the second shoe he saw his toes begin melding into one another. “He’s losing his toes?”

“Apparently so. I didn’t see that coming, but it makes sense. His entire surface is becoming hardened and small digits would be troublesome to maneuver.”

“What about his hands?”

“They should be the thinnest, and it doesn’t look like they’re melding together.”

“What about his eyelids?”

“I’m curious about that too. So far they seem unaffected…no, wait, now they’re forming. Looks like a second flap above that can lower in place. Double lids, actually. One armored one not.”

“He’s turning into a tank,” Brad said as the flash growth fed by the biomatter in the machine continued.

“Those patches are of varying densities, but some are the equivalent of low level armor. I don’t know how he’s going to move though. I’m curious to see how they solved the problem.”

“You can undo this if he locks up, right?”

“Same method, only in reverse. It’s the telepathy that I’m still having trouble reversing.”

“What about the Reds?”

“There is no reversing that unless you want to wipe their memories in the process.”

“I thought you said it was possible?”

“Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for them, it’s not an add-on like your Sav. That alone would be damn hard to reverse, given how integrated it has become into the rest of you, but the Reds’ upgrade takes their existing components and alters them. I can’t change them back without killing their functionality. They’d basically have to reset to defaults, assuming they survived the process. I could do it with the hardware alone, but the software they’re currently using would be incompatible with the lesser processors and I’m not sure exactly what would happen. It would be bad, I’d wager, plus we still don’t know how a person’s core is bound to their body, so that’s one area I’m not going to mess with if I don’t have to. Growing a bigger brain is one thing, forcing one to recede is fraught with problems.”

“What does that mean for the big transformation?”

“If it’s a knowledge upload like I suspect, that won’t be an issue…if we’re upgrading an unlocked Red. Anyone else and we’re in the same boat.”

“Because we’d be back to brain shrinkage again?”

“Essentially yes, technically no.”

“And you need the bigger brain to handle the extra knowledge?”

“Still unsure about that one. Hoping that these experiments will let me glean a bit more about their transformation code, but we’re still years away from the big prize,” he said as Memma went through his final changes and a grid-like network of crevices across his body began to glow blue, but with the rest of him being the same exoskeletal black, though those patches were now gone and replaced by the same lumpy material spread over his entire body.

“Damn, he did get ugly,” Brad said with a cringe. “You sure we need to wake him up?”

“Your call, but I’d prefer to get conscious data from him…as well as his perspective.”

“Take it slow. This is going to be a big shock.”

“Understandably,” Vortison said, adjusting the controls to begin waking him up.

Brad made mental contact with him to ease the process, with his voice being the first thing Memma heard in his mind as he returned to reality. The Archon coached him through the process, while also warning him before his senses fully woke up.

His eyelids flicked open, with the same intense blue orbs being there like spotlights, but the rest of him was wholly unrecognizable. Brad thought he looked like a skinny, black version of The Thing from Fantastic Four. “How you doing?”

“Heavy,” Memma said, with approximately the same voice as before, save his lips moved differently and his pronunciation was a bit off. He looked down at his hands, seeing only the thin glow of the lines rather than the previous large patches of skin. Also the green was gone, with only those bits of blue remaining.

“We can knock you out again if needed,” Brad said, feeling Memma start to panic.

“No,” he said, focusing his mind. “I can do this. Take your scans.”

“We are,” Vortison answered. “All you have to do is stay within the chamber. You can raise your hands if you wish.”

Memma lifted one up and twisted it around in front of him. “So heavy.”

“Your body mass has increased by 12%.”

“Why is this a good thing?”

“A type of armor, I’d imagine,” Brad said, walking over to stand beside him just outside the railing. “Try a few stretches. See how much you can move, joint wise.”

Memma twisted at the waist, then flexed his arms wide, over his head, and behind his back. From Brad’s perspective he didn’t move much at all.

“Not good,” Memma said. “I am so stiff.”

“What about your sense of touch?” Brad said, sticking his hand inside and in front of the altered Protovic. “Grab my wrist.”

Memma did as instructed, feeling the Human’s arm with his fingers. Brad could sense the diminished feel, but he was still functional.

“Everything is dull.”

Brad pulled his arm back. “Can he come out for a minute or two?”

“Take as long as you need,” Vortison said.

Brad pulled up the arm bar. “Walk out, slowly.”

Memma did as instructed, taking short steps until he cleared the machine and then began to hop in place experimenting with his new body. “Hit me…lightly,” he requested

“Here goes,” Brad said, stepping forward and palm-punching his chest. The shirt he wore still covered him, hiding the rock hard skin beneath until the Archon made contact with a loud ‘thump.’

“Barely felt that,” Memma said as he rocked in place. “Go harder.”

Brad smirked, gave him a warning, then put a good punch into him. Memma fell backwards, but Brad telekinetically caught him before he hit the floor and pulled him back up to his feet.

“I feel like crap,” Memma admitted, “but that barely hurt.”

“Hit me,” Brad said, pointing at his chest as he steadied himself. Memma stepped forward and swung his fist forward slowly, knocking Brad back a step.

“I have no speed,” Memma said.

“I noticed that, but those spurs on your hands hurt.”

Memma glanced down at his fingers. “I didn’t even feel it.”

“If you don’t mind, we’ll take a tissue sample now,” Vortison interrupted. “Then the sooner we get you reversed the easier it will be on your body and mind.”

“I can handle it if you want to put me through some fitness tests.”

“No, I think we know enough,” Brad said, not wanting to put him through much more of this. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t recommend this transformation?”

“Hell no.”

“Then let’s get the data and get you back to your luminous self,” Brad said, pointing back into the machine. “If we want armored bodies, we build it. We don’t grow it.”

“I 100% agree with you, Archon,” Memma said as he stepped back inside and put his hands on the sphere. “This is not an upgrade.”

“Not for us, but someone else thinks so.”

“Ancestor or not, they’re dumb.”

Brad laughed. “Perhaps, but they went to a lot of trouble to program this into your genome. I’ll wager they had some use for it. We, however, do not.”

“Can you show me what I look like?”

“Of course,” Vortison said, pulling up an auxiliary hologram and configuring it to replicate the live recordings being made. He projected it in front of Memma so he could see.

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” Brad agreed. “Quite the change.”

“Externally yes. Internally no,” Vortison added. “Almost all of the changes have occurred on the surface. Inside you’re still basically Protovic.”

“Good to know,” Memma said, “but I don’t feel like it.”

“We’ll get you back soon. Just hang on a little bit.”

“As ordered,” Memma said, shutting his eyes and just focusing on standing in place.

Brad could feel his distress, but he was weathering it well and taking one for the team. Maybe rushing the transformation had a negative side effect and a gradual process would not be traumatic, but there was no way Star Force was going to use this. Memma would be the one and only Blue that they were going to unlock, and once they had the activation key from him and all the data Vortison wanted they were going to permanently lock down the others so this couldn’t happen naturally.

The Protovic were going to stay Protovic, not turn into rock monsters.

7 months later…

Brad walked back into the medical station chamber, finding Vortison and a staff of Humans and Protovic crammed into the small space along with biocrates stacked nearly to the ceiling.

“Is this a bad time?”

“It may look chaotic but I can assure you it is not. Just step carefully, I need to show you something,” Vortison said from the control station.

“Excuse me,” Brad said, stepping between two of the Protovic while easing across the surface of one of the closed crates before he stepped up next to Vortison. “Trouble?”

“No, no…something else,” he said as the medical station was empty, but there was a full genetic profile before him. “I had them bring in some Red eggs along with the rest, just for analysis sake, and it turns out the mental augmentation has not occurred yet. Not even in a minimal way. I’m guessing that it will kick in down the road at some stage, but this is not an anomaly.”

“The Red eggs shouldn’t be unlocked yet.”

“Most aren’t, but a handful are.”

“How?”

“How do you think?”

“The only ones that are unlocked are in the experimental training units, and they’re forbidden from mating for the duration.”

“Forbidden isn’t the same as incapable. You should have mandated temporary sterilization.”

“Who?”

“We’ve traced a single individual that gave us 3 augmented eggs. It was an anomaly that we even found the first one, because I was only going to scan a handful of them. When we located the other two I confirmed my results. The genetics are unlocked, but they’re not formed yet in any of the three. They still have a ways to go before hatching, but we’ve got a window of opportunity here to remove the capability before it kicks in that I previously wasn’t aware of.”

“Noted, but how did this happen? Who did the eggs come from?”

“A civilian not involved in your exclusive group. I’m guessing the father is.”

“Can you determine who it was?”

“Given time, but you should be able to find out quicker with your psionics.”

“True, and I’ll get to that, but we have to find out if there are other eggs out there like these…damn it, there may be younglings already in the maturia if this has been going on for a while.”

“There’s another point worth noting.”

“How the father can pass on his genetics?”

Vortison nodded. “Typically anything that is binary defaultly reverts to the mother’s code, and aside from some genetic glitches everything Protovic is binary.”

“Except the augmentation.”

“We’ve had Oranges impregnate Reds before with no activation, so we didn’t think this was possible. But apparently Red on Red does transfer the unlocked code.”

“Because if a male unlocked first it would be waste,” Brad said, thinking out loud.

“Your guys probably thought there was no risk in transmission and that the restriction was pointless.”

“It’s also about mental focus,” Brad said, thoroughly ticked. At least one of them had violated protocol to get laid, which they had been told could not happen under any circumstances while they were in the program. He’d told them that if they wanted to quit there would be arrangements made to shut off their reproductive capability so they couldn’t transmit the unlocked genetics. Maybe some of them didn’t like that, but it didn’t matter. They’d agreed to the restrictions and then violated it, resulting in what may have been younglings gaining access to the upgrade without earning it.

“I need you to scan all Red unhatched eggs, as well as run tissue samples from the younglings that have been born since the Red program started and give me numbers to work with. If they are in the maturia we need to pull them out and put them into a special version.”

Vortison waved a hand at all the crates. “What do you think all this is?”

“I’ll put an end to the wellspring, but we’re going to have new eggs to test for a while too.”

“Already prepping for it.”

“Have you ordered tissue samples taken yet? Or do you want everyone marched down here one at a time?”

“Samples, and I was going to let your people handle the collection. Just send them to my staff and they’ll get them checked. I’ve got more pressing matters to deal with, but this does mean that we can include all Red offspring going forward, so we no longer have a hole in our plan.”

“How’s the first batch coming?”

“I’ve gotten through 237 so far, and all are accepting the changes without incident. The egg shells remain unchanged, but internally they’re our new Protovic as soon as they come out of the machine.”

“How long does it take…and are there any developmental side effects on the horizon?”

“Unknown at this point, but I doubt it. They’re all accepting the Orange code and their latent mystery genetics are being wiped clean without incident. I think I can do the same with an adult now, but this is much easier.”

“How many variants have you gotten through?”

“Orange, Purple, Yellow, and just now Red. I’ve halted the process to begin scanning the rest of the Reds, but I don’t anticipate any trouble with the other four. Here, let’s run one now,” he said, turning to one of the Protovic maturia staffers. “Get me a Blue egg please.”

The Red Protovic walked over to a crate stack near the wall and opened the case revealing the sterile life support systems inside that were more or less unnecessary, for the eggs didn’t need to be given any fuel other than air access, but Star Force didn’t take chances with them and always stored them in a controlled environment…including during transport.

He pulled out a baseball-sized egg that was soft to the touch but not slimy. It was slightly oblong and blue in color, though not bioluminescent. The handler brought it over to the machine and set it inside a specialized crate that was hooked up to an interface port so biomatter could be added if needed.

When he saw that Brad frowned but when he opened his mouth to ask, Vortison was already a step ahead of him.

“A safety precaution. If there is something wrong with the egg or the infant we can repair it or restock the internal fuel supply. The alterations don’t require enough physical changes to warrant a supplement themselves,” he said as he pulled up the live genetics readout from the Blue egg that was several months away from hatching.

“Basically point and click at this stage. The leg work has already been done in the lab,” he said as he began the mostly automated process with the hologram highlighting the code segments that were being altered. Some small bits were changing, from what Brad could see, with a chunk being added that he assumed was the Orange’s enhanced strength/speed code that all the new Protovic would be getting as default, then he saw what amounted to pages and pages of code being deleted and knew that was the mystery transformation that he had ordered removed from them. Vortison assured him he could put it back in if needed, but it was safer to have the younglings squared away from birth rather than leave this time bomb in place.

If they were ever exposed to all the activation keys it would be of no consequence to them now, whereas the risk of having whole populations start transforming like a plague was not something that was appealing. If the mystery change was beneficial they could add it to everyone a person at a time here or in future eggs just like this, but for now Brad wanted a clean slate with the new Protovic only having the Orange augmentation and the potential for nothing else. The Blue armor modification had just been stripped away from this egg, so this female would never have to worry about going through that unwanted transformation if/when her internal clock ever got to the natural unlocking point, for it was now gone entirely.

“No anomalies detected,” Vortison said after the massive erasure was finished. “Growth sequence stable and unaffected. Easy enough.”

“And the bioluminescence?”

“Already switched. I don’t want to puncture the egg, but if you put a microprobe through the skin you’d see the new Star Force glow.”

Brad put a hand on Vortison’s shoulder. “Good work.”

“That’s what I aim for.”

“I’ll leave you to it then. Right now I’ve got some skulls to crack,” Brad said, meandering his way through the crate stacks as he headed towards the doorway.

9

December 19, 3086

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

“You’re back,” Octaviak said from her seated position within the meditative chamber as a Human approached the open doorway. Her eyes were still closed, but she could sense her Master’s familiar presence whenever he was nearby, even within a crowd.

“And you’re stronger,” Pel-9833 said as he walked into view outside his armor but wearing the telltale Archon white uniform with an identifying stripe down the sides. “I can feel it.”

“I do try,” she said, standing up smoothly and turning around to face him…with her eyes widening a bit. “Your stripe is different.”

“I’m a titan now. Level 3 at the moment.”

“I thought you were out fighting lizards, not training.”

“We always train. Taking planets doesn’t happen overnight, and there are opportunities to advance your skills if you know how to take advantage of them.”

“I thought most people stayed even at best and usually lost a bit of strength during lengthy campaigns?”

“We’ve learned to manage most of that, but it does happen. Less so for Archons than Commandos and Knights.”

“My congratulations, titan. To what do I owe the honor of your presence?” she said with a sarcastic little bow.

“Checking on my students,” he said, looking her over. “Why are you still green?”

“I’ve chosen to focus solely on my telepathy.”

Pel raised an eyebrow. “Curious on its own, but that doesn’t preclude you from taking on the Star Force blue.”

“I know, and in my heart I’m pure Star Force, you know that, but the ranking system is built for the younglings coming out of the maturias. I don’t fit in that advancement system because I already have telepathy, so if I took on the coloration of a level 1 I’d be both ahead and behind them. I don’t have the Orange upgrade, so it wouldn’t be a true representation of where I stand. I prefer my own coloration anyway. It marks me as a prior, which I am, rather than me pretending to be something that I’m not.”

“Then you don’t want the other upgrades?”

“No…well, a part of me does, but if I have to choose between pursuing them and furthering my telepathic skills, I choose telepathy. It sets me apart from nearly all others in the galaxy and I need to be as strong in it as possible.”

“You haven’t neglected your physical training?”

“Of course not. Mind balances with body, as you taught me, though I’m beginning to see more depth into it now. How long are you here for?”

“A few years at least.”

“Oh? Aren’t you needed back on the front?”

“The lizard systems are falling fast now, but they’re also becoming more difficult to take. Most of the easy ones are gone, leaving the more developed band around their core…on our side anyway. Over the past two years the amount of reinforcements they were getting have dropped off sharply. We think they’re hoarding them now to protect the core worlds, making naval invasion of their other systems far easier…yet those systems also have a great deal more  defensive infrastructure, both in orbit and on the surface, that we have to fight our way through. The victories are almost assured, so long as we don’t get sloppy, but there’s a lot of work to do in each location, for their anti-orbital defense networks are far more dense than we’re used to dealing with. We punch a hole, then have to work everything through on the ground else we lose far too many ships.”

“And you’re not needed for that?”

“We’re not in a hurry, and we need to cycle people back for many reasons. I need a breather and a chance to work on other projects…including you.”

“You’ve already taught me what I needed to know.”

Pel smiled. “I’ve given you the beginner knowledge. Time to amp it up a bit.”

“How so?”

“You’ve been focusing on solitary skills. Now that there are several of you sufficiently advanced, I’m going to teach you how to make use of interconnected telepathic elements.”

“Team telepathy?”

“Precisely.”

“I thought we couldn’t do that?”

“It’s not battlemeld like I have, but there are ways you can create a pseudo version. You have to be fairly skilled as an individual first, which was why we haven’t delved into this before. I think you’re ready now.”

“When do we start?”

“Now,” he said, turning and heading towards the doorway while raising a hand and curling his finger in a ‘come’ gesture.

Octaviak smiled and followed him out, eager to learn more Archon telepathy secrets.

Brad walked into one of the new genetic alteration medical stations, separate from the one Vortison had set up long ago, with the line of Protovic younglings going wide-eyed when they saw him. All of them were 16 years old and knew of him through their lessons in the maturia, but none of them had expected him to show up here and now, nor had their handlers or the medical staff overseeing the alterations.

“How we doing?” he asked, looking at the lead medtech, one of the few with clearance to actually use the handful of these devices built for this specific purpose and placed within the newly built maturias.

“Just about to start this group,” the Human asked, surrounded by a room full of Protovic. “Is there a problem?”

“No. I was just passing by and felt like dropping in to observe. This is a big day for you guys,” he said, turning his attention to the 14 younglings present. Unlike the handlers and some of the medical staff, these Protovic did not have green bioluminescence. Where the others had green patches, these had Star Force blue signifying that they were the new generation of the race. Where their other color would have been these younglings had dull black patches of soft skin in addition to the exoskeleton of the same color.

The blue/black heads nodded their agreement but said nothing, all staring at him with glowing blue eyes.

“Are you planning to stick with the program or going civie once your basic training ends?”

“I’m staying,” one of the 9 males said.

“Me too,” the female beside him echoed.

Brad nodded. “Protovic maturia are now the longest within Star Force…not counting advanced training units. If you stick around until you make Final Form it’ll take a long time before you join the rest of the population. Think you can handle that?”

“We can’t come back?” another male asked.

“Yes and no,” Brad answered, crossing his arms over his chest. “If you choose to leave when basic is over, you can’t come back to this maturia. If you change your mind, say a day or even a century later, there will be another program you can enter that will complete your training. We never give up on anyone, but if you want to stick with your peers here you’re going to have to stay in the program and keep up. As I hear it, you 14 are top of your class?”

More heads nodded.

“Good for you, but be warned…even Archons do not advance at the same rate through every level. We go fast through some, slow through others. It all depends on the individual and where our aptitudes lie. You’ve done well to get here a little bit ahead of the others, but don’t assume you’ll always stay ahead or that they will always stay behind. Focus on your own progression and keep moving forward no matter what the pace, even if you get frustrated at times. For now though, you’ve earned your transition to second tier and it’s time you received your upgrades,” he finished, nodding at the medtech.

The Human pointed and one of the Protovic assistant medtechs, a Red, placed a glowing hand on one of the youngling’s shoulders and directed him into the machine where she sealed him inside with the arm bar and stepped back. The medtech gave him and the others basic instructions on what to do with his hands and not to move with Brad standing in the back and watching. The younglings’ attention was suddenly off him and onto their peer as the machine activated and they saw the soft black patches on his body come alive and start to subtly glow, getting brighter with each passing second until they were completely gone.

The black exoskeletal segments were still there, but now all of his soft tissue was aglow with the previous blue now added to with streaks of brilliant white. When the youngling opened his eyes they too had changed color, no longer blue but likewise white glowing orbs.

“You’re finished,” the medtech said with a grin. “Congratulations.”

The assistant removed the arm bar and escorted him out a step to make room for the next conversion.

“Feel different?” Brad asked.

“A little queasy,” the youngling admitted, with Brad and his glowing hands competing for his attention.

“That’s the genetic upgrade,” the Archon explained. “Your immune system just got beefed up and it’ll take an hour or so for your equilibrium to reset. Some people feel it, others don’t, but it’ll go away soon enough.”

The youngling stepped further aside as his peers swarmed around him, some poking the new white spots and others giggling with excitement as the second one in line stepped into the chamber. Brad stood back, watching them and judging their reactions, both visibly and telepathically. These were amongst the first generation of the new Protovic to get the tier 2 upgrades. None were old enough yet to have reached tier 3, but the rest of the maturias with unaltered younglings were nearing their end with only a few years left before they all graduated.

When that happened the new ‘Blues’ would take over, in that they would be all the new populations coming forth. Even the eggs from the older greens would be altered prior to their hatching, meaning that their offspring would also be the new Star Force Blues, whose blue patches were opposite the original Blues that had a green base. Blue was the new base for these younglings and would be kept all the way through to their Final Form, separating them from the rest of the Protovic across the galaxy and drawing a distinct difference from even their Purple skinned ally.

These Star Force Protovic would also be far more powerful, given the Orange upgrade as a default then earning the other 5 with telepathy coming last. There would be three more color upgrades following that, as rank indicators similar to his golden armor, but with the telepathy they will have reached Final Form and their very long maturia process would come to an end.

Most of that process was still theoretical, with only a small group of tier 2 Protovic ahead of these. Brad was watching their progress closely, wanting to troubleshoot any difficulties or new advantages as quickly as possible. For so long this faction had been in flux, even before they’d realized that the hidden transformation was within them, and he felt it necessary to get them cemented now, even before they had a chance to probe that mystery further. If they needed to add something later they could, at the end of the maturia phase through special training similar to how the Archons received their psionics after transitioning through the adept ranks, but Brad wanted the civilian base of the Protovic established and codified now so their future would not be in doubt.

As for the existing Protovic population, they were being given access to auxiliary training programs so they could earn their Star Force Blue if they chose, but many weren’t. Some of those were civilians and others were techs and military. That was fine with him, for they were different, in their origins at least, while these Blues were the future of his ever growing Protovic faction. One that would be more powerful than any other within Star Force if his expectations came to fruition. Not in size, but in skill and potential, even more so than Humans.

Archons would still vastly outmatch them, but no other race would have this many abilities at their disposal, especially for a civilian population. The catch was these younglings had to stay in the maturia when they had the option to leave it. How many that would thin from their numbers he didn’t know, but he expected there to be far more Protovic telepaths than there were Archons in short order, and how that dynamic and their other abilities would change this faction he didn’t fully know. That was one reason why he was still keeping this system off limits to normal Star Force traffic and tourists, and it was going to stay closed until these changes worked themselves out.

Then there would be the issue of how these new Protovic affected the rest of Star Force, especially Axius. Davis had been in regular communication with Brad over the changes going forward and brainstorming with him potential problems and advantages. While it didn’t look like much right now, this was going to be a huge transition for the empire down the road and one they had to stay a step or two ahead of at all times.

But the other big thing with these Star Force Blues was that they didn’t have the mystery genetics within them anymore, so there was no chance of them being affected by whatever it was, good or bad. The fear of a faction-wide epidemic sweeping through the Protovic if one began to spontaneously change and spread it to others was no longer a concern for anyone with the Blue base skin, and as their numbers grew the potential problem would lessen. The Greens had already been altered so to not produce activation material, but they hadn’t had the mass of code removed. Doing so with an adult was still a bit tricky, but Vortison had managed it with a few people thus far.

The process was so lengthy that it wasn’t worth putting the full population through just yet. Plus they might need it later, because as Vortison had said, putting it back in was probably going to be harder than taking it out, and to date he hadn’t tried.

Brad knew that Humans would never be given psionics as younglings, nor would the general population for that matter. That had been settled for a long time and this wasn’t going to change that. Protovic having an advantage over Humans didn’t both Brad either, for all of these younglings were pure Star Force, same as the Humans. They were brothers and sisters, and Humans didn’t have to be top dog in every category. As it was they were already punching bags to the Calavari, but Humans still made up the core of Star Force.

As time went on that was evolving a bit, for now there were much older individuals from other races rising through the ranks, both military and tech, that were taking their place in the upper cadre of Star Force leadership. Even a few Monarchs were now non-Human, and put in that position because Davis thought they merited it rather than misguided notions of ‘diversity.’ There had been complaints for a long time within the ADZ about Human domination, but those within Star Force knew there was no basis to the whining. The Humans were older and wiser, hence they held the leadership positions. Now a few others were working their way into that group, and rightly so, but Humans would always be top dogs.

And that came down to their V’kit’no’sat legacy. The Ikrid block was more important than anyone realized, and even with a lot of Protovic telepaths entering the population they wouldn’t be able to read Humans. Also, only Humans could become Archons, Arc Commandos, and Arc Knights. Brad knew they were going to have to develop a fourth category for the advanced Protovic that reached Final Form, but he was waiting on that until Vortison figured out what the mystery coding was and if there was any of it that they could use, but even then the Protovic would never be able to become Archons.

The new Protovic ‘ultras’ might be physically superior to Archon adepts, or even acolytes at similar ages, but there was no matching the raw power woven into the Zen’zat genetics and Star Force wasn’t going to give Protovic the title of ‘Archon’ if they couldn’t fully be Archons. They would find their own niche, and a powerful one if Brad’s speculation was correct about their potential, but the military leadership of Star Force would always be the Archons.

As for the Monarchs, Davis would always be tops and the generation that had developed Star Force along with him would never be superseded…save for the possibility of a Grand Admiral Thrawn type rising up through the ranks. If that ever occurred Brad would be very interested to see how that played out, but he knew that would be a rare individual and not a mass transition.

Humans would dominate the upper Monarch ranks for the same reason the trailblazers were still the top Archons…they got a head start on everyone else, and there was no replacing or duplicating the experience they’d gained building Star Force from the ground up.

Other races would add to and grow Star Force’s population and strength, but the Humans…the elite Humans anyway…would always be the tiny eye in the center of the storm that guided everything else, while the hurricane that the empire had become was, and would continue to be, mostly made up of non-Humans.

But like with these younglings, they might not be Human but they were fully Star Force and his brothers and sisters. So there was no contention between them. Each had their strengths and their niches to fill, Brad’s niche just happened to be a very exclusive one.

10

February 27, 3092

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

“You sure about this?” Kip asked. “Last chance to back out.”

Nefron turned his glowing red eyes on the trailblazer a few steps shy of the medical station. “You keep repeating yourself. My mind hasn’t changed.”

“We can reverse the process at any time if needed,” Vortison reminded them from the control board. “Say the word and I’ll end it within 60 seconds of getting you back in the machine.”

“Be sure,” Brad told the Red-skinned Protovic volunteer, one of the oldest amongst the Protovic faction. “We still don’t know all that this will do to you. Your mind especially.”

“There’s only one way to find out, so let’s get to it.”

The two trailblazers in the room exchanged glances, then Kip shrugged. “He’s right.”

“Alright then, let’s jump into this,” Brad said, pointing Nefron into the station. When the green/red Protovic walked inside he telekinetically lowered the bar to lock him in, leaving the three other men outside with no one else here to view this moment. This medical station had been built specifically for this test with an adjacent sterile living quarters and small workout center for Nefron to be confined within during the transformation, for this was going to have to be a gradual one. The physical changes could be activated and rushed via the machine, but Vortison didn’t want to risk complications with the mental side, so they were going to see this process run its course naturally.

Vortison flicked a button and a blue energy shield cut off the medical chamber and the rooms behind it from the control station and the three Humans. Nefron would be of no danger to them, but once the process was activated the medtech feared he might be able to infect other non-Blue Protovic and trigger them to transform as well, thus this experiment had to be conducted in isolation.

“Releasing activation material now,” Vortison said, with a mist from seven special canisters releasing above his head and flowing down over top of Nefron. “Just stand still and wait it out, I want to monitor the process with the scanners as long as possible.”

“Take your time,” the Protovic said as he felt the cool mist drape over him. “I take it you two are watching my mind?”

“We are,” Kip confirmed. “But don’t hesitate to talk. We’re recording images and audio as well, so if there’s anything important, or even trivial that you want to mention, do so.”

“Nothing yet,” Nefron said as the mist plumes continued to fall onto his shoulders and then onto the floor where they were beginning to form a low cloud that extended all the way out to the energy shield.

“It’s already happening,” Vortison said in awe. “All slots have been filled and the prime code is activating. I can see it in progress.”

“I don’t feel anything,” Nefron said.

“It’s prepping you for changes. I don’t know how long it will take before they actually begin to unfold.”

“What about the genetic memories?”

“Also prepping. I have some idea of what you’ll be transforming into, but I have almost no clue what the process will be or what timetable it will take. We’re just going to have to wait this out.”

“Should I…ah,” Nefron said, leaning slightly forward and putting a hand over his abdomen. “That’s new.”

“What?” Vortison asked.

“A sick feeling in my chest that’s spreading out through the rest of my body.”

Vortison studied the holographic displays for a moment, altering several until he found what he needed. “Transition material is being formed. It’ll soak up nutrients and other vital components you’ll need later like a sponge. It’s forming tiny tendrils right now through your entire body…microscopic, but it isn’t wasting any time.”

“Should I start eating now?”

“Give it a few minutes, I need as much data as I can get and the biomonitor is not nearly as effective as this device.”

“You still thinking this will take days?” Brad asked.

The geneticist nodded. “Yes.”

“I’ll take first watch,” he told Kip.

“Alright. I’ll be around if you need me.”

“We should go opposite each other,” Brad added as Kip turned to walk out. “That way we’ll be less likely to miss something big.”

“I’ll get Terry to relieve you in 3 hours,” he told his fellow Archon, then turned back to look at Nefron. “Hang in there buddy. I think you’re in for a wild ride.”

“I’d be disappointed if I wasn’t.”

Kip smirked and threw him a two fingered salute as he headed out, leaving the medtech and the Archon watcher in place as they both monitored his transformation and would continue to do so round the clock going forward.

Twelve hours later Kip returned, finding Vortison still there along with Amy-12199. He was sitting on a stool watching his monitors while she was on the floor in a meditative pose with Nefron nowhere in sight, though Kip could sense him in a nearby room.

“Tag,” he said, walking up behind the mage.

She stood up silently and turned around. “He’s in considerable pain, but weathering it well.”

“I can feel that. How long has this been happening?”

“The past 7 hours,” Vortison answered.

“How long are you sticking around before you need some sleep?”

“At least another 10 hours.”

“And then?”

“I sleep and get back here while my staff takes my place.”

“Where are they?”

“Working the data I’m sending them. We’re learning more by the minute than we’ve uncovered in years previously.”

“Enlighten me,” he said as Amy lightly touched him on the shoulder as she left.

“Both the physical and mental changes have begun, which is causing him the pain. They’re not advancing rapidly enough to incapacitate him, but they’re not moving as slowly as I anticipated. However, there appears to be a lot more going on than I thought so this should still take days to work its course.”

“Welcome back,” Nefron said as he appeared in the lab area again in response to Amy’s departure. “How do I look to a fresh set of eyes?”

Kip glanced at him, immediately seeing the changes in his skin. The red glow persisted, but the green had dimmed so far his skin almost looked black while his exoskeletal patches were actually shedding their outer layers.

“Not good,” he said honestly.

“That’s about how I feel.”

“Any new memories popping up?”

“Just a sense of the importance in this. I feel like crap, but part of me says this is the most important moment of my life. Call it a destiny sense. Can you feel it?”

Kip concentrated, pushing his way through everything else swirling in his mind. “Just a touch. Your head is a mess right now.”

“Not so much a headache as a disconnect. Like I’m fogging over. I’ve stumbled a few times, but I can still move around if I focus.”

“Have you tried sleeping?”

“Hurts too much for that.”

“Running?”

“Did a little earlier and it helped, but tried again an hour ago and my insides complained mightily. I think I’m going into a cocoon or something.”

Kip raised an eyebrow at Vortison.

“A metaphor,” he assured him.

“Need a break from the pain?” Kip offered.

“Amy was helping me a bit, but I don’t want to get reliant on you guys and then have it smash me in the face later.”

“A couple minutes…long enough for me to help you assess what’s going on internally?”

“Sure,” Nefron said, with Kip numbing out most of the pain the next second and the Protovic sucking in an audible breath.

“You didn’t realize how bad it’d gotten.”

“I guess not,” he admitted. “Thanks.”

“Focus on what’s different and I’ll piggyback on your thoughts. Show me around inside your head.”

“I’ll try,” he said, grabbing the wall for support before he closed his eyes and poked around his own thoughts as he stood. Kip followed his mental course, poking around himself off tangents and beginning to get a grip on how much the alterations were affecting him. His entire head felt like soup, with a lot of the foggy areas covering the changes. Kip pressed into a few of them but didn’t have much better luck than he did, though he did pick up a lot of conversion issues.

“I think his genetic memory is unspooling and trying to interface with his language processors. I can feel a lot of back and forth going on.”

“The code is very active and adaptive,” Vortison echoed. “I think it’s looking for the path of least resistance to reduce the damage being done to him in the process. I expect his condition to get a lot worse going forward.”

“You still game?” he asked Nefron.

“This hasn’t licked me yet.”

“Good man. I’ll stick with you the next few hours and whenever you need a break let me know and I’ll numb it out. If you want to try and sleep an hour now I can hold the pain back for that long.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Vortison suggested.

“Your range reach all the way to the bed?” Nefron asked.

“Easily.”

“Then I’ll take you up on that offer. Now that the pain is mostly gone I’m getting drowsy already.”

“Night night,” Kip said, pointing to the doorway.

“Wake me in an hour regardless, ok?”

“Deal.”

“Night then,” he said, disappearing into the other chambers, though Kip could still see him with Pefbar and was connected to him mentally.

“I’m getting a little worried,” he whispered to Vortison.

“I can reverse this and flash heal the physical damage whenever you give the word.”

“Why is the pain this bad?”

“Rather than upgrading his existing body, he’s growing a new one piece by piece and those pieces are incompatible with the old ones. The transitional tissue is holding him all together and keeping him functional, though I imagine it will disappear eventually. When this is done he will cease to be Protovic rather than being an upgraded version. You knew that already.”

“It feels like it’s tearing him apart from the inside out.”

“More true than not.”

“At least our ascensions happen quickly. This is approaching pure torture.”

“I think it’s a necessity due to the transition material. Leaving him in limbo for a longer period of time to reduce the pain might actually put him at more of a risk of death. He can’t be two races at the same time, and this tissue is cheating to keep him alive while he is. I think the programming is pressing him through the most vulnerable part as quickly as possible…and I think we’re just beginning to enter that phase now. Some of his organs are literally failing and being cannibalized into new ones while the transitional tissue takes over their functionality. Are you feeling it or just numbing it out?”

“I can feel it when I choose to, and it’s getting very nasty. What are your readings saying now? He just fell asleep and I felt a change.”

Vortison studied his displays, cycling through a few options. “Everything just sped up across the board.”

“That’s what I thought. Is that bad or less bad?”

“I’m not sure.”

Brad had been in bed for no more than 10 minutes when Kip’s mental contact slapped him awake, with him not being gentle about it.

Get down here now. We have a problem.

What is it? he asked, shaking himself fully awake.

We screwed up and I need your help. Hurry.

On my way, Brad said, heading straight to the door and telekinetically grabbing his slip-on shoes as he ran. They flew onto his feet as he headed out of his quarters and darted through the hallway traffic in his white pajamas that weren’t all that different from their casual uniforms. Kip didn’t say anything more to him and he took that as a bad sign, running as fast as he could and using his telekinesis to move aside those ahead of him that weren’t responding to his telepathic warnings to clear a path.

He got back to the medical chamber within a few minutes, finding Kip and two other Archons seated next to the energy shield with Nefron standing on the other side looking at them, his glow gone from his skin and eyes and his shirt now removed, with Brad able to see his exoskeleton almost having completely flaked off, now replaced by several growths on his skin and a lesser wrinkling that was beginning to resemble the original Blue enhancement that had turned Memma into a living tank for a short period of time before they’d changed him back.

“Hello…Brad.”

“How you doing?” he asked, mentally making contact and being freaked out by the changes. There was a whirlwind of activity, with the mind that he’d previously known only being partly there…with something entirely new alongside it.

“I don’t…know. Can’t seem to…focus.”

“I screwed up,” Vortison said in a mortified voice.

“How?” Brad demanded, still looking at Nefron.

“I can’t change him back.”

The trailblazer’s eyes turned straight to the medtech. “What…” he said icily.

“I can change his body back, and I can remove the genetic knowledge being given to him. That hasn’t changed. But the coding is doing more than adding memories, it’s corrupting and altering his existing ones. It’s infecting them, so if I remove all the new material, physical and mental, it’ll rip out his old memories along with them. He’ll be a blank slate, not knowing who he is, or was…he may not even be able to walk or breathe. I can’t say for sure, I had no idea the coding could even do something like this, but if I try and change his mind back he will either die or become a vegetable. I’m so sorry, I missed this. I missed this,” Vortison repeated, and Brad could feel the anger the man had for himself.

“Kip?”

“We’re trying to slow the changes and isolate portions of his memory to preserve them, creating a bubble for him to function within. Help us.”

“How?”

Kip and the other two sent him an instantaneous battlemeld link and he accepted from all 3, forming a 4-way bond that answered all his questions immediately. Adding his considerable mental power to theirs he put down walls attempting to block the invasive programming and undoing the bits of it that were creeping in. So long as it was software they had a chance, though physical alterations were outside their ability to manage…but Vortison could handle that with the machine, though Nefron wasn’t standing in it.

“Vortison, we want to try something but we need your help. I’ll feed you the information as we go, but we need some physical blocks made or we’re going to lose him eventually.”

“Ready,” he said, wanting to do something, anything to fix this.

“Nefron, please step back into the chamber,” Brad said.

“My name…” he uttered, not moving and staring confused at the ground in front of him. “My name…”

“Move him inside,” Vortison urged.

“My name…” the transforming Protovic said as his mind suddenly shifted and a clouded piece of it gained focus, “is Radonon.”

Revelation

1

February 28, 3092

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Kip telekinetically picked up Nefron and pushed him inside the medical station cage, lowering the arm and holding him there as the Protovic struggled to retain focus as a wash of memories and new mental programming began to take hold.

“Follow my lead,” Brad said as he began sending Vortison mental images and cues as the four Archons fought a losing battle inside Nefron’s mind to ward off the changes being made to his existing memories. He played communicator while Kip took the lead, deciding where to make physical changes as if laying sandbags ahead of a flood.

“This could make things worse,” Vortison cautioned.

“Don’t focus on quality, just get the blocks in place as fast as possible,” Brad said as one of the mages took the physical restraint away from Kip and allowed him to focus totally on the mental war as both of the mages and Brad helped him where they could by disrupting new programming and causing it to have to rewrite itself multiple times. No matter how many pieces of it the Archons undid, it would regenerate itself and continue to spread.

Kip knew they weren’t going to be able to shut that down, so his strategy was to try and isolate a piece of the Protovic’s mind physically like an island, and to do that they needed tissue changes of their own. The structure of Nefron’s mind was changing far less than his body, due in no small part to the fact that you couldn’t tear his brain down and rebuild it without killing him. With the Red’s neural enhancement already in place there were only minor changes being made to the hardware…in addition to new brain tissue being added, but the corruption was being done via software so Kip figured they had a chance of preserving a bit of him if they could get a capsule formed.

“We have to lock it down entirely,” Brad explained as he continued to feed Vortison position data for within the Protovic’s mind as he rapidly grew physical components that were forcing the transformation to seek out new routes into the region they were attempting to protect…and losing fast. “Make it think there’s nothing left of his mind to convert and it might shut itself down.”

“I’ll try,” the geneticist said as he rapidly pressed buttons and the machine made the changes in biology just as fast. “But this is going to be crude as hell.”

“Let us worry about that, just become our tool and forget about the big picture right now,” Brad said as he blanked another tiny segment of the new coding like he was wiping away a rain drop, only to have another one immediately fall in its place. He could continue doing so indefinitely, blocking further corruption, but there were only so many places he could manually control and even with the other three Archons doing the same there was just too much brain for them to cover. Focusing on the sections that they knew to hold reasoning and judgement programs, they drew their no-go line there with Brad having Vortison physically sever inroads so the transformation couldn’t reach it.

That also meant that from Nefron’s clouded point of view he didn’t have access to it either. The Archons were disconnecting a piece of his brain by making the physical blocks, but Kip had no other choice rather than just sit by and watch the Protovic being consumed by the transformation programming. As they worked he had Lina-10388 numbing some of his pain, for the transformation of his physical body wasn’t slowing, but the rest of their focus was so intense that they didn’t even feel Amy come into the room until she offered them a battlemeld prompt. Adding her strength to theirs they continued to wipe away as many new tendrils of corruption as they could while Brad and Vortison added more sandbag blocks around not a physical piece of his brain, but rather a section that held specific programming.

That meant it was stretched out across several areas, with each needing to be encapsulated with the blocks. They focused on the major inroads first, but left themselves access points that they guarded the heaviest. Little by little they held their lines, having drawn them conservatively at first and been fighting well beyond them in a losing effort to buy time for Vortison to throw up the blocks. The more that went in the less ground the five, and soon to be eight Archons once more arrived, were able to firmly hold the rest of the openings until they were no longer in jeopardy of being overwhelmed.

At that point Kip let them continue while he searched other places looking for regions not yet infected…which was when he began to feel the new tissue being grown and coming online. It wasn’t just more brain, but with it was coming the memories, skills, and powers of a very strong telepathic race he’d never encountered before…and it was happening within Nefron. There weren’t two people in his mind, but two customizations…one of which was being repurposed and converted, ostensibly so this new race wouldn’t be clueless as to what was going on in the galaxy and helpless at the outset.

It would know everything that Nefron knew, save for the piece they were walling off, which wasn’t much, but it was all they could do for him. Already Nefron was becoming another race, in mind and body, with very little Protovic left in him.

“You cannot stop this,” he said after several hours of silence being held in place inside the machine, startling everyone in the room with his reverberating voice. He was speaking English, but it had a definitive accent to it that wasn’t there before, being produced on vocal chords that were no longer Protovic. “I am becoming what I was always destined to become, I can feel it happening, and no amount of genetic manipulation is going to stop it. As you already have doubtlessly learned, the transformation is redundant and will continue to make alterations until I am complete. Try to delay as you will, but you will not succeed.”

“What are you?” Brad asked, realizing he was talking to Nefron, but a Nefron who now thought he was someone else.

“I am soon to be Chixzon. A race far older than your memory. We made an error once that nearly destroyed us, forcing us to disappear from the galaxy until we were but myth. Now we are returning, first I, then many more to come.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I know you Brad. Your powers are impressive, far more than any we’ve encountered before, and I know you are in my head. All of you are in my head,” the peeling black creature said as the growths on his skin continued to bump out into nodules. “I do not have the strength to resist you, so there is little point in deception. Your abilities, that I know of, make you very powerful, but know that I am more so. Not in raw physical strength, but the Chixzon on the whole are superior. I know you will not believe this, and even now you are conflicted with concern for me. Do not be. I am in a great amount of pain, that is true, but this is who I was always meant to become.”

“This wasn’t part of the plan.”

“No it wasn’t. You were to learn and then return me to my inferior form. Now you are learning that is not possible, for this is not an upgrade, rather a return to former glory. We had to diminish ourselves in order to survive. An abominable task, but necessary. None of those living at the time were able to do so, only subsequent generations were able to be altered prior to birth. Though I have no way of knowing for certain, it was assumed that all Chixzon would be hunted to extinction. The fact that you have no knowledge of us reinforces this prediction.”

“Hunted by whom?”

“Our enemies, of which there were many. You do not have to be one. The Chixzon will never serve Star Force, but we can coopt you. We can find a place for you to service us. A recompense for hastening a unification to which there was no guarantee. We owe you enough to endow a privileged position…and while your first reaction is to deny, in time you will learn. I will not hold your ignorance against you. You will keep me imprisoned while you search my mind for answers. Until I am strong enough to resist such intrusions I will not attempt to slow you. Learn from me what the Chixzon are and realize that you are better off with us than against us.”

“Is there no other option?” Brad floated, trying to make this an intellectual discussion even as his insides were twisting up in disgust at how Nefron was being hijacked.

“You have grown too large, and developed skills too powerful to be ignored. Your only options are to join with us or be destroyed by us…and killing me will not prevent this. I am not in a position to make demands, but know that our seeding of what you call Protovic occurred throughout the entire perimeter of the galaxy. You only have access to a shred of it, and even your ally The Nexus is not so large as to possess the ability to search out and find all of our wayward seeds. Sooner or later you will encounter us. Better it to be here and now while you have time to make a wise choice rather than as an outsider that must be contended with.”

“Galactic domination is your end goal then?”

“No. There is far too much galaxy for us to control, nor do we wish to do so. We cannot, however, ignore threats. Foremost among them are the core plague known as the Klamensh, of which you have no knowledge. Fortunate, that is, for we feared they may have spread this far out over time. There are…no, you have seen them,” Radonon said, seeing a twitch in Brad’s facial expression. To test that theory he used what was there of his own telepathic ability to transmit the basic knowledge of the Klamensh to the others in the room.

They had the same reaction, a visible twitch, and one of understanding.

“You do know the Klamensh, but by another name I assume. Tell me how far they have come, for you have not made their existence public knowledge. Are they close? Tell me, for I cannot reach into your minds. They are so strong my limited skills are blocked entirely from access.”

Guys, he’s finishing for information, Brad told the others, Vortison included. Finish plugging the holes but do not speak to him. Let me handle the interrogation.

Good idea, Kip said, trying to push that recent revelation out of his mind so he didn’t slip up on the last few necessary holds while Vortison finished creating the capsule.

“You know far more about us than we do you, so it is you that we will focus on.”

“Information shared may garner you favor,” Radonon offered loosely.

“What sort of favor does being your slaves hold?”

“Servants and slaves are not the same. As I previous inferred, the galaxy is vast and we do not wish to hold firm control over most of it. We seek to find and eliminate threats before they can harm us. We failed to do so previously, the same mistake will not be made again. In this form we are vulnerable, and until our empire is rebuilt your assistance can be immensely valuable, for which we would allow you to maintain most of your current holdings and expand upon them with our blessing and guidance. If you align your objectives with ours it can be a great advancement for Star Force, rather than the penalty that your words infer. In this language the term ‘subordinate associates’ would be more accurate.”

“And if we refuse?”

“Then you will probably kill me, but that will not stop our eventual return.  While there are no guarantees, we placed many seeds to counter statistical improbability. And the fact that two of the eight segments had already achieved second state before your beneficial intervention tells me that the time is nearing for others to unify. You may have another million years, but eventually my brethren will come to this part of the galaxy, seeking out potential threats, for which your considerable abilities will take our notice. Better for your empire to be an ally before that happens, for we do not take chances any longer. If there is doubt we will destroy you. No malice intended, but we cannot linger in indecision. You will either join with us or not. Time will not be granted to you to develop a means of battling us.”

“As someone else did?”

“My head is still awash with transformation. Can you not find the answer to that yourself within it?”

“Trying to gage our skill level?”

“Would you not?”

“I’m more interested in why you do not think you are Nefron anymore.”

“Because I am not. I am Radonon, first of the Chixzon to return.”

“How do you know you are the first?”

“My name says so. When I encounter another I will pass on the transformation code along with a temporal marker. When he wakes he will have a different name, based on what number he is.”

“What happens if you encounter many at once?”

“It will sort itself out. We are telepathic, and even though I cannot read your mind I can sense it there. Likewise we can sense each other, as can our code, and it will appropriately name us all, and from those names we will know our purpose.”

“And yours is what?”

“I am to do what you will not allow me to do. Find other ‘Protovic’ and fulfill their destiny to become Chixzon. Because you will not allow this I must negotiate an adequate alliance first. You are in my mind, so you should know I am not being duplicitous. Any agreement made here will be honored into the future, and not just with my faction, but any others that venture into this portion of the galaxy. We act as one, and an agreement made will be honored by all, so when you speak with me you are speaking with the whole of the Chixzon.”

“I’m not impressed yet,” Brad said dismissively. “What are those growths on your body?”

“Additional limbs. We had to disguise our physiology in a somewhat compatible form else our seeds would have been discovered and eradicated. The Protovic physiology is what you would consider to be our base, while we have many additional add-ons…which the medtech is no doubt now realizing.”

Brad raised an eyebrow in Vortison’s direction, but mentally told him not to respond and keep working.

“Enlighten me then.”

“We are quite skilled with biological manipulation, and have altered our own over the course of time to meet our needs. My primary limbs you see here, what are growing off them are secondary ones.”

“And from your back?”

“We share a bit of familiarity with your Bsidd. They are mandibles that have weapon caliber endings.”

“Poison tipped?”

“No, these are physical weapons…with an armor piercing modification. It is so strange to be talking with someone who has access to my own memories, for I can hide nothing from you. Even amongst ourselves there are limits, to which I know you can breach even if I was fully formed. I’m beginning to understand just how much you’ve hidden from everyone else, but tell me, you did not engineer such things. I know this because your biological skills are inferior. Is this truly a natural development? Our telekinesis was not.”

Another twitch from the Human, which Radonon noted…and that he knew the Human knew he noted.

“We can play games as much as you like,” the Chixzon said as another piece of black skin flaked off and fell to the floor of the medical chamber, “but given that I can hide nothing from you let us just speak plainly. Or rather I will, your secrets you will keep until a time that you choose otherwise. Right now you do not understand who and what we are, so the idea of an alliance is ridiculous from your current point of view. You are dominant here and you rightly should not give it up lightly, but know that I can solve your lizard problem with much greater ease. Theirs is a primitive problem solved most efficiently through spreading contagion that will target their biology specifically. Given that they are annihilating every race they come into contact with rather than picking and choosing wisely, they are a plague that must be eradicated by us, so I have no qualms with building the weapon for your use.”

“You should know we don’t fight that way.”

“I know, but you are also calculating and keen warriors. If the lizards are to be all killed, why not use a more direct method. Offer them surrender first, and then when they refuse bombard their planets with canisters. I can assure you only they will die, and it can be made into a numbing death. We typically do not care about such things, but allotments can be made to fit your methods.”

“No,” Brad said flatly.

“Then what do you wish of me? My transformation will require additional time, but soon I will be complete. You no doubt want information from me and my body. Will you kill me thereafter or will you preserve me while you study the…problem? Long enough for you to fully grasp my offer. I am patient when needed, so there is no rush. Mistreatment will be held against you, though I know that is not your way.”

“It is also your way.”

“My protoform, perhaps. My way is that of the Chixzon, and I can feel it returning to me like waking up from a long, suppressive dream. I am becoming myself, I know you can feel this in me. This is who I am supposed to be, do not allow yourself to believe otherwise. As for your neutered Protovic Blues…you may keep them if you wish. Without their true nature buried inside, they were merely empty vessels and no longer seeds.”

“But you want the others?”

“We can negotiate that. As you already know there are other seeds out there, some that did not wish to partake in this unification. I can wake them up and leave Star Force as is, if that is what you wish.”

“Generous…or cold, I’m not sure which.”

“I was not myself until moments ago, and I am not fully there yet. The Protovic are not Chixzon.”

“Good to know.”

“You would not say that if you understood. Perhaps when the turbulence within my mind settles you will be able to learn from me more quickly.”

Done, Kip said after conferring with Vortison to make sure the capsule was holding. There’s not much of him left elsewhere to save, but the corruption is taking a while to fully unfold. We’ll have to wait and see if the capsule holds, so we need stay here and monitor.

“You need food?”

“My physical transformation will delay until I have sufficient resources, yes. You should know you cannot stop it without starving me to death, so yes, I need more food in larger amounts than previously. I’m guessing you didn’t account for my additional limbs?”

Brad telekinetically lifted the arm up, knowing that there would be more data collection inside the chamber but right now it was a moot point, for they were going to make damn sure no one else went through this transformation.

“Have a seat. We’ll bring you additional foodstuffs while we chat.”

“Thank you, Brad,” Radonon said as he stepped out, his bare feet clicking on the floor for the first time as the stubs of claws or talons were beginning to show. “We do have a great deal to discuss, and I won’t be fully able to answer your questions until my mind is complete. The knowledge is unspooling as I speak.”

“Food first then,” Brad said as he spun around and headed for the door, then hesitated and half turned his head back. “You won’t go anywhere?”

“Yes, we do have a sense of humor,” Radonon said, picking up on and answering the reflexive probe.

“Probably helps make up for the ugliness,” Brad said, glancing at Kip as he walked out. This one’s not dumb.

2

March 2, 3092

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Kip walked into the visitor ‘gallery’ outside the containment shield where Brad and a couple of mages were sitting. Vortison was nowhere to be seen, nor were his typical replacements. Brad knew he had to take breaks, just as the Archons, but he usually left someone else here to actively monitor the data feeds coming in from the biomonitor still attached to Radonon’s head, though it’d slipped off numerous times during the physical transition that was now complete.

The Chixzon was sitting on a stool on the opposite side of the energy shield with its tail wrapped around the vertical pylon, the tip of which was twitching rhythmically against the solid floor and making a dull ‘thud’ every time it hit. It was colored black, but transitioned into splotches of dark green halfway up. Its legs were likewise colored, with its solid torso being blank. Apparently the splotches were badges of merit and would augment the standard ones that were emblematic of their civilization’s achievements once Radonon earned them.

His arms still had hands and five fingers, but coming off the elbow there were spine-like limbs tucked into niches on his forearms that he could pull clear and use whenever he wanted. He had more on his upper arms that ended in telescoping talons while the lower ones were blunted and much thicker, intended to be used for movement rather than attacks. The talons doubled as poison injectors in addition to the ones in the palms, though they each had different types of poison, not all of which were lethal, that could be customized as needed depending on the target race and whether you wanted to debilitate or even just stun your opponent, giving the Chixzon an easy way of taking prisoners when they so wanted.

Radonon’s head no longer looked Protovic, for it had elongated out into a skull twice the size that accommodated the additional brain tissue by stretching out into a cone tapered backwards, leaving the facial structure more or less the same. His nose was covered with a nubby spine that was only a little more dense than the rest of his light armor-caliber skin, and like other segments of his body it was black with dark green splotches. Gone was the Protovic exoskeleton and bioluminescence, replaced by a ghastly and intimidating visage of a being that was almost entirely black save for the green patches, but the most prominent feature was the two limbs coming off his back.

Situated like wings, the two bendable limbs arched up behind his head like ornamental brackets and could bend forward into much larger versions of the talons on his arms. They had enough reach that he could shoot them forward in a stabbing motion or twist them around to do the same in just about any direction, giving the Chixzon a bit of StarCraft’s Kerrigan in his body shape. They did not have poison, but rather armor piercing capabilities in the form of an energy coating that worked like a dull lightsaber blade. They were strong as metal and sharp enough to do damage on their own, but once activated they could tear through just about anything given enough time.

They were the only bioluminescence that the Chixzon had in addition to the eyes, both of which glowed green but could be triggered at will. When not active, both the back spike mandibles and the eyes appeared pitch black, matching the majority of the rest of its body coloration, including the toe talons that were built more like cats’ claws than anything else. They could do damage but were mainly for grip, with the Chixzon being impressive jumpers and would bound more than run from place to place.

Right now that wasn’t being tested, for Radonon was still confined to his private quarters with at least 2 Archon guards stationed here round the clock so he couldn’t tear his way out through the walls or use his limited telekinesis to otherwise escape. He’d made an attempt earlier, right in view of Brad so he knew he wasn’t serious about an escape…then was appalled when he realized that the Human had the ability to disrupt his own telekinesis.

Radonon was learning from them while they were learning from him, but Kip knew he wasn’t going anywhere, as did the Chixzon. But as long as he was stuck here he might at least gain what information he could, with the hopes that Star Force would come to the conclusion that it was better to side with the Chixzon than against them, though Radonon was truthfully allowing a long exploration period without taking offense to insure the Humans and their empire knew what it was that they were being offered…and threatened with.

“Morning sunshine,” Kip said as he sat down next to Brad, though his comment was directed at Radonon. It was hard not to think of him as such, for the Nefron he knew seemed to have been completely replaced by a new person, though he knew that wasn’t technically correct. Visually, and even mentally, he was totally different and didn’t identify himself with his past, with his memories having been converted into useful data while his Chixzon manufactured memories were what he clung to as his sense of self.

“Is it? I seem to have lost track of time. How long then before you let me do some real workouts? The hamster wheel you’ve got in here is insulting.”

“Do you even know what a hamster is?” Brad asked.

Radonon thought for a moment. “I don’t believe so. It’s just a phrase I learned from others. You know well that I have nowhere to go. Even if I broke free and spread the transformation to the rest of the Protovic on the planet you would act immediately to control the situation. There is no hope of success there, so why will you not believe me when I state my intentions? You can confirm them directly, so why not let me have a proper facility to use?”

“One is being built,” Brad answered. “Have to keep the air clear, and we don’t feel like dispossessing others to accommodate you.”

“Or do you intend to withhold it in exchange for my assistance?”

“You should know us better than that,” Kip floated as one of the mages got up and left.

“Farewell, Weyni,” Radonon said, waving a hand at the departing Archon.

“Nefron,” she replied evenly before disappearing.

Radonon made a chirping sound with his teeth clicking together that Kip could sense was a sign of frustration. “Outdated moniker,” he commented, but otherwise let the name drop pass. “So, Kip. What shall we talk about today…or would you like to spar? If your armor has corovon elements my cutting edges will not be able to penetrate it quickly, so there will be no real threat to you.”

“Trying to gage our strengths?”

“The more we understand of one another the better…plus this body is new and needs calibration, so we would both benefit from it. I can promise I will not hold back, so you can accurately ascertain my current strength.”

“Not today,” Kip dismissed. “What were you discussing?” he asked Brad.

“It seems they have learned to create biological starships.”

Kip raised an eyebrow. “Oh?” he said icily.

“Constructs only,” Radonon assured him. “They had a similar reaction of distaste. They are not living beings, nor do we rely upon them. They are merely one element in our concord, but one that most other races cannot comprehend.”

“Used for what purpose?”

“Many. We do not build as quickly as Star Force. Your material collection and processing rates are astounding. You should truly be proud of that accomplishment.”

“Lose the patronizing,” Amy said.

“We are superior, so you misunderstand my tone. Until you come to accept that, many things you will misinterpret. You build faster than us, but not better. Our technology is far superior, and a good portion of that is what you would call biotech. Our word for it is ‘Hamjat.’ It will continue to function where mechanical elements will not.”

“Such as when they detonate a certain weapon,” Brad added for Kip’s benefit.

“Ion cannon?”

“More or less,” Brad answered, sensing that Radonon didn’t catch the reference. “The Chixzon don’t always go for the brute force approach. They come at you from the sides whenever possible, and are used to winning that way. I don’t think they do well in a straight up fight.”

“If we are mismatched, why would we fight in such a manner? You should not begrudge us this given your aversion to losing troops.”

“Paul would eat them alive navally,” Brad said, eyeing Radonon.

The Chixzon did an approximation of a smile with his rock-like lips bending ever so slightly. “I remember his reputation, but I am curious to meet him. Is that to ever occur?”

“Not on the schedule at the moment,” Brad said as he sensed another person approaching.

“Ah, the master manipulator is back,” Radonon said a few seconds before Vortison entered the doorway, having sensed him approaching. “Still failing to find a way to do the undoable?”

“I’m fairly confident now,” he said, ignoring the Chixzon and addressing the Archons. “But I can make no guarantees.”

“A new attempt?” Radonon asked curiously but laced with sarcasm and boredom, for he knew there was no undoing what had been done. The Chixzon had made sure of that in their programming, for this had not been a hasty measure. They had fought long and hard to give their scientists enough time to get this right and spread the seeds before they were presumably wiped out in one final grand push, with the surviving Chixzon going to their deaths and hoping to take as many of their enemies with them as possible to create a more fertile future galaxy for their seeds to grow within.

“Do we need to throw you inside or will you walk?” Brad asked evenly.

“I trust in your ethics,” Radonon said, uncurling his tail from the stool and standing up, his claw talons clicking on the floor as he shuffled his way over to the medical station with his tail riding a few inches off ground level and oscillating behind him.

“But don’t share them,” Kip added.

“You are predictable at least, if not fully competent,” he said as Brad lowered the arm bar to seal him in. “That you have accomplished this much is testament to your potential, which with our help you could fully unlock.”

“Still trying to sell us that deal?” Kip asked.

“Attempting to open your eyes to the logic of it, yes,” Radonon said as he placed his black hands on the sphere. “What are you attempting today?”

“Your transformation is complete, correct?” Brad asked.

“It is.”

“And what of your transformation mechanism. Is it still active?”

“If you are attempting to grow additional brain tissue, it will not be affected. Now that I am fully Chixzon the transitional programming has eradicated itself and only exists within other seeds. There is no need for me to carry it any longer.”

“Software too?”

“The full process is complete,” Radonon reiterated. “I carry nothing of the seed.”

“So I believe,” Vortison echoed, “but I’ve been wrong before.”

“You can do a partial?”

The medtech nodded.

“Make it small,” Kip said, giving him the go ahead.

“Am I to guess?” Radonon asked.

“No, you’re to stand still and shut up,” Brad quipped.

Radonon huffed once, but decided there was no point in arguing and did as they wished. A few seconds later he was unconscious and standing within the device like a statue.

“He’s out,” Vortison said, looking at Brad. “I have no idea how this will interface even if it works.”

“Bit by bit then and see what happens. We’re not in a rush.”

Vortison closed his eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. “I suppose I am.”

“Don’t blame yourself. None of us expected this,” Kip said, guessing at his thoughts even though he couldn’t read them.

“He was my responsibility and I failed him. There is no getting around that.”

“Let me rephrase then. Don’t distrust your judgement, for it did not fail. We stumbled across something much larger than we’d ever imagined and it took us all by surprise. It wasn’t lack of skill that created this situation, it was lack of understanding.”

“I still screwed up.”

“Don’t do so again by rushing or second guessing yourself,” Brad said stiffly. “This was our idea too, and Nefron is also our responsibility. If we can’t return him to his original form that is our failure, but we’ve let it go now. We’re not going to abandon him, but we’re going to work the problem for what it is rather than trying to get back to what cannot be. This happened, we lost, now time for the next battle.”

“I’m not getting sloppy,” Vortison promised. “I just don’t like him having to live like this.”

“It’s done…and you didn’t do it. The Chixzon did with their hidden programming. You just didn’t find it in time. They’re to blame, not you. We did screw up, but we’re not the one who caused it. Now we have a lot of work to do to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else, starting with trying to get a little bit of the Protovic back.”

“I don’t need a lecture. I need results.”

“Then let’s get some,” Brad said, gesturing to the control board.

Vortison started working it, with the master holo enlarged enough that the three Archons could follow along, more or less. The capsule that they’d created earlier was being altered, with a tiny portion of it being walled off from the rest with a new barrier being grown. When that was complete Vortison began to slowly remove impediments from that section, allowing it to reconnect with the rest of his now Chixzon brain, though the biochemistry was virtually identical, save for new subsections had been grown to add to what had originally been there.

That allowed the two tissues to match up functionally, and when the first impulses began to travel between the two Vortison saw a spike in mental activity…in the negative. It was a compatibility issue that was essentially grinding his mental gears, but the corruptive flood that had been present previously was no longer here. The exposed bits of the Protovic section were not being compromised, but rather accessed by the rest of his mind and attempting to integrate. Up until now the puzzling functions of Radonon’s mind had been absent, and the Archons had tested as much. The additional brain tissue hadn’t replaced them, leaving him only with the ability to act and remember rather than reason.

He could still do a fair amount of deduction, but the parts of his mind where learning would occur was what the Archons had fought so hard to preserve, and the first bits of that were now trying to integrate with the rest of his Chixzon mind.

“It’s rough, but taking,” Vortison reported, not expecting the Archons to be able to fully interpret the holograms. “Far rougher than I’d expected, but it’s working itself out. If we progress very slowly this might work. Go any faster and I can’t even guess at the problems that could result, but it would be bad.”

“System crash?”

“I don’t know.”

“Segments or do this in one long haul?” Brad asked.

“Having him fully awake with only pieces of this programming would be a bad idea and could cause further complications. I’d like to keep him out until it’s fully accessed then bring him slowly back to consciousness and troubleshoot as we go. We’re talking hours, minimum.”

“How’s he set with food stores?”

Vortison brought up another hologram, imputing multiple commands until he got the scans he wanted. “He needs to eat again soon, but I can supply what he needs through the machine enough to get him through the delay. His digestive systems are still raw and need food to adjust, but that’s a low priority right now. I’d prefer to get this all done first then let him fully acclimate.”

“Do you need anything from us?”

“Just your protection. Even now I’m detecting faint telepathic activity, which is another stark sign that I do not fully understand their biology, for he should be fully unconscious and unable to actively use his abilities. My guess would be this is something automated, but I have no idea what it is and I don’t want to speculate. If his telekinesis also becomes active I’ll need you here to shut it down before someone could get hurt.”

“We’ll stay here permanently,” Kip promised. “The new facility will have insulated walls so you don’t have to worry about that.”

“Which he can tear through?”

“We’ll keep a guard on him to make sure that doesn’t happen either. We’ve got your back then and now. He’s not going to misbehave and get away with it. Count on that.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say. Proceeding with the gradual activation,” he confirmed aloud as he started drawing another line of tissue across the capsule in prep for the next reveal once the first eventually got stabilized.

Kip and Brad exchanged a few thoughts, then excused Amy so she could get some training time in as the pair of trailblazers stayed with and mentally monitored their sedated friend…who had unwittingly become their enemy.

3

Radonon’s eyes slowed opened, with his mind not far behind them. He looked down at his hands on the sphere then out to the pair of Archons and the medtech. “You rendered me unconscious. Why?”

“The procedure took some time,” Kip explained. “You can step out now.”

The arm bar lifted but the Chixzon didn’t move. “What have you done to me?”

“Feel different?” Brad asked.

“I am not the same, but I do not know how.”

“We’ll let you figure that out with time, but for now let’s continue with our chat while you eat.”

“What have you done to me?” Radonon demanded.

“We’re not saying,” Kip said firmly. “Still think the process is undoable?”

“It is, of that I have no doubts. Other alterations can be made, and you have definitely done something.”

“Have a seat,” Brad said, pointing to the stool with a tray of foodstuffs set beside it on a portable tabletop. “One way or another.”

“Our discussion is over until you tell me what you’ve done.”

Brad raised a hand for emphasis, then telekinetically lifted Radonon off his feet and flew him out of the medical chamber and over next to the stool where he dropped him a few inches onto the ground.

“If we have to dig the information out telepathically we will, but as you’ve already pointed out, you have nowhere to go and you cannot stop us, so let’s make this civil.”

“And what harm is there in telling me?” Radonon challenged.

“It’s a puzzle. We’re assessing your abilities in self-analysis, thus we can’t tell you when you have to figure it out yourself.”

“Testing our superiority?”

“You could call it that.”

“Have you damaged me?”

“Not by intent,” Kip promised.

“Yet you are making alterations in a physiology that you do not understand,” Radonon complained as he twitched his head for the third time. “Or is it physical? Perhaps you have done something to my mind.”

“You tell us.”

“Experimentation is beyond the limitations of your scruples, thus you must have a direct purpose. A biomonitor chip buried within my body?”

“We don’t like implants,” Brad said, nixing that idea.

“I feel unbalanced, so a sizeable alteration has been made,” the Chixzon said as he stood in place, twitching his head fractionally to the side again as if trying to reset his thoughts. “Why am I still here?”

“Meaning what?” Kip asked.

“In this room. You know I have the ability to cut through most materials, so why am I not in a fully shielded cell?”

“You’re not doing anything with us here,” the trailblazer said confidently.

“Such a declaration implies an unnecessary risk. You seek to solve most problems through infrastructure, yet you do not now in favor of a personal guard that could potentially lapse in a moment of opportunity for me.”

“You have nowhere to go,” Kip reiterated.

“But I could still cause damage, even kill one or two of you. The medtech perhaps.”

“Only if we get sloppy.”

“But keeping me here is sloppy. That is not your method of operating. You cover your weaknesses, not leave them arrogantly open…unless you’re hoping I’ll attempt to break out.”

“Would we risk our people for that?”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Radonon said, glancing at the floor but Kip could sense that his mind was going elsewhere. He was distracted and trying to ‘blink’ himself back into focus. “Which is why I do not understand your recklessness. If you are readying another facility you could keep me sedated until it is complete, just like you previously did.”

“Maybe we think you’re mostly talk with little skill to back it up,” Brad offered.

“You may be ignorant of us, but you are not dumb. Do not expect me to believe so under any circumstance. You are working another angle.”

“Feel free to figure it out,” Kip taunted, tossing his hands up and to the sides in an innocent gesture.

“Eat up,” Brad suggested. “Your body is low on fuel.”

Radonon looked at both Archons, not willing to let go of the problem at hand, but in agreement as to his physical needs. He sat down on the stool, wrapping his tail around it again as he picked a sugar stick up and smashed half of it into his small mouth opening before biting it off.

“Taste the same?” Kip inquired, but the Chixzon didn’t respond.

“Is your superior patience beginning to run thin?” Brad asked.

“Perhaps,” he said, taking another bite and fighting a mental war with himself, the source of which still eluded him.

“Well then, how about we discuss a topic of your choice?”

“Your origins.”

“What about them?”

“You’re hiding something. I didn’t realize how much until just now. Your abilities and aspects of your tech don’t add up. You’re siphoning off of something.”

“We’ll discuss anything that we would with the Protovic,” Brad said evenly. “Certain secrets we will still keep.”

“What did you hope to gain from my transformation? Your current powers are far too advanced, and your understanding of genetics far too simplistic. If you had a handle on your own genome you wouldn’t need me to upgrade the Protovic, you would have simply designed what abilities you wanted to give them. You were looking to gain from a mystery when you already have something far more valuable. How is that possible?”

“We did not add our abilities after birth,” Kip said, throwing him a bone. “We were born with them.”

“Then why does he not have them?” Radonon asked, pointing a black finger towards where Vortison sat.

“We only want those who have earned them to have access to them. So yes,” Kip said, reading his thoughts nonstop, “that makes us biologically superior to you.”

“You have an advantage, we have others. Do not assume superiority.”

Brad lifted the tray of foodstuffs off the tabletop and floated it to the side. Kip took control of it as Brad lifted the table a few inches off the ground then used his Lachka at full force and crushed it down into a ball over the course of three seconds. He continued to compress it even further, then dropped it at Radonon’s feet.

“You were saying?”

Both Archons could feel the wheels moving inside his mind with the analysis portion that was still Star Force developed being pulled on heavily. The more doubts they fed him the more it differed with the limited propaganda that had been downloaded into the rest of his mind. There wasn’t much, for a race as advanced as the Chixzon couldn’t be too deluded or they’d cease to function and self-destruct, but everything about them was tinted with a slight deviance that didn’t exactly match up with the truth.

All of Nefron’s memories had been altered accordingly so they were useful but didn’t conflict with his new culture and knowledge…but the learning portion was untainted and still remained Star Force, developed through all the years spent in the maturia and then further with advanced training and even combat against the lizards. Nefron had been one of the oldest Reds in the Protovic, and the higher level of wisdom that he had accumulated over the years was now fighting with the much older and polished doctrine in the few places where it didn’t match up, with the Archons trying to give him as many corners to peel back as possible.

“You’ve never seen telekinesis that strong,” Kip said as Radonon stared at the ball of twisted polymer. “In fact, you didn’t even consider it possible. Yours is far too weak to ever attain that level, used primarily as a tool. A precision tool for when your fingers are too large.”

“An upgrade we created,” he admitted. “Built to mimic one naturally occurring that we discovered. It was somewhat stronger, but not on this level.”

“Just one?” Brad asked.

“Telepathy may not be widespread, but it is not exceedingly rare. Telekinesis was a myth until we encountered one race that had it.”

“Which you destroyed?”

“They…”

“Deserved it?”

“They would not yield.”

“They were not a threat to you,” Brad continued, pulling more data from his mind as the subject matter floated to the surface. “They had something you wanted. Something you feared not having, so you took it from them then killed them so only you would have it. I can understand your fear now, especially because you can’t get inside my head to see how it works. You must be terrified.”

“Do not mock me. It is a weak tactic that will not work.”

“I mock your cowardice, which I will admit is not your own, only now inherited in memory. The Chixzon destroyed an entire race out of fear, not necessity. Their telekinesis was not strong enough to truly threaten you, it was just something they could do that you could not. You couldn’t stand that. How pathetic.”

“And inferior,” Kip added.

“Perhaps you are correct,” Radonon said, his head complaining against that admission, “but we are not in the habit of leaving potential enemies at our back. Your track record in that is hit and miss.”

“Meaning?”

“You do not pursue the Skarrons. You left their empire intact.”

Brad and Kip exchanged glances. “You do know how big it is, right?”

“No larger than the lizards.”

Brad laughed. “Are you serious?”

“He doesn’t remember,” Kip said with a smirk. “I think he never paid attention in the maturia to that portion of the map.”

“Or did we not give them that much of a map?”

Kip hesitated for a moment. “Good question. Maybe we didn’t.”

“If you withheld knowledge, I am not to blame for that,” Radonon pointed out.

“Well then, let me bring you up to speed,” Brad said, telepathically sending the size and scope of the known Skarron Empire to him while making sure not to include anything else.

The Chixzon visibly flinched, and as he did so Kip could feel his analysis programming digging into it and working all kinds of new angles…and in the process, it was very slowly augmenting the rest of his altered memories and knowledge to bring them into line with logic and reality. That caused even more mental friction, but it was like trying to cut down a tree using a pad of sandpaper…very ineffective, but what wood was scraped away wasn’t coming back, and given enough time and effort the tree would eventually be felled.

Which meant it might take years, or even centuries, but if they could keep exposing Radonon to stimulus that required him to learn rather than just remember and repeat they could undermine the Chixzon in him. They couldn’t bring the Protovic back, but maybe they could free his mind enough for him to chart his own course going forward.

That was the hope, at least, and it hadn’t been squashed by the transformation programming reasserting itself and wiping clean the bit of Protovic now exposed within him. Yet, anyway, with Vortison closely monitoring his mental status in case they needed to yank him back inside the chamber for another quick alteration if some new surprise thwarted their plans, but for the moment it seemed they had a crack in the Chixzon stranglehold on his mind and it was already beginning to widen as the alien imperative to remain in the know and gain the upper hand was actually prompting the analysis and working against itself.

Now it was just up to the Archons to feed that fire and see where it went.

“Their empire did not exist previously,” Radonon said warily. “For them to have grown so large with such inferior capabilities is both alarming and impressive. The Brijderat used to inhabit that region of the galaxy, a part at least that we allowed them to, and they were far more advanced, as were others. What transpired to wipe them off the map? Something major. I know a great deal of time has passed, but there are too many races missing. You know what has occurred. Tell me…or at least confirm that you know and it’s amongst your list of secrets.”

“Why do you assume the forces set against the Chixzon didn’t continue to fight and destroy others?” Brad asked, getting back to a limited point that they’d explored previously.

“They were weak, and only wise enough to exploit a major flaw in our strategic alignment. We relied on the Uriti too heavily, to our gain for such a long time, but their weakness was not one that we could counteract. The Alliance against us could not destroy them, but they did neutralize them…and with that single tactic shattered our entire plan. Our conventional forces were not developed enough to hold their inferior forces back, nor did we have time to augment them. We were running too low on population and could not quickly correct our mistake. Our enemies were far greater in number, but they did not have the power to overtake others that we had previously held under our suppression. No, something else has occurred.”

Kip frowned. “They didn’t destroy the Uriti?”

“They could not, and I do not believe they have found a way to this day, though I have no way of being certain.”

“What did they do?”

“They found a way to pacify them. Attack them and they would undo the restraint.”

“Any chance the Uriti are still out there, or do they have an expiration date?”

“To our knowledge the Klamensh do not expire with time, and when we created the Uriti we did not see nor anticipate that changing. Only two Uriti were ever destroyed, both of which required extreme and unpredictable circumstances. It is most likely that our Uriti are still out there imprisoned, though they are useless to us until we find a way to counteract the sedative.”

“What of the original Klamensh then?”

“I do not know. The sedative did not work on it, and we never discovered why. If the facility that held it was destroyed it is most likely that the Klamensh was released. Hopefully it destroyed the attackers in the process and exacted a small mote of vengeance on our behalf.”

“Didn’t you guys kind of have it coming?” Kip asked, not ignoring the magnitude of what they were just discussing, but not wanting Radonon to pick up on any reaction from him. “I mean, come on, when you go around wiping out entire races for the fun of it, you’re not exactly being the good guys.”

“It was never for fun, Archon. If you are truly in my mind you would know that. Every one we destroyed was out of necessity…” he said, cutting off with a bit of hesitation even though his thought was complete.

“Even you can see the lie in that. Your telekinetic grab didn’t require their extinction.”

“Leaving a weapon such as that for others to find and copy would have been foolish.”

“Oh, so you plan to backstab us later on if we agree to side with you?” Brad asked.

Radonon looked at him and flashed the green in his eyes. “We do not break agreements. Serve us and you will not meet the same fate.”

“Don’t lie,” Kip said, even though he detected no deception within him. “Our abilities are too advanced for the Chixzon not to try and steal from us. Even if you personally did not, the others would eventually. You’d need to find a good way to do it, since we can kill you rather easily if we wanted, but do not deny that the Chixzon would try if they had an opportunity, agreement or no.”

“We are far too dangerous to leave alive,” Brad added. “You would betray us eventually. It’s in your nature.”

Radonon’s mind was in flux again, almost to the point of a headache as he tried to reconcile the actions of his remembered past and the logic thread the Archons were weaving…without success. The two were incompatible, not on their face, but other tenets of Chixzon culture clashed with the facts, most of which the Archons didn’t even know about yet.

“I will not betray you if you are loyal,” Radonon finally said. “And the others are genetic copies of me. We all think and act alike. Our agreements will hold so long as you do not break them.”

“Unless necessity dictates,” Brad reiterated.

“An advanced race cannot exist without some commonality, some binding tethers to give it structure. Chixzon hold to one another and to our word. We may lie as a tool, but when we make a formal agreement it is fixed, we do not alter it unless the other party does first.”

“Has that always held true in Chixzon history?”

“Yes,” he said, though both Archons picked up on a flinch.

“In reality, or rewritten history? Remember, you didn’t observe any of it. You only have manufactured memories. You can only speak for yourself, not others that you have had no actual contact with or knowledge of. You were Protovic, and carry the memories from Star Force, the knowledge you’ve gained, the skills you’ve learned. The others, present or future, will not have that base. If they come from cultures that were deceptive, would the Chixzon in them hold pure or would it be inclined to loosen the loyalty where necessity demanded?”

“As you know, I can only speak of myself and what I know. And what I know is that we hold to our agreements. Join with me and I will honor whatever bargain we strike.”

“But you can’t honestly guarantee, 100%, that any other Chixzon will,” Kip said firmly.

Radonon didn’t answer that for a long moment, but in his mind both Kip and Brad sensed the doubt creeping in…and how the analysis section of his mind fed off it.

4

December 26, 3092

Solar System

Earth

Amy-12199 walked up the circular staircase and into Davis’s office to find the Star Force Director and Greg waiting for her. She paused for a moment on the top stair, stretched her arms behind her back and twisted her neck to the side, rocking her curtain of red hair as she let out a long sigh.

“That bad, huh?” Greg asked from his chair.

“Kip and Brad didn’t want to leave, so they sent me to fill you in,” she said as she walked up and grabbed a seat next to the trailblazer and across from Davis.

“What’s Nefron’s condition?”

“Uncertain. His telepathic ability is increasing, but not to the level where he can block us out so he has no option of duplicity. That said, we’re not totally sure everything he thinks is on the level. If he’s convincing himself to believe and play along now he could change his mind later.”

“He’s cooperating?” Greg asked.

“Yes, if only to inform us of the superiority of the Chixzon so we’ll ally with them. Kip thinks that’s a ruse for himself to give him the option of cooperating with us. I can’t be sure, but there is a lot of internal conflict within him that’s only growing with time. He’s unlearning what they’ve drilled into his head, but it has to occur one tiny piece at a time. We’re driving him on with training that he’s agreeing to go along with, but for every tweak he makes to himself he runs the risk of plateauing. If he’s ever to break free of this programming it’s going to be a very long, cumulative process that I’m not sure he has the will to pursue. Brad and Kip are planning to drag him there if they can, which is why they’re not leaving Nym.”

“But that’s not why they sent you back?” Davis guessed.

“No. They’re still holding out hope of saving Radonon from himself, and we owe it to him to keep trying, but they could have informed you of that process by message. I’m here to discuss what we can’t put into messages.”

“Start by assuming we know nothing,” Greg prompted, “and give us a full summary. We’ll pick at it from there until we get up to speed.”

Amy sighed again, blowing out a long breath that she channeled into a silent whistle. “We can’t get a firm lock on the timeline, but we do know that the Chixzon empire existed prior to the V’kit’no’sat. They controlled most of the galaxy outside the inner half, with what they call the ‘Klamensh’ being a plague on the interior. We’ve confirmed that they are Hadarak, and that the Chixzon did capture one that ventured too far out. They were lucky more than anything, in that it nearly destroyed the fleet sent to battle it.”

“We can’t draw a crude map of the Hadarak territory, for like the V’kit’no’sat database pointed out, the Hadarak don’t stick to borders. They pushed out in tendrils, destroyed and fed off systems almost at random, then retreated back towards greater gravity wells to spawn. The Chixzon knew not to mess with them, but one day a single one made its way out and attacked their third most important system in the galaxy. They were obligated to defend it and only succeeded in saving less than a tenth of the population, but at the end of that battle they had wounded the Hadarak to the point where it couldn’t leave the system.”

“They tried to finish it off and failed, having to call for additional support from their scattered strongholds across the galaxy. Their travel capabilities were subpar so they got really stretched out, and it took some time for even the closest outposts to send them aid,” Amy said, throwing sporadic mental images she’d gotten directly from Radonon at Davis and Greg while she narrated. “When they finally got there a different decision had been made in the interim. They didn’t try to kill it, instead they damaged it further to the point where it was not able to do them much harm, then they corralled it and began to study it as it rapidly healed.”

“They built their prison facility faster, keeping it bottled up but always having to keep it partially injured. They knew what it was capable of, and that it could call for help, so they continuously destroyed various components as it regrew them. Their hope was to find a weakness or to coopt its abilities into their already significant biotech wing. They use machines for the most part, then trick them out with biotech where advantageous. This project was the first true diversion from that, in that they eventually figured out how to force the Hadarak to spawn.”

“They lost all of the offspring numerous times before they were able to get them to survive in an artificial gravity well. When they did they killed them and began to experiment with making alterations. It was a huge project, but they knew it would cement their dominance over the galaxy if they could even partially succeed. At the time they had systems scattered around the galaxy, but no brute force capability for domination. They had negotiated and tricked their way into the forefront in most occasions but for a lot of races that wouldn’t work, so the Chixzon just ignored them inside their borders…much like The Nexus is doing now.”

“When they got their first successful Uriti it was no longer a Hadarak. They’d altered its genetics so much that most of its strengths were gone, but they’d added other things to it. Most important of which was the minion reproduction. Hadarak minions were not effective enough for what the Chixzon wanted, so they altered them to produce what amounts to conventional forces of a biological nature. Fighters, mechs, infantry. The Uriti are sterile, so they can’t reproduce, but they can spawn minions and, more importantly, factory-like independent growths that can then produce more on their own.”

“Colonies?” Greg asked.

Amy nodded. “The Uriti could fly between stars like a Hadarak, and with its resilience could go basically anywhere and plant the seeds of an invasion force. If those seeds weren’t found and destroyed they’d multiply exponentially, creating an army of minions that would do the Chixzon’s bidding upon arrival even if the Uriti wasn’t in the system anymore. It was with those minions that they sought out and conquered the races they feared the most, plucking them from the galaxy one at a time while giving the core a wide berth. They had no intention of ever attacking the Hadarak, merely skirting them and their somewhat predictable incursions into the outer rim. They feared the Hadarak would continue to spread to one day consume the entire galaxy, but they too were choosy and didn’t blanket systems in their path like the lizards do.”

“Radonon was most interested in the current state of the Hadarak. We didn’t tell him of the V’kit’no’sat, but he feared a more widespread presence than there is now. He doesn’t know how long it’s been either, but we’re estimating that they found and captured the single Hadarak at least 12 million years ago, with their eventual defeat no sooner than 5 million.”

Davis whistled.

“That’s why the V’kit’no’sat don’t have any records on them,” Greg added.

“We think there may have been some overlap, but with the blanket of Hadarak covering the core the Chixzon never explored there. They seem to do almost everything out of fear. Not an irrational fear, but a bit of paranoia. The V’kit’no’sat dominate out of ego, while the Chixzon seem to have been motivated by removing threats before they could kill them. They would have destroyed the Hadarak had they a method of doing so, but without one they chose to keep clear of them whenever able rather than embrace the challenge the way the V’kit’no’sat founding races did. There’s no shortage of ego with the Chixzon, but it’s geared towards survival through preemption and subterfuge. The Uriti were the first time they had a blunt force approach, and they used it to conquer the outer rim all the way around the galaxy.”

“Population?” Davis asked.

“We don’t have firm numbers, but from Radonon’s sense it is something less than the V’kit’no’sat. They lived in clusters of systems situated in about the size of the ADZ that could support one another if attacked, and they had thousands of those clusters spread across the galaxy, from which they sought out and eliminated anything they thought was a threat. They also acquired biotech from other races, then destroyed them to deny the abilities to anyone else. This is how they got telekinesis, though their version isn’t very powerful. They didn’t know of anyone else in the galaxy that had it, in any form.”

“Explain these Uriti further,” Greg asked.

“Smaller than Hadarak, but still miles wide. Each one is different, another upgraded version of the previous and often in different shapes. They could only grow one at a time and they needed resources from across the galaxy to do it, but often one was enough to use as a hammer to subdue whomever they wished. The threat of it alone was the equivalent of a Death Star, for they could only unleash it upon a planet. The first model they had almost no control over, and had to stay clear of it when active. They engineered a recall and submissive mode, but when it attacked it basically destroyed everything around it.”

“How many did they have?”

“According to Radonon there were 118 produced, two of which were destroyed by their own error. Both were early models and they threw them against enemies that were too powerful. They did their job in destroying most of their targets, but they were killed in the process. After that the Chixzon were more cautious about their assaults and they never lost one during the culling period that lasted for at least 500,000 years. They basically went around the galaxy knocking off every major power one at a time until there was no one of sufficient strength to actually kill a Uriti.”

“When they had the big players eliminated they used the minions to focus on grabbing more control over their territory. They knew better than to overreach and grow too large, but they bullied and threatened other races into working with them, mostly in terms of tribute that ironically went to growing more Uriti. They’re corovon hogs, like the Hadarak, but there are a number of other very select resources needed to accommodate the skills they built them with…not all of which are the same. Different models different attempts, but they’re all build to be a strong point the enemy cannot destroy and will gut their attacking fleet against if they try.”

“The minions aren’t that strong, not even close, but they use flood tactics like the lizards and with each additional model the minions were also being improved upon. Their most advanced versions were able to conquer whole swaths of territory without even a Uriti supporting them, merely going around and planting them in a location and letting them grow to sufficient numbers. Then a Chixzon command force would come in and assume control, dictating them as they saw fit. It was this reliance on the minions that kept the Chixzon from growing their own forces large enough to make up for the lack of the Uriti when a means of sedating them was discovered.”

“It was a group effort of races that hadn’t been deemed dangerous enough to be tagged for elimination during the culling phase, which meant they had their hands full with just the minions and a very long war took place. Sedating the Uriti was not a simple nor easy process, but once one was locked down the Chixzon’s enemies defended it as a prize and would not let them recapture and wake it. One by one they plucked them from the lineup until they had only a handful left guarding their homeworlds. For fear of them being taken they didn’t send them out, altering their plans for further galactic conquest into survival mode.”

“They fought through a retreat with the minions being churned out at home while they looked for other avenues of attack. Many were tried, all ultimately failed on a grand scheme though massive damage was done to their enemies, which continued to grow as more races joined them in a populist crusade to overthrow the Chixzon. While buying themselves time, the Chixzon worked on many backup plans, including the one that they eventually settled on. It was last ditch, but the only viable option at escaping their enemies. Others were tried and assumed to have failed, though Radonon doesn’t know for sure. He thinks that if they had succeeded the Chixzon would already have rebuilt and returned to glory by now, hence he is fairly sure all of them were hunted down and destroyed.”

“There was a push made at the end, after the Protovic had been quietly seeding across the galaxy, meant to convince their enemies that in one last massive counterattack the Chixzon were finally wiped out. They hoped their enemies would disperse and be destroyed themselves over time by either the Hadarak or events beyond prediction. The split nature of the Protovic genetics was meant to act as an inhibitor to ensure that a massive amount of time passed, with the unlocked varieties responding directly to development, which they also used as a sort of internal clock. They did not want to return so soon that their enemies would be waiting for them. They wanted to disappear from memory, then return to a new galaxy that might not even have record of them. A fresh start, or at least a resetting of the playing field.”

“Radonon expected the Hadarak to still be a scourge on the galaxy. Apparently the idea of someone actually fighting them successfully hadn’t occurred to the Chixzon.”

“Who does he think did it?” Davis asked.

“We left him hanging on that, but gave him access to bits of map to gage his reactions and to spur the analytical circuits in his head. The more he has to learn new things the less hold the programming has on him. It’s pretty much a fool’s errand, given how much Chixzon there is controlling him, but its theoretically possible that he could recover to a semblance of Star Force standards…but it will almost all be new to him. He’s going to have to learn a second time, if it comes to that. Kip and Brad aren’t hopeful, but they’re fighting this one regardless and digging intel out in the process. They insist that the Protovic cannot be allowed to become Chixzon, even if we have to fight a few wars to remove these genetics from the colonies out there.”

“Uriti aside, they’re that dangerous?” Greg asked.

“Very. They won’t hit you in the face, they’ll stab you in the back, misdirect you to jump off a cliff. They come at you sideways and are as sneaky as a Teemo. The Uriti gave them a much larger presence in the galaxy than they were used to. Normally most of their power wrangling occurs quietly, and they don’t have a problem with using biological warfare. Radonon has already offered to build a weapon for us to kill the lizards, citing that they have to be destroyed due to the fact that they’re wiping out everything in their path. If the Chixzon don’t have to do it later so much the better, so he’s more than willing to make it happen.”

“Like hell it is,” Greg scoffed.

“We pretty much said the same thing.”

“These Uriti,” Davis asked warily. “Were they killed after they were captured?”

“No,” Amy said firmly. “They were sedated. Attack them and they wake up. That’s why they had to be guarded as prizes. The Chixzon’s enemies couldn’t destroy them. They’d already taken out those who could long ago, and without the sedative being developed and a lot of gritty war to follow the galaxy would still be in their hands.”

“I think the V’kit’no’sat would have had something to say about that,” Greg added.

“It’s a fight I’d be curious to see play out,” Amy admitted. “But do not underestimate the biological knowledge the Chixzon have. Kip and Brad are confident that it’s superior to the V’kit’no’sat, probably because they’ve never had cause to develop it in that direction. The Chixzon have even less scruples, so they’ve delved into scientific regions where the V’kit’no’sat have not gone and gained a formidable arsenal from it.”

“Not applicable in space battle,” Davis commented.

“No, it’s not. Which is why they come at you sideways.”

“‘Come at you sideways,’ is that a quote from somewhere?”

“Some movie, I don’t remember which,” Amy confessed. “But the metaphor fits.”

“Serenity,” Greg supplied.

Amy frowned. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen it. I must have picked it up from someone else then, but I assume you take my meaning?”

“I do,” Davis said, seeing some of the images of the Uriti as Amy sent them to him and feeling the awe and terror that they invoked…especially when he had a wealth of V’kit’no’sat knowledge on the Hadarak to let him know just how dangerous these things were. “And you’re saying that these Uriti could still be out there somewhere waiting for the Chixzon to come back and free them?”

“After so many years there’s no way to know what happened to them. Maybe they got loose and returned to the core with the other Hadarak. The V’kit’no’sat have no record of them, so it’s possible they’re still out here somewhere.”

“Does Nefron know where to look?”

“No, but there is a short range recall they can use.”

“Define short,” Greg asked.

“Depends how much power you put behind it, but we think no more than 80 lightyears. It seems the Chixzon were able to wake up some of them in this manner, which is why their enemies eventually spirited them away to presumably safe locations.”

“And if one is woke up now, by someone other than the Chixzon, what will it do?”

“It depends greatly on which one is woke up,” Amy emphasized, “but expect it to kill whoever it wakes up and then begin to create minions that will attack everyone they come in contact with. That’s how the Chixzon programmed them in the end as a failsafe. If they operate on intuitive drives then there’s no clue what they might do, though seeking out the Hadarak is a possibility.”

“Would the Hadarak accept them?”

“No clue.”

Davis and Greg exchanged glances.

“What?” Amy asked.

“I think it’s time we worked on our own biological weapon,” Davis said, to the mage’s dismay.

“Without Radonon,” Greg added. “We need to be able to infect Protovic populations with a biological weapon that will delete the primary coding.”

“Can we do that?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know,” Davis admitted, “but we’re going to figure out how...”

“…before these bastards pull a Zilean and come back,” Greg finished.

5

April 3, 3093

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Radonon dipped down a few inches, prepping his muscular legs for a split second before launching himself up and over the 2 meter wall, then dropping arms spread for a moment before hitting the floor and sprinting ahead with his tail smacking the ground on landing as it usually did. His sprint wasn’t a run, but a triple step forward into a horizontal jump/dash that repeated continuously as he moved down the obstacle course towards the turret ahead.

It didn’t fire on him until he passed within the circle outlining it at a distance of 55 meters, but he had to go right by it for the corridor didn’t allow him any other options. The tiny projectiles being fired at him splattered when hit, imbuing a stun effect if he was careless enough. The first three he redirected away from his body with his telekinesis, then as he launched himself into another dash he had to stop one cold in front of him, overstressing his limited power enough that the next two he couldn’t fully deflect.

One bounced off his head, brushing his thick and useless skin. A tiny bit of the stun bled off even though the ‘stinger’ didn’t break, but the one that hit his right leg did. A splotch of ugly yellow paint marked the epicenter of the stun effect that passed right through his bioarmor. His leg went partially numb, but he could still walk on it. Jumping was out of the question, so he hobbled forward focusing on his telekinesis to protect him as he headed straight for the meter high cylindrical turret. The single barrel it held was still firing at him nonstop, but the rate was low compared to the much harder training challenges he’d gone through as a Protovic previously.

The difference was those turrets fired stun energy, not physical goo pellets. He knew the alteration was due to the fact that he now had telekinesis that the Archons wanted to help him develop if only to thoroughly test his abilities, but what was worse was the fact that Brad had gone through this course when he’d first shown it to Radonon and he hadn’t even needed to use his much more powerful ‘Lachka.’ He had been able to dodge the stingers, something that Radonon should be able to do, but now after getting hit that wasn’t going to be possible.

His anger boiled over and he just charged the turret, deflecting a few more stingers wide of his body and tanking two of them. They stunned his chest to the point he felt like he couldn’t breathe, but his limbs still worked and he covered the last few meters up to the turret, taking one more to the throat that sent his head awash with disorientation.

With a frustrated yell his shoulder spikes glowed neon green on the tips and jutted forward on either side of his head, hitting and sinking into the turret’s armor casing like it was made of nothing more than paper. He pulled both tips down through the material and crisscrossed them, eviscerating it only to pass through the ammo pouch. When he did he lost the feeling in his mandibles and the numbness quickly shot down into his torso, with him blacking out a few seconds later.

“Hey genius, that’s not going to work,” Brad’s voice said in Radonon’s head as he suddenly began to wake back up. His senses returned to him enough that he could see the Archon standing beside him and the trashed turret, having just delivered the destunning serum that marked yet another failure on his part. “You have to evade, not crush.”

“You enjoy flaunting your superiority,” the Chixzon grumbled as he slowly stood up.

“At least you admit it now,” the trailblazer said, standing a meter away but with no protection or armor between him and Radonon. That had become standard in recent months, with the Archons making it obvious that they weren’t afraid of him. They still kept him separate from everyone else, but with their skills and ability to monitor his thoughts it was unlikely that he could successfully attack one of them. Plus the fact that even if he did kill one he would end up dead soon thereafter.

He didn’t want to do that though, and not just because of his past association with them. They hadn’t mistreated him since his rebirth, aside from the confinement. He granted that in the reverse position he would have done the same at the minimum, so he didn’t hold it against the Humans. They were even assisting him with his aims to ‘take over the galaxy’ as they called it, offering him bits of current intel on the state of affairs in the galaxy in exchange for training milestones. If/when he completed this course he’d earn another nugget, allowing him to very slowly pursue his genetic imperatives.

“Your anger is untrained,” Brad added. “Emotions are weapons and must be honed. Yours is raw and a hindrance. Your transformation took you backwards in that respect. You’d mastered your Protovic emotions long ago. Can you not remember the process by which you did that?”

“I have the memories, but the emotions are not the same,” Radonon said, kicking aside a piece of the turret that he’d destroyed. “I think you’re prodding them intentionally to force me to learn to control them.”

“Control doesn’t mean restrain.”

“I remember that much.”

“And what do the Chixzon teach about emotions?”

“We operate out of a position of dominance. We are unaccustomed to dealing with failure.”

“You kill the failures?” Brad asked, sensing a memory surface.

“Perhaps that is a long term weakness,” Radonon admitted. “We don’t permit large scale failures to endure, so we never learn from them…personally. We do analyze and learn from others’ mistakes.”

“Can’t do that with emotions, and a great many other things.”

“So I am learning. Do you have another turret?”

Brad smirked. “Get back to the starting point. It’ll be ready before you are.”

“You anticipated this?”

“Yes,” Brad said simply, summoning a hidden door in the hallway to open and pointing Radonon towards it.

The Chixzon flexed his newly destunned muscles and thumped his muscular tail on the floor twice before walking out, with Brad following and studying his mandible spikes closely.

“How long does it take for those to get fatigued?”

“A very long time. If you want to give me a lot of targets I’ll indulge you in finding out.”

“In exchange for another data packet?”

“Of course.”

“Perhaps later. Though I think you just feel like tearing stuff up right now.”

“You shouldn’t have to ‘think,’” Radonon reminded him. “You know well how to frustrate me.”

“It’s something all of Star Force has to learn to deal with. You know that,” Brad said as they came to an intersection that required them to go different directions, Radonon back to the start and Brad to the observation post.

“I am no longer Star Force.”

“Yes you are,” Brad said flippantly. “You’re just in denial.”

“I am not responsible for your ignorance.”

“Nope, just your own. Now get going…and this time, try to focus your aggression into actions beneficial to the task of completing the course.”

“No promises,” Radonon said, walking off.

Brad let him go, suppressing a smile. ‘No promises’ was something Nefron used to say, and this was the first time Radonon had ever chosen to use that Star Force phrase.

Several days later Radonon ducked under a wall, squeezing himself through a narrow gap between it and the floor only to have it fall down upon his back and pin him to the ground a few meters away from the finish pedestal. This was the first time he’d ever laid eyes upon it, but he knew he wasn’t going to make it. The rover chasing him was only seconds away from shooting his lower portion that was still behind the wall.

A sense of inevitable failure saturated his frustrated mind, but he chose to resist it. Channeling his frustration into anger and focusing it into physical action, he pressed down his arms, legs, tail, and spike mandibles into the floor and forced the wall back up a few inches. He wiggled a knee down for better leverage then let the wall drop slightly as he jutted further through. Repeating the process he got his hips under it and lifted it further, then jumped through just as a pair of stingers hit his tail.

The wall dropped down with a thud as he tripped ahead of it and in the clear. Standing up with an eagerness he hadn’t felt in a long time, he took a step towards the finish pedestal as the wall suddenly lifted up behind him to give the rover a clear shot.

Shit, he thought, being off balance with his tail no longer functioning. He leaned forward and made an awkward jump onto the finish pedestal, falling on top of it as he was carpeted with stingers. He got one black hand on top of the button and pushed it down…with the incoming fire ceasing immediately.

The Chixzon slumped to the ground, most of his body not responding to his brain but he didn’t care. He’d made it, challenge completed, and that was all that mattered.

He sat there in a pile of numbed body parts until Brad appeared beside him and injected him with a specialized probe that could get through his thick skin. Radonon didn’t know how that worked, and it was just another slight nod towards what he was realizing was a considerable technological superiority masked beneath a shell of ineptitude that Star Force apparently hid within well.

“About time,” Brad scoffed, then extended a hand to him. “Good work.”

Radonon looked at it, getting his head to stop spinning more than anything, then he grabbed his hand flesh to flesh with his poison injector literally touching the Human’s skin. He didn’t know if this was a test or if the Archon had some defense against it, for all it would take was a very fast impulse without any real thought to inject him.

Radonon looked him at him, knowing his thoughts were in the open for him to see, then decided to accept the gesture for what it used to be and let the Human help him to his feet. With a very powerful yank Brad pulled him up then looked him in the pure black eyes. “Grip the wall and pull yourself through next time rather than crawling under. It’s faster.”

Radonon released his hand undamaged. “You’ve found a counter to our poison.”

“Long time ago,” the Archon said with a smirk.

“And these?” he asked, raising and activating his spike mandibles over his head and pointed towards Brad. They glowed green, as did his eyes, but the Archon didn’t move.

“Ready for another lesson in true superiority?” he scoffed.

“I’d prefer a straight answer.”

Brad sucked in then blew out a slow breath. “Hit me with one.”

Radonon hesitated.

“Just once,” Brad assured him.

“If this is a test to see if I will…”

“Not a test. Consider it an order if it will help.”

“You think your Lachka can stop them in time?”

“I won’t use Lachka, now stop bitching and hit me.”

Radonon growled. “Very well,” he muttered, then jutted his left spike towards Brad’s shoulder.

The Archon knew he redirected it away from the easy target that was his head and noted the caution, but it was unnecessary. A pale blue energy shield snapped into place around his body and stopped the spike with a very loud crackle/hiss as the two different types of energy canceled each other out.

Radonon took a step back. “You are not wearing armor. Is this being projected from elsewhere?”

“Nope. It’s a bioshield. Jealous yet?”

“Very,” Radonon said on reflex, then hesitated when the Chixzon in him didn’t approve.

“Unless you catch me off guard, you can’t hurt me,” Brad said, eyeing the still glowing spikes. “You can put those away now. Don’t hit me again.”

The two stiff snake-like limbs lost their glow and retreated back behind Radonon’s head like ornamental brackets. “I remember a rumor from long ago. I hadn’t given it consideration because I assumed it was your telekinesis at work. Bioshields are…something I’m curious to see how you manage. That technology is unknown to us.”

“It’s one secret we’re going to keep, sorry.”

“Yet you reveal its existence.”

“Only to let you know how superior we are so you can make an informed choice,” he mocked.

“To join your empire?”

“You’re already a part of our empire, you’ve just forgotten.”

“I have forgotten nothing. I have simply remembered who I truly am.”

“And which empire is superior?”

“Apparently you haven’t been studying my memories as closely as I assumed.”

“We have,” Brad assured him.

“If I am correct in that you have access to technology that you have not created yourself, your strength is partially an illusion. Ours is not.”

“No, you just stole a lot of yours.”

“We learned from others and mastered it. Have you mastered it? I think not, else you never would have permitted my transformation to run its course. Your biological abilities are superior to ours, but they are not your own creations.”

“Still hoping you’ll get to steal them from us some day?”

“It’s high on my priority list,” Radonon admitted. “Though I doubt I’ll ever be able to so much as inform the others of their existence. You’d kill me first.”

Brad raised an eyebrow.

“You would kill me if needed, but perhaps not when perpetual imprisonment would suffice.”

“That’s better. Though you’d lost your head for a moment…say, do you guys ever do that? Cut your own heads off with those?” he said, looking directly at his shoulder spikes.

“No one deserving of the name Chixzon.”

“So some dumbies have jabbed themselves,” Brad said with a satisfied smirk.

“Only the ends cut, which makes it difficult to hit yourself…though some have succeeded,” Radonon said with a bit of irony that was yet another inkling of his Protovic self. The Chixzon in him condemned those individuals to nonexistence and mentally ostracized them rather than just labeling them ‘stupid idiots.’

“I don’t think any race is without morons, though I suppose in some rare cases it could be a plausible accident.”

“Have any of you telekinetically ripped out your own organs on accident?”

Brad stared at him with a gruesome look. “No.”

“Then perhaps it is a good thing that the general Human population does not have your abilities.”

“Eew,” Brad said, thinking that through. “Has that ever happened to the Chixzon?”

Radonon smiled…or at least his stiff faced equivalent, and Brad realized it had nothing to do with the question at hand.

The Archon inclined his head slightly. “Well played.”

“You’re hard to get information out of,” he added, being gracious in his small victory.

“So you can’t affect anything you can’t directly see?”

“Or feel behind us. You can penetrate matter then? Your powers continue to grow more impressive.”

“Our powers remain the same, your understanding of them grows. Consider it a bonus for the obstacle course.”

“More likely it’s due to the fact that you did not know how telekinesis could be line of sight restricted. Have you not found any races with a similar power?”

“We haven’t come into contact with any telekinetic races, other than you.”

“Good,” Radonon said, accepting that Brad wasn’t going to talk about their knowledge of the rest of the galaxy so freely. “Then we both preserve our advantage. We worried that being out of the loop so long might see the galaxy become stronger than before, with worse threats springing up than before we culled it.”

“The Hadarak are still out there,” Brad reminded him, using the Star Force word for the Klamensh.

“In them we have a common enemy, at least,” the Chixzon said as a random thought struck him. “A request?”

“Ask.”

“Substitute whatever packet I earned for a genetic sample from the lizards. If you will not pursue a bioweapon I may still be able to provide some insights that your Vortison has missed. I’d prefer to be of some use to the galaxy rather than a total spectator, and they are another common enemy.”

Brad studied him and his mind closely, then nodded. “Granted.”

6

July 2, 3093

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

“Have you seen this?” Vortison asked as he barged into Brad’s office, holding up a data pad.

“If that’s the overview Radonon provided, yes, I’ve skimmed through it,” the trailblazer said casually. “Was there something significant that I missed?”

“What’s not significant?” the medtech said, pulling up a chair and sliding a chip into Brad’s desk so they could get a fuller view with a meter high hologram popping up in between them as the nighttime cityscape was splayed out behind Brad through the wide window. “First off the length.”

“I only looked through the summary,” Brad admitted. “Too long?”

“He practically wrote a book detailing lizard genetics…and one that the V’kit’no’sat could learn from. A lot of this is over my head, but I’ve learned more in the past 9 hours about their coding than I have in the past 9 centuries.”

Brad raised an eyebrow. “Useful then?”

“As in developing a superweapon against them, no, but in understanding their coding. The genetic stranglehold on their individuality is plain as day to me now. Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about it once they’re developed…short of cutting out chunks of their brain, programming wise, which Radonon spelled out how to do. We technically have a way to free them from it, but at a loss of a significant portion of their knowledge and abilities. They’d still be functional, not a vegetable, but I don’t see how that’s of any use to us. My point is I can see it now, and I can vouch for the Chixzon’s biotech superiority. They are far more dangerous than I had given them credit for.”

“Did he give us anything practical to use?”

Vortison frowned. “You still don’t get it. He gave us everything about them. They’re an open book now, granted a very complex one.”

“But can we use any of that knowledge in the short term?”

The geneticist sighed. “Militarily…I don’t know, but as far as advancing our understanding of genetics he just gave us a very valuable addition to our database that we will be learning from for centuries to come. It may not help you when you invade their core worlds, or maybe it will. There isn’t a weapon I can give you now, but when you want to do something in the future, something specific, well, let’s just say we have a lot more options now.”

“He also outlined the bioweapon,” Brad added.

“Actually,” Vortison said as he reached across the desk to the trailblazer’s side and sifted through the holographic menu until he found a specific list, “he created, or perhaps recreated, 7 different bioweapons that could be used against them, one of which would render them in a coma-like state.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“We can’t use it…or at least I didn’t think you’d want to. If we didn’t recover those infected they’d starve to death while asleep. You said something a long time ago about what constitutes an ‘honorable’ death, and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply.”

“No, you’re right,” Brad agreed. “If we have to kill them it’ll be in battle. We’re not going to starve them to death. So your point is Radonon did us a big favor?”

“Yes.”

“With booby traps?”

“The knowledge is so advanced I’d be lucky to find them if there are any. What I’ve read through so far appears genuine, and even if it’s not there’s enough revelations in it to advance our understanding considerably. He actually helped us, and in a big way.”

“You’re wondering if this is Nefron coming back?”

“You tell me, you’re the one that’s in his head every other day.”

“He’s playing along, and he knows I know it. We can’t trust him, but at the same time I think it’s also giving him an excuse to explore possibilities that his mind was restructured to ignore. The crack we preserved in his mind is allowing him to learn and augment the Chixzon programming, not undo it. Luckily Star Force isn’t based on a lie, so as he goes through the logical progression of subjects he’s essentially changing himself into our model. He’s never going to be Protovic again, but he’s starting to become a Star Force Chixzon in the smallest of ways.”

“You said he was playing along?”

“He has no choice, and it allows his internal priorities to be satiated as he works things through. If he just sat and did nothing he’d go crazy. The genetic imperatives are very strong within him, and despite our prodding it’s to his own credit that he’s been able to create some wiggle room. That takes a very strong will.”

“But it’s not enough?” Vortison asked, sensing something in his tone.

“Enough for what?”

“To break free of the Chixzon programming.”

“Too early to tell. Right now it’s a matter of whether he wants to or not. Or more specifically, if he has a reason to. The more holes we can poke in their culture the more opportunities we give him to make a choice. The problem is their empire isn’t based on lies as much as it is self-interest. As you’ve already noted, they have a great deal of knowledge and that doesn’t occur with delusional people. We’ve got to show him a better way, and so far he’s allowing himself the leeway to consider alternatives. The Chixzon are supposed to be superior, which means verification isn’t avoided.”

“It’s been a year. How long do you think this process will take?”

“It’s not a process, it’s him charting his own course. The Chixzon already have him on one, one that we’re all but denying him. The overlap is something Kip and I are monitoring closely to give him the necessary ‘permission’ to learn while furthering his imperatives. Basically we’re improvising day to day and seeing progress, but he’s nowhere close to earning our trust, let alone his freedom.”

“I know this may sound cold considering what’s happened, but what he just did is probably more valuable to Star Force than the sum total of his entire life as a Protovic.”

“Doesn’t make up for the mistake we made.”

“That I made.”

“We,” Brad emphasized. “But your point is taken.”

Vortison reached into the desk and pulled the data chip out, with the holographic display disappearing. He turned to walk out then hesitated, twisting halfway back.

“If this is still the Chixzon in him, why would he give us something so valuable?”

“Does it help us fight them?”

“It advances our own genetics capability considerably…at least once we absorb the lessons from it.”

“But they’re still far superior?”

“Yes.”

“Then the answer is no. It doesn’t help us defeat them.”

“But why help us at all?”

“Information.”

“How so?”

“He gets to see how we react, and is cagey enough to use it to ferret information out of us, sometimes when we don’t even realize it.”

Vortison considered that. “Then it’s probably best that I don’t speak with him concerning this?”

“Do you need to?”

“Not if it could be used against us, no. I can figure this out with time.”

“But a conversation could advance your timetable?”

“That was my thinking.”

“I agree. Don’t speak with him. We can’t let him know about the V’kit’no’sat or our connection to them, and he’s already deduced some of it.”

“Hello there,” a new voice said as another masked mental presence walked through the entryway into Radonon’s fortress of solitude.

The Chixzon looked up from the isolated computer console that he was using to further study the data on current events that Star Force had provided him and saw another Archon, another trailblazer, but it was not Kip or Brad.

“Are you here in response to my previous request or for another reason?”

“Bit of both,” Paul said as he walked inside and the airlock doors closed behind him, severing his telepathic link with the outside world for the entire chamber was insulated from it, though he could still see the guards outside with his Pefbar. “I was on my way back from the front and figured I’d stop in and say hi.”

Radonon extended a black arm towards a nearby chair designed for the Humans. “Sit…and ask your questions.”

“Do you get bored in here?” Paul said, looking around the spacious quarters that had been redesigned per Radonon’s requests…to a limit. They weren’t going to allow Chixzon cultural alterations, but given his tail some alterations had been made.

“Quite. I believe it’s incentive to do workouts.”

“You would anyway.”

“The body must be maintained.”

“Just maintained? You’ve forgotten much.”

“My priorities lie elsewhere.”

“Lifespan?”

“Unlimited while maintained.”

“But you don’t press training to gain advantages, you engineer weak tissue.”

“Weak?”

“Undeveloped through experiential adaptation. Your telepathy, for example.”

“Yours is obviously stronger by default.”

“And enhanced via training…a great deal.”

“So I’m learning.”

Paul finally sat down, with Radonon pivoting slightly on his stool to face him. “Relearning.”

“Actually no. What I learned from Star Force previously was…inadequate. Now that I have a proper mind I am seeing it for the first time again.”

“Again,” Paul noted. “And what are your second impressions?”

“You have no philosophical mandate. You simply look for what works.”

“Restricted by...?”

“An abundance of caution.”

“It works for us.”

“That it does.”

“But?”

“You are intolerant.”

“Of?”

“What you refer to as the ‘darkside.’”

“What I know of your history makes that comment hypocritical.”

“I wasn’t speaking of the Chixzon, only Star Force.”

“Yet you infer that tolerance is preferable.”

“It is necessary for coexistence.”

“You still don’t want us destroyed, but rather coopted?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“You are not a threat in the conventional sense. You seek to protect rather than destroy, and your conquests are geared towards eliminating threats. We hold a similar philosophy, though we take it to its logical extrapolations.”

“You’re sloppy,” Paul said flatly. “You judge a race to be unfit and do not take into account the individual.”

“Rather than risk our security, yes. Chixzon lives take priority.”

“We don’t prioritize, save for whom we may save first.”

“You don’t embrace sacrifice, and I admire that in you. It is shortsighted and restricts your capabilities, but it also gives you focus and within your restrictions you are…professional.”

“You would have us pacify a region for you,” Paul said, reading his thoughts.

“That is one possibility. We do not seek to possess all star systems. Such an endeavor is folly. The galaxy is too large.”

“Understatement of the millennia. What was your specific interest in me?”

“Your naval skill is unmatched.”

“Liam and Roger would contest that.”

“You have an edge on them. I’ve seen it in your battle records.”

“Elaborate.”

“You can read your opponents well, and make use of inferior forces to overcome dominant ones. You alone are more valuable than entire fleets.”

“It’s not the size that matters, but how you use it.”

“Innuendo?”

“You remember.”

“Yet accurate. Our own dominance does not come through a direct approach, but rather creating and exploiting opportunities. You can enter a disadvantageous fight and find a way to come out victorious. We are envious of this.”

“We?”

“The Chixzon have always wanted to afford a direct approach. Logic dictated that we avoid them.”

“And the Uriti?”

“Our first endeavor, though it was not our own forces. Had we wielded them better I do not believe we would have fallen. Can I assume you have read the information I have given the others?”

“Some of it.”

“The recounts of naval battles.”

“Lacking without actual data, but I thumbed through them.”

“I wanted to ask you a question.”

“Could you have won?”

“Yes.”

“You could have survived by deploying the Uriti defensively, but in order to utilize them as you wished you had to expose them to the thickest of your enemies, and so to the sedative. You should have preserved them, rather you spent them as disposable resources.”

“They are not destroyed.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“Nearly.”

“Could you find them now?”

“I could, but I will not help you do so.”

“Why?”

“You might be able to destroy them.”

Paul leaned back an inch in his chair. “You think we’re superior to your previous enemies?”

“Post culling, yes. I would say that’s a fair bet, though only in certain elements. Across the board you are not.”

“And you think we would kill the Uriti?”

“If released, you would have no choice.”

“I make a habit of finding choices where others see none.”

“You cannot communicate them. Our kind are outside their realm of influence.”

“Then how did you direct them?”

“We engineered an avenue, but we never truly controlled them.”

“Control isn’t the issue. Are you saying they are too primitive to communicate?”

“Quite the opposite. They are too advanced. Not in intellect, but in sheer magnitude. Their minds dwarf our own, and as such their perspective is different. We inhabit the same galaxy but view it from different angles. Communication must utilize common ground.”

“Did you ever try?”

“Their telepathic presence is too dangerous for direct connection. The slightest shift could kill us with feedback.”

“So you build transmitters to insulate you?”

“More like a prod to get them to respond in a predictable method. We imprinted those responses into their coding. Communicating with the Klamensh is impossible.”

“Perhaps you were never interested in doing so.”

“You know a way?”

“We have never encountered one to try.”

“I would recommend against it.”

“Therein lies your problem. You ask me to tell you if you could have won, but you do not understand your own weapons. I’m not talking about the Uriti, but your techniques. The darkside is not a fictional element, nor a metaphor. It is a set of tactics and strategies that have some advantages, as you well know since you utilize them…but they also have disadvantages. The lightside is the same. You say we are restricted, and that is true when your objective is to kill someone. Ours is not to simply kill, but do the right thing. In that there is no restriction. And when one holds to the lightside, to doing the right thing, there are unique techniques afforded to us that darkside users cannot possess. Given our lightside advantages, I could easily have found a way for the Chixzon to not only survive, but prosper.”

“You are inferring that our darkside techniques restricted us, channeled us into a no-win scenario?”

“I don’t believe in the no-win scenario, but yes, I think your successes with darkside techniques made you additional enemies. Star Force has many enemies, but far fewer because outsiders see us and judge us by our actions over time. The come to realize that we are honorable and trustworthy…predictable. They know what is required to avoid our wrath, and most usually do rather than fear us. Were we to give them reason to hate us our enemies would multiply greatly and our powerbase would weaken. Do not underestimate the power of the lightside. It is often the indirect methods that it works through, while the darkside takes the easy and obvious direct path to achieving short term goals that sacrifice longevity.”

“Intriguing perspective. I’ve never heard it put that way before.”

“For your situation, I would say that true superiority doesn’t come from killing your rivals, but in growing beyond their ability to harm you.”

“Unfortunately we do not always have that luxury.”

“It is not about luxury. Darkside users are easily enemies of one another, but with the lightside there is a commonality even between those who have never met. By holding to the lightside you are joining a universal team, whereas darkside leaves you with temporary and deceitful alliances at best. Defending yourself is not dishonorable, how you go about doing it can be. Sometimes if you are worthy of saving a stranger will bail you out…if you’re lightside. Not always, and sometimes you do find yourself in untenable situations, but you have to ask yourself what is the utmost priority. Staying alive, or something else…”

“Something else?”

Paul nodded.

“Another test of my intellect?”

“This isn’t something you deduce logically. You have to also feel it out. Trusting in the conscience that genetics do not create.”

“What you call the core?”

“What do you call it?”

“We do not have a name for it since we cannot identify it. We know it exists through inference, not observation. It is simply the individual, or person.”

“Life for the sake of life is not the priority, but the means to continue working towards the priority. You can’t win the game if you’re not in it, but throwing the game in order to prolong it is illogical.”

“Which begets the practice of sacrifice.”

“No, it doesn’t. It’s totally different.”

“I fail to see how.”

“Yes, you fail…”

Radonon’s eyes glowed for a brief moment, barely a dull flash, but it was obvious when the black orbs altered. “You really want me to believe that we were defeated because we were not lightside?”

“I don’t fight using darkside techniques. I fight against opponents who use them, therefore I’m familiar with them and their effectiveness, but I don’t use them. Star Force doesn’t use them. With the skillset we have, and your aforementioned technology, it would not have been overly difficult for the Chixzon to survive, but to exert dominance over the galaxy. Klamensh included.”

Radonon looked at him warily. “I suspect you are lying, yet I know your kind do not without purpose…and I am failing to derive a purpose.”

“I’m not lying. Using the darkside came back to bite you. The short term gains you made with it sacrificed your long term survival.”

“Star Force seeks to challenge the Klamensh?”

“If it comes to that. We don’t back down from a challenge.”

“Then you are ignorant to their true power.”

“Feel free to enlighten me, but from everything we’ve learned from you and others, they are a powerful opponent, not an unbeatable one. You are proof of this.”

“We defeated a single one that mistakenly isolated itself. We would have had no chance at surviving three of them, no matter if we had our full galactic fleet at our disposal.”

“As you have noted, I make a habit of turning what looks like unwinnable fights into victories.”

Radonon slightly smiled in what Paul mentally recognized as a smirk. “I was hoping you would say that.”

“My knowledge will do you little good so long as you utilize darkside methods…and you can’t change back and forth at will.

“Relations aside, I fail to see why not.”

“And that’s why you have much to learn. Darkside techniques are not just different from lightside, they’re also easier because they’re lower level. Mastering lightside requires true superiority…something the Chixzon apparently never even approached.”

“If there is any truth in that, I wish to know. Thus far you have not been hesitant to teach.”

“I just got here.”

“I meant ‘you’ in the plural.”

“You should have said ‘us.’ We wouldn’t be having this conversation if you also weren’t Star Force.”

“Was,” Radonon corrected halfheartedly.

“Once you learn the truth, you don’t unlearn it. And as you said, we’re built on the truth. You’ve just had your memories messed with, leaving you with incomplete pieces.”

“So all of you seem to believe.”

“Like you said, we focus on what works. You’re Nefron with a different name. Different body, altered mind, but same core.”

“If you had been born a Chixzon, your core wouldn’t have mattered. You’d be Chixzon.”

“Perhaps. Would I still have my naval skill? It’s not genetic. They checked.”

“You know I can’t answer that.”

“I can.”

“And?”

Paul smiled. “I’m a badass, no matter what race I was born into. I just got a sweet deal landing as a Human in Star Force. You…kind of went the other way.”

“Speculation.”

Paul shook his head. “Intuition. The same way I learned how to fight warfleets.”

“Intuition can’t be taught.”

“But it can lead you to knowledge that is teachable.”

“And you think by teaching me you will undo the Chixzon in me?”

“Augment. I know there is no way to remove the memories. You may be Chixzon, but Star Force isn’t about races. It’s about the individuals.”

“Are you trying to coopt me?”

“Trying to return you to form, perhaps a better one given the benefits the Chixzon have given you.”

“Once I learn lightside techniques?”

“You’re the one who asked.”

Radonon looked at the flat, white ceiling and the likewise bare walls around him. “It seems I have time to kill. If there is wisdom in your techniques, show it to me. I will judge.”

“It only works if you’re willing to learn.”

“I will not block knowledge for the sake of tradition or cultural structure. We were destroyed once for failure. We cannot allow a misstep or oversight to doom us a second time.”

“I’m not going to be here long term, so I hope you learn fast,” Paul said, telekinetically adjusting the console and opening up a new keyboard for Radonon and triggering a second console to rise up from the floor, with him having to move his chair to the side.

“What is this?”

“Best way to teach you is to kick your ass, so we’re going to spar, navally, and I’m going to explain in detail why the Chixzon lost.”

“You anticipated my request?”

“Yep,” Paul said, bringing up the program list and giving Radonon access to it via a temporary code.

7

March 19, 3094

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Radonon stood in a handstand alone in his quarters, save his was a tripod on each arm. That gave him far more stability than a Human or Protovic, allowing him to hold the position for long periods of time. Chixzon didn’t meditate like Star Force did. Theirs involved mantras and other active components, whereas Star Force meditation was just a formal way of saying one quieted their senses and became passive, eliminating unnecessary distractions to provide potential new insights otherwise missed.

Which accomplished nothing. The mantras were necessary to realign the mind, which was what meditation was for. However, as he was meditating in an inverted position keeping focus was a bit more difficult, and to his shame he had picked up a habit of drifting off and finding himself lost in thought. His words would end and his mind would quiet with him slipping into a Star Force meditation and today was no different. Ever since Paul had come here to school him on why the Chixzon had been defeated, Radonon’s mind was plagued with running calculations, variations on what they’d done and not done, seeking to find a way to do what he said was not possible with their ‘darkside’ methodologies.

He couldn’t help himself, so as he was holding his handstand his mind drifted there again but this time it branched off to other thoughts, almost as if he was in a daydream and not in full control of his mind. The chanting would have prevented that from happening, but with the importance of finding the fault in their history overriding everything else he’d stopped uttering the words and allowed himself to become lost in thought.

Radonon couldn’t retrace much of his thoughts in a state like this so he never knew where he’d end up, but something happened this time. Something that shocked him to his core. For a moment he wasn’t Chixzon, and his view of their history, his time as a Protovic, his personal assessments of everything happening in the galaxy today…all of it shifted, as if coming into alignment. It chilled him to the bone, but then it was gone just as fast.

He tumbled over, getting his feet on the deck but not standing up. He sat in a crouch, searching himself in an attempt to determine what had just happened. He was Chixzon again, but for the briefest moment he hadn’t been. He remembered an anger at the Chixzon that he now couldn’t comprehend…but it had happened. It wasn’t a dream or mistake, though he was losing his limited memory of it already. Within a few seconds it was gone completely, leaving him with a mystery to solve that he would not ignore.

Something was wrong and he couldn’t just brush it off. He’d found an error, meaning that everything that seemed in order now was a lie. Something was hiding within his mind and there was no tolerating it…but how to find it again?

There were no Archons here. He was sealed inside his isolation chambers where even they couldn’t sense his mind. He’d learned the walls were made of a material that blocked telepathy. How that functioned was beyond the Chixzon, but yet another item on his ‘to obtain’ list. That meant they hadn’t seen it and could offer him no help. This was something he was going to have to track down on his own.

After several minutes of mental sifting he had no answers, so he did the obvious thing and put himself back into the handstand, hoping to recreate the same situation. To that end he didn’t chant, but tried to think of the same things he had vaguely remembered considering before…which was how to use the Uriti to poke an enemy rather than smash, and what kind of alterations would be needed in their coding to give the Chixzon the necessary control over the beasts.

He tried hard, which was possibly the reason why he failed to encounter the anomaly again. He remained in his pose for the next four hours until the door opened and he righted himself, feeling only a minor head wash from the long time being inverted.

“Busy?” Kip asked sarcastically…then his eyes narrowed, obviously picking up on the Chixzon’s thoughts. “What’s wrong?”

“A mental disturbance that I am unable to recreate, thus I cannot analyze it. I am annoyed.”

“What happened?”

“A shift in perspective is the best I can describe it. My memory has fogged in the aftermath.”

“I sense nothing beyond your vexation.”

“I anticipated as much.”

“If brute force won’t recall a memory, taking your mind off the subject may allow it to resurface.”

“I can’t let this go. It is important.”

“Why?”

“It is dangerous. I cannot leave myself with a weakness.”

“If you have a better idea you would have tried it already. So where does that leave you?”

“I do not know.”

“A superior mind would find it.”

Radonon’s black eyes flashed green for a moment. “Which is why I cannot let it go. Come back tomorrow. I must pursue this.”

“Good luck,” Kip said, oddly not offering any resistance or redirect. He simply turned around and walked out with the door shutting him into his solitudes again.

Radonon stood there for a long moment, considering going back into his meditation or trying something else. He compromised, wanting to maintain his inner search but choosing a different physical stress…one with greater difficulty that might loosen his mind. To that end he left the ‘guest’ room and went down a short hallway that led to his person training sanctum. He went straight to the track and began hop/running laps and attempted to lose himself in thought and time.

Round and round he went until his muscles started to become warm and a bit numb. By then his thoughts were lost again, moving away from the mysterious glitch and back to conquering the galaxy. Most of the thoughts were repeats, with him going down the same mental paths as before and getting the same simulated results. It vexed him that Paul’s analysis seemed so flawless, but that meant the Chixzon were doomed to possibly repeat their own demise if they were faced with a similar situation. They needed greater power, but the darkside techniques they employed were wholly inadequate.

The most obvious solution was to find a way to inoculate the Uriti or future creations against the sedative, but extensive work had been done on that before and there were zero viable options to work there. Radonon didn’t discount that possibility entirely, but even Paul had covered in detail how he could have defeated the Chixzon even with the Uriti holding the same immunity that the Klamensh did, for the same sedatives were not effective against them. It was in the alterations that the Chixzon had made to groom them into weapons that gave the Uriti their weakness, but it had become clear that the Uriti were not the Chixzon’s ultimate solution.

They had to use ‘darkside’ techniques, for they were too useful not to. What Radonon had to discover was a way to access more advanced versions or perhaps repurpose the ‘lightside’ tactics that Paul had proved were effective when conducting galaxy-wide empire building. Trust and predictability were key, and Radonon had to admit that the tendency to backstab others out of convenience undercut that. He had to find a way to work what Paul did into the Chixzon’s lexicon of tactics, despite the Human’s openness and mocking of the Chixzon.

Part of Radonon’s mind knew that was because Paul was right and that darkside users wouldn’t be able to access lightside techniques, but the rest of him would not accept that, with him getting lost in logic loops like this often as he repetitively searched for a way to accomplish that task. Falling into that familiar exercise, Radonon kept making laps and having no more luck solving the riddle than he had previously.

When he wasn’t thinking about tracking down the anomaly and barely paying attention to his hop/jumps he had a sudden and uncontrollable flash that caused him to nearly trip and fall. Radonon coasted to a halt and knelt down on one knee, seeing things clearly again and trying desperately to hold onto the sensation. It lasted a few seconds, long enough for him to realize the magnitude of what had happened to him. All of his memories were still here, but they’d been altered. Like they’d had all the color from them removed, then further distorted to make them fit Chixzon culture.

Whatever had just happened, his mind was seeing them clearly again, while at the same time seeing all the Chixzon memories and knowledge from an almost disconnected perspective. He could see the Star Force in him and the Chixzon, with his mind finally coming to grips with the fact that he had been seeing things incorrectly. What he had been learning from the Archons now made full sense, and allowed him to judge the Chixzon in that moment and see them for what they really were…more than the Archons ever could, for they could only sample his thoughts and memories. He was the only one that truly knew.

He also remembered that he had lost this last time, so he held his crouch and tried to hold on to his true self and cement this clarity in place for at least a few more seconds. He didn’t know what was happening, and neither his old Star Force knowledge nor his excessive Chixzon intellect could make sense of this, but from his perspective it seemed like he was waking up from a long dream and now everything was making sense…horrific sense.

He held still and soaked it in, with more revelations hitting him with each passing moment…but that wasn’t important. He had to hold onto this. Even if he lost it again he needed to make mental notes that he could use later and hopefully retrace his mental steps.

Except that he didn’t lose it, not yet anyway. Feeling as if he was breathing again after being smothered with lies, he took the opportunity to work through things now that seemed painfully obvious, including his most recent vexation. Paul was right because…he was right. The Chixzon were the enemy and rightly so, not victims of bad luck or misfortune. Their methods had served them well in many regards, but they’d also doomed them. Rather than build true strength they sought to destroy those who were stronger, making the Chixzon defaultly ‘superior’ without enhancing themselves.

It was a loser mentality. Knocking others down rather than building yourselves and your allies up. The Uriti were an abomination, a forced Klamensh alteration and deployed like monsters to destroy whatever was in their path while the Chixzon hid and reaped the rewards afterwards, often finishing off opponents when they truly were no longer a fair match. They preyed on weakness and engineered it to happen rather than fight an opponent straight up. They had been effective in what they’d done, with the lost list of the superior races that they’d killed attesting to that, but the Chixzon were scum…and with his Star Force memories and his sanity temporarily restored he could see that and desperately wanted to chisel it into stone so he couldn’t forget it again.

But when this passed he knew his mind would alter again, so at best he wanted to leave himself some bread crumbs to follow back to this moment of clarity. He spent several minutes just looking at the floor, then when the inevitable cloud didn’t immediately fall back upon him he jumped into a run and headed back to the guest room, punching open the comm button.

“Brad, Kip, one of you get in here now,” he said, not knowing how much time he had. “Hurry.”

“Is something wrong?” a guard’s voice answered.

“I need one of them in here immediately. There’s no time to explain. Contact them even if they’re in training. This is extremely important,” he said, trying to freeze up his mind and maintain this until they could get inside his head. “Tell them my name is Nefron.”

8

A handful of seconds later the door opened and Amy rushed in, apparently having been posted outside. “What’s going on?”

“Help me,” Nefron insisted. “I don’t know how long I can hold this.”

“Hold what?” she asked, searching his mind.

“My mind is clear, but I can feel it starting to slip. Help me hold onto it as long as you can.”

“I don’t know what help I can be if I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, diving into his mind aggressively and ready to make changes as needed. “Define ‘clear?’”

“I have the Chixzon knowledge, but my thoughts are Protovic.”

Amy blanched. “How?”

“I don’t know, but I’m fogging up again. Do something. Anything.”

“Here goes nothing,” she said, comparing what his mind felt like now to what her experience with him previously had been. There wasn’t much difference, but he wasn’t the same either, that much she could tell. “Keep talking and explain as much as you can. Don’t go passive.”

“I can see the difference between what I’m told to think and what really is. It’s a very subtle alteration that happened unexpectedly. This is the second time, the first was a brief moment. This has lasted a few minutes.”

“Are there any alterations we can make to assist?”

Nefron thought about that, then shook his head in a gesture that the Chixzon never used. “I don’t know what’s happened. The shroud is there and creeping back in, but I do not know the actual source. This was not supposed to have been possible. The genetic rewrite either takes or does not immediately. There is no lagging effect.”

“Theoretical or actual?”

“Theory only. There was no trial run…” he said, pitching forward and dropping to a knee, suddenly out of breath as a wave of thoughts flooded into his mind coming from Amy.

“Culture war,” she guessed. “Use mine as a counter point. If it’s perspective you need you’ll have to fix yourself, but I can counterbalance the Chixzon a bit.

Nefron’s mind was now awash with two distinctive feels…one being Chixzon, the other Star Force Human and neither being his own, but they did press against each other and leave him a disoriented spectator rather than Atlas trying to hold up his world through might alone. The Star Force in Amy was close enough to his own that he got an echo from it, as well as the relief, and that immediately began to stabilize him…but it also pushed him further into his past than he had been on his own, effectively gut punching him by pulling the Chixzon effect back so much, so fast.

He hadn’t realized how much of an effect it had had on him until now, leaving him a fatigued weakling in the eye of the storm that was surrounding him. He knew his time was limited, so he tried to catch his mental breath and put himself back together as much as he could, but fearing it wouldn’t be enough he instead focused on her request. Was there anything he could tell them to do that would help him fight this?

“How you doing?”

“I’m here.”

“Are you losing ground?”

“Not at the moment,” he said, still taking a knee on the floor and trying not to move or do anything to jostle the precarious position he was in.

“I think I can keep this up for a while. An hour at least. Make use of the time and collect yourself.”

“I understand. Thank you.”

“I can’t read much while transmitting, so most of your head is your own right now,” the Archon said as she basically bypassed her own Ikrid block by continuously sending him a copy of her own thoughts moment by moment. “Kick this thing’s ass.”

“I wish I knew what to do. I don’t think I’ll be able to resist it if it comes back.”

“Then breathe the fresh air and store up as much of it as you can. You’ve broken through on your own now, you can do it again later. Plan for the long game and try to construct some advantages for yourself later on. Don’t fall into panic and waste your seconds.”

“Hard not to,” he admitted. “The Chixzon programming sucks the reality out of life. I can see, do, and remember but it’s all tinted. I don’t feel it correctly.”

“But you do now?”

“Yes, more so now with your help.”

“I’m just making counter noise. You’ve managed a disconnect. I don’t know how.”

“You mean you don’t know why I didn’t a long time ago.”

“That too,” she said, realizing he was picking that up from her own thoughts. “Is the programming active or passive?”

“Passive.”

“Then you can fight your way around it…again. Learn to see the truth and remember. It may be like digging yourself out of a snowstorm, but if the snow isn’t actively falling it’s just a matter of time and effort. So pull out your shovel and dig.”

“I’ve never actually done that, but metaphor taken.”

Suddenly Amy’s memories of that activity flooded into him, giving him the proper context to see what she fully meant. “Dig. Find the pieces that are the thickest, the most unlike the Protovic, and start hacking them down to size.”

Nefron pushed his way through his fear and focused on the Chixzon knowledge, hoping that doing so wouldn’t suck him back in faster. Seeing it in the clear now he looked for the points of contention, thinking and analyzing each briefly as he looked for the biggest ones…and when sacrifice came up he knew he’d hit a major sticking point. The Chixzon weren’t quite the lizards, for they didn’t hold to sacrificing themselves so readily, but they didn’t have any reluctance to do so with others if it furthered their goals.

There was no sense of the common good, of right and wrong…only survival, dominance, and subordination. They were essentially hollow and seeking to rewrite the galaxy to fit their assertions rather than facing the truth head on and trying to work the problem. His own imperatives had been skewed to suck away the influence of his conscience. He knew from the Chixzon knowledge that the conscience wasn’t something genetic, but residing in a person’s core. Its effect was known and had to be countered along with any other imperatives that the Protovic form had that differed from Chixzon.

In order to avoid detection, they’d had to create the Protovic to be different in body and mind so that their true destiny could not be guessed at. In order to make the transition into Chixzon, everything that the Protovic were or became had to be altered within well-defined parameters that made the Chixzon Chixzon. Their race had no sense of a conscience because they wished to have none.

Focusing on those memories given to him, he pushed further down that logic thread now that he could think clearly, guessing at the cause and finding it.

The Chixzon, like all people, did have a conscience, but it was engineered out of them, or rather their connection to it was stifled…first with genetic inhibitors self-imposed long ago to give them the ‘steel’ to do what was necessary for survival. They wanted to see the galaxy as a numbers game, resources, assets, and threats that needed to be managed, culled, collected. The idea of non-Chixzon being ‘people’ was an impediment to doing what was required, but once suppressed the Chixzon tested had become solitary, losing their connection and concern for their fellow Chixzon. To counter that they added loyalty imperatives to bind them together into an efficient race that knew no equal, had no division, no backstabbing.

They operated as a single unit, much like the lizards, but on a far greater level…and that wasn’t Chixzon arrogance speaking, for with his mind free now Zefron could come to grasp the sheer magnitude of what the Chixzon were and capable of, while at the same time seeing how they had several blind spots.

Focus on the blind spots, a voice boomed in his mind, and it wasn’t Amy’s. See what they can’t see and it will break the mold. You’ve nibbled your way this far, now bite off a chunk.

“Do you know what is going on? What did you do to me that first day?”

“We preserved a piece of your mind,” he said as he jogged through the open door and up beside Amy. “Encapsulated it until the transformation subsided, then reconnected it with the rest of your mind. There was conflict from the beginning, but now you’ve finally broken through to see a glimpse of the truth.”

“What piece?”

“Analysis and learning.”

When he said that, Nefron’s memories of the past 2 years suddenly crystalized into understanding. That had been the missing piece of the puzzle, for his own mind wasn’t working as it should have been according to the Chixzon’s design and the Archons had never told him what they’d done. Now that he knew he could make a fresh analysis of everything that had happened and was able to size himself up within a matter of seconds.

Kip could feel him gathering his strength, then after a few more moments he stood up and looked at them both with glowing green eyes. “Slowly stop transmitting. I will take it from here.”

“Are you sure?” Amy asked.

“This is my fight. I need to take it head on.”

“As you wish,” Amy said, reducing her mindstate transmissions over the next ten seconds before dropping them off completely after that. Both she and Kip felt him shudder, with the weight of the Chixzon back fully on his mind. Rather than resist it he attacked it, with a whirlwind of conflict stirring up that blinded both Archons from being able to see much of what was happening to him.

Nefron knew the truth now…which is what he had been lacking before, not just because of the Chixzon, but because he hadn’t known about the alteration. Now that he did he was able to correct mistakes and have them take, resetting his mind bit by bit without erasing the Chixzon, which he was not able to do. Knowing a lie and being ensnared by it were two very different things. Seeing its inconsistency and inaccuracy made one doubt, but knowing exactly where it was wrong was what freed one’s mind and he had a lot of material to work through, though with each chunk that was corrected he could feel his own strength growing even as his fatigue increased.

This is your last chance, a very loud voice boomed through the storm and made its way inside to Nefron, which he instantly remembered from one of his favorite Human movies. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill…the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill…you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

“Red always was my favorite color,” Nefron said pithily in response to Brad’s bit of help and recognizing the imperative in it. He needed to go all in and tolerate this no longer. Truth couldn’t be watered down or compromised on. He had to root out these lies once and for all or fall victim to a hybridized prison for his mind…and the truth would never be so fresh as it was now. If he delayed he could numb up a bit again, and he couldn’t afford that. He was Nefron, not Radonon, but he was Chixzon and he needed to assimilate his new race on his terms, not theirs.

Removing the lies hurt, like pulling out shrapnel from his physical body. His mind had to heal and reset itself with each epiphany, but as he did so his connection to reality grew stronger and the risk of relapsing became less and less. He knew he wasn’t going to get through every single bit of memory in him at one time, but he needed to kill the juggernauts and let himself sweep up the rest as an afterthought in the coming days, so he sought them out and forced himself to look at things from an angle his programming resisted. It was raw effort and gave him a monstrous cumulative headache, but he welcomed the pain over the numbness. It was real, not imposed.

His green eyes continued to glow brightly, looking in the direction of the 3 Archons but not seeing them. His eye line remained steady, almost as if he were a statue for the better part of an hour before his spike mandibles suddenly sparked to life and went as green as his eyes. They reached back behind him in coiled positions as his arm struts deployed and fanned out. He raised his head towards the ceiling and yelled…a cleansing reverberation connecting all the mental alterations to his physical form and blasting away the storm in his mind with the effort.

The sound of his voice was low and menacing, but with so much power behind it and his mind that it was evident that this was not a Protovic at all.

When his yell ended he turned sharply and jutted out his glowing spikes into the computer console that he had spent so much time studying trying to figure out a way to ensure Chixzon domination over the galaxy. He slashed through it twice, then pulled back his mandibles and went about beating it into a pulp with his fists, breaking it down into pieces and finally stomping on them with his hardened feet and talons, taking out what seemed like a lifetime of torturous frustration on the device before he casually stood up and walked a couple steps towards the watching Archons.

“My name…is Nefron. And that isn’t going to change.”

Brad, Kip, and Amy were all smiling, and he could feel each of their presences within his mind. Barely wisps of thought, but he could feel them none the less…which they also noticed.

“I am not Protovic,” he said firmly. “And I am not going back. My body could return to its former attractive glory, but this brain won’t fit in my old head and I don’t want to lose the knowledge and capabilities I have now. Not after what it took to get them. I can help you far more as a Chixzon, even teach you a few things you don’t know. That’s such an odd feeling talking to Archons.”

“Welcome back, buddy,” Brad said, making it official.

“Hugs are not necessary,” Nefron said warily. “Don’t want to accidentally poison you. Is Vortison still here?”

“Yes,” Kip answered.

“Get him. I need these poison glands removed. Even the nonlethal ones. I don’t want them at all. We don’t fight like that.”

“And your glowsticks?” Amy asked.

“No…I kind of like those,” he admitted with a weak smile. “If that’s ok with you guys? I’d also like to get out of this box, sanctum or not, and breathe some fresh air.”

“Actually,” Kip said, thinking. “I have an idea. Come with me.”

Vortison sat in his lab as he did most days, just having come back from a workout and wanting to get to the most recent batch of simulations he was running. What had happened to Nefron had been his fault, and until he found a way to change him back, impossible as that was, he wasn’t going to let it go. He knew better than to let himself become obsessed with it, but the truth was that studying the Chixzon biotech was at the top of his to-do list anyway, with other high level Star Force work being delegated to his lesser peers as he committed himself to exploring and potentially solving the mysteries revealed to them here.

He had a suspicion that the Chixzon, with all of their genetic knowledge, could have undone what they did to Nefron, so he held a little hope that if he assimilated enough of their knowledge that perhaps he could one day undo his mistake…and right now that meant studying the lizard genetic code and notes that Radonon had provided him and learning from it.

To that end he was running various simulations based on that work, some with lizard code and a few with others applying similar principles, all accomplished via computers and not live experiments. Star Force never experimented on those who could not give their consent, let alone torturing them to gain insights. That sort of thing prompted Star Force to conquer races that did, with more than one example in their history to that point.

“I used to think you were so smart,” a deep voice said behind Vortison, causing him to flinch and turn around suddenly…then jerk backwards and fall off his chair as he saw Radonon standing behind him.

“Now you’re just a newb,” the Chixzon said as Vortison saw Kip standing behind him at a distance and smiling.

“What’s going on?” the geneticist said, retreating around the other side of his work station and out of range of those spike mandibles.

“It’s ok,” the Chixzon said, staying put. “It’s me. I’m back. I’m Nefron again.”

Vortison stared at him coldly for several seconds, then his eyes flicked to Kip, who nodded. The medtech frowned and looked at the Chixzon again. “How?”

“Not entirely sure, but my mind is back to…somewhat normal. I still have the Chixzon knowledge, which I think you’ll be very interested to investigate. That rundown on the lizards is just an appetizer. I’ll teach you the good stuff, given time. There’s a lot of prerequisites I have to get you up to speed on first.”

“Is this for real?” he asked Kip as Brad and a few other Archons came into the lab.

“Just happened,” the trailblazer said. “And I can confirm that he’s back.”

“Mission accomplished,” Nefron said. “Took longer than we hoped, but I’m here, now, and fully Chixzon.”

“Can you show me how to turn you back into a Protovic without gutting your mind?” Vortison asked, still very reserved.

“I could, but I’m not going back. I have too much valuable information, plus the cognitive upgrades are considerable. But I can go back, and I’ll show you how to do it later, but right now I need you to make the alterations to remove my poison glands. I don’t want them anymore. Afraid I might jab someone on accident.”

Vortison cautiously walked around his workstation and up to Nefron, looking at him closely.

“It’s me,” he promised. “A whole lot uglier, but like I said before, I’m willing to take one for the team.”

A single tear bubbled up beneath the medtech’s right eye, but he kept the emotion out of his voice. “Alright then. Let’s get to work.”

9

May 29, 3094

Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

Nym

Nefron walked into the hangar bay carrying a duffle of personal gear hooked over his right spike mandible to find Brad and Kip waiting for him at the base of his dropship’s boarding ramp. The two Archons were talking with each other as he walked up to them along with some of Vortison’s medtechs that were carrying their own travel kits in addition to pushing some hover crates of more sensitive equipment that was going back to Earth, along with him.

“Is something wrong?” Nefron asked.

“Nope,” Brad said reassuringly. “Just wanted to see you off.”

“Any last orders?”

“You’re on your own from here, but I do want constant updates.”

“You’ll get them,” he promised as Vortison came into the hangar behind him along with the rest of the passengers headed back to Earth.

“You are leaving me someone, right?” Brad asked across the bay.

“You have three medtechs that I’ve cleared to make the alterations to the eggs. I assume that’s sufficient.”

“Take care of your apprentice,” Kip said, talking to Nefron. “He’s got a lot to learn.”

Brad snickered, but Vortison didn’t share their amusement. “Yes, let’s get back to a proper facility where we can be left to our work in peace and you guys can get back to doing your…thing.”

“Thing?” Kip objected, knowing how peeved Vortison had become with his own lack of understanding of the science that Nefron had been exposing him to.

“You do improvise, so ‘thing’ seems a suitable term.”

Brad shrugged. “Can’t argue with that. Is there anything you need from us here, data or otherwise?”

“Just periodic updates as usual until the completion of the program. I don’t anticipate any anomalies but we need to be thorough.”

Brad nodded. “Thank you.”

Vortison cracked a small smile. “That’s what techs are for.”

“You’re welcome,” Kip added.

“For what?” Vortison asked.

The Archon pointed dramatically at Nefron.

“That wasn’t your doing,” he scoffed, turning and headed up the boarding ramp. “Come on, Nefron. Time to get you acquainted with a far smarter peer group.”

“Which he’ll be teaching,” Kip spat back.

“And learning from.”

“Your medical technology is impressive,” Nefron offered. “It’ll open up some new possibilities that the Chixzon never had access to. I’d still prefer to be fighting rather than doing tech work, but I’m looking forward to this, and not just because I get to see Earth and the Director.”

“He’s an Archon too you know,” Kip said, looking at Vortison who was half turned around on the ramp.

“He is?” Nefron asked.

“Yes, and you can ask him about that when you arrive,” Brad said, raising a fist towards Nefron. “See you later.”

The Chixzon raised his own hand and lightly fist bumped the Human so not to hurt his soft flesh. “Later,” he echoed, then offered the same to Kip before following Vortison up the ramp and towards an exciting new chapter in his life. Both Archons retreated a few steps then waited while the dropship lifted off and exited up through the open ceiling port and into the planet’s atmosphere through the energy shield.

“He’ll be fine,” Kip said.

“I know.”

“No, you’re worried about a relapse.”

“If I was I wouldn’t have let him go.”

“But you’re still worried.”

“The knowledge is still there, but he’s owning it now.”

“Yes he is,” Kip said, eyeing him as the dropship moved off laterally and disappeared from view as it made its long trek up to orbit. “So what’s bothering you?”

“There could be Chixzon out there somewhere in the galaxy right now.”

“Our Protovic are getting inoculated, so unless they show up really soon we’re not going to have to worry about it.”

“Thankfully no, but these guys were beat once. I don’t think they’ll make the same mistakes twice.”

“They’ve got the V’kit’no’sat to deal with this time.”

“They could just avoid them and push into the rim again.”

“I’m more worried about them using biological weapons. The V’kit’no’sat can kill Hadarak, so what do you think the Chixzon would do to take them out?”

“I don’t think they can.”

“That’s what worries me. I don’t think they can conventionally, but they’re good at finding roundabouts. I’m not sure how we prepare for that.”

“With him,” Kip said, gesturing at the sky. “He knows everything they know…unless some of the originals survived.”

“I don’t think so. These bastards got wiped out a long time ago.”

“Maybe the V’kit’no’sat finished them off.”

Brad laughed. “That would be ironic, but I doubt it. Core and Rim. They never came out this far. I think the Chixzon were destroyed, and are going to give the galaxy a big coming back party in their own way. And the damn thing is we can’t stop it from happening outside our little slice of the galaxy.”

“We’ve got time. If the galaxy is as rough elsewhere as it is here, the other colonies are probably turtled up trying to just survive…by the way, are we still going to bring in any more that we find?”

“Yes. Same indoctrination program and we’re going to keep looking for more to inoculate anyway. Any that we can bring back, we will. Our population is large enough to absorb them without issue now.”

“Will they do the same?”

Brad considered that. “I’m not sure. Nefron said they didn’t need to, but if there’s a large population of Protovic I don’t see why they wouldn’t convert them all.”

“But will they seek out all the colonies or just leave them be unless they bump into them?”

“You’re thinking that if the Chixzon return, the first we’ll see of them is the Protovic colonies quietly disappearing?”

“Possibly.”

Brad nodded. “Something to look out for, to be sure. I get the feeling they’ll keep a low profile until they’re ready to strike. There could be some records of them out there, and I don’t think they’d risk a backlash they can’t withstand right away.”

“I’m curious as to where these Uriti are.”

“I’m still not sure they’re around. If the V’kit’no’sat never encountered them then…I don’t know. The idea that they could still be sedated after all this time seems farfetched.”

“If Nefron thinks they could be, I’m not going to argue.”

Brad put his hands on his hips in frustration. “That is worrying me. It’s a loose end that doesn’t fit. Plus, where are the races that beat them? There’s no record of any of them in the database. I get the feeling we’re missing a big chunk of the timeline.”

“Maybe we are, but that doesn’t affect the Protovic anymore, does it?”

“You mean our Protovic?”

“Yeah.”

“I suppose not. If you’re asking about any more upgrades the answer is no. Their telekinesis is intriguing, but we can’t copy and paste it anyway. Besides, I don’t want to give them any more powers than they’re going to have, and we don’t know how that will all shake out yet anyway.”

“What about special teams?”

“We still don’t know how many final form Protovic we’re going to get. They may end up being our special teams.”

“Nefron said he could do it, in time.”

“Give them telekinesis?”

“Yes.”

“How much time?”

“He didn’t know. I’m sure he could put it at the top of his priority list.”

“No,” Brad said, shaking his head. “He’s got enough to do right now and we’ve got to get the Protovic established as Blues. Maybe someday down the road we’ll look into that with a program similar to the Arc Commandos, but right now we need to get this faction’s identity fixed. There’s been too many changes happening.”

“Sounds like you’re going to be camping out here forever.”

Brad smiled. “Seems like. Don’t need you anymore…save for some advice time to time, but we can cover that via comms.”

“You kicking me out?”

“No, just giving you permission to leave. The big mystery is solved and we’ve got a plan in place for the Blues. Still a lot of micro tinkering to do, but I can handle that on my own. What’s next on your to-do list?”

“Some Clan work. Need to do a little personal overhaul there myself, then I’m going to the lizard front. Not the core worlds, but either up or down on the galactic plane and pick off a bushel of their smaller systems.”

“Dodging the hard stuff?”

“Making do with less ships than others would so they can be used elsewhere.”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“I’m not counting on the Preema or even the Voku to get the job done, and we can’t afford to let the lizards spread into new areas while we hit their bigger worlds. We need a sweeping team, and I’m going to volunteer myself to that.”

“Want to take along some Protovic units and get them some experience?”

“Definitely. I’m going to be using Clan Protoss and whatever bits and pieces I can scrape up so I don’t put a dent elsewhere. Gonna hit up some of the wards too.”

“Want a few veteran Beyond units thrown in?”

“If you’ve got some that you’re not planning on using elsewhere, yes. Please.”

“What did you mean about the Voku?”

“Just a gut feeling.”

“About?”

“They serve the Zak’de’ron, so you never know what they’ll do since they’re not making their own decisions.”

“You think they’re going to bail?”

“No. I think this is our war to win, with or without them.”

“Our half anyway.”

“Yeah, I still don’t like that, but it can’t be helped. And we’ve got a whole lot of work just to clean out this side of the line.”

“At least Morgan’s doing a fine job of marking it.”

“That she is…and keeping the systems for herself.”

“Suits her.”

“It does,” Kip said, glancing around the hangar. “Any last bits you want me to help with before I head out?”

“No, dude. You’re free and clear.”

“Alright. In that case I think I’ll head out now. No point in delaying. Keep up the good work.”

“Go kick some lizard ass,” Brad echoed, with both Archons fist bumping as they headed for the hangar exit. When they got there they walked down a bit of hallway side by side then went their separate ways. Kip to his quarters for a quick pack before hopping on a dropship and commandeering a ship in orbit to take him back to the ADZ, while Brad headed back to his oversight duties and the continued building of his Protovic faction.

It would be years more until the first of the Blues reached final form, and once they did he’d have to figure out how to fully integrate them into the already existing culture…not to mention the quitters who left the maturia at various stages. There was a lot of balancing work to be done, as well as the construction of new cities, ships, and programs to bring the Protovic up another notch within the empire. They still had a long way to go, but Brad was proud of them and what they’d accomplished thus far, not to mention their potential going forward.

As for the Chixzon and their programming, soon it would be erased from all the Protovic on Nym, and then the ones in Axius and everywhere else in the ADZ, including the independent Protovic whom Brad had already been in communication with. From here on out things should settle down and normalcy resume…at least as much normalcy as there was when building an empire within an empire, to which Brad was going to need to add another system soon.

Details, details, and training in between. That was his path for now and he was comfortable with it. He was going to miss having Kip around, but that’s the way the trailblazers operated…going where they were needed and often on a moment’s notice. He’d get back to doing that one day in the distant future, but for now this was where he was needed. So this was where he was going to stay.

10

July 19, 3096

Ittaru System (Shanplenix territory)

Plentrin

Kara fell into the upper atmosphere of the planet like a bullet, further braking against the planet’s gravity and slowing constantly after having spent more than an hour drifting through space at high speed after being shot off from the Ghostblade Ma’kri that had quietly snuck her into the system. The Shanplenix’s technology was considerably advanced, but there were no sensor systems in the outer half of the system where the Ma’kri had entered. After that it was just a matter of staying away from the inhabited planets and keeping the cloaking shields running, turning the ship into a giant black spot save for a few tiny exceptions where sensors were located.

The ship had gotten Kara as close as it dared, then accelerated for a short stint to give her the propulsion she needed. The honorary trailblazer had flown out of the hangar bay and into the black with the ship decelerating and retreating behind her while she drifted in shadow mode down to the spec of a planet far ahead.

Now that she was here, she was having a hard time bleeding off all the speed with her limited gravity drive, but the calculations were easy enough to make and she knew that she’d get her descent under control within the next 23 seconds, though her friction in the atmosphere was leaving a tiny visible streak. She didn’t care about that or she’d have approached slower, knowing that the Shanplenix weren’t going to be able to track her once she got to ground anyway. They might think she was just a falling rock from orbit or ignore the anomaly altogether. That didn’t matter, nor would it hinder her mission.

As the turbulence abated the view of the varied world became clear in the cloudless skies. The portion that she was descending towards was a barren savannah that separated four large cities, but nothing the size that Star Force typically built. The Shanplenix kept theirs limited and dotted across the planet giving Kara plenty of wilderness regions to come down in, with the Archon eventually choosing a basin that was covered in high grasses that hid her sensor-stealthed black silhouette when she finally touched down…and sank well below head height until her feet finally hit dirt.

Glancing up, she realized that the grass was at least 4 meters high and barely thicker than a straw. The planet’s lower gravity may have factored into that, but she’d never seen any varieties this tall before.

Using her Pefbar and armor sensors she got a feeling for what was immediately around her then scanned the sky, looking for pursuit. After she was satisfied that there was none she took flight again, rising up just above the top of the grass that was swaying in the wind then began skimming it as she headed towards the nearest settlements outside the cities. It took her more than two hours to get to the first native on the planet, seeing an isolated outpost on a hillside.

Deeming it too small she flew by it and continued on until she got to a decently sized village. Approaching quietly she settled back down into the grasses and went in on foot, sliding into the clear cut perimeter and daylight behind several buildings and out of sight of the hundreds of people she sensed on the other side. Moving as a shadow in daylight wasn’t exactly stealthy, but with her able to feel where everyone was she could evade and play whatever tricks were needed to avoid detection.

She isolated one of the yellow-skinned Protovic and took control of her body, walking her around a corner and right to Kara. The shadow disappeared revealing a red armored monster that peeled back it skin to reveal the supply pack that held the numerous doses of the virus Star Force had prepared. Kara pulled out one vial and loaded up the handheld injector, finding a patch of soft glowing skin between the exoskeletal patches on her arm and quickly administering her first inoculation on this planet.

With her mental remote control still working, she spun the Protovic around and returned her to the original course she’d been walking before releasing her hold on her mind. The Protovic stumbled a bit, shaking her head and wondering why she’d blanked for a moment, but was otherwise unaware that anything had happened.

Kara repeated the process with a few dozen more people in this village, knowing the virus would spread quickly to the others but wanting to make sure it had a good hold on this group in order to start the planetary spread. From there Kara flew into the nearest primary city and inoculated a few more, then hit up several more positions in this section of the planet, exhausting her supply before she finally flew back up to orbit, summoning as much speed as she could once beyond the atmosphere, then waiting out the long coast until she got far enough away for the Ma’kri to risk coming in to pick her up.

Deciding to take a nap with her proximity sensors on, Kara just floated on her ballistic course out from the planet hoping that the virus was as impressive as she’d been told. A single inoculation should have been enough to start the spread across the planet, though it had to be from person to person, at relatively close range. Once inoculated, the dormant coding that would change an individual from a Protovic into a Chixzon would be isolated and deleted from the genome thanks to a combination of techniques from the V’kit’no’sat and the considerable knowledge that Nefron had contributed.

There shouldn’t be any visible effects of the virus and it should go unnoticed while being ever present, infecting more Protovic years from now when these crossed their paths. In theory, a single inoculation could spread through all 3 Shanplenix systems given enough mixed travel, but Star Force wasn’t playing those odds. Kara was going to visit each planet they possessed and spread a bag full of goodies out amongst them to get the ball rolling quickly.

One other addition to the virus’s attack and destroy code alterations was the poison upgrade within the yellow genome. These Protovic hadn’t developed it yet, and better that they don’t going forward. Should the virus find its way to one that already had, then it was programmed not to undo that upgrade and just delete the primary coding. With the hidden imperative to assemble present in all the Protovic it was possible that these would be seeking out others later on and would spread the virus to them, further inoculating more and having a chain effect going forward. That was the hope anyway, though Kara and others were going to be visiting every known Protovic colony that Star Force had located to date, with her taking all the difficult ones.

They weren’t going to tell anyone about this, let alone ask their permission. No, they were going to quietly nip this in the bud in this region of the galaxy and potentially see it spread beyond over the course of time. The Chixzon had put down Protovic colonies all the way around the galactic rim, most of which were beyond Star Force’s ability to reach or even detect, and Nefron hadn’t been given knowledge of their initial placements since his transformation had made their existence superfluous…had it fully worked. His ability to overcome it was due, in hindsight, to the isolation of a piece of his mind. Without that he and the others had declared, without exception, that any Protovic transformed into a Chixzon would be beyond their help.

They were a threat that couldn’t be reasoned with, for according to Nefron they did not care about anyone beyond their own race and their ‘allies’ were merely tools for them to utilize. They did hold to their word, mostly, but if they had to go back on it they would, just not for trivial things. The transformation coding was so heavy and well crafted that there was no way Nefron could have worked his way clear of it without the little bit of his mind that had been preserved, and even then it had taken him 2 years with a lot of trailblazer handholding.

Given the importance of making sure the Chixzon did not return, Kara had volunteered to go on as many of these quiet inoculation missions as needed. This was one threat they could stop before it happened, at least here, and the virus gave them the possibility of doing so far beyond their borders if/when the other Protovic did begin to assemble on their own merits, so there was a tiny chance that they could end up inoculating the entire galaxy…though no one actually expected that to happen.

When Kara had drifted far enough her proximity sensors woke her to the sight of the Ma’kri rushing in towards her. Its bay door wasn’t visible, nor was most of the ship aside from a small marker that allowed her to pick it up. Seeing it she was able to get the dimensions of the ship, and vice versa, allowing it to come get her without running into the tiny spec that was the Archon. Still a shadow but for her own marker, the Ma’kri saw it fly around to the back side of the ship where the hangar bay was open and exposed, yet facing away from the distant planet where no one else could see inside.

Kara flew through the atmospheric containment field and landed into a jog that took her across the deck as her armor retracted, revealing her casual uniform beneath and the clear jewel on her left wrist where the red scales had retreated into. She kept jogging out of the hangar and into the ship’s corridors, headed to the nearest restroom to relieve her full bladder before hitting the sanctum and getting some training in before heading to the second planet on her mission list.

Paul stood onboard the starport in Venus orbit, looking over the entire Solar System from the command nexus there as he watched the fleets assemble. Gone were the old drones, now replaced with new models that had Dre’mo’dons from destroyers on up. The cutters, corvettes, and frigates had a new weapon system known as a Bri’mart. It wasn’t something the V’kit’no’sat used, but was something that was built from knowledge in the database. One of the races they had conquered had developed it and it along with the rest of their culture and technology had been thoroughly cataloged before, during, and after their destruction, then relegated to the mass of data the V’kit’no’sat kept around in case it might ever be of use in the future.

The Bri’mart were going to be very useful for Star Force, because they were a low powered system that operated like a shotgun. Not useful at all against advanced shields or armor, but very good at chewing apart lesser tech. These weren’t to be standard weapons for Star Force, but dedicated solely to the lizard war…at least until they could find a way to further shrink their Dre’mo’don designs.

Gone were the maulers and even the Ta’lin’yi. Sammy anti-missile functions were likewise history, replaced by baby Keema batteries that also doubled as long range weapon systems. There were no rail guns or missiles, just a streamlined duality meant for a single purpose…destroying lizard cruisers as fast as the enemy could throw them at you.

In addition to the standard drones there were specialties…shield ships, dedicated missile boats, IDF traps, etc, but this was the first time they were going to reveal their new tech to the lizards. They’d been producing the old models while slowly ramping up production on the new ones and building up their numbers here in Sol, along with the production of upgraded warships, the newest Mk. 78s, and even a handful of brand new command ships, though a lot of others were being brought in to augment this invasion fleet.

Ever since Star Force had cut apart the lizard empire the enemy had been conserving its resources. They still fought and resisted the Star Force advance, but not in the numbers that they could have. Scouting missions had revealed that they were pooling their cruiser fleets at their core worlds in an attempt at a last stand, or maybe a counterattack. With the new Dre’mo’don-equipped drones it wasn’t going to matter, so long as Star Force built enough of them and they didn’t get ambushed with unbelievable numbers…which Paul expected them to.

There had been a considerable amount of traffic heading out of the lizard core systems and across the growing gap to the other half of their empire. It was under continuous attack by the Preema and the Skarrons, but what limited intelligence Paul had on that region said that the lizards were growing as fast as they were losing systems, while the rimward half was shrinking fast on the coreward side. Star Force was now on the doorstep of the core systems while the lizards still had a humongous stretch of territory on the far side that ran all the way out to The Nexus’s H’kar border.

Paul and their allied H’kar fighting partners weren’t going to target those weaker systems, rather they were going straight at the core now that they had it exposed. If/when they defeated the strongest of the lizard systems they could begin sweeping up the others, but so long as these remained, with their orbital ring shipyards pumping out more ships every hour of every day, they would meet heavy resistance. Take out the heart of their empire and the rest would fall much easier, though it would still take centuries to complete, given how many systems had fallen to and been colonized by the lizards. That couldn’t be undone quickly, but it was going to happen one way or the other…and he had a feeling that other parties would be more inclined to jump into the fight once the lizard homeworld fell.

The Preema were not going to help Star Force assault the core worlds, that had already been made clear, but they were still cleansing systems on the spinward side and opposite from Star Force territory. Paul was thankful for the continuing help, even if the Preema were dodging the heavy fighting. The less systems the lizards held the less they could spread, though he knew that completely eradicating them from the galaxy was going to be virtually impossible.

This fight was personal anyway, all the way back to when they first invaded Corneria. Star Force had beat them off with the help of the Hycre, otherwise they would have lost the planet and probably Earth…save for a patch of Antarctica. Their ally had come to save them at a very critical point, with it being fitting that Star Force was now the stronger and had returned all of the Hycre’s captured worlds to them. Their empire was now lizard free and it was the Humans that were leading their multi-racial empire on a crusade to destroy or capture the lizards…with the ‘capture’ part still never playing out, even when the lizards knew they were going to die they never accepted the surrender offers, and Paul didn’t expect any different with their core worlds.

Right now Paul was just waiting to board his new flagship, which right now was officially the beastliest command ship in existence and barely 4 years old. It’d been sitting in Sol undergoing upgrades almost the moment it came out of the shipyards, then was kept here while a proper crew was assembled, both to man his command ship as well as the new warships. This wasn’t a hastily thrown together fleet going off to the front, it was a specially designed one built to be a core world buster…and it wasn’t the only one.

Two others were likewise being assembled, one in Epsilon Eridani and the other in Rotunna. Those were being built up of a combination of old drones/new drones and were drawing from the industrial capability of multiple systems to fill them out while Paul’s was exclusively coming from Sol and tailor made to his wishes under Davis’s care.

The fleet in Epsilon Eridani was going to be under Roger’s command, while the even larger one being assembled in Rotunna going to Liam. The three of them were going to hit the lizard core worlds simultaneously, forcing the enemy to choose where to reinforce and keeping them from throwing ships from all their systems into one to meet them. If they did that the other two fleets would push on from one core world to the other, not even bothering to mount ground campaigns but focusing on destroying the massive ring shipyards.

Paul knew there was an advantage to building ships in space but there was also a disadvantage, and in this case it meant that the Star Force fleets wouldn’t have to fight past ground defense batteries and shield generators to get to them.

But there would be, he suspected, even larger fleets than what the lizards sent to Gvaris guarding those rings. They were the key to the lizards’ only advantage over Star Force, and with the Dre’mo’don-equipped drones that his fleet had it didn’t matter, not to Star Force anyway, but it did matter to the other systems out there that were just coming under lizard attack. Taking out the rings not only helped protect Star Force warfleets going forward but it also protected the anonymous civilizations out there that Paul might never even know about. Deny the lizards their ability to make more ships and you shielded far more people than you could ever count, so they were the prime target and Paul was in the prime slot.

Roger’s and Liam’s fleets were larger than Paul’s, but not as strong. His was to be the primary knifeblade into the core worlds and the other two naval specialists hadn’t objected. They liked the challenge of using the ‘older’ ships to get this done, and were more than eager to get at it. Even though they wouldn’t be in the same system at the same time they were most definitely going to be working as a team, with each invasion fleet bringing a mobile comm relay so they could coordinate with each other.

That amounted to bringing a specialized seda in with each fleet, as well as positioning a few others in nearby systems to add links in the chain, but when they entered combat they were going to adapt as needed, even if it meant abandoning their target system and moving to another if there was an opening to do so, for this wasn’t just an assault on 3 systems. This was to be the first move in a campaign to take out all the core worlds, including their homeworld.

Paul had been fighting the lizards for a millennia, basically his entire life, and finally it was down to this. It wouldn’t end the lizard empire, for they were beyond the coreward no-go line and out of their reach, but this was the seat of their power, the implacable enemy that everyone else fell to or ran from…and he was about to go up on their porch and punch them in the face.

He wasn’t sure how this was going to play out, and he was fairly confident the lizards would have a few surprises waiting for them, but as far as karma was concerned this had been a long time in the making.

The trailblazer looked out through the nexus, seeing every ship in orbit of every planet, every space station, every bit of infrastructure that Star Force had in this very clogged system. The strength of the fleet he was taking with him was a mere fraction of the firepower situated here, most of which was defensive emplacements rather than warships, but the irony of it still amazed him. They’d come very far in a millennia, and were now the dominant faction. With that came responsibilities, primarily to not sit on one’s ass while others were getting theirs kicked, but there was a great deal more to it than that and all the trailblazers realized it. They weren’t just leading Star Force anymore, but this entire region of the galaxy, small as it was on the full galactic scale.

And that was going to remain the status quo unless the V’kit’no’sat came back. Paul’s never-ending nightmare was still on the periphery of his mind, but right now they were the dominant power and it was time they loudly proclaimed that.

A ping on the nexus system told him that his dropship was loaded and ready to depart, so Paul disconnected and powered down the station. He locked it away behind sealed doors then made his way across the massive starport that was off limits to tourists. Venus was still a ‘work zone’ and reserved for people that had actual Star Force business here, so everyone on this station was one of the busy bees building or outfitting his fleet and many others.

When Paul hit the hangar deck there was no fanfare, no well wishes or goodbyes. This was just business as usual, though a piece of him felt the significance riding underneath the surface. What they were about to do was going to send ripples across this galactic arm, and if there was ever a shout to the galaxy that could reveal themselves to the V’kit’no’sat this was it. But the only other choice would be to let the lizards spread and consume everything outside Star Force territory and just stand by and watch them do it.

That was never going to happen, and even if they did just turtle up the V’kit’no’sat could still come for them. No. This little chunk of the galaxy was theirs to dominate and protect, regardless of what would or would not happen with the V’kit’no’sat. Better to go down fighting for what was right than live in apathy.

But Paul intended for neither to happen, and even if the V’kit’no’sat did come back they had plans to deal with them. Plans that he and the others had been working on their entire lives. The odds were not in their favor, but at least they’d have home turf.

Paul walked up into the dropship and gave the pilot the go ahead to take off, sliding into the empty copilot seat and riding over to his command ship there as he got to see with his eyes the array of ships in orbit that he was about to take out of the system once they were fully equipped. It was a full naval fleet, no ground troops, though those ships were being assembled as well under the command of others.

Paul was an Archon and fully comfortable with leading any of the five divisions of Star Force, but he still preferred naval above the others. His peers knew this, which was why they’d politely taken the other duties on themselves and given him the most badass fleet Star Force had ever built. He was to be the tip of the spear in this campaign, and like his nickname stated, this was what he was practically built for.

Grand Admiral Thrawn was now a newb in comparison, and Paul was more than ready to show the lizard core worlds what a true Admiral could do.

Ringworld

1

April 2, 3098

Menchet System (lizard core)

Middle Zone

The Ma’kri decelerated heavily against the twin stars, using both their combined gravities to pull it out of its jump far from the blockade of cruisers choking the preferred zones around the pair. The Star Force ship came to a stop 138 million miles from the center of the system and far from the three inhabited planets, hopefully dropping undetected into the overpopulated system and engaging its cloaking shield immediately upon entry.

The star’s light bouncing off the hull plates disappeared into a black silhouette, but the Ma’kri immediately repositioned just in case their entry blink had been detected. Coming into the system saw any approaching ship ramming into the solar radiation and bouncing it back faster than light could normally travel, so if the lizard sensors were set up to measure it they could get an indication of which jumpline a ship was entering on.

With the Ma’kri moving laterally and getting off its jumpline it all but assured that the lizards would lose it even if they did see its blink. Moving anonymously through the empty spaces within the system the Ma’kri began passively scanning the cluttered regions…groupings of ships stationed around constructs situated in stellar orbits, parking zones around the pair of stars, and the three inhabited planets, one of which was circled by a ring shipyard and a beehive of ship traffic.

Each of the three worlds were packed with lizard cities so dense that they were literally built on top of one another with little or no land space left on the surface. Huge pillars reached up from the ground on the primary to the near geosync orbit of the shipyard ring, providing some structural support to keep it from drifting out of alignment as well as numerous lifts to carry materials and personnel up and down far faster than dropships or starships could accommodate.

Around their base were huge pits sunk into the ground that were likewise covered by cities. The result of old mining projects, the new infrastructure was built over top of now subterranean mines that probably were laced with even more lizard cities, but the Ma’kri couldn’t get any data on that without active scanning and getting a whole lot closer. Right now it was just here to scout and survey the system ahead of the invasion that was coming, getting Star Force updated intel that would allow their trailblazer warlords to tweak their assault plans accordingly.

If the ship was discovered it could run, for it was faster than anything the lizards had. It couldn’t fight its way out though, for there were so many ships here the computers were having a hard time counting them all. The swarm-like fleets were overlapping and making it impossible to get firm numbers, so the Ma’kri kept changing positions to get different perspectives and hoped for somewhat accurate numbers to report back.

It kept clear of the planets and anything lizard, bouncing around in the doldrums and having to execute heavy thrust on odd angles to do it, but that was far better than risking detection. While they might be absorbing most electromagnetic and other energy types, they were not expelling any. That meant if they passed in front of the distant stars their black spot would stand out instantly. Less so for the background starlight, but even that could be used to detect them if the lizards were close and keen enough to make use of it.

But if the lizards weren’t looking and the Ma’kri kept its distance it should be able to complete its mission without incident, though there were never any guarantees. It had been the only ship sent in, and the Ma’kri had been chosen because of its smaller size and knifeblade profile, which diminished its arrival blink considerably compared to the much larger jumpships Star Force built. One of those could have come in and dispatched a dozen scout drones to look around, though those weren’t typically built with cloaking shields. They were a move obvious means of gathering intel and right now this one needed to be clandestine so the lizards wouldn’t know that this system was the next to get hit.

The Star Force invasion corridor wasn’t right on their doorstep yet, with more than 120 lightyears of systems left for them to conquer before they got right up next to the core worlds…but the trailblazers didn’t want to be predictable, so they were going to hop over that last little line of defense and go straight for the big targets, hopefully catching the lizards at least a little off guard.

From what the Ma’kri was seeing though, that wouldn’t be an issue. This system was so well fortified that it might not even need support if it came under attack, but at the least allowing the trailblazers to enter the system knowing where the enemy ships and battlestations were was an advantage that this scouting party was intending on providing them.

This system has been scouted before, a long time ago, but since then a great many things had changed. The third inhabited planet had filled out considerably, and the first bits of a second ring were being assembled around it. Barely in its infancy and without more than some long structural supports, a few ribs sat in orbit with no connecting pillars down to the ground…and yet, there were no construction crews working on it. The cargo shipments coming in from the outer rocky worlds were going straight to the completed ring, with construction on the other apparently having been halted.

Building even one of the massive constructs was mind blowing, and with Star Force getting closer and closer to the lizard homeworld it seemed their plans for the second shipyard in this system had been scrapped in favor of building more ships.

That had been the rumor…that the core worlds were fortifying themselves with exterior resources rather than spending them on the defense of their other systems that Star Force and their allies had been hacking apart with regularity for more than a century. There were so many of them to go through that even their defeats were buying the lizard core worlds time…and apparently time well spent, for in addition to the millions of starships present in the system there were thousands of new battlestations spread across planetary orbits and even out into the null zones.

The Ma’kri made sure to get a closer look at those, seeing that they were of varying sizes, but the smallest of them were 54 miles long and 14 miles wide, cylinder-shaped, and covered with weapons, shield generators, thick armored plates, and even a few systems that the passive sensors couldn’t identify. The larger battle stations were bigger than the largest Star Force sedas, with several being truly Death Star size and qualifying as small moons, though mass wise they were but an afterthought compared to the shipyard ring. It was approximately 22 miles wide, with variations at different points, and stretched around the primary planet standing as a testament to the industrial muscle the lizards commanded and their ability and audacity to take on extremely long term projects.

And for as long as it took to build that ring, and how many planets had to be strip mined to provide the resources, they were now churning out starships at an amazing rate, not to mention more battlestations that were attached to the ring like berries on a branch. The Ma’kri wasn’t going to be here long enough to measure construction rates, but judging by the number of slips on the ring the lizards could be producing thousands of ships per day so long as they had a steady influx of resources.

It was suspected that the lizards were using core taps to get mining resources from the planet that the shipyard was around. Dig down deep enough and you’d hit the magma layer and could, with proper technology, continuously suck it into processing stations that could filter out the wanted materials and send the rest back into the slurry. Though that wasn’t visible from the surface, there were several facilities within proximity to the connecting columns that Star Force had guessed were the top port access tubes that connected to the ultra-deep mines, and judging by those the planet was covered with magma siphons.

Take too much material out and you could have planet destabilizing issues, but if the lizards were also dumping waste material back down as well as worthless ore from outer planets in the system then the equilibrium could be maintained and a cracking of the planetary crust could be avoided…and based off the huge chunks of the outer rocky worlds that were missing the scout crew assumed that was just the case, especially when one of those chunks was tucked up against the ring next to one of the big slips that were building the battlestations.

As the survey continued they spotted more and more chunks of planet that had been moved to the ring, and they were almost sure they were waste material being funneled back down to the planet, for most of the incoming cargo was in traditional form. An almost continuous stream of jumpships were coming into all the planets from stellar orbit to deliver what was assumed to be processed materials that the shipyard would then use to construct more starships, including more jumpships, which paled in comparison to the size of the ring itself.

Their larger slips were also visible, with dozens of tiny cruiser slips tucked in around them and dotting the entire surface of the ring all the way around, both facing in towards the planet and facing out. None of the surface area was wasted, with the miles of internal structure presumed to contain the factories necessary for making the parts for the ships out of the raw materials being delivered.

And the convoys bringing in those resources were the reason for the swarms of ships guarding stellar orbit. Blockade those and the shipyard would wither, reduced to only those materials this system could provide, and by the looks of it the lion’s share of them were coming from the rest of the lizards’ empire…and that was saying something, considering how much material had to be coming up those support columns round the clock.

Star Force, in all its infrastructural glory, had nothing even approaching this. This one system alone had to have been built up over millennia, tediously and cautiously, into the ship building powerhouse that it was today…and to think that the lizards had 47 worlds with ring shipyards like these, that Star Force knew of anyway.

But it wasn’t just the shipyards and defensive fleets that were the draw here, for the Ma’kri was also interested in the three planets’ cities. Within them was housed a massive population, and given the part of it that was visible from a distance there were distinctive buildings that by now were known to Star Force to hold specific industries. Spaceports on the surface were active nonstop, and a lot of these were exporting. Given the surrounding structures the Ma’kri assumed they were troop ships, or at least personnel transports, sending out reinforcements to somewhere.

Those ships were tracked back to the stars where they were docked with waiting jumpships that then left in convoy clusters. Their exiting jumplines were noted, but where they were going was unknown. In recent decades it was assumed that the non-core systems were basically left to fend for their own defense while sending resources back to the core worlds, so where these ships were going was a curious mystery.

That said, judging from the visible surface infrastructure, one of the three worlds was geared heavily towards producing more lizards. There were so many hatcheries they appeared like grains of sand dumped across stretches of continents…whose surrounding bodies of water had long since been sucked up. Those lower areas now contained more cities with a Coruscant-like covering to the planets, save these had a predominantly yellow-tan coloration.

It screamed artificial, with whatever native wildlife or plants having long since been eradicated. Why the lizards hadn’t colonized the airless worlds further out in the system seemed like a contradiction, until you realized they were probably saving them for deconstruction later. The sheer magnitude of the plans at work here was chilling, as well as the fact that Star Force was about to come in and bust it all up.

How they would do that the Ma’kri crew didn’t know, for the shipyard ring and the battlestations were so massive it would take forever to chew them apart. There was a rumor about the H’kar having taken down a shipyard ring long ago in a very bloody attack that left them with little more than a victory. The story went that the ring had been severed then pulled down to the planet’s surface in a chain reaction that had brought the whole thing down segment by segment…but after several days’ worth of passive scanning the crew noticed large slits in the ring. They were fully connected, but the various slips that were normally scattered about didn’t sit on any of those lines.

Further passive scanning and some deduction brought about the realization that these were disconnect points, probably instituted as a defense mechanism against a similar tactic to what the H’kar had used. If Star Force managed to cut and push a piece of the ring down to the planet and crash it into the cities below the ring could disconnect from it to minimize the damage, leaving only a tiny bit missing out of the giant ring rather than all of it being destroyed.

That revelation was also chilling, for the lizards had to have instituted that change within the past few centuries, and given the number of the noticeable slits it was not a simple upgrade to make. The lizards’ ability to adapt was showing even on this scale, and it was becoming clear that any invasion of this system was going to be very costly, either in terms of casualties or the sheer size of an invading fleet that Star Force would need.

Making those plans wasn’t the Ma’kri’s job, only gathering intelligence was, and it did so carefully and quietly for some two weeks, getting good passive pulls on the shipyards and the three planets before heading out to the smaller sites around the dead worlds and a pair of asteroid fields. From there they headed in as close as they dared to the pair of stars, one white and one blue, to get as good a ship count as they could, taking a full lap around the system to do it, then they picked a very odd jumpline and got as much gravity as they could without alerting those fleets to their presence.

They dropped the cloaking field a moment before they made the jump, switching back over to shields to protect them as they slingshotted their way out of the system and hoping the lizards didn’t see them leave. If they did their ship placements might change and their data stale a bit, but the bigger pieces weren’t going to move and the majority of the puzzle was set.

The big question was the ship count, not only in this system but in others…and what if one of the others sent its fleets to augment these? The core systems were not that far apart from one another, and given enough jumpships to haul the cruisers they could reinforce one another in short order, making any assault potentially be up against a number of ships that couldn’t be calculated. Given those uncertainties, in addition to the sheer size of the fleet and defensive infrastructure here, the Ma’kri crew knew this would be the most difficult campaign Star Force had ever undertaken, making the fight in the Gvaris System look like a warmup exercise.

The Ma’kri ended its jump in a dead system with no planets whatsoever. Just a single red dwarf star and no one there to give them trouble. From there they made a slow jump into a non-core lizard system that itself was built up considerably, though without a ring shipyard and a much smaller stellar defense fleet. It was still more than enough to kill the Ma’kri if it got close, so the ship came out further away from the star than typical and made a run around orbit to get to their jumpline with a detachment of lizard ships futilely pursuing while others were headed to the most likely jumppoints to try and intercept.

The Ma’kri beat them to its jumpline, but had to move further out on it to do so. In close to the star the cloaking shield didn’t work, for there was too much stellar radiation to absorb, but they didn’t need it in this case. With thousands of ships waiting lower on the jumpline for them the Ma’kri just ran up higher and got in position, making a slower than wanted jump out but not having any real difficulty in evading them.

That was because, with all of the advancements the lizards were continually making in their technology across the board, Star Force engines were far and away superior to what the lizards used, and the Ma’kri had been designed with the strongest engine/mass ratio for a jumpship. They could pretty much go where they wanted when they wanted and the lizards would be hard pressed to stop them, but the crew knew better than to take chances and accepted the slower jump rather than risk diving into a lower stellar orbit to try and grab enough gravity for a standard one.

The point of this mission wasn’t speed, but in getting the data back to the trailblazers. A little delay was far better than risking a lucky intercept so prudence was exercised, even if the ship and its pilot were more than capable of outmaneuvering the lizards at closer range.

Another two jumps got them clear of lizard territory and into the occupation zone that Star Force and the Voku had emptied and were now patrolling to make sure no one reentered, which was a task in and of itself so large that both empires were having to dispatch fleets of ships just to that end. There were hundreds of Ma’kri out there on solitary missions, jumping from one system to the other dropped surveillance drones and picking up data from others…all to keep squatters off the territory that the big powers that fought so hard to evict the lizards from.

What would become of it later on wasn’t known, but after the centuries of hard work to clear out those tracts of space the hardest of all lay ahead of them, and while the Ma’kri crew wanted to see how it all went down, they were more than glad to stick to reconnaissance missions, knowing they weren’t outfitted for a heavy slugging match.

And the fight that was about to come was going to take ‘slugging’ to a whole new level.

2

June 2, 3098

Trenchet System (Occupation Zone)

Rennpret

“Well, looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Jack-020 said as he looked over the holographic map of the Menchet System with his fellow 2s. “Those battlestations look nasty.”

“Too bad the scout didn’t get any active scans,” Megan-026 said with a frown. “I’d like to know exactly what weaponry they’re packing and how thick that armor is.”

“Ditto,” Paul said as he conversed with his campaign leaders in a private planning chamber onboard the Excalibur as their assault fleet was parked around the now empty planet of Rennpret, one that had been cleansed of lizards less than three years ago and sat just on the good side of the boundary line between the empty occupation zone and lizard territory. “First priority goes to the star guards though, and I suggest we take them without tackling any of the battlestations first off.”

“They have some in position,” Jack noted.

Paul zoomed the map in with a few telepathic inputs to the control node buried within the holoprojector, then pointed a finger at the dots that represented the string of lizard battlestations in orbit around the pair of stars. “Not where they should be. They’re too far out. We can jump in behind them and force a fight in closer to the stars. If the lizards choose to fall back to them we just sit and blockade the system. My bet is they’ll fight it out.”

“Given the amount of trade going through this system, I’m inclined to agree,” Megan added. “A stalemate works in our advantage.”

“Until they call for reinforcements and spam us out of existence.”

Paul shook his head in the negative. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right…if they can get them into the system. Group their convoys as close together as they like, it’ll still take days to get the amount of ships they need into the system and if we’re smart we can sit on the known jumplines and poach a lot of them on the way in. Unless they take some detours, we know where they will be coming from.”

“You’re right,” Megan agreed. “The fight is going to be over stellar orbit. If we can take and hold it, it’s downhill for the lizards after that.”

“If we don’t lose too many ships doing it,” Jack pointed out. “We’re not going to get any reinforcements so we’ve got to nail this first time out.”

“We’ve got this, barring any surprises,” Paul said, rubbing his smooth chin as his eyes were on the detailed map that he zoomed back out again to get a better perspective of everything in the crowded system.

“The battlestations don’t count?”

“We’ve known they were there for some time, we just didn’t know they’d grown.”

“What if they’re mobile?” Jack asked.

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Then that’s an additional wrinkle.”

“We need an active scan,” Megan insisted.

“I know, but we’ll tip our hand if we do.”

“This isn’t exactly going to be subtle.”

“Like Jack said, we only get one shot at this and we need as many clean, easy kills as we can get. Letting them reinforce before we get there is a bad idea.”

“If they do then we just switch targets.”

“Or…” Jack added. “We sent a scout to pull an active scan in a system that’s not our target. Where do we have confirmation of existing battlestations?”

Paul’s mind altered the hologram again, pulling out to a regional view of the entire lizard core with half a dozen systems being highlighted, all of which were around the edge of the rough sphere. The last time they’d pulled a scouting mission to their homeworld had been before the battlestations had been implemented.

“We could, but we’d have to delay…and I don’t like the idea of letting them know we’re sniffing around. If our scouts have been successful in keeping quiet, I’d rather blindside them entirely.”

“Unless we’re the ones that get blindsided.”

Paul raised a finger in the air. “Let’s assume they’re mobile. How are they going to use them?”

“Blockers,” Megan guessed.

“Distractions for our heavy hitters,” Jack added. “We pay them attention or they unload on us. Either way it keeps their cruiser swarms alive for longer.”

“Kamikaze?”

Megan bit her lip. “Depends how mobile they are.”

“Not for a kill,” Jack said, tilting his head to the side as he thought with the glow of the hologram reflecting off his face in the mostly dark room, “but they can bump us aside. Maneuver us around as they like or just break up our formations. If used properly, and if those things are even remotely mobile, they’re going to complicate things.”

“Starting to wish we’d brought a few Sentinels with us.”

Paul shook his head. “No, we need to stay mobile. We can avoid these battlestations unless the cruiser swarms fall back to them for protection. That’s not their normal procedure and we can slowly snipe them from range if they do, so I think they’d be more of a bait into a trap than a real nuisance. They’re prepped for a slugging war, but that’s not what we’re going to give them. This is a numbers game, so we’re going to whittle them down as quick as we can without making ourselves too vulnerable…and like Megan said, if they pull back to defensive positions we starve their shipyards out, so they have to fight.”

“So their best bet is to get us to do something stupid and bite off more than we can chew,” Jack said, zooming the map back in on stellar orbit. “Which we’re not going to do, so that leaves them with giving us more than we can handle. To do that they have to go on the offensive. You think they’ll pull the fleets guarding the shipyards away to overwhelm us early on?”

“I’ll make sure they regret that decision if they do,” Megan said icily.

“In which case we’ll just bounce around the system and not fully engage,” Paul added. “We’ve got the engine power they don’t, and we’re going to use it effectively. That means more taking advantage of opportunities than a straight up fight, but it can be done.”

“Reminds me of one of those awful naval challenges when we were cadets,” Jack mentioned.

Megan laughed. “You mean before or after we taught them how to train us?”

“After. They threw something at us that even they didn’t know how to tackle and let us figure it out. We wrote the book for everyone else coming through, and I think that’s what you want us to do now?”

“The lizards are used to standard Star Force tactics,” Paul said with a nod. “Those battlestations are designed to interfere with how we normally fight large fleet operations. But we’re not going to fight large scale this time, not tactically anyway. We can do that, they can’t, so we’re going rebel alliance on this. Hit them where you can and pull out, don’t get goaded into a slugging match.”

“Until we hit the big stuff later,” Megan amended.

“Right. Our priority target is the cruiser swarms. Take them out and the big guns are easy to snipe down from range. If the battlestations are mobile that’ll delay the process, but this is all workable so long as we don’t lose our heads. We’re the stronger fleet here, but we can’t fight like it. We have to fight like we’re weaker and can’t handle big engagements.”

“One problem,” Megan noted. “If we do it this way, and it takes a lot of time, will we draw enough reinforcements here or will Liam and Roger get dumped on?”

“Good question. I don’t know, but we will have a head start on them. Hopefully the call for reinforcements will go out before they can analyze our tactics.”

“How many transmitters do they have?” Jack asked, bringing up the target system again.

“They’re out of reach,” Paul said as 8 positions spread over three planets were highlighted. The lizard interstellar communications tech had gotten better over time, but it was still line of sight and made use of surface facilities rather than spacebound transmitters…which meant the rotation of each planet brought the transmitters in and out of alignment with their target systems periodically.

“I agree,” Megan said. “We’d have to take out all of them and we’d lose far too many ships punching through their planetary defense networks. That’s not our job here anyways.”

“A comm blackout would rally more reinforcements.”

Paul altered the hologram again, bringing up the known range of their transmitters and seeing how many nearby systems they could get a message out to. “Damn.”

“18,” Jack said after counting.

“How many jammers do we have?” Megan asked.

“13.”

“Too many systems packed together,” Paul said, noting the density of the lizard core where they’d colonized virtually everywhere they could, including planets that elsewhere they’d typically skip over.

“How much delay could we give them?”

“Some, but we don’t want to tip our hand to those right away. We need to completely black out a system, and right now there are too many relays in play. We gotta knock some out first.”

“Alright,” Jack agreed, “saving those for later. So they’re going to know they’re getting hit. How bad can they hurt us if they wanted to?”

“They could theoretically send reinforcements through dozens of different jumplines so we couldn’t poach them all. The real wildcard is how many ships do we have left. If they’ve hurt our numbers initially then their reinforcements could smother us even if we knocked down half of all that came in before they could leave their jumpships.”

“It all comes down to that first fight,” Megan said, looking at her two peers.

“That it does,” Paul agreed, returning her look.

“It’s curious,” Jack said, changing subjects. “Where are their chess pieces?”

“Probably sent to somewhere they’ll be more effective,” Megan answered. “Skarron territory I’d assume. They know cruisers are their only effective way of battling us.”

“Only known way,” Jack amended. “I think they’re trying out these battlestations for number 2.”

“And a few other things,” Paul said, zooming into planetary orbit around Tess, which was a shortened version of the only known moniker for the planet, which was a long winded lizard name of Tesstraveskinamentenr. No one else had ever known this system, at least within recorded history, so there was no original name to go by and most lizard identifiers were unnecessarily long…though to be fair, they renamed every world they took and that amounted to a huge list of names, not all of which could be short.

“What are those?” Jack asked as he looked at several large space stations situated away from the shipyard ring but obscured within the orbital traffic and auxiliary facilities.

“I think they’re storage sheds that might be holding a surprise or two for us.”

“They’re definitely big enough,” Megan commented as she got a scaling from the map. “Big enough to hold an invoker.”

Paul shook his head. “There are extendable slips for those on the rings, and there’s no reason to shut one up here. They’ve got something else inside, maybe cargo, or maybe something they don’t want anyone else to see.”

“How many of them are there?”

Paul had already gone through this data an hour earlier, but he’d never counted. Using the map functions he quickly tallied up all the facilities around the planets, then discovered a few more out in null space. “289.”

“Nuts,” Megan said, her face scrunching up.

“Like I said,” Paul emphasized. “We’ve got this barring surprises.”

“They’re not defended well,” Jack added.

“Could mean they’re not a priority, or that could just be them hiding them in plain sight. Only one way to find out at this point.”

“Yeah, go in there and crack one open. Permission to add that to my to-do list?” Megan asked.

“If you have an opportunity go for it,” Paul obliged. “Just don’t waste resources if they don’t feel like letting you.”

“I’ll be discrete,” she promised with a smile. Her section of the battle plan called for her to keep the lizard defenders spread out across the system by potentially hitting valuable targets if they all mushroomed into low stellar orbit. To accomplish that she’d be commanding legions of mages who would then be commanding their own task groups. This was a huge operation, and one that Paul hadn’t wanted to carry out himself. Likewise, Liam and Roger also had a few other trailblazers with them to assist with the massive coordination necessary to free up the naval specialists to guide the overall battle flow and adapt faster than the lizards could.

“Well,” Jack added, “they’ve been preparing for this for so long I’d be disappointed if they didn’t try something new.”

“We know the lizards better than anyone,” Paul said, looking at each of them in turn. “They’re not going to go down easy, and if I were them I’d have already evacuated most of the leadership to the Skarron zone.”

“Leaving these systems to do what? Make us pay for taking them?”

“That and to keep pumping out ships as fast as they can.”

“The Voku are seeing a lot of convoys jumping the gap.”

“Plus how many more they’re not picking up on,” Paul said with that ‘supreme intellect’ look he rarely flashed out except when in Admiral mode. “The rats are abandoning ship, but they’re too savvy to let all this go to waste. Even if they only get a fourth of the jumpships across to the Skarron zone those ships will make a huge difference over there and I’d bet they’re getting far more than that through.”

“Making end runs high and low?” Megan asked.

“I would.”

“So you’re saying they’re going to be real touchy about us blockading the system?” Jack wondered.

“They have to keep feeding the factories and sending out convoys, otherwise all this,” he said, pointing at the system map, “is a waste. They know we’ll destroy it all. I’d bet they’re playing big picture here, and there is no usefulness whatsoever in holding out if they lose the ability to export. They will just out of spite, but they need these shipyards operational for as long as possible.”

“So you think they’re going to call our bluff and hit us with everything they’ve got to keep the spacelanes open?” Megan asked.

Paul shook his head. “It all depends on what we bring to bear and how they choose to adapt, but make no mistake, they’re seeing this system and even their homeworld as expendable now. If they’re holding on to some sentimentality I’ll be extremely disappointed. That’s not the enemy we know.”

“Yet you’re assuming they know we won’t go coreward after we finish out here?”

“I think we’ve pretty much broadcast that. They might not know our reasons, but the line in the sand has been cut pretty cleanly by now. If I were them I wouldn’t depend on that, and I don’t think they are. Word is they’re spreading out farther and faster than normal, skipping over systems they’d normally take in order to get distance. They know we’re not pursuing them there now, but they’re going to get so large a footprint that we won’t be able to track them all down even if we do.”

“They’re playing multiple contingencies?” Jack asked.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Honestly, I would have hit the ADZ just as a massive middle finger to us.”

“Unless you had some other path to victory in the works.”

“Like what?” Megan asked.

“Getting far away from us and rebuilding.”

“Like the next galactic arm?”

Paul nodded. “Exactly. The Skarron empire practically gave them a roadmap away from here and plowed the way of any real threats. They know what they have to do to beat them and that’s far better than facing us or pushing out into the unknown…which they’re doing anyway. I think they’re going for Skarron territory hardest because it’s their way to put distance between us and them. We’re not cherry picking like they are and cleaning out everything in our path. That slowness combined with their expansion will put them out of our reach, then they can find a quiet region to build up their forces again.”

“Long term in the extreme,” Megan declared.

“I learned long ago not to underestimate them,” Paul said with a smirk.

“But?”

“They’re still stupid.”

Jack laughed. “To anyone else that would be a contradiction, but I fully understand what you mean.”

“Tactics war?” Megan guessed.

“Experienced savvy units versus spamming weak, inexperienced ones. We may not be able to eradicate the lizards, but we are going to beat them so long as we don’t screw up…surprises or no. We can always pull back and adjust, so don’t get too locked in on any objectives.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jack promised. “We’ve got our work cut out for us this time.”

“Good thing we like challenges,” Megan responded, putting her fist into the hologram. “2 tough.”

Jack followed suit. “2 smart.”

Paul finished the knuckle triangle. “2 beat.”

“Let’s get to it then,” Megan said as she withdrew her arm and headed for the door enroute to the hangar.

“See you on the other side,” Jack said, heading back to his command ship as well.

Paul let them go, shutting down the hologram and following them out a few steps behind. When he got through the door he glanced at the titan waiting for him off to the side in the hallway with her back leaned up against the wall.

“Big kids all done?” she asked sarcastically.

“That we are,” Paul answered as he looked at her new blue locks. “Nice hair.”

“An homage,” Riona said as she fell into step with him. “We ready to kick ass?”

“You got my back?”

“Always.”

“Then we’re ready. Most cruiser kills gets a box of donuts.”

3

June 19, 3098

Menchet System (lizard core)

Inner Zone

Riona stood in an auxiliary command nexus onboard the Excalibur several decks above the bridge where Paul was stationed, but she could feel his presence within the ship’s battlemap systems even though his telepathic presence was mixed in with the rest of the crew. She could contact him that way if needed, but so long as both he and she were plugged into the system they might as well have been standing next to each other, for within the command and control systems that guided both the ship and the entire Star Force fleet they were easily visible to one another.

There were a host of other remote pilots onboard the command ship, but her and Paul were the only senior Archons. The rest of the mages and scattering of titans were spread out across the fleet, most of which were onboard the warships that were carrying the drones to the battle that was just now breaking out. Should the lizards find a way of actually jamming their battlemap systems…which would be nearly catastrophic…they needed to have Archons onboard the various ships so they could use the shorter range backup systems, even line of sight lasers if needed, to keep in control of the drone fleet.

Ship Captains and Admirals could do that with the help of their crews, but they didn’t have the same experience levels as the Archons, let alone the few that actually had Sav. It’d been determined that the ability was going to be gained when one made titan with Jumat and Ubven being reserved until one made the next level up that was going to be called ‘ViLord.’ The latter tier 3 psionic trigger had finally been discovered by Vortison after pouring through the biomonitor data from Rio when he’d gone through his ascension. Thanks to his growing understanding of genetics under Nefron’s tutelage he’d been able to find the needle in the haystack that he’d been missing before, so that now made three tier 3s that they were able to share out of the four currently possessed.

Jason’s Kex trigger was still elusive, but the decision had been made to give new ViLords all tier 3 abilities going forward. Right now that meant two additional ones to the Sav that titans already possessed, but Vortison said he was hopeful to be able to find the triggers for the rest before the Archons even stumbled upon the abilities themselves. Riona wasn’t too sure about that, but would be glad to get the full set…something that no Zen’zat to date had even come close to achieving, though the Archons definitely weren’t following the V’kit’no’sat rules and happily cheating whenever they could.

At present there were no ViLords, with Morgan narrowly holding the top spot with a level 354 titan ranking. She, like the other Archon veterans, had been given Ubven ahead of time and now stood on par with the rest of the trailblazers and a lucky few second gen like Riona who had also been gifted with abilities ahead of her rank, which in her case was the addition of Jumat…which she absolutely loved and now fully understood the new ranking name, which indicated a proficiency in melee combat that the Jumat was oh so good for.

That left the non-privileged titans as the only ones that had Sav, but most mages were so used to using the command nexus system that they were far more skilled and had a telepathic advantage over the more mundane neural interfaces that the naval Regulars used. They were also visible within the battlemap system if Riona wanted to find them, but only the ‘biggies’ were constantly visible, with Paul being the only one at present given that the Excalibur was in the process of decelerating from its interstellar jump into the lizard system at extremely low orbit around the pair of stars at a position that the scout had determined was not heavily defended.

Within a handful of seconds the command ship slowed down enough that sensors began to function and the swarms of lizard ships nearby started to become visible, which she knew would be coming after them as soon as they could, but they had succeeded in hitting a small pocket of space that would give them some maneuvering room prior to the melee to come. They needed that time to set up to cover the incoming fleet, which immediately involved the four Godzilla-class transports that were following the Excalibur dangerously close during the jump.

They came out in single file spaced only a pair of seconds apart. Any deviation in the mathematics of the jump would have seen them ramming into one another, but the jump deceleration had been spot on and the massive transports that dwarfed the Excalibur successfully arrived right behind them and, as per previous orders, immediately fanned out in four cardinal directions as the Excalibur dove closer to the star to move off their entry jumppoint…which it then sent a signal back to the next ships in line to indicate that it was clear and no alteration would be necessary.

The next ships were some 30 seconds back and spaced a bit more carefully, knowing that the arrival point was going to clog up fast, but the Godzillas had been designed and sent specifically at the head of the fleet to do one thing and one thing only…release the Warship-class jumpships that they were carrying in racks and get them into the system far faster than had they made individual jumps single file into the jumppoint.

As soon as they got some distance on each other the massive ships broke apart with a flower petal-like dispersion. Each Godzilla carried 22 warships and had been designed for quick release through three waves, the first of which detached within 20 seconds and got free enough to accelerate further away on their own, clearing the way for the second layer to peel off, then finally the third, leaving a collapsing skeleton of the giant ship reducing itself down into a much smaller vessel that immediately fell back behind the Excalibur as that command ship guarded their rendezvous point.

With the warships fanning out into a more or less spherical defense screen they began releasing their own drones from their racks, putting several thousand of the advanced starships into play within minutes as the first of the lizard cruiser swarms began to close on the jumppoint that was now starting to spit out more warships that belong to Riona’s task force…which was the Excalibur and a chunk of Paul’s third of the invasion fleet. She handled the ship they were on to free him up, then would coordinate the mages in charge of yet smaller task groups, though at the moment she was letting Paul handle the starting moves and just watching until he gave her something to do with so few ships yet in the system.

The titan didn’t have to wait long, for with a thought Paul gave her an immediate mission priority. Even though the Excalibur stayed put to cover the Godzillas with a smattering of drones pulled in from the deploying warships, within the battlemap Riona sat in whatever virtual perspective she wanted and mentally went with 16 warships and their drones in pursuit of an approaching lizard fleet tendril that was further away than three others. For whatever reason Paul wanted her to tackle that one and she wasn’t going to argue the point, sinking her Sav-enhanced mind into the task of repositioning every ship in her group where she wanted it and handing out orders to the three mages in it, ship Captains, and even some specific ones to individual support ships.

She micromanaged ahead of time as much as she could, then when her hastily formed battle group came within weapons range she had to trust in those under her command to handle the duties. She could control a lot of ships and weapon systems simultaneously, but battles of this scale quickly became chaotic and overloaded a person with detail…but for Star Force they never got that far because the commanders shared duties and spread out the work load, as Paul had done by assigning her to this task.

Likewise she let the three mages guide the chunks of this battlegroup as she kept an eye on the larger strategic picture while mostly tuning out what was happening back at the jumppoint and pouring her attention where it mattered most. The lizard fleet tendril was stretched out, with the leading elements trying to get to the jumppoint as quickly as possible. That left her with wider spacings between the enemy ships than they needed to really pound Star Force’s advanced shields and she took advantage of that right away, sending some priority target markings to the battlegroup and letting her subordinates decide exactly how to handle the attack.

The mages likewise did the same, deferring to their ship Captains who then deferred even smaller details down to their remote pilots so a gunner didn’t have to worry about anything other than shooting the target assigned to him, while Riona didn’t have to worry about aiming any batteries or maneuvering ships around to get a better line of sight on targets. She could mentally click a target or fleet move orders with a variety of priorities and her people would carry them out more efficiently than any computer system, given the fact that they could adapt and improvise using their skills and experience.

The lizards, on the other hand, just threw themselves into the chaos. Riona could see some coordination between them, and they no doubt had commanders and probably even masterminds organizing the mess of ships, otherwise they would have literally been running into each other in such large numbers, but when the fighting started she could sense the chaos and its effects in their fleet movements. The coordination lessened into a mob mentality, pursing a single target or order and leaving the fighting to the individual ships. They adapted on that level rather than with fleet tactics…which just let Riona cut them to shreds.

She rotated ships in and out, getting shield-weakened ones away from harm by looking at the surrounding area and anticipating lizard moves. It was all very simple, but in a mess this big there was so much to watch and do that you could easily get blindsided by the simplest of attacks if your attention was elsewhere.

Riona wasn’t overloaded, not on an engagement this small, and neither were her mages with the lizard ships coming in piecemeal. That density increased until some of them tried to make a run around her glob of ships and get in to the jumppoint, but she saw the maneuver coming even before they got parallel to the jumpships, which were sitting mid formation and sniping targets at range with their heavy Keema batteries and bloon launchers.

She diverted a slew of drones out to intercept the blockade runners and successfully got them there in time, though a few managed to ram her drones. Just as she was issuing a recall order for a couple of them the part of her mind that she’d left free to observe what was going on with the rest of the fleet back at the jumppoint she saw a massive flare of shield energy behind them that she recognized as a dampening umbrella.

Riona was glad for the stop, but the fact that the lizards were already trying long range kamikaze runs against them was chilling…and that one had been a jumpship, blocked by a Star Force jumpship specialized not for carrying drones, but for being able to drop a huge interdiction field that would chop down massive amounts of momentum. Paul must have gotten it into place as soon as it came out of the convoy, and it had just saved at least one of their warships, if not several that would have been caught in the debris wake had there been a collision at those insane speeds and that high mass.

Glad that Paul was a step ahead of the lizards already, Riona kept the bulk of her attention on her own engagements and truly forgot that her body was back at the jumppoint inside the Excalibur. Her point of view was fixed inside her own battlegroup as she constantly adjusted their formation to counter the incoming waves of ships. The mages would add their own tweaks to her orders without contradicting them and in effect make her own tactics more effective in doing so…right down to the gunners and helmsman that did the same within their very narrow-focused tasks. The overall effect was immensely damaging to the lizards’ chaotic attacks, but their numbers continued to climb higher and higher, even as they were having to navigate around their own ship debris to get at the Star Force fleet.

Managing that debris was one of Riona’s primary tasks, with her giving specific orders to the support drones in her battlegroup to get to and push it into various positions, some being sent back into the approaching lizard ship flows as slow moving islands that they’d have to divert around and lose some of their grouping over…and the more they could spread out the enemy ships, even if just in a handful of situations, the less firepower they could get on the Star Force shields, whose recharge rate was so impressive that a single cruiser could be firing on a Star Force destroyer and take more than an hour of continuous damage to even bring the shield down…whereas the destroyer could take out the cruiser with three quick Dre’mo’don blasts.

The lizards had to mass against them or they were just wasting ships, so Riona’s primary mission here was to cause them to get into positions where they wasted ships…but even as she watched what was coming towards her battlegroup she could see what was on the horizon as Paul had sent scouts out into the rest of the system and that data was feeding back to her mind via a short delay.

The defense fleets around the planets weren’t holding idle and they were already sending ships their way, with the intent obviously being to smash this incursion before it could get any larger. Neither Megan nor Jack’s command ships were here yet, let alone their portions of the fleet, meaning there was no one to backdoor the lizards and make them pay for lessening their defenses…though at this point Riona figured they probably didn’t care. They just had to stop Star Force from securing a foothold to bring in the rest of their fleet.

Then Riona noted that another battlegroup was sent out, for it went flashing past her position making a small jump under the command of a mage that was actually in one of the warships, unlike Riona who was only here in mind’s eye and was restricted by lag range, so Paul couldn’t send her out to take advantage of the opportunity.

No, she was stuck within an operating range from the Excalibur, which wasn’t going to be an issue here because she got an automated prompt from Paul that went out across the entire fleet that indicated they were going into ‘Alamo’ mode. Riona knew that meant they had to hold this position at all costs, but a quick personal message from Paul indicated that he didn’t want her group just sitting here and shooting ships as they came in.

She agreed, knowing that the situation would snowball out of control if they let them group into insane numbers, so she had her fleet abandon its current battle and fight its way clear of the growing debris field to the point where they could make their own short microjumps in clear space and flank the approaching swarms. There were so many ships that they couldn’t microjump in close, forcing them to move under relatively slow speeds like flood waters choking out a narrow river.

Riona’s battlegroup hit one of those big river tendrils from the side further out, destroying ships and forcing them to fight her there…which would decrease the flow going in to the jumppoint slightly and give them less incoming firepower to soak up.

It also meant that her battlegroup was going to get overwhelmed quickly if the lizards chose to divert enough to pounce on them, but their reaction speed wasn’t great and Riona had a couple of minutes to do a lot of damage before she saw the shift coming from ‘up river.’

Rather than stand and fight, she ordered another quick pullback to clear space and sent her group even further up the flow and hit them again, making the pursuing ships choose between chasing them or letting them keep ambushing their fleet from the flank.

The enemy chose the latter and had the pursuing ships turn back towards the jumppoint, deciding to weather the ambush with almost all the ships that Riona was firing on ignoring the attacks and pushing on ahead. Gritting her teeth she resolved herself to the now obvious mission.

She was getting free shots and had to take as many ships out as she could, for they wanted to shut down the jumppoint and ambush the incoming Star Force ships if possible, and right now they were sending so many ships towards them that it looked like they were not going to be able to hold them back without losing a massive amount of drones, and maybe not even then.

Riona knew she had to change the game, so she dispatched her few support ships to go after the lizard debris that was drifting past their position. Latching on and slowing it down, then hauling it out into the traffic. She was going to build a dam with it if she could and disrupt the flow, and her battlegroup was providing her with plenty of stones to work with, for their Dre’mo’don were literally cutting the cruisers in half on impact and the smaller drones were shredding others with repetitive Bri’mart conical blasts as they tried to fly past.

Riona had her fleet stretched out into a long line and, like an assembly line, chewed the closest ships to bits with the support ships grabbing chunks at the end of the line under her personal command and started building her floating asteroid field that was already starting to bottleneck a bit of the enemy flow. There were so many ships getting past though, without even taking a shot, that she knew Paul was going to have his hands full. If they could just hold out long enough to get their entire fleet here it would be a different story, but right now it was a race for time and position, with Riona easily able to destroy the ships passing her position but with too few guns to take them all out.

Like a school of yellow/tan fish ignoring a predator, they zipped by en mass and poured down onto the defense lines around the jumppoint with Riona unable to watch much of what was happening with her focus being on killing every possible ship that she could to lighten the load on Paul.

4

Ouch, Megan said when her command ship came out of its jump into a small open area that had Star Force ships continuously moving out to clear the path for more to come in. Meanwhile there were entire portions of black sky and the double stars obscured by yellow/tan clouds of ships.

No kidding, Paul replied through the battlemap system along with a waypoint. Get at it.

Happy to, Megan said, immediately diverting her heavily armored donut straight ‘down’ as Paul tagged a few warships and their drones to go with her along with the incoming ships in her task force that would be following along. She knew instantly that there was not going to be any end runs going on right now, for the situation was so dire that holding the jumppoint was the only priority that mattered. If not, the rest of their fleet would get ambushed as they came in, with all the lizards having to do was park their cruisers just outside the jumppoint and let the incoming speeds provide all the destructive power required through collisions.

Keeping them from doing so were large Star Force formations stretching back along the jumpline from the jumppoint, around which the lizards were trying to circumvent. The waypoint Paul had given her wasn’t there though, rather it was a staging point for a quickly transmitted battle plan.

Mentally linking with her growing number of ships, Megan took them away from the jumppoint and into one of the few remaining clear areas, for the lizard swarm was beginning to creep around and would soon encompass the entire area, hitting them from all sides as even more continued to pour in from their parking positions around the pair of stars and a lesser stream coming in from the planets. She should have been going after those with prodding attacks, but it seemed their arrival had drawn more attention than expected…or the lizards had just gotten lucky and had the bulk of their fleet randomly positioned near to the incoming jumppoint.

It was clear to Megan what the lizards were attempting to do, aside from poaching the jumpline…they wanted to encircle the jumppoint so that the Star Force ships would get bottled up and block each other’s firing lines. To be most effective they needed to spread out in a tight blanket and use their weaponry to shoot down the cruisers as fast as possible, not stand in line and take turns getting focused on and damaged before cycling back behind the front lines. They needed everyone on the front lines, and Megan was about to make a new one for them.

Moving her command ship to the head of her little formation she took the brunt of the incoming firepower as she ordered the drones to tuck in behind while the warships held the flanks as they pushed out from the jumppoint and curled back around to form a corner on the incoming swarms that was to their advantage, bottling them up a bit rather than the reverse. Megan dove her command ship into the fray and punched straight into the cloud of ships while leaving the rest of her task force to form the new front and hold it.

She knew her ship couldn’t stand up for long against that many ships at pointblank range, not to mention the slow speed collisions occurring against her shields, but the command ship was fresh and that afforded her the luxury of such recklessness. Plowing into the horde of ships that had not yet come under Star Force fire, she cut a path through them with every weapon system on the ship activated and shooting in all directions now that there were no friendly ships nearby. Setting a curving course that would bring the ship back out of the swarm, Megan rammed as many ships as were shot down and left a trail of debris in the lizard backlines that was a far cry from what was accumulating around the jumppoint and interfering with both fleets’ abilities to fight.

Paul was having his hands full keeping that debris away from the jumppoint, but now the lizards would have their own navigational hazards to worry about before they even came within firing range on a Star Force ship…not to mention the brief disruption in ship flow that would get to Paul soon.

When Megan’s ship came out of the swarm and into mostly clear space its shields were down and she had a trail of lizard cruisers chasing after her that she led back into her waiting drone fleet. They didn’t seem to care, wanting to get as many hits into her hull as possible and she was willing to make the exchange in order to draw them out to their quick deaths.

The drones parted to let the command ship through, which then took up position behind them and the warships as it continued to snipe with Keema batteries as the shield emitters recharged. As they did Megan’s mind was with her drones, tweaking their positioning and giving them priority targets within the edge of the swarm that was pushing out to try and flank them again. The enemy desperately wanted to encircle them, but had to do so in significant numbers or else they were just giving up easy kills.

That was the trick of it all, and Megan kept working them into situations where they got stretched out and her drones could rip them apart with more aggressive assaults while the bulk of her line was in cycling mode to keep ships from being destroyed. The lizards knew well the tactic by now but had no real way to counter it. If they dived the retreating wounded ships the nearby drones would turn on them and take them out before they could get to their targets, meaning the only way to beat the cycling strategy was to cause more damage than it could counter.

And the best way to do that was to flank the ships so they didn’t have much of a backline to retreat in to.

It dicey, because Megan needed her ships spread out to do maximum damage, but with lines thick enough to accommodate the cycles else she’d be wasting drones. Fortunately she had the perfect point of view to orchestrate the battle from while the lizards seemed to be fighting in an almost chaotic frenzy that she was often able to manipulate to her own advantage through baits and faints.

But for every small victory she had there were more lizard ships arriving, with it becoming clear that this was the battle for the system and everything else after this point would be secondary…though if the lizards did enough damage here and now there wouldn’t be enough ships left to take on rest of the system’s defenses. This was the lizards’ best chance of success and they were taking it before all the Star Force ships could arrive and really put the hurt on them.

“Oh shit,” Jack said as his command ship arrived and he got his first look at the scene. Coming in third in line with his task force he’d expected to come in hot, but the sheer carnage around the jumppoint was beyond anything he had seen before. There was literally a dome of debris encircling them, and it wasn’t all lizard ships.

As soon as he arrived he got waypoints from Paul and didn’t bother distracting him with any chitchat. He could tell the situation was dire and there was no time to delay. A third of their fleet was still in transit and a tendril of the lizard fleet had broken through and was nearly in to the jumppoint with only a scattering of drones and a pair of warships engaging them in a losing effort not far away.

One of Paul’s waypoints was there and it was obviously the highest priority, so Jack diverted his command ship directly to it while sending the next few warships to come in behind him to plug the other holes in their lines. As he did so he saw/felt Megan’s presence within the massive space battle and took that to be a bad sign, for she was supposed to be drawing ships away by making feints against the shipyard ring. If she was still here then their plans had been shot to hell and they were in a scrap just to keep their heads above water.

Which was exactly where an Archon wanted to be, on the front lines in the thick of it, where they could make the most difference.

First priority was to get to those warships and ensure that they weren’t destroyed. Drones were crewless but the big controlling jumpships were not. Heavily armed and armored as they were, they could and would go down under enough pressure and these two didn’t have the luxury of pulling back to survive, for they were nearly backed up to the jumppoint itself and falling back there would put them in danger of collision while running out to clear space through one of the remaining gaps in the shroud of ships around them would leave the jumppoint exposed for the lizards to intentionally do just that.

Jack drove the Middle Claw directly into the swarm of ships surrounding and pounding on the two warships while their drones held the backline to keep the lizards from slipping past, taking a moment to transmit an incoming audio clip that every fleet controller on those ships would hear, using a familiar movie quote from the X-men character Wolverine whom his Clan was named after to let them know that help was on the way and who it was coming to their aid.

A few seconds later his command ship rammed the lines of lizard cruisers, plowing into them with altered shields to accommodate such a task as he ordered the two warships closer together and put the Middle Claw directly over top of both of them, giving them some blocking mass and using his far superior weaponry to chew apart the lizard swarm around them as some of the drones now coming off the warships following him up arrived to bolster the lines. Jack pulled some of them forward and positioned them around the two heavily damaged warships to aid in the covering fire.

He held position there for the few minutes necessary to cut through the bulk of that lizard swarm tendril and preserve the pair of warships until enough of his own task force had gotten in to the system to make them obsolete. Jack ordered them back to the small holding area where the other badly damaged and noncombat ships were clustered, then took his growing task force out of the battle entirely, save for the few holes that still needed plugging, and began pooling his ships outside the brawl but in a position where he could look down on it with the backdrop of the two stars making for an eerily silent, yet epic cinematic.

Needing to wait for enough ships to arrive, he didn’t like sitting out here and just watching but he trusted Paul enough to not argue with the battle plan as more and more of his warships caught up and redirected out to him before they even released their drones. There was so much debris in the area now that both sides were having a hard time navigating around it and finding each other to shoot, with the lizards more than happy to simply push that debris into the jumppoint using their own cruisers to nudge it forward or to make sacrificial microjumps at extreme short range to plow it forward in shotgun style.

As soon as the rest of Jack’s task force arrived they could leave the debris field behind and start fighting this invasion the way they wanted, but until then they had to hold this position and protect the incoming ships.

But then something happened that changed their plans and Jack immediately jumped part of his fleet away from the battle, racing out far from the stars to a group of lizard ships that had just made their own microjump further out. The first few ships were being followed by a new swarm that was so far away from the battle it made no sense at all…except that they were continuing to drift on their momentum and brake against multiple gravity wells in order to get to a null point where no planet, moon, or even asteroid existed.

They were trying to get to the jumpline far out from the jumppoint and mine it with the hulls of their ships.

Jack immediately transmitted a signal back along the jumpline to the incoming ships telling them to alter their arrival path. They didn’t have much wiggle room off the jumpline, but with two stars to push off of they had more options than normal. The message indicated which direction from the line he wanted them to veer, with them having to make a second hard maneuver at the end of their jump to hit the designated jumppoint else they’d fly into the waiting lizard fleet around the perimeter.

Normally they could have told them to brake harder and come out further away from the star, but the entire convoy had had to pass through a lizard occupied system to get here, though they’d timed it so that the rotation of the planet would give them a few hours head start before the lizard interstellar transmitters could come into alignment and send a warning ahead.

To make better time the entire convoy was coming in at almost maximum sustainable speed, which was part of the reason why they were exiting so close to the star, in addition to the strategic value of that position. That meant they literally couldn’t brake much harder and were locked into this jumppoint. Had the lizards not surrounded the jumppoint he could have had them go off it and dip closer to the star in a curving brake line, but that wasn’t an option. A little wiggle was all they could manage right now, and with that message sent he knew he had to get to those lizard ships before they could align themselves in the precise spot to die and take the incoming ships with them…which would also spread ship-sized debris into the jumppoint and damage/destroy even more of the Star Force ships already fighting there.

Had there been a gravity well near that position the lizards would have beat them there, but since there wasn’t and it was just a null point in space, ships coming in from a lateral angle had to use the weaker side gravity to decelerate against. Star Force engines were still superior to the lizards, but Jack also had the advantage of coming out almost in a direct line from the stars, meaning he could use their gravity to get near to that position far faster than the flankers coming from elsewhere in the system.

He could also use that gravity to brake against while the lizards had to essentially coast in, and he did so without putting his own ships on the exact jumpline, but coming far closer to it than he would normally have liked. He had to get between the lizards and the line and the numbers were coming out in his favor, but beating the lizard ships there and stopping them were two entirely different things, for they were fanning out and obviously going to attempt to sprint past them and get at least some ships in the way…and daring the Star Force vessels to follow them into the oncoming traffic.

“Like hell you are,” he said to himself in the command nexus as he tagged individual targets for his drones to go after…but not to destroy. He had all of them that were capable of it reconfigure their shields into dampening mode and had them fan them out like umbrellas, including the Middle Claw, and go after the spreading ships in a blockade formation, intending to stop their momentum and hold them in place.

Some of his drones that were capable of it he sent on ahead to piggyback on the lizard cruisers and wrap an IDF field around them, essentially neutralizing their engine power and allowing them to be towed away even as they fired nonstop into the belly of the drones, with their shields taking the hits as they yanked them away from the jumpline and sent them on slow microjumps in other directions before releasing them and coming back to pick up more.

There were too many to do that with in every case, but for the ones that did manage to slip by Jack had his hunters go in and snag them and send them careening away while his command ship and others slowed or stopped hundreds more like they were pushing their way through an invisible wall of glue…but so long as their engines were active they were making headway, and once they realized this the lizards upped their engine power and tried to punch through via force alone.

Meanwhile Jack had a few ships flying around killing the stuck ones desperately hoping to reduce the strain on the dampening shields. Fortunately most of the lizard ships were too consumed with trying to run that they didn’t bother firing on the more distant targets, for like his command ship they had no conventional shields, having put everything into the dampeners and leaving their hulls exposed in order to buy time and protect the incoming convoys.

That’s what had to be done, and Jack made sure to use every trick he knew of to hold the lizards in place long enough for their weapon systems to snipe them down, with his command ship killing many at range with its Keema batteries where the Dre’mo’don wouldn’t reach. It was dicey for a long stretch of time, but eventually Jack got the situation under control as the number of enemy cruisers dipped down into manageable numbers with no more seen to be incoming.

He destroyed them and made sure their debris wasn’t going to float into the jumpline before taking most of his ships back to the main battle, leaving a few behind just in case the lizards tried this again, but for the moment sensors were clear and his ever growing task force back in the main fight needed his assistance and guidance, with his command ship crew and himself picking up priority control over them as they came back into the thick of it and the three trailblazers worked their way through the swarms, gutting them and protecting their own at the same time.

5

As soon as the last ship arrived Paul had the fleet retreat away from the jumppoint, breaking up into small groups and scattering across the system. The lizards did not follow, instead choosing to hold on to stellar orbit for the time being as they picked their way out of the debris field they’d been fighting within. Paul didn’t wait, however, and immediately had the fleet begin attacking the edges of their formation and any other exposed ships across the system.

They did not hit the battlestations, or the ring shipyard, or any other facilities. Their targets were simply the cruisers, and now came the tricky part where skill and navigation were more important than sheer firepower. A lot of lizard cruisers had been destroyed already, but it was a small percentage of what was in the system and unless Paul wanted to destroy his own fleet taking them down he was going to have to go about this in a roundabout fashion.

To that end he personally led several raids, jumping a handful of drones in to snipe down a cruiser or two then pulling back before their shields could be breached. With the Dre’mo’dons it didn’t take much time to kill a cruiser, so all they had to do was get in and out very fast and they would have some clean kills.

But it wasn’t just Paul doing it, for his entire fleet was doing the same and making hundreds of raids simultaneously at different locations and picking away at the enemy fleet in annoying fashion. The lizards did what they had to, bunching up even further to try and mass firepower on the ships when they did jump in and even attempting to ram them, but with dampening shields successfully deployed at the right times those could be blocked and the attacking ships preserved.

Not all were, for there were some slipups and times when the lizards got lucky. Some drones escaped damaged while a handful were caught and destroyed over the coming weeks but the kill counts were decidedly one sided. It was going to take a very long time to chew through the enemy fleet like this, but it would take even longer to build new ships if Paul wasted them here. This one system wasn’t his target, for there were others to hit after this and he needed to preserve as much of his fleet as possible, especially for when they got to the shipyard, for it was going to take a whole lot of firepower to destroy that much mass.

But first things first, they had to remove the cruiser swarms and stop the incoming convoys, the latter of which were being received and escorted by the former as they arrived and exited the system. Rather than go after them and take the obvious bait, Paul gave the fleet orders to ignore them and keep hitting the lizard swarms where they were weak and slowly diminishing their numbers.

“My men are nearly ready,” Braskon said, with the Calavari crossing both sets of arms over the chest of his Clan Rwby uniform. “Another couple months and we should have a full 6,000 tested out.”

Rio nodded as the pair looked out over the open air training fields on the planet of Heshor, capitol of Clan Rwby and located on the outer edge of Alpha Region. It had once been a lizard occupied world laid empty after their removal, but Rio’s Clan had won sole possession of the world in a previous trial and had decided to move most of their assets here to develop it, though there were another two planets in the system that did not belong to them. One was a mainline Star Force colony and the other was Scionate.

“Good. We’re going to need them. As it is we’re already stretched thin.”

“May I ask a question?”

“Technically you just did,” Rio pointed out as the wind blew through his neon red hair. “Go ahead.”

“What is our Clan objective, long term?”

“You mean why aren’t we joining the army heading to the lizard core?”

“No…and yes. I meant in a larger context, but that was also a question I had.”

Rio briefly searched the much larger biped’s mind. “As to why we’re not going to the core, others have already claimed those spots. I didn’t because they had it covered and our troops are a lot greener than I like. We need more experience and throwing them against the heaviest lizard worlds isn’t my first choice.”

“The lizards are fierce no matter what their numbers are.”

“True. It’s more the special surprises they might have in store. They typically don’t go to such extremes on their smaller worlds. You’re wondering why we’re not claiming worlds for our own when other Clans are?”

“What are we gaining if we do not?”

“Experience, and it’s not about pure gain. We’re taking these bastards out because it needs to be done. Don’t mistake our trials system for our motivation. We fight to fight, not for reward.”

“I do not mean to argue, but other Clans are doing just that.”

“The Ninja Monkeys?”

“And the RaSeru.”

“Both of them negotiated separate deals with Director Davis and have taken up the role of defensive Clans. Shields that are guarding the coreward wall against the other half of the lizard empire and others. We are relatively safe here, as are the others, and we do not have to devote excessive resources to holding this planet. We’re not going to get careless, but we’re building to attack rather than defend.”

“How then are we to grow other than through trials?”

“Let me worry about that. It’s not so much a competition as a by need basis. We’ll have the worlds we require to fuel our focus…which is building a comprehensive Clan. Others are specializing, but we cannot afford that luxury. We can have no weaknesses. This requires a great deal more effort and a slower pace of expansion that the others. I have accepted this and resigned ourselves to developing stronger units rather than pursuing material gains and war campaigns as others have.”

“But to what eventual end? Are not the lizards our most powerful enemy? If they are falling then what are we patiently building toward?”

“Would it help you to know that they are not our most powerful enemy?”

Braskon twitched, and Rio could sense that he’d never considered that. “The Skarrons?”

“No…others. Others that have not yet reached our borders. The other trailblazers and myself must keep an eye on distant and possible threats in addition to the current ones. You will not be made aware of them until needed, but I must plan ahead with regards to how we develop this Clan. Defeating the lizards here is extremely important, but it is not our highest objective.”

“And may I ask what it is?”

“To prepare to survive against an enemy stronger than us, and wholly superior. Clan Rwby must improve, and it is improvement that is our primary focus. Fighting the lizards accomplishes that and the removal of those bastards, so we achieve two goals with one action, but the larger challenge is in upgrading ourselves. Clans Ninja Monkey and RaSeru are embracing the current threats in a way to grow their battle experience and give us time to focus on development to counter future threats. Do you understand?”

“Not as much as I would like.”

“There are a great many secrets we keep, and we keep them for a reason. It is better for people like you to focus on the tasks at hand and not get distracted with everything else going in Star Force. For the few like me we have to, in order to prepare for the future and not get blindsided. In a way I envy you, but I also understand you needing a purpose beyond just following orders, so I will share this with you, on the condition that you do not speak of it with anyone else…”

The Calavari nodded.

“We have knowledge of many races beyond our borders with technology superior to us. We are not in conflict with them at this moment, but we cannot count on their good graces going forward, or luck. We have to become just as strong, if not stronger, to truly protect our empire…and my plans for this Clan directly tie into that primary objective.”

“How far behind them are we?”

“Too far.”

Braskon considered that. “Is that why the Clans were formed?”

“Partially. We are here not only to fight the toughest battles, but to figure out how to do things that we can then pass on to the mainline and faction troops to strengthen them.”

“I came here because you requested Calavari ground troops, specifically, over Bsidd. Most people see us as inferior to them. What do you know differently?”

“Consider it me playing a hunch.”

“A hunch?”

“You may not realize this, but when making improvements you often must tread a path without knowing where you’re going. You experiment and often fail until you find a means of success. We often go on hunches to decide where to proceed and how, and we’ve gotten good at it.”

“We are better pilots, but in ground combat our scores are not superior to the largest Bsidd.”

“And they reproduce far faster, I know. Still, I sense an advantage with the Calavari that I want to explore in more depth. Hence your invite and our troops needing combat experience against the lizards…without getting in over our heads.”

Braskon looked back out over the training fields from the main observation tower that doubled as a command center and barracks that stood some 34 levels high with the platform they were currently on being an outcropping at the very top. “What have you learned so far?”

“Don’t try to wrestle a Bsidd. They have far too many limbs.”

Braskon huffed, slightly amused. “I meant about us.”

“All those who want to fight should be able to. I have nothing against the Bsidd, but in this Clan we’re focusing on less known troop configurations.”

“Doing more with less?”

“Do you consider me less for only having two arms?”

The Calavari growled. “You have other skills, and are far stronger than you look.”

“And what of the Human Commandos?”

“They are physically inferior to Calavari, but their combat records attest otherwise.”

“Exactly. Brute force is only one way to fight, and each race needs to test and develop their own capabilities, right down to the individual differences. Customization is the key, and Clan Rwby is going customize Calavari more so than your faction has.”

“And then share with them what we have learned?”

“In time, yes.”

“Are the other Clans doing the same, in different ways?”

“We each are pursuing ways to strengthen the empire and testing and developing them in the Clans. This is the way I’ve chosen to proceed, without Bsidd and a few other things. We are one of the few Clans shooting for a balanced alignment. Most others are specializing in something.”

“So we will be the best at nothing?”

Rio raised an eyebrow. “We did win this world over all the others.”

Braskon smiled. “That we did.”

“Trust me,” Rio requested. “This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this.”

“I do trust you, trailblazer. I just don’t see why we can’t keep a planet or two.”

“In time we may, but right now a larger population and more resources is pointless. We have to improve our quality, and only training and combat experience will accomplish that. Let the Ninja Monkeys take as many lizard worlds as they can. We’ll exceed them in the end. Too much combat means too little training. We have the luxury of choosing our fights. Sometimes they do not.”

“So it is a competitive race then, Clan against Clan?”

“It is.”

“To spur improvement to prepare for future wars?”

“If it comes to that, yes.”

“And the lizards are…”

“An enemy we cannot take lightly, and one that must be removed now before they can grow any more powerful.”

Braskon clapped his upper arms together, punching fist into palm. “That is what I needed to hear. May I tell them as much?”

Rio glanced down at the nearest group of Calavari sparring with combat drones on a grassy field. “About the lizards, yes. Don’t worry them about the distant threats. If they come our way I’ll give you the heads up when needed. Best right now to focus on the lizards and your training.”

“That we will. How soon will we depart?”

“As soon as we hit 6,000. The rest of the troops are already at the qualifier marks.”

“Even if we do not lay claim to the planet, we still can claim credit for liberating it single handedly?”

“Oh, we’re definitely keeping count,” Rio assured him. “Gonna build a monument somewhere to post the Clan’s achievements, just haven’t gotten around to picking the spot yet.”

Rio woke up with a yell, his arms burning as he sat up in bed and tore the coverings off him, dumping the thin blanket on the floor as he found himself in a sweaty sheen with a very nasty headache. His hands and forearms were in so much pain he had to hold himself perfectly still for a few seconds to get his panicking mind under control and lock down on his bodily control. After he did that he sat still and tried to figure out what was happening.

As far as he knew he’d gone to sleep after a heavy workout and was out like a light after a few minutes…only to wake up now in a state of agony. Looking around his quarters he couldn’t detect anything amiss, no threats or debris. The ceiling was intact and hadn’t fallen on top of him. Everything seemed normal save for his body. As the seconds went by he began to realize that he felt like he’d just gone through an ascension, but that wasn’t possible when one was asleep, for it required a considerable conscious effort to achieve…plus he didn’t feel that bad, save for his arms, and his next ascension, whatever it might be, would have peaked him into a cascade frenzy that he did not want to even think about, and he would have stopped an ascension from reaching completion multiple times before seeing it through.

Which was why he did not understand what had just happened, or was happening to him. Maybe this was some type of illness or a toxin. Maybe he had been poisoned?

Whatever the case was he had to get to the medbay, so he rolled out of bed and let himself fall to the floor on his hands and knees, thoroughly exhausted and far more than any workout could have accomplished. He was about to force himself into a painful walk when his arms finally got to the point that he could not tolerate any longer. Rio sat back on his heels and stopped leaning on his hands, trying to steady himself and slip into a healing trance right then and there to diminish the damage.

As he did so he glanced down at what appeared to be unmarked flesh with no visible sign of why they were hurting so bad. They weren’t even red, and moving them made it hurt just a tiny bit worse so he tried not to…but then he saw something in his palm and turned his hands over fully to get a better look, for they were totally numb with pain, otherwise he would have felt it when he laid his hands on the floor.

Both of his palms had slits in them, not bloody, but almost like orifices directly in the center of each hand.

“What the hell?” he said with a grimace as he forced himself to his feet and headed for the door.

6

The door into the nearest medical bay opened and Rio stumbled inside, pain evident on his face and his arms held out in front of him as steady as he could manage.

“Help…” he said calmly.

“What’s wrong?” one of two visible medtechs asked as she walked over to him.

“I’m not sure…get me numbed up and under a scanner. My arms are killing me.”

“Over here,” she said, pointing to a nearby bed as the other medtech raced off to get an injector. “What happened?”

“I woke up like this,” Rio said, rolling onto the bed as the scanning equipment extruded itself from the wall and moved out over top of him. “I think it might be ascension based. Pull the data from my biomonitor from the past few hours as well,” he said with a grimace as the other medtech came back with a sedative.

“Local injection,” Rio specified. “Both forearms, and make it heavy. I can handle the rest of it.”

“Hold on a second,” he said as he adjusted the dosage, having to run back and grab a different canister. A few seconds later he was back and pressed the tip of the small cylinder against the top of Rio’s right wrist. A moment later the trailblazer lost all feeling in his right arm below the elbow and most of the feeling all the way up to his shoulder. His arm slumped against the tabletop, with his other soon to follow.

“Ah hell…” Rio said in relief, despite the persistent headache. “Thank you.”

“If this is an ascension, it’s out of our league. Do you want us to call someone with a higher rating?”

“Get Trofsky in here…even if he’s busy.”

The medtechs exchanged glances and the man hurried off, leaving the woman to tend to Rio. “What else can I do?”

“Tell me what is in my palms.”

“Your palms?” she said with a frown, reaching down and turning his numb left hand over. “Oh…that doesn’t look like damage, it looks like a splitting growth.”

“Look inside it…and my forearms. Tell me what you see.”

The medtech focused the scanner on those areas, pulling a more detailed analysis, but that wasn’t necessary to see the large new organs located in each arm. “What the hell?”

“There’s something there?”

“Yes…I don’t know what, but it’s long and large and in both arms. Ends just shy of the elbow and runs all the way up to the wrist…with a connecting tether to those slits on your hands.”

Rio laughed loudly, having no clue how this could have happened.

“Do you know what this is?”

“I think so. Tell me what’s inside those glands.”

“They look like containers, mostly empty right now, but there is some type of fluid. I’ll need a minute or two to identify it.”

“Take your time. I think it’ll be hydrogen based.”

“Why?”

“Just a hunch.”

“You said you just woke up with these?”

“Yeah. Didn’t have so much as a twitch before I went to sleep.”

“I thought ascensions required effort to trigger?”

“They do,” Rio said warily. “Which is why I don’t understand this.”

“But you have a hunch?”

“Yeah I do. Tell me whatever you can.”

“Well, for starters, there’s a lot of microdamage in your arms.”

“Flash growth. Been there before.”

“Was the pain this bad?”

“Ah…no. But this time it’s mostly local to my arms rather than my entire body.”

“How’s your head?”

“Hurting, but tolerable. I need to stay conscious, so don’t numb me up any more.”

“I won’t. Looks like there’s some type of solidified gasses in your new glands.”

“Solidified?”

“There’s some type of a binder keeping them from blowing up like a balloon, but they’re reading as gasses on the second level scan. I can go more sensitive?”

“What gasses?”

“Hydrogen, like you said, but also nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.”

“Variable…son of a bitch,” Rio muttered.

“If you can tell me what this is, please do. If it’s an Archon secret I understand.”

“It’s something new. Something we have no data on.”

“But you know what it is?”

“I think so.”

“Ok…” she said, shrugging.

“Get the regenerator,” Rio said, deciding to find out for himself.

“We don’t have it here, if you’re meaning the special one. It’s on the other side of the planet last I knew.”

“It’s alright. Just get Trofsky here and record as much data as you can in the interim.”

“That I can do,” she said, wishing she could be of more help.

“I think it’s a weapon,” Rio told her.

“A biological weapon?”

“Not in the traditional sense, but yes. I’m hoping it is.”

“That you know nothing about? How did it get inside you in the first place?”

“Sorry, that falls under the secret category.”

“Must be one hell of a secret.”

“It is,” Rio said, staring at the equipment over top of him. “It is.”

“Rio, what happened?” Trofsky asked when he came in and saw him lying on a med table.

“Feels like an ascension, but it happened in my sleep,” he told his Clan’s top medtech. “I need data. Focus on my forearms and hands.”

“I can take it from here,” he said, glancing at the now four other medtechs standing by and watching. “Give us some privacy.”

“Above our clearance?” one of them asked.

“Possibly,” Trofsky admitted. “There’s nothing you can do to help anyway.”

The medtech nodded and the four of them walked out of the room, closing doors behind them as they left.

“Your dreams?”

“I think so, but I can’t remember anything this time.”

“You’ve never had pain before, have you?”

“Never. It’s like I had an ascension in my sleep that I can’t remember.”

“This is incredible,” the medtech said as he looked over the obvious data that had been collected.

“What’s your take?”

“Can you activate them?”

“I had them numb my arms.”

“That bad?”

“Extremely.”

“Well, there is a hell of a lot of new tissue in there…and it looks like some of your other pieces had to be relocated. Jumat particle density in your arms has increased, which I assume is to compensate for the loss of volume in the new areas. Your musculature has also altered to accommodate the pouches. That’s probably where the bulk of your pain is coming from. It didn’t just add muscle tissue, it looks like it tore it apart first to relocate it. How was your range of motion before you got numbed?”

“I was trying not to move.”

“I’m guessing it won’t be an issue. The V’kit’no’sat designed these too well to get sloppy with something like that, but this isn’t one of the psionics listed in the database.”

“I know. I think it’s a tier 4.”

Trofsky raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never mentioned a tier 4 before.”

“As far as we know, it’s never been reached in V’kit’no’sat history. There’s no data on it, just a rumor from Kara’s memory.”

“How many tier 4s are there supposed to be?”

“She didn’t know, but at least 3.”

“Is this one of those three?”

Rio smiled. “I think so.”

“Care to share?”

“You first. I don’t want to jinx myself.”

“That good huh?” Trofsky said as he continued to study the data and gather more. “I see your biomonitor data is here as well. Hoping to find the trigger?”

“Hoping you can tell me when this happened and how long it took.”

“Well that’s easy enough,” he said, pulling up the timeline. “Looks like growth began at 3:34 and ended at…4:02? Ascensions don’t last that long.”

“Not previously, no,” Rio said, still laying on the bed.

“And you have no memory of this?”

“Nothing until I woke up with my arms on fire.”

“Figuratively I assume?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like smooth growth throughout. Had to cannibalize most of your fat stores and some stuff it probably shouldn’t have touched. You hurting all over?”

“Less so.”

“That’s why. It stripped pieces from all over your body to build those. You need supplements and food now.”

“Where’s the regenerator at?”

“On its way. I was told you requested it?”

“It’ll heal the damage enough for me to unnumb and test my theory. How fast are my glands filling up?”

Trofsky adjusted his equipment again. “Just a trickle…of what I’m not sure. Looks like liquid comprised of solidified particulates of…gasses? What’s the purpose of that?”

“Ammo.”

“Volume compression then. With liquefied storage to maintain suppleness of tissue. The only weapon I know of that could operate off of this material is a plasma rifle.”

Rio smiled. “That’s what I’m hoping.”

Trofsky stared at him for a moment. “The V’kit’no’sat engineered a biological plasma weapon into your hands?”

“I think it was the dragons, but yeah. And we know they have one in their mouths. Kara saw that used first hand.”

“The more I look at this it’s genius, but I still don’t understand the triggering of it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Is it possible that they engineered an automatic ascension?”

“As a reward for completing the dream challenge…possible. I would have thought it just would have kicked me out of dream mode with an active ascension prompt.”

“That would make more sense.”

“How much data did we get on the trigger?”

“I’ll have to dig through it later, but right now I’m not seeing anything.”

Rio frowned. “You should at least have a regional ID.”

Trofsky shook his head. “Not showing one at first glance.”

“Are you running the analysis software?”

“Yes, and it’s not showing any sign of a trigger. Since this is new it might just not have the right context to identify it.”

“No, Vortison said it would pick up anything and narrow it down.”

“Well, it’s not in this case.”

Rio sighed. “How long before the regenerator gets here?”

“A few hours. It’s being flown over as we speak.”

“I’m not waiting that long,” he said, throwing his legs forward enough to pull his torso up without the help of his arms. He slid his head out to the side so he didn’t hit it on the scanning equipment and rolled into a sitting position on the very edge of the bed.

“You want denumbed?”

“No, I can do it myself. I need the practice anyway.”

“How exactly?”

“I should be able to use Haemra.”

“Even if you can’t feel your arms?”

“I can feel above them. I think I can work down from there. Gonna try anyway. Have a second numbing dose standing by if this turns out to be a bad idea.”

“If it hurts that bad why try…unless you think you can heal the damage now?”

“I started to earlier but couldn’t concentrate enough. I’m not guessing now will be much different, but if I can do a little so be it. I just need my feeling back.”

“Wait until I get the dose,” Trofsky said, walking off into a nearby supply room.

Rio didn’t, getting a feel for his upper arms and beginning to isolate the numbing serum in his tissue. Once he was able to ‘see’ it he triggered a purging procedure, pulling it out and clearing his nervous system from the interruption. The rest of him numbed up a touch as it hit his blood stream, but he was able to counteract that and essentially eat away the drug a little bit at a time and send it into his waste systems.

By the time Trofsky came back he had his elbows somewhat returned to normal with the beginning of the pain returning and he pushed on from there, relying on his excitement and forced aggression to see his way through it but he was realizing that it was taking too long and that he wasn’t going to be able to maintain focus.

“Forget this. Manually unnumb me.”

“Could have made credits on that,” the medtech scoffed, procuring a separate injector from a pocket on his uniform.

“Just the left arm.”

“Wise…er,” he said, indicating that he still thought this was stupid. “Ready?”

“Do it,” Rio said, bracing himself as best he could.

Trofsky put the tip of the device against his skin and the numbing effect vanished over a handful of seconds, replaced with the blinding pain that was somehow worse than Rio remembered. He dropped to the floor, pulling inwards to try and control it.

“Stand…back,” he ground out between clenched teeth. The trailblazer only had one arm to contend with this time and he managed to temporarily push his mind past it. The sensation was hazy, but he could feel the new part in his arm, though he knew his control over it was going to be questionable given the pain distraction.

“In here?” Trofsky asked, taking two hasty steps back, then circling around to the other side of another med table.

Rio half yelled, turning it into a continuous sound that he poured his effort and focus behind. Inside his arm he could feel his Rensiek activate, heating a tiny chamber beneath his wrist in a very specific and automated fashion. The potential within it was small, but building. He could feel it through the pain, hazily, but it was there. He also knew that it was being contained beneath a shield, and that if breached there was no going back.

He knew this from the genetic knowledge that came with the upgrade, as there had been confirmed to be with others, but this one had to be far more complex, for there were different stages to it. Three to be exact, and he knew it even before he moved to stage two.

Increasing his yell after a short pause to collect his breath, he forced the heated material in the holding cell down a short tube to this palm where it pooled. The orifice on his hand split open a bit wider and he could feel an energy field be produced around it, into which a glow flowed. Just a pinprick at first on the surface of his hand, but it grew in size and brightness, as well as oscillating different colors.

“Amazing,” Trofsky marveled from several meters away as Rio held it in his hand, palm up. “Careful,” he also warned, having to yell to be heard over Rio’s own Goku-like guttural trill.

Rio sensed that he didn’t have much ammo to work with, but he pulled what he could into a glowing ball that turned nearly white, then he stood up and angrily pointed his palm towards an empty wall. The pain wasn’t subsiding, and somehow using his ability was even making it worse. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to do this twice, so he went all in and steadied himself a bit more, giving himself as much of a Dragonball Z pose as he could manage with his arm straight out in front of him.

Part of him wanted to say the words, but he didn’t have the luxury. A yell was all he could manage and it was the only thing holding his effort intact, so before he lost control he flexed his arm and his mind, causing the energy field to squirt the white ball the size of a marble forward, condensed down into a narrower stream that stretched out a meter and a half as it flew towards the wall.

The explosion that followed paled in comparison to the pain that Rio was racked with, but he smiled none the less as debris sprayed him and the med bay in a giant poof of dust and fragments…then he dropped to a knee as his focus crumbled.

“Now?” Trofsky asked, coming out of the thinning cloud and kneeling down next to him with an injector.

Rio nodded, and soon the biting pain disappeared along with his feeling and control of his left arm as doors opened and other medtechs came racing in.

“It’s alright,” Trofsky said, raising a hand and waving at them through the lingering dust. “Just a little Archon redecorating.”

“What happened!”

“Don’t worry about it. Just call for a cleanup and repair team.”

“Is he alright?” one of them said as they saw Rio on the ground.

“Yeah, he is,” the trailblazer said, getting his focus back a moment before he did his feet and stood up with his arms drooping lazily to either side. “He is doing real well.”

Trofsky looked at the expression on Rio’s face, then glanced at the medtechs surrounding them.

“Take note, this is what destructive euphoria looks like. It’s rather common in Archons, especially the more powerful ones, and there is no known cure.”

Rio smiled, then began laughing. Not so much at Trofsky or the fact that he couldn’t use his arms right now and probably looked a bit stupid. No, he started laughing and didn’t stop, tuning out everyone around him and just relishing the moment.

He didn’t know how he’d done it, but he’d just achieved something that no Zen’zat in the history of the V’kit’no’sat had ever attained, let alone even known about…well, maybe the Zak’de’ron Zen’zat knew of it, but the rest didn’t, though they all had it hidden within their genetic code.

Rio had stumbled across the tier 4 psionic called Choratrik.

And now he had a real Kamehameha.

7

February 7, 3099

Solar System

Earth

“You wanted to see me?” Wilson asked as he ascended the last few stairs into Davis’s office.

“Sorry to bother you, but we need to have this discussion in person.”

“It’s not a problem. I’ve got a 2 hour window, if that’ll be enough.”

“Possibly. We have a bit of trailblazing to do.”

“Oh?” Wilson said as he sat down.

“Have you heard about Rio?”

“No. Is he alright?”

“Happiest Archon in the galaxy right now.”

“New psionic?”

Davis nodded. “The first tier 4.”

Star Force’s head trainer whistled. “What did he get? We know of 3, right?”

“Kara knows of 3, and Rio got bioplasma.”

“Let me guess, he needs new training challenges?”

“There is that, I’m sure, but what I have you here for is something more long term.”

“You have that look.”

“Which one?”

“A combination of a mastermind and incoming problems.”

“Oh…that one. Fairly accurate. Didn’t realize I was emoting so much. For now let’s keep this between us, alright? The trailblazers have enough on their plate as is.”

“Fine with me, but you haven’t said what it is yet.”

“Rio’s ascension wasn’t a normal one, and there are issues with that that we’ll get to in a minute, but his was a one shot and it really wrecked his arms.”

“Cascade issue?”

Davis nodded. “I don’t know what the V’kit’no’sat had planned, but the Archons are getting so many new tissues that their bodies are literally running out of room. The reorganization is getting more extreme each time, and I’m wondering when or if there is a line where we hit too much.”

“Isn’t that more of a medical question?”

“No, it isn’t. This new revelation aside, I’m not worried about them dying. They can take the adjustments more gradually. But from a tactical viewpoint, are all of the psionics necessary? Should we eliminate some?”

“Unless there is a disadvantage the answer is a flat no. The more capability one has the better.”

“Let me rephrase. We’ve been using the V’kit’no’sat playbook thus far, and given recent developments with Nefron we may one day be able to write our own.”

“Custom psionics?”

“We’re far from it, but I’m looking down the road. I’m sure the V’kit’no’sat had their reasons for developing each of the psionics, but is it the best kit for our needs?”

Wilson’s eyes widened. “Honestly, that is something I’ve never considered before.”

“While you think on that, you should know that the tier 4 ascension happened when Rio was asleep. He woke up in pain with the new ability and no memory of what happened. Apparently he’d been chasing a very specific dream for years, something that some of the other Archons also seem to have. An identical dream that disappears when they wake. Rio was apparently better able to hold onto bits of it and brought it to the others’ attention. They were convinced this was some sort of test, and apparently Rio passed it.”

“Which was why he couldn’t avoid the cascade penalty.”

“Yes, but the important part is that this method had never been used before, or at least activated, in known V’kit’no’sat history. The trailblazers seem to think that the more tier 3s someone has the more access they have to the dream, or at least better able to remember it.”

“Now that is interesting. Our sharing aside, if someone achieved a tier 3 it automatically opened up a…dream challenge?”

“Without information to analyze it’s guesswork, but Rio seemed to think so.”

“The blackout is probably to keep them from adapting to the test. If it’s trying to locate a specific prerequisite then it’s probably a reaction test where foreknowledge would compromise it.”

“Rio said his personal notes said it involved a quest of sorts, as if it was a fully interactive video game.”

“Is he coming back here?”

“Already has. Vortison is working on him now. It seems the trigger isn’t there.”

Wilson frowned. “That means no sharing?”

“That’s what they’re checking on now.”

“If this is a mental test, then the trigger probably lies there and isn’t a physiological state that can be mimicked.”

“But if it’s just an ‘on’ switch it might be medically able to be initiated.”

“That sounds too easy.”

“Yet worth looking into. Down the road we may be able to do more than just turn it on. We could adjust the existing psionics or even create all new ones.”

“And you need to know what we need to look at?”

“This is very long term, but we need a plan in place.”

“That would depend on what is possible. I can probably come up with some modifications to the existing psionics, but as for creating new ones…I’m kind of at a loss. I don’t know what’s biologically possible.”

“Well, like I said, we’ve got time. Another matter I wanted to let you know about is that we think we’ve found a way to wipe the Zen’zat psionic coding from the civilian population. Not all the secondary physical enhancements and not the Ikrid block, we’re not going back to the weaker Ter’nat, but we should be able to eliminate the problem of accidental breakthroughs.”

“Can you add them back for the Archons?”

“Yes, we’ve still got the Zen’zat profiles stored. It’ll be a few more years, but we’ll start wiping the ability from the younglings in the maturia and eventually eliminate the problem altogether.”

“And no more rogues.”

“It won’t stop existing ones, but it would stop any future ones from occurring,” Davis said, referring to a handful of stable breakthroughs that had occurred and escaped their medical radar. Some of those individuals had put their meager powers to less than scrupulous purposes before they were found out, and even a few small bands had been formed of the ‘mutants.’ One had been shut down but Davis knew there was evidence of some others still out there, not to mention other rogue individuals.

“And this upload can be altered, in time, to meet whatever requirements we want?”

“We can’t experiment too much, but we are going to tinker. Long term I was thinking it would be a good idea to have some abilities that the V’kit’no’sat do not know about.”

“Immunities would be the most useful. We already have an Ikrid block, but a semi-permanent Rentar in passive mode would be a big upgrade.”

“To make you immune to telekinesis? That could also be a disadvantage if you need to be lifted or thrown by another.”

“That’s why I said semi-permanent. But even something that only blocks internal organs. The idea of an Era’tran reaching inside and scrambling everything around for a one shot kill, right through our armor, is something we can’t ignore. Our regulars can have psionic resistant armor, but the Archons can’t.”

Davis swallowed. “I don’t recall any mentions in the database of them doing that.”

“They probably didn’t need to, nor wanted to, but it is possible. All you have to do is reach inside and squeeze.”

“And if someone doesn’t get their Rentar up quick enough they’re dead.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re right, we can’t let that stand.”

“And as long as you’re asking for a Christmas list, might go for a skeletal enhancement.”

“Wolverine style?”

“I don’t think metal would be a good idea, but we’re fragile compared to most V’kit’no’sat races. Now that I’m thinking about it, there are a lot of little things that could be improved upon.”

“Keep thinking on it, especially with a mind towards giving us more ‘challenge beating’ potential.”

“How long does Nefron think it will be?”

“Nefron isn’t doing it. He doesn’t know about the V’kit’no’sat and that’s not going to change. He’s trustworthy, but I want a safety in place just in case. He’s teaching our medtechs what the Chixzon know, so it’ll be our people adding that knowledge to what we’ve learned from the V’kit’no’sat.”

“How does the Chixzon compare?”

“I’m told it’s superior in many areas, but not all.”

“That’s why you think we might have the chance to one up them on this?”

“Yes, but I’m more interested in tailoring the psionics to fit our style more than just trying to counter them. Impressive as they are, we don’t need hand me downs anymore.”

“Ingrate,” Wilson said sarcastically.

“Yes, I know. And this all sounds preposterous considering we’ve inherited the most powerful known biological package in the galaxy. Still, if we can improve on it we’re going to.”

Wilson nodded as a stray thought occurred to him. “You said the tier 3s were the bridge to this dream test?”

“A working theory at the moment.”

“What about the eyes?”

“They did mention that. It’s possible it’s a marker to indicate who is playing the ‘game’ and who isn’t, but that’s still largely speculation.”

“Has Morgan had these dreams all this time?”

“If she has she hasn’t been able to remember them. Rio seems to be unique in his ability in this regard. With some coaching a few of the others have been able to remember snippets.”

“But he couldn’t remember anything this time?”

“No, he couldn’t.”

“Has he had the dream again?”

Davis nodded. “At least once.”

“So it’s going to continue until he unlocks them all?”

“Guessing again, but that’s the going theory. Whether or not it’s exactly the same dream is speculation. Rio knew he had another, but couldn’t provide any details.”

“Are these dreams interfering with his rest?”

“Hard to say without baselines to compare with, but there’s a possibility of a little interference. He hasn’t complained though, nor has he noticed any difference when waking from one. It doesn’t seem to leave him exhausted.”

“Wait a sec…are we looking at customizations to Humans or other races as well?”

Davis winced.

“That’s where we could make some huge gains,” Wilson pointed out.

“Those will have to wait, for we’re still pulling off the V’kit’no’sat knowledge of Zen’zat coding. Doing so with another race means we’ll have to draw our own blueprints and that’s far harder.”

“You don’t want to give up our dominance?”

“It’s our backup plan in case of revolt. I don’t want to lose it, but I see your point.”

“We’ve had Human revolts before.”

“But to be truly effective we’d have to upgrade the masses, especially in the case of the Bsidd.”

“Why? We can do it with individuals like we have with the Archons.”

“And make them immune from our Ikrid?”

Wilson leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re not worried about dissentious Humans anymore. Why?”

“The rogues do concern me a bit, but otherwise you’re right. I understand Humans far better than I do other races, and I’m still interested in seeing how the Protovic upgrades shake out. That’ll give me a better indication of where we should or shouldn’t go from here. Until I learn more I don’t feel comfortable trusting non-Humans with too much power.”

“That honestly surprises me.”

“How so?”

“Usually you’re ahead of the game.”

Davis smiled, then raised both hands gesturing to his office. “I don’t get out much, and when I do it’s still Humans I’m dealing with.”

“Too much intel, not enough experience?”

“Bingo.”

“There’s only one solution to that, especially now that you have Ikrid and can get inside their heads and look for yourself.”

“You telling me to go on vacation?”

“No, and I’m in the same position you are. Very little contact with non-Humans, but there is a difference in that I’m writing training for them. There are differences between the races, but training is training no matter who or what you are. There’s a commonality there that trumps everything else.”

“Noted. But there’s another issue in play.”

“Leadership?”

“Of a sort. Ethics.”

“I didn’t think Star Force had a problem with that, in any faction.”

“No, but there’s always the Archons there to beat you into a pulp if you go to the darkside. Take that away and I know how Humans react. I don’t know how others will.”

“And there’s no way to test that short of removing Star Force?”

“A blind spot we’re forced to deal with, I’m afraid. Some people are on good behavior because they don’t have the option of misbehaving rather than because they’re lightside…and there’s no genetic marker for lightside.”

“Maybe not genetic, but then that’s what I’m here for.”

Davis raised an eyebrow.

“You told me so from the beginning with the Archons.”

“Yes I did,” the Director said, remembering back to those early days. “I told you to make sure they were trustworthy.”

“And I know ways to bring to the surface corruption if it is there. All in the construction of the challenges.”

“Unfortunately it’s not that simple.”

“Have we had an Archon go bad guy?” Wilson challenged.

Davis raised his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright. I get it. You have an insight there that I lack, and without it I’m hesitant to upset the balance we currently have.”

“I’ve been reading Brad’s notes recently. What’s your current take on his plans for the Protovic?”

“He’s making their race stronger than Humans across the board, but the upper level are still grossly inferior to Archons.”

“They’re your backup plan to everything, aren’t they?”

“Yes they are, and I trust the trailblazers to make sure they don’t go bad. Without that linchpin this empire wouldn’t work.”

“Do you really think they’re special?”

Davis looked at him as if he were stupid. “Of course they are.”

“But are they unique? Think about it. Out of everyone in Star Force today, it’s impossible that all 100 of them were born on Earth at the same time. How many other peers do they have out there in the empire now fulfilling other roles?”

“They have no peers that I can see. Even the second gen don’t quite measure up.”

“And there’s a reason for that, but not the one you think.”

“Enlighten me, please.”

“They’ve ascended to another level. That’s what makes them unique, but who and what they were in the beginning isn’t. Part of ethics is learning, the other part is having a pure heart. Pure hearts can be messed up by culture, but at the core they’re still pure. They just have to be uncovered.”

“That’s not news to me.”

“It should be. You’re assuming the trailblazers are the only pure hearts out there.”

“Maybe it’s just the warrior in me now. I can’t see someone who isn’t a warrior as a pure heart. When something bad happens you can’t sit on the sidelines and watch, you have to fight.”

“And others would too, if they knew how. Don’t take this as ego on my part, but the trailblazers are what they are in large part due to me. I set them on a path that they have continued on their own, but that initial training is what others lack. And other Archons didn’t get the same training, which is why they’re not quite up to par.”

“Why aren’t we up to par then?”

“Ascension. They had to build this military and that was an additional type of training the rest of you didn’t get. The second gen got some, but they were never the tip of the spear. The trailblazers have always been the tip of the spear and they’ve not only embraced it, they’ve left the rest of us behind ascending to a level that is, arguably, beyond my understanding. I can train them because I act as an opponent throwing down challenges to them, but I can’t see through their eyes. If I tried I’d screw things up. I have to act like they’re a force of nature rather than peers. Insert myself into their shoes and I’d never push them as hard as they can take.”

“All the more reason why they’re unique.”

“They are, but who they were in the beginning isn’t unique. There are a lot more of them out there that will never be the tip of the spear so they will never ascend to that level, but they can become a great deal more if they want so long as we provide them the path. That has happened with the other Archons and even the Monarchs. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that’s a Human only thing.”

Davis sighed. “I can’t navigate what I can’t see. The trailblazers are the ones building the factions, including the Clans. I’m primarily guiding Human development. As far as ascension goes, I don’t have the path before me to gain the knowledge and experience needed with the other races.”

“Then trust those that do. Brad and Larissa especially. And me with regards to training weeding out the unworthy.”

“If I had trust issues Star Force never would have happened.”

“Then where is your hindrance?”

“Size. We’re growing so big that we’re coming up against new problems. There’s only so much I can see and monitor, and I rely on the Monarchs and Archons to assist in that, but there is still so much room for misbehavior and it’s only getting worse.”

“Because there are so few Humans,” Wilson pointed out.

“Are you advocating non-Human Archons?”

“Why do you have non-Human Monarchs?”

Davis frowned. “Not the same thing, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I’m both, so I should have the perfect perspective.”

“But?”

“But I can’t see going through basic training with a Protovic or Bsidd.”

“Too different?”

“Yes…yes. I guess that is it. There’s a camaraderie of the similar that would be lost. Monarchs operate independently of each other, never in teams, so it’s all about individual skills. Archons need both.”

“And you feel that brotherhood is what binds Star Force together more than anything?”

“Essentially yes.”

Wilson nodded. “Not a problem.”

“What isn’t?”

“Give me some time to play with this. If psionics won’t be a prerequisite in the distant future, then I think I can give you additional options without compromising that brotherhood.”

8

May 1, 3099

Menchet System (lizard core)

Middle Zone

Paul ducked his head underneath the water level in the shower tube, holding his breath and letting the current jets scrub him from head to toe. He stayed under for several minutes, at first holding his breath then pulling on his Hamne for additional oxygen to sustain himself. He let his mind drift as he did so, not thinking of anything in particular but allowing his overstressed mind a few moments to detox.

It was getting close to a year since this invasion had began, and ever since then every day had seen naval combat. Hit and runs designed to destroy a few ships without losing any of their own to diminish the millions of lizard cruisers while the ring shipyard kept pumping out more to replace them. The lizards still controlled stellar orbit, and aside from a few intercepted convoys Paul hadn’t been able to put a dent in their supply chain. He, Megan, and Jack had become a constant nuisance that the lizards were combating through tolerance…for that was all they could do.

No additional fleets had arrived to help in the defense, not that it would have done them much good. The lizards couldn’t force Paul’s fleet to engage for the simple fact that Star Force engines were superior. That gave Paul the ‘high’ ground and let him pick the time and place of each battle. He remembered back to when he’d first seen Star Wars Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith, and Obi-wan had told Anakin that their fight was over because he had the high ground. It hadn’t made much sense at the time, but now he understood.

The side that had superior mobility controlled the flow of the fight, and every time the lizards had come after his ships he’d ordered them to flee and not engage in a massive brawl. The small strikes were continuing around the clock, probably even a couple now while Paul cleaned up after a short but intense workout. He trusted his fellow Archons and the fleet commanders enough that he could take breaks from the action and not worry about them getting baited into a trap, which the lizards were constantly attempting to do, even going to the lengths of giving him opening in their defenses to hit.

Paul knew that would favor them, and right now, so long as they kept the status quo, they were killing more cruisers than the shipyard was pumping out. At the rate they were going it would take another 75 years to get through them all but Paul knew it wouldn’t come to that. It was just a matter of withering down the millions of cruisers into manageable numbers, at which point he’d engage them more aggressively and really rack up the ship kills. Unless the lizards screwed up and gave him a real opening to exploit he had to be patient and chip away at their defenses…even as Liam and Roger were engaging the enemy in two other systems.

They were doing the same thing, nipping away at the defending fleets, but they didn’t have the firepower that Paul’s fleet had. The plan was for him to take out this system’s defenders then move on to either another core world or come in to assist them. Right now they were giving the enemy three systems to heavily defend, but this was the one that was expected to fall first…or draw off enough reinforcements that would give Liam or Roger an opening to exploit.

It was tedious work, with even one mistake meaning a chunk of your fleet got destroyed, but so far that hadn’t happened. Ever since the opening battle at the incoming jumppoint Paul hadn’t so much as lost a ship, and he thought that was why the lizards weren’t sending reinforcements. Greater numbers wouldn’t aid them in pursuing an enemy they couldn’t catch, but get their fleet trimmed down enough and he wouldn’t be surprised if more suddenly arrived. That, or they would hoard them on their other worlds and let this one fall to buy time.

Where they were going to make their final stand he wasn’t sure, but they knew and Paul knew that they were not going to win this war. Star Force had the edge, and it looked like they were still going to play it out, but it was just a matter of time and resources before they were wiped out. That could take years or centuries, and it looked like the lizards were aiming for the latter, during which time they’d continue making more ships and tightening their defenses, some of which were being shipped out to other parts of their empire.

They were either playing for time or had aspirations to hold out and force a draw. Paul could see no possibilities of them ever retaking the territory they’d lost to Star Force, and as was their standard practice they were still not responding to surrender offers. They were going to make him wipe them out, and he couldn’t stop the ping-pong game inside his head that kept bouncing back and forth between that being sheer stubbornness or them having a larger game plan that he wasn’t fully comprehending.

Paul pulled his head back up above water level and into the rain-like drops coming from above, breathing the air and stretching his body out. His workouts were tolerable, but he wasn’t making as much progress as he wanted. His priority was the invasion, and the more time he spent out of the command nexus the less chance he had of finding a new inroad against the lizard defenses.

But one had to train and sleep, so when Paul was finally clean he drained and climbed out of the shower tube, drying himself off and dressing before downing a small vile of ambrosia and slipping into bed. He needed to recharge, physically and mentally, and get back at it sooner rather than later. Longevity was the key to an operation like this and one couldn’t let himself get burnt out, but the skillful took their rest in short, efficient brakes that kept them in the game for far more hours than others. To that end he let his mind disconnect from everything and just sleep, a skill he’d developed long ago that had become extremely useful over the years.

While Paul slept Riona was awake, as was Megan in another part of the system and dozens of other high ranking Archons commanding small task forces that were spread out everywhere and were almost always on the move. They weren’t due for a supply run for another two months, so until then they stayed away from stellar orbit and bounced around the system keeping the lizards guessing and hitting them in multiple places whenever possible.

Right now the ships in Riona’s task force weren’t engaged, merely waiting alongside the Excalibur and in a few other nearby places with their drones all tucked onboard. She sat in the bridge command nexus silently, eyes closed while she meditated, monitoring the status of the entire fleet spread across the system which had eyes on everything lizard. She saw their positioning and movements along with their own. Megan’s presence was in the system, noticeable as a distant bright spot within her mind, but within the local ships hers was the dominant persona.

After more than an hour of watching Riona finally sent out a command, a mere thought, and a group of ships further out in the system were given a waypoint to move to. It wasn’t an attack, merely a repositioning that would allow her to gage the reaction, if any, of the lizards. They were fairly sure of their sensor range by now but they didn’t have access to their technology to know for sure. There were dead spaces where they couldn’t sense and right now the Excalibur sat within one of them, out of the enemy’s range but not their own, giving them eyes out and the ‘high ground’ as Riona watched and waited, planning the next hit from her ship group.

Right now there were two others ongoing that she was watching. They’d learned over time not to give the lizards too much respite, for their refueling rates were far inferior to Star Force’s and if you kept them bouncing around from place to place you’d eventually cause them to have to either stop, which would create an opening to exploit, or trigger them to reposition to a supply pickup that could accomplish the same.

And that’s what happened while Riona was watching. It wasn’t a large alteration, but a group of ships were heading out of one of their border positions and moving in towards the largest planet to meet up with a supply depot.

The titan’s eyes opened as she double checked what she was seeing. Megan, tell me this isn’t a trap?

Where?

Riona sent her a few waypoints and waited.

Move quickly. I don’t think they see the weakness.

With a thought she activated not only the Excalibur’s gravity drives, but those of the flanking warships and fed all of their navigational computers coordinates, forcing an almost instantaneous microjump at extreme power to get the acceleration necessary from their null orbit. The Captains of all the vessels barely had time to register what was happening before the stars behind them disappeared and they were suddenly in motion, with Riona sending them a text update as to what was happening, including to the Admiral just on the other side of the wall from her.

A moment later she triggered a ship-wide alarm, with the repetitive klaxon indicating that the command ship was about to come under attack.

Paul was so disconnected from everything else that it took him a moment to recognize what was happening when he sat up in bed at the sound of the alarm…then he realized what it meant and got to his feet, not rushing out the door, but heading over to his information terminal so he could get a situation report to know what was happening.

He pulled up the battlemap data and saw that it was dated, for they were currently mid jump and headed towards one of the lizard battlestations.

Paul activated a direct comm line to the command nexus. “Riona, is this something I need to worry about or can I go back to sleep without fear of a hull breach?” he said sarcastically.

“They blinked, so we had to move. Sorry to wake you.”

“What exactly are you…” Paul said as he looked over the holographic map, then saw the flaw for himself. “Nice catch. I think you got us moving in time too.”

“You want first chair?”

“You’re going to be engaged before I can get to one, so take the lead and I’ll assist when I’m able. Just don’t hold back. This has to be a gut punch.”

“I know what to do, but feel free to chime in when you like.”

“I’m gonna be dark for a few minutes.”

“Then get moving, cause I ain’t waitin for ya.”

Paul smiled, flicking off his console and heading for the door. His shoes flew onto his feet as he jogged out, then he ran through the corridors enroute to the bridge knowing he was going to be late getting to the party.

The battlestation in question was the rendezvous point for a sizeable lizard cruiser fleet, one that was doing little more than covering for part of the convoys coming in and out of the system. So far Star Force had kept clear of all the battlestations and the lizards had been banking on that, using them as little islands of safety to retreat to but always keeping sufficient cruiser numbers in support.

A chunk of those had just left along with even more cruisers from a number of locations, all headed to the supply depot for what was probably a refueling/supply transfer. But what they didn’t realize was that it took the cruiser count around this particular battlestation too low. It didn’t look like that to anyone who had been watching this invasion from the get go, for it wasn’t weak enough for one of their hit and run attacks…at least not to get more than a handful of ships.

But that was also part of the ‘rope a dope’ strategy. Paul and his fleet had been waiting for the right opportunity to really go on the offensive, but without trying to force the issue they’d been patient. The lizards had either gotten used to that or didn’t realize the full capabilities of the ships Riona was about to ram down their throat.

The Excalibur came out of its jump a few seconds ahead of the warships, already having reconfigured its shields into a wide dampening field. It added to this by tipping up on its side so it faced the enemy top on like a pie pan being flung at the swarm of ships floating planetside of the battlestation. They weren’t tightly clustered, but were all in approximately the same position with the cargo ships in between them and the battlestation, leaving the station with clean lines of fire around it for the most part.

Riona had aimed the command ship at the cruisers, allowing some of the jump momentum to remain so that the Excalibur slammed into the center of the formation and put a visible dent in it, dragging a few hundred cruisers with it caught on the dampening shields just as if they had tried to ram the ship and were stopped…for momentum in space was a point of view. Ship hitting shield was exactly the same as shield hitting ship.

That left the Excalibur with only a thin backup shield covering its hull but the ship was tanky enough to be able to take some hits, which it did as soon as the cruisers that hadn’t been pancaked into each other turned and fired on it…but for the moment the cruisers around the hole in their formation were somewhat isolated, enough that the warships that followed could fire into them and fight their way out into those tendrils as they loosed their drones.

Keema and bloon launchers hit them immediately, with more and more warships coming into the gap the Excalibur had drilled into the formation. Its dampening field was now gone, almost entirely eaten up by the effort, but the ship itself was still holding position just inside the debris field it had created and that field was moving forward into the rest of the lizard ships, advancing the corridor of clear space the Star Force warships were entering.

The pancaked lizard ships were damaged or destroyed, but a lot of them hadn’t been taken out of the fight. They were bumping into each other, with a few actually lodged together, but they weren’t too slow in recovering and joining the school-like flow of cruisers as they repositioned to get better firing lines on the attacking ships.

Time was of the essence, for Riona could already see other cruiser swarms leaving position to come join the fight, but they were minutes or tens of minutes away at minimum, leaving her with time to take out a lot of these bastards.

The Excalibur, being on the inside of the enemy formation and totally surrounded, opened up with all its weaponry and tore apart cruisers at all angles, immediately adding to the debris field it had already started to create as the warships’ drones spun out like angry bees from a hive and hit the nearest cruisers in overwhelming numbers…and when Star Force outnumbered lizards, the lizard ships died within seconds under the combined firepower of multiple Dre’mo’dons.

Within 2 minutes a third of the cruiser swarm was junked, leaving them with too few numbers to seriously hurt the attackers. They still had cargo ships to protect and a command ship exposed with its shields down so they didn’t flee. They poured their entire attack against the Excalibur, ramming it from close range in some cases and getting through to imbed their flat ship hulls into the Star Force gray armored plates like playing cards, some of which continued to fire off a few batteries at point blank range.

But the command ship had mass and a fleet of drones to help screen for it, with them blocking or blowing off the ships that had imbedded themselves into the hull while likewise hunting down and ganging up on the cruiser formations, taking them out so fast that they did little shield damage in return and what firepower they did have was directed against the Excalibur.

It was a fair trade but Riona didn’t leave it there, sending flanking units around the cruisers to go after the cargo ships that were scrambling to get away from the fight. There were so many parked close together they were literally tripping over each other, but give them a few more minutes and they’d disperse.

When she sent the drones and two warships after them the battlestation got into the fight, coring one of the drones with a brilliant white beam the width of a dropship. The shields held briefly, then the destroyer suffered hull damage that left a sizeable hole in the hull. A moment later another beam tracked it and burnt all the way through, with most ship functions going offline.

“I saw that,” Paul said, causing Riona to jump.

“Don’t spook me like that,” she said as his finger overlapped her hand on the control sphere they were now both sharing.

“I’ve got the battlestation.”

“All yours,” she said, with the pair of them standing side by side in the command nexus yet all but forgetting they had bodies. Their minds were occupied with the battle through the battlemap instrumentation and the live feeds they were getting. Riona felt Paul take command of a few of her assets, but he left the rest to her as she ignored the battlestation and went about hunting the remaining cruisers even as the ship they were both standing within was getting hammered…on the outer hull.

They were safely inside the redundantly armored inner core with deck after deck of ship blocking for them outside that. The Excalibur would take an awful lot of damage to disable, let alone destroy, and right now the lizards were drawn to it like bugs to a zapper. Riona used that to her advantage, exchanging hull damage for taking out nearly all of the cruisers…in this group anyway, for there were more coming in to add to their numbers and assist the battlestation that was now under attack.

Just then more incoming ships jumped into position nearby, all Star Force, as more of their fleet had been dispatched to the battle. That hadn’t been Riona’s order, for she didn’t think the Excalibur was truly in danger from the battlestation, but it soon became clear that Megan had different plans as another command ship came in leading even more ships and Riona took a moment to look at the bigger picture.

One hole in the lizard lines had been exploited, but now there was a much bigger disruption. Either the lizards abandoned their battlestation or they moved to defend it. Scratch one station if they did nothing, or open up more opportunities for the attackers if they did move in to aid in its defense, for they were coming in in staggered groups rather than one solid mass.

And staggered groups would basically feed Star Force more kills.

“We sticking around?” she asked Paul.

“They’re not adapting quickly enough. We have an advantage and we have to take it,” he said, even as she felt other Star Force ships in distant parts of the system maneuvering…and not to come here.

“Full on?”

“Until they wise up, yes. Don’t give them time to think…and don’t take out the battlestation too fast. It’s the bait right now.”

“All yours,” she said, mentally reconfiguring the ships under her command and incorporating a few more warships that were close by and incoming. This fight wasn’t going to happen in just one spot, but as far as this one was concerned it was going to be a double sided formation, more interested in fighting off what was coming rather than the battlestation that it was arcing around to attack from multiple sides.

9

Jack was on the other side of the system when the move came, deep into a training session that he immediately abandoned. He ran onto the bridge of his command ship dripping sweat, which fortunately didn’t have a negative effect on the nexus equipment.

He logged into the system and saw that they were already moving, Admiral Menti’s orders. He assumed control and modified them, seeing a couple of other weak points in the lizard ship alignments form as they raced to reinforce one another. Jack split his ships to multiple tasks, sending several groups to the main battle while he took another back towards the two stars. A convoy was in the process of arriving and even if he couldn’t get to it he needed to keep the lizard ships pinned there so they couldn’t all flood in to pounce on Paul and Megan.

The longer they could keep the mismatch going the more ships they would kill, and judging by the numbers they’d already taken out more in the past 10 minutes than they had the past month, so even a slight prolongment was going to be advantageous.

The other thing he noticed was the fact that the battlestation had cleansing beams, and big ones at that. So far none of the ships in the system had those equipped, but they were a big step up from the phasers in terms of both range and sheer damage. Perhaps they hadn’t miniaturized them enough to put on the cruisers, but that upgrade alone was a game changer, not just for this invasion but for the overall war and especially for the Skarron region. The lizards were getting more and more technologically powerful as time moved on, making it all the more imperative that Star Force and their allies take them out now.

Jack had a feeling that the coreward border line was going to come back and bite them, but he agreed that they couldn’t go chasing the lizards that direction indefinitely. With the way they spread they could end up following them all the way into V’kit’no’sat territory. In some respects it was ironic that the lizards hadn’t developed the cleansing beams earlier, taking them from either Star Force wreckage or, more than likely, from Hycre or Protovic ships.

But as his command ship coasted through its microjump Jack studied the fresh battle recordings and realized the design wasn’t theirs. The firepower was off, scaled in a direction that Jack knew was one option they’d had in developing the weapon, yet they hadn’t chosen it, opting for a more reliable variety that would give them longevity rather than burstiness in combat.

That meant this wasn’t a copy of their tech, then it also dawned on him that the coloration was wrong. Cleansing beams were invisible, with Star Force having added a visible tracer to it. This beam totally gleamed.

Jack mentally pulled up the weapon files they had, sifting through them at lightning speed until he found a mention in the V’kit’no’sat database of a particular variation that did glow. It was still a cleansing beam, but one that didn’t have as much armor penetration. What it did have was a shield eating function manifesting from an unstable matrix. A binder was used that gave the glow, allowing for longer ranges but shorter than the stable version that Star Force used.

This was definitely not a copy of Star Force or allied tech, and Jack was seriously wondering if the lizards didn’t have access to some sort of treasure trove of their own, for no other known race used that particular type of weapon and between The Nexus’s records and those of the Voku and Preema, they pretty much knew everyone on the block…unless it was a race they’d destroyed millennia ago and were only now figuring out the tech.

Regardless, it meant they had a new weapon that was going to give them serious punching power in short to medium ranges and an upgrade to the phaser range if they adjusted the binder accordingly. Something told him they would, but then he smiled as he saw an addendum within the copy of the V’kit’no’sat files that had been copied and pasted into the Star Force database.

There was a weakness in this version that could countered with a specific shield setting. It wasn’t one that Star Force used, but they’d developed their matrixes to be flexible and Jack knew it wouldn’t take much of a modification, he just didn’t know if they could do it on the fly.

He had to wait for the microjump to end, but as he did he compiled a text message then sent a clear burst signal to the communications seda on the outskirts of the system, then he made a good forward assault against the lizard cruiser swarms in stellar orbit, finding them somewhat out of position as they were feeding ships into the main battle in a long train of microjumps. Those there immediately repositioned, with Jack successfully cutting off that flow of reinforcements via threat alone, then he signaled a couple of his mages to make flanking runs to try and get to the backside of the jumppoint the lizard convoy was using as it rolled in.

He didn’t know if they’d get through, but it was one more poke the lizard commanders would have to deal with and the more he kept them reacting the better. Star Force was organizing better than they were, especially in large scale battles, and get them moving around too much and the lizards’ formations would gap. Do that at the right moment and it’d open up a cascade of ship death if Jack’s fleet was close enough to exploit it…and right now he was getting very close, knowing he was going to lose some drones but comfortable with that so long as he was able to rack up a lot of ship kills and buy Paul and Megan time to do the same.

The communications seda was not Canderian, but rather a Star Force mainline construct geared to be a mobile interstellar relay with enough armor and defenses to defend itself against fairly heavy attack…enough anyway to make a run for it if the lizards came en mass, but ever since arriving in this system it had been sitting so far outside the stars and planets that the lizards couldn’t get to it except at a crawl, with its own superior gravity drives ironically giving the small moon more maneuvering capability than the tiny cruisers.

Being that far out from the stars also gave it better line of sight with the distant systems it was linking to. There were only three within range and it had lines on all of them, monitoring their occasional feeds as well as sending out periodic reports of their own. One of them was Liam’s fleet, with the other two being actual relay stations quietly placed on the danger side of the safe occupation zone border that linked to others in a breadcrumb line all the way back to the ADZ.

When the seda received Jack’s update it immediately sent a burst transmission to the first of the three distant points, then repeated it for the other two. So far no information about the cleansing beams had come in from either Liam or Roger, so it was going to be needed intel if they also had to deal with battlestations in their target systems. Along with the message was a request for modifications to the shields, which was tagged to go all the way to Earth along with any and all shipyards and research facilities within the ADZ.

Someone would determine if it required a hardware rebuild, modification, or just some tinkering with the existing equipment, but when they did find a fix they’d not only be able to block the shield penetrating nature of these alternate cleansing beams, but actually make their shields stronger than normal against them. The raw power they were pumping out couldn’t be negated completely, so they’d still do some damage, but Jack guessed it would be less than the phasers would do, making it a degrade against Star Force while still a powerful new weapon against everyone else.

Paul kept his fleet in the thick of the fight until the numbers began to fall off. They still had an advantage, but not as much of one as he wanted. They were starting to lose a high number of drones, so he called for a retreat and the Star Force ships scattered, leaving behind their drone debris but none of the manned warships.

Immediately upon the withdrawal Paul sent his ships out to hit secondary targets and exploit tiny advantages they had, not giving the lizards an hour of rest after more than a day of pitched fighting. Paul was tired, but not physically. His mind was wore down from nonstop control operations while he’d insisted that the other Archons take periodic breaks and swap out to stay fresh. He was too valuable for that so he’d stuck it out, knowing that the lizards wouldn’t have the same luxury.

How many masterminds were commanding those fleets he didn’t know, nor did he know where they were located. It was possible they were within the cruiser fleets but there were no command ships out there to find. Monitoring lizard transmission was doable, but only in hindsight. They were using encryption that couldn’t be hacked instantaneously and they were good about switching it up. Also, they used a lot of directional transmitters to keep Star Force in the dark completely when they weren’t in combat and had the luxury of pointing their equipment. During battle their transmissions were omnidirectional and able to be monitored, but through all the battles they’d fought thus far Paul’s analysts had failed to identify any commanding ship or signal.

They were out there though. Paul could feel it in the way their ships moved and reacted. They were being guided by more than their standard variety, and the whiff of a mastermind was easy to detect nowadays after having so much experience fighting them in the past. Most planets did not have one, but when they did their ship movements took on a different profile, as did their ground forces. Why every world didn’t grow one Paul didn’t know, but they were definitely the elite commanders, the Grand Admirals of the lizard empire, and he knew for a fact that they had several here.

One was in stellar orbit, another was planetary based, and the others he couldn’t be for sure, but given the reaction times to their own signal lag he had been able to isolate a few of them to specific regions. They could be on the move as well, but so far they were hiding them from him well, for if he knew what ship or station they were on Paul would take them out no matter how many drones he had to lose. Without them controlling the mega fleets he could take their entire cruiser force down within a week. They were what was melding the mass of ‘tiny’ ships into an effective fighting force, whereas normally they just snowballed their opponents with never ending weaponsfire.

That wouldn’t work against the strength of Paul’s fleet, let alone his own tactical experience, and he was pretty sure the lizards knew it. They’d been fortifying their core systems ever since Star Force had cut their empire into two halves, and he was pretty sure that had included mastermind deployment as well as massive ship counts and battlestations.

And the fact that they could hide their placements from him was both impressive and annoying. Too bad these bastards had to be bad guys, for they definitely had useful skills that could be put to better use.

Paul saw the hit and run attacks resume, trying to gage some reaction times off of them and noticed one fleet segment lapse in its mastermind control for a good ten minutes before resuming the normal ‘feel.’ Paul tried to link it up with other ship movements but failed to do so. The lizards were having some type of lag issues, but he couldn’t identify them yet. That was frustrating, but just another problem to solve going forward. They’d bitten a significant chunk out of the lizard fleet this time and that gave them less ships to maneuver around against them. A few more bites like that and the invasion would snowball in their favor, but for now Paul needed rest and the other Archons could handle the standard poking of the enemy lines, so he abandoned the nexus and command of the ship to Admiral Hestin and headed straight to the closest cafeteria, downed a lot of food and liquids, then went back to his quarters and just crashed in bed without bothering to set an alarm.

Liam was in the command nexus onboard his flagship when the interstellar transmission came through. It was routed to him immediately, with him reading Jack’s text message first off and finding it both curious and ominous. In all the years that Star Force had been in existence they’d been researching and building new tech thanks in large part to the V’kit’no’sat database. Even then it was a time consuming process, with him knowing that pure research was even more tedious. For the lizards to have created the phaser tech was a huge upgrade, but now to have also gained the cleansing beams, a completely different type of energy weapon, didn’t feel right.

Either their tech curve was greater than other races or they were getting help, and the nature of this new weapon suggested the latter. Liam’s fleet wasn’t engaged in any heavy action at the moment, just blockading a flew jumplines and poking around the perimeter of a pair of planets, so he dug into the files along with his personal research notes concerning the cleansing beam tech.

His conclusion was simple…this was not a prototype weapon, but rather a fully functional model that had gone through numerous revisions. Knowing the lizards, he didn’t think they’d sit on something this long to put out, which meant they’d gotten it from somewhere. Stealing the blueprints was possible, reverse engineering wreckage was less likely but still feasible, but the fact that these weapons were on the battlestations…which his fleet hadn’t attacked yet…and not on the cruisers suggested to him that they were designed as planetary defense weapons and were gradually being scaled down.

That meant whoever they’d gotten them from had used them in that capacity, and no known race on Star Force’s map was attributed with these cleansing beams. The versions they’d given to the Hycre and Protovic were considerably different, so it hadn’t come from them. Someone else out there had cleansing beams and they were off the radar. Whether they were allied with the lizards or one of their conquests Liam didn’t know, but this was definitely not lizard-inspired tech.

The trailblazer wondered what actually was, or did they get most of their toys from the races they conquered. They definitely had a motif to their equipment, but he wondered what their fleet had looked like thousands of years ago. He’d have to put in a request to the H’kar to see if they had any ancient records, maybe with those he might be able to pinpoint where this ‘help’ had began, though at this point it was irrelevant. They were here, now, and equipped with a new weapon that Star Force had to contend with…and Liam found it very ironic that with a little adjustment their shields could actually make it less effective than the phasers.

To that end he informed the techs he had onboard to start working on the modifications and to get him an estimate on what it would take to implement them.

10

January 31, 3101

Menchet System (lizard core)

Middle Zone

The Excalibur sat side by side with six other command ships as they all targeted a distant battlestation cluster with their Keema batteries, absorbing the firepower coming from some 14 of the lizard stations that had four cleansing beams each, though most of those were not aimed at the command ships. They were covering other angles of attack, which was why Paul had them situated along a single vector. The battlestations, as it turned out, were in fact mobile, and after the defense fleet had eventually been ground down to nothing but a scattering of cruisers running around the system pulling recon the Star Force fleet had begun targeting the battlestations.

A few had been picked off in isolation, then the others had begun redeploying into clusters. They didn’t move fast, but they were the only mobile attack assets left to the lizards…until the shipyard ring pumped out enough new ships. They were pulling off resources stockpiled there and new shipments coming up from the planet below now that their convoys were being intercepted when they arrived in system, but that hadn’t put them out of business entirely.

So far Paul had left the giant ring alone, preferring to pick off the battlestations and wait to see if reinforcements would be arriving now that they’d finished killing the 5.2 million cruisers that had been defending the system. His own force of some 80,149 drones had been reduced down to 62,611 with no warship or personnel losses, which looked like a humongous victory for Star Force, but 17,538 drones was not something you replaced lightly. Still, it was resources well spent to expose this system, assuming they were able to continue here without interference.

Rather than lose more drones Paul was using the command ships to assault the various clusters of battlestations. Their shields could hold up to the pounding of the cleansing beams even without the new rework. Had they the time they could have gone back to a shipyard to get the upgrade, but Paul wasn’t going to waste a single day now that he had their fleet down. Give the lizards time and they’d rebuild, with his first priority being to get the shipyard ring eliminated. To do that he needed to get the battlestations out of the way first then go about tackling the defenses on the ring itself, which were considerable but nothing his fleet couldn’t handle. The trick was to go forward without losing more drones, for they’d need them in the other core systems.

He also hadn’t split up his fleet, sending task groups to aid Liam and Roger. He had to eliminate this ring first, then he could get around to helping them. They weren’t nearly as far along but were chipping away at their own defending lizard fleets with mixed results. Neither trailblazer was pushing the issue, knowing better than to waste resources when it was just a matter of time before Paul broke through here and came to double up with them.

So far none of the three systems had seen reinforcement from the others. Why that was was still a guess, but it looked to Paul like the lizards were just buying time rather than trying to stop the invasion. Fight here and they’d leave their other systems exposed if they lost this engagement. Typically the lizards would have gone for that, putting all their strength into one killing blow that they could then snowball off of later, risky as it was, but they’d learned not to underestimate Star Force and Paul got the distinct feeling that this entire system had been tasked to do nothing more than stall his invasion and do as much damage as possible before they died…hoping to whittle down his fleet enough that he wouldn’t be able to make effective assaults at the other core worlds, at least not for a while.

That was fine as far as he was concerned, for these systems had to fall and them not supporting each other was going to make it easier initially so long as he didn’t let his fleet get beat down. He wasn’t going to straight to their homeworld with it, but with these ring shipyards the lizards were able to build ships a lot faster than Star Force could and until they got knocked down there was still a slim chance the lizards could build their way out of this mismatch.

And that’s why Paul still couldn’t kick the feeling that help was on the way to keep him from destroying this one, but for now he needed to take out these battlestations so they couldn’t interfere with either the ring takedown or the planetary invasions to come. The latter wouldn’t be accomplished by this fleet, for there were no ground troops in it, but there were units standing by back in the ADZ that could be loaded up and shipped here quickly if/when the time was right.

Paul wasn’t ready to call for them yet because he wasn’t sure that they really controlled the naval situation in this system, but for the moment he was getting to shoot their battlestations down unopposed while the new cruisers coming off the slips were mostly staying put around the ring or headed down to the surface to avoid Paul’s fleet until they could group up again.

The cleansing beams coming at the Excalibur and the other command ships were packing a punch, but at this range they were petering out a bit while the Keema batteries and bloon launchers were not. As for the launchers, they’d been upgraded enough over the years that they were nearing almost railgun range, in that they could be launched and let drift ballistically for several minutes before the energy shells cracked, but attacking with only them would have meant an unbearable waiting time against the heavily armored battlestations.

As it was they were taking quite a pounding, allowing even the lesser powered cleansing beams to hammer the command ships with repetitive hits…the kind of damage the drones couldn’t take, and at this range pinpoint shots were out of the question. Both sides had huge targets to aim at, but picking off individual weapon systems was not possible even for Star Force’s Keema batteries, though Paul’s gunners were trying to disprove that assertion.

Basically it was a grinding war, with the lizards having a lot more mass to play with. If Paul wanted the battlestations dead faster he could close range and take more damage in order to bring his short range weaponry into play but the numbers didn’t add up there. He’d have to use his drones and he’d lose a fair number of them in the assaults, and even if he swarmed the targets the lizards would be able to take down a fair number of them. He didn’t like the delay, but outranging their cleansing beams was the only way to take down the battlestations cleanly, though he had ships standing by to intercept them if they attempted a retreat.

Right now they were just content to stay huddled up nearby each other and exchange fire, which suggested to Paul that they were buying time, possibly for reinforcements to come, but they’d already taken out 573 of the battlestations and no such fleets had arrived. Right now Paul had three different groups of command ships going after more stations while his warships and drone fleets held stellar orbit and continued to ambush incoming convoys. How long that would continue Paul didn’t know, for the message should have already been sent out to stop them from coming. There was a lag issue involved, but soon they should be diverted to other systems now that this one was not accessible.

Maybe that was a reason why reinforcements weren’t coming as well, for they’d lose so many in transit that it wouldn’t be worth it in the long run. Just like Paul’s fleet had to fight their way into the system and hold the jumppoint for a long time so would the lizards. He’d caught a bit of bad luck at having the enemy fleet so nearby when that happened, but he was going to lose drones no matter what and if the lizards were going to make Star Force come to them then they’d have to fight their way into each of the other systems the same way…though there were slower ways to get a massive fleet into a system.

As he let his gunners do their thing he watched as another cleansing beam went offline, hit by weaponsfire that was being thrown at the target battlestation that was not maneuvering around the others for cover. That was sloppy on the lizards’ part, for they could have prolonged this fight by using each other’s bulk to block for one another. Their shields weren’t all that great so it wouldn’t have saved them much damage, but when one was going to die without accepting the surrender offers that were continually going out, you’d think you’d want to get every cleansing beam hit in that you could.

Right now they were just soaking up damage with their armor and mass rather than using their maneuvering capability, but keeping all of the stations in position to attack simultaneously. They hadn’t let Paul come in at an angle to block out a few and had maneuvered around that attempt so they could all be firing at once. And while they were just sitting there throwing energy back and forth, Paul had ordered all firepower on one battlestation, grinding it down until its weaponry stopped returning fire.

It would then rotate around to bring another side into play and the process would repeat until it was totally offline but still floating there more or less intact, for these huge constructs didn’t blow up from within, they had to be worn down over time and the shipyard was going to be even worse…which was why he’d decided not to destroy this one.

Paul stayed at his post in the command nexus for several hours before taking a break and letting the bombardment continue at the hands of others, with the command ships rotating in and out to let their shields regenerate. He got a short workout in then some sleep before finally getting the word that all the stations in this group had had their cleansing beams knocked out.

When that happened they moved in and started targeting the short range weaponry to make sure the stations were completely incapable of harming the fleet. Meanwhile Paul, Riona, and a few mages onboard the command ships got armored up and into dropships that were then sent over to one of the smoking and damaged stations after another surrender offer was ignored.

Star Force might be killing all the lizards, but how they died mattered to Paul and the others. They weren’t going to just let them starve to death out here, so they were going to at least afford them a combat death while saving the excessive firepower that would be required to render each of these battlestations into rumble. To that end the Archons boarded the stations in teams of 6 and proceeded to clean them out personally even though there were thousands of lizards still alive inside each.

Such numbers weren’t an issue to the Archons and they simply took their time fighting their way through level after level and sweeping them with their psionics to make sure they got everyone killed. It wasn’t the kind of job one liked, but if the lizards weren’t going to surrender they had to be taken out and Paul wasn’t about to leave death boats drifting around the system while they made their move on the shipyard. Others might have, but Star Force wouldn’t if they had an alternative.

Paul fought clean, and eliminating these battlestations mean taking out everyone on them either through destruction or surrender. Then when they were clear they had a few surveillance probes left nearby to alert them if the lizards tried to sneak anyone back onboard. They weren’t going to get them in working order again, but if you’d tagged a floating junkyard as enemy free it would make a very good place to hide out if you could get there undetected. The lizards might not take that tactic in space but they had done so on the ground before so Paul wanted to eliminate that possibility by placing a few electronic eyes nearby and then moving on to the next group of battlestations.

Eventually the lizards moved the remaining ones all together after seeing them being specifically targeted. Paul intercepted and delayed some of the movements, but eventually there was a group of 294 left that he had to whittle down very slowly with all the command ships in his fleet poking at them briefly before cycling out to recharge shields. Taking them down was slow going when he wasn’t willing to commit drones to the fight and the lizards knew it, now goading him into doing so or waiting out the months’ long process.

But Paul chose to wait and poke from range while he sent his drone fleets to start engaging the shipyard ring’s defenses. They encountered some cruiser resistance until Paul upped their numbers, at which point what seemed like every cruiser they had left gathered and counterassaulted one point, forcing a conflict that Paul willingly engaged. He ended up losing 8 drones with 52 others being damaged, but he eliminated all the cruisers that the shipyard had been pumping out up to that point and managed to pluck away the defenses around a specific slice of the shipyard ring.

Ships in their slips under construction were the next logical point of attack, but Paul held off. He didn’t even have his fleet continue plucking defenses off the ring, rather just guarding stellar orbit and that particular blind spot while he continued to chew on the battlestations.

Or rather others did, while Paul, Megan, and Jack took a much larger Archon team down into the ring itself and began fighting their way across miles of the facility. There had to be billions of lizards inside the entire ring, far too many for them to kill themselves without camping out here for years, but their point of entry hadn’t been random and one of the support struts was nearby. They fought their way over to it and eventually destroyed the lifts that were running supplies and personnel up and down. It took a lot of destruction for a few hundred Archons to disable it, but once they did they began fanning out into smaller hunter teams and eliminating lizards while locking down entry points and staking out their foothold for the much larger battle to come.

As soon as the lizards knew they were fighting on the inside Paul guessed they’d be sending troops up the other shafts to counter them in a ground war for the ring. That would be a very messy campaign, but so long as they were going to fight the lizards on the ground eventually they might as well take out some of them up here…and the support struts would actually allow a route down to the surface past the anti-orbital defenses so long as the lizards didn’t blow them up to prevent it.

But first things first. Paul, Megan, and Jack sought out the control center for this piece of the ring, giant as it was, to make sure that the anti-grav generators wouldn’t be shut down and the whole thing allowed to fall to the ground. As much destruction as that would have meant for the lizards below, he’d expect nothing less if they knew they could take down trailblazers with it. To that end he also had the gravity drives and their power sources secured next, with teams of Regulars assembled from multiple warships and command ships within his fleet to come in and help hold them while the Archons continued to hunt down and further cleanse their little piece of the ring.

Meanwhile Paul sent the order back to the ADZ to send the army. He hadn’t expected to need them this soon, let alone to be fighting with them, but there was no way he was going to be sitting around and chewing apart this ring for the duration until it was totally junked…and he wasn’t going to crash it down onto the planet either. That was a possibility, at least for the chunk they now owned, but if they were going to have to clean up the planet afterwards they didn’t need to make a mess of it now and recycling this behemoth would be a lot easier if it was still intact in orbit…not to mention that Star Force could probably find a use for it if he was able to capture it rather than destroy it.

So that was the battle plan he set in motion while the battlestation cluster annoyingly defied annihilation. He wasn’t going to waste drones taking them out the quick way and neither was he going to waste ammunition and time killing the shipyard ring the way the H’kar had. It might seem to others that this was taking the hard route, but there was a difference between being a conqueror and a destroyer, and Star Force were definitely conquerors. This ring was a prize that the lizards were going to be denied, and if Paul could actually take it from them it would be that much more of a middle finger in their direction, not to mention the logistical and strategic value.

And on top of that, Paul remembered a similar assault by Anakin Skywalker during the Clone Wars against a space station that circled an entire planet. At the time such a thing seemed preposterous, but here he was doing the exact same thing and for some reason that seemed fitting…even if he didn’t have a lightsaber. That was one bit of tech even the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t figured out how to make, cutting tools aside, but the rest of the similarities held up, even if the lizards weren’t battle droids.

Though they definitely treated them as equally expendable.

Paul and the others had a lot of killing ahead of them, even when they received their reinforcements…which would also be a bigger goad to see if the other lizard systems would respond. Destroying the ring might be expected, but if they were going to take it that might just provoke the kind of reaction the lizards were trying to provoke in him against the battlestations…to come in en mass and waste ships.

As much as he knew about the lizards there was a part of them that was still an enigma and he could never fully anticipate what they would do, so right now he was leaving it in their court. Come in and try to stop the takeover of this station via a massive naval assault or let Star Force fight it out inside and slowly rip one of their painstakingly constructed prize possessions away from them.

Paul didn’t know which way they’d respond, or perhaps even a third option he hadn’t considered, but one way or another this shipyard was now out of business and the industrial might of the lizard empire had just been taken down a measurable notch. This war was already a long one, and the conquest of this system was going to take years more, not to mention the other core systems and the rest of the rimward half of their empire…but it was coming down. There was a lot of work to be done and none of it safe, but this was happening, with this system and this shipyard being the first big hit Star Force had inflicted as opposed to the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategy that they’d been consuming them with up until this point.

And from here on out, everything was only going to escalate.

www.aerkijyr.com

Table of Contents

Initiation

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Hamoriti

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Marauders

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Newbslayer

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Fiddlesticks

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Proving Ground

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Ghostblade

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Trials

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Starchaser

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Revulsion

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Rescue

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Headstrong

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Cascade

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Divergent

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Resistance

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Divide

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Perquisition

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Revision

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Revelation

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

Ringworld

- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10